That Fate can be cruel is common multiversal knowledge. Less well known is Fate's particular fondness for one of its countless tools.
Nexus.
*****
The cave is empty. If the layered dust -- unmarred by even the smallest pawprint, as if in deference to the last occupant -- is any guide, it has been so for many, many years.
The purple, white winged dragon hangs his head miserably at the entrance. His rumbling sigh wafts through the cave, making restless ghosts of the cobwebs. Behind and above him, a deep purple thunderhead mutes the daylight as it mutters and rains in sympathy.
Panic had seized the dragon's heart with claws of ice when he'd first arrived to find the cave in such a state, and he'd hurled himself from one corner of the land to the other searching for news of the Sweet Emerald he'd left behind. His efforts had been rewarded only with the sickening realization that the absence of the dragoness known as Spitfire is far from the only change -- indeed, most all of the Dominance looks back at Rexalc Stormcrest with the face of a stranger.
Were it not for his debilitating melancholy during his dimensional wanderings after the destruction of his home, he might well have been prepared for this eventuality. Time, he now learns, is not always a constant between realities. In the few days since his departure, many thousands of years have past in the Dominance. All that he has known and loved here has long since moved on to other places, other lives.
Did Spitfire live out her full span here, waiting for him to return? Did she die wondering what had become of him? He will never know. He has failed her, utterly.
The cobwebs stir a second time as a slightly smaller dragon settles beside him -- a young metallic wyvern named Quicksilver, one of the few natives of this unfamiliar Dominance whom Rexalc has befriended during his short, frantic searching.
"Loved her muchly, did you?" the wyvern asks sadly, laying a comforting wing claw on the larger dragon's shoulder.
The Storm Dragon raises his head and gazes down at the wyvern as if he'd just asked him if he enjoys inclement weather. "Of course, friend Quicksilver," he sighs. "How could I not?"
Quicksilver nods knowingly, ruffling his wings and sending up a fine mist of rain. "Always sad when a loved one is lost to us, is it not?
"But," he adds, brightening, "did you not say that you had encountered your -- What did you call them? Ah, yes! -- your 'Storm Sisters' at a kind of winter festival back in this 'Nexus' of which you spoke?"
Rexalc smiles faintly at the memory. "Yes... yes, I did, friend Quicksilver. But what does-"
"_And_," Quicksilver cuts him off, warming to his subject, "if you could find such familiar faces so unexpectedly in this 'Nexus'... why, is it not possible that your 'Spitfire' might yet be found there as well, alive and waiting for you still?"
"YES!" Rexalc cries, his cloud's crackling echoing his sudden excitement. "Of _course_! Why did I not see it this possibility before?? I shall search the width and breadth of the Nexus, and I shall find my Sweet Emerald, and perhaps the Dominance I left behind! Indeed, if it be the Creator's will, I may yet find my own lost home, as yet untainted by the touch of Legion! THANK you, friend Quicksilver!!"
He takes the wyvern in a huggle that squeezes a small puff of flame from his lungs, then hurls upward to his eagerly waiting cloud with a single beat of his great birdlike wings. With supernatural speed far beyond simple drifting, the massive purple storm moves off to the west in search of the portal that so recently brought it hither.
Quicksilver smiles as he watches the cloud depart. And, as it crests the mountains in the distance, his face begins to change.
His snout shortens, his mien becoming markedly less draconic.
More humanoid.
More angular and cruel.
The face of Loche.
The smile, however, never fades.
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