Into opalescent cloud they had descended, mirror pools of pitch and obsidian—like black eyes gazing out from a porcelain face, eerie and out-of-place.

It didn't bother her as much as it once might've. With the turning of the seasons, she had come to grow more into herself, filling out her frame (slowly but surely!), sinew waxing to muscle and thin flesh to voluptuous curves. It was an odd sensation, but benign in its foreign taint, and it felt... good. Like she was finally beginning to grow up; finally beginning to be... someone to be reckoned with. And with her gradual aging—though she did not know it—not only was her delicate body flowering but the sharpness of her mind, the edge of her thoughts.

Unlike in the idyllic days of their youth, her dragon tended to stay away from the contortions and knots of her mind, choosing to prowl amongst the edges. His wariness, a reek of caution which ebbed and flowed, was much like that of a toddler's crawling through a rosebush. It would be far too easy to cut himself on the malicious edge of a thorn.

Privately, buried away within the tumultuous soil of her decaying thoughts, she harbored a deep-rooted and sickly pride of this. Once, she had feared her companion's ability to influence her, the the lecherous touch of his metaphorical hand on her's—but now, it was she who suckled on the bittersweet milk of Lil's worries.

The scent of bodies, warm and moist, cloying in her nostrils, was what drew her and her dragon forth, a perverse curiosity singing a siren's call through her veins. Through the shadows and light alike they wove, silent wraiths—Lilómiel's natural tendency towards chirps and shrills silenced abruptly by the firmness of Nym's will—unheard, unseen, and unknown. The last few times such a dense mass of scents had crossed their paths, it had resulted in the capture of a queen's egg; Nymeria, the seeds of her ambition growing, was unwilling to give up the possibility of such grandeur again. So on they went, meandering and ambling at a deceptively slow pace, whereas behind the fabrications of her thin illusions she took all shortcuts and never wasted a breath.

When they arrived, the skull-faced daughter could not claim surprise. You never knew what you would find; not here in Helovia, where magic spilled from every seam and companions abounded from every cavern.

Brows furrow and flex in puzzlement to hear the riddle rolling out, her weight shifting in a mesmerizing flicker across her body. Of course she didn't know how to write, or the nature of letters and words; Confutatis, strangely, had never had such interest in those arts. Still, despite her lack of understanding for what is at hand, she takes no chances. Each other individual gathered 'round, competing, murmurs out declarations of double letters and repeated consonants-and-vowels—so she replicates, duplicates, and copies. "As the others have said—the two letters. You need double letters to pass."

Pick off my petals

and make my heat explode 'cause I've been saving all my summers for you