“i’ve heard about you from others, of course. but what would you say your occupation is exactly?”

sua is still on the bed, her skin porcelain white in the sunlight trickling through the dust-woven curtains, marred only by bruises in the shape of your teeth. outside, you can hear guests making their way home from last night’s wedding, but that feels like a different world than the one you exist in during this moment.

you look at the knife in your hands, the metal blacker than the spaces between stars on the nights where the moon has yet to be reborn. the blade catches all of the light in the room and tries to devour it with an endless hunger.

“i hunt monsters.”

there’s a pause. you pass the knife from one hand to the other, the gesture and the statement similar in the way they’re both natural and inherent.

“what makes a monster?” sua asks, but it almost isn’t even a question.

and suddenly...the knife is in her hand instead of yours. you never feel the sensation of it being taken from your grasp. it’s just cool in your palm, and then it isn’t.

you look at her face and her gaze levels on you, pupils blown wide and dark, “well? what makes a monster?”

you say nothing. the air in your lungs compresses itself away.

sua draws the blade against the side of her palm and golden blood drips against the sheets like ichor, like the soul of the sun itself.

you and sua meet at the wedding the night before. some half-important noble is celebrating the marriage of his daughter to a man twice her age and three times her wealth, and as a well-known figure this side of the mountains, you don’t really have a choice but to be there. the noble did hand invite you after all, some gaudy thank you for the pests you eliminated for him earlier in the summer.

inside the meeting hall, oil lamps and candles burn bright light that bathes all of the guests in a haunting sort of glow. a small troop of troubadours and minstrels performs raucous music and the air is almost palpable with the scent of the alcohol being served gleefully, without recourse. you aren’t sure if it’s that or the look of discomfort on the young bride’s face that drives you to duck out early.

the town is at a low elevation, and all of the fog rolls down the dragon spine of the mountains and pools into the bowl of the valley. the air is almost as hot as the skin-warmed stickiness inside the meeting hall, but the fog itself is soft and cool and offsets the worst of the mugginess. there’s a mug of mead sweating in your hand, and you sip it more out of obligation than actual interest.

“tired of the party?” the voice startles you because it seems to come from all around you, and your hand falls to the blade at your hip instinctively. 

then the woman steps out of the blanket of fog breathing against the side of the building. her blonde hair is pulled around her head with religious reverence and she looks at you with dark eyes and a smile that tilts almost as much as the terrain of the mountain peaks off behind her.

“i’m not the biggest fan of social gatherings,” you admit, though not really apologetically. you don’t recognize her, so you’re not concerned about offending someone incredibly important. you would recognize her if you needed to.

she grins at you though, teeth white in the dark. her eyes look like her mother must have scooped up handfuls of the darkest night and poured them into her skull, but her teeth are the opposite. too dark. too light. too many extremes all across her face. it unsettles you and her voice drags fingertips of cold uncertainty up your spine. “i’ve heard your kind aren’t very social. i’m not surprised.”

“my kind?” you ask in reply. it feels like an insult, somehow, but you bite back the acrid tang of defensiveness. you look her over again, forcing yourself to accept she truly is quite beautiful, despite everything, despite the way she looks like someone the people in your hometown might debate burning at the stake. 

or maybe it’s the mead getting to your head.

“you’re out here alone too,” you point out, before she can reply to your first statement.

and she just hums. “your kind. hunters . you know what i mean.” and then she shrugs a fair, delicate shoulder, the top of her dress sliding down it some and revealing the cartography of her collarbone, “i’m not fond of social gatherings myself. i prefer more private company.”

the fog shifts when she steps closer, as though making room. up close what you found unsettling is still haunting, but in a different way. your stomach turns over and the alcohol in it feels heavy. “is that so?” you manage.

her dark eyes meet yours and they swallow up the struggling glow of the stars. 

it’s months later before you see her again.

you’re in a new town, past the tallest of the mountains, along the banks where a river washes away the sediment with a ravenous hunger. the farmers have been complaining about murdered livestock, nothing left behind but tattered fur and the cloying copper of blood in the pasture grass. 

it’s an easy hunt with years of experience. a few days to secure the kill. a few thousand coins in the pouch under your tunic. nothing too difficult. the monster lays dead in the center of town like some sort of gore-tattered monument, and you do not feel the pride that the locals seem to expect from you. there isn’t much to feel except a satisfaction that you aren’t dead, and a sort of desperate, inherent need to maintain your family’s honor. not much else.

you don’t expect anyone to be in your private hostel room that night, so when you open the door to another presence, you nearly draw their blood on the spot. but it’s impossible not to recognize those eyes, the way they rip all the light from the room. even the candle burning on the table seems to reach for her like a child seeking its mother.

“how did you get here?” you ask.

sua smiles at you, but there’s no kindness in it. her teeth are maybe a little too sharp. a little too much, like always.

“you haven’t stopped,” she replies.

your eyebrows arch, “i wasn’t aware that i was supposed to. i’m one of the best hunters in the western kingdom. i have a duty. an obligation.” it’s more defensive than you mean to be, but your father died doing exactly what you do now, and its a wound that you can never stitch closed. and her sharp, almost cruel smile seems to be biting into the wound, tearing it more raw even after years of refocusing on the task at hand.

“there’s more to existence than just honor, you know.” sua replies. and then she scoffs a little. “you claim that you’re a protector, but heroes don’t shed innocent blood like you do.”

and you scoff right back.

“who ever said i was a hero?”

sua’s smile is no longer a smile, but you can’t quite comprehend what expression it is instead. “well. at least we agree on one thing.”

she leaves, and all of the lights in the room follow her, the candles going out the instant the door closes.

in the evening light, sua looks far less human than she has in the past. the pillows press her cheek puffy, and as you look into her eyes you think maybe the issue is that she has never gotten good at mimicking what humans are supposed to look like. good enough, but not quite perfect. uncanny enough that she unsettles you.

and yet, here you are, with her in your bed again. fully clothed this time. you don’t know why you brought her up here at all. maybe a part of you still feels softness, and you’d felt guilty for the way she sagged against the bartop, her entire body weighed down with the weight of the wine she’d consumed. the glasses had sat all around her like a graveyard.

maybe it’s because she feels like some sort of incredible challenge, a hunt you can never quite finish. and you aren’t sure why, because she’s right in front of you now all soft and vulnerable. that first night, she was bare and open beneath your hands and you could have easily slit .

but you didn't. and you still don’t.

“why do you keep following me?” You ask, finally.

she looks at you with those not-quite-human eyes. the glow from the candle next to the bed jumps slightly, blooming inside the darkness of her pupils instead. a laugh escapes her, and that sounds more real, mismatched against her teeth that are slightly sharper than normal. “you haven’t figured it out?”

your brows furrow in confusion, and sua sits up dizzily, the sheets pooling around her hips. her head tilts and she looks at you lopsided and inhuman. her voice is dazed. “everyone has heard about you, you know. about your father, how he died killing the worst dragon any of the four kingdoms had ever seen. how he and the dragon fell from the sky together. everyone knows. and when they said you were following in his footsteps...i grew curious.”

you swallow thickly. “i have a duty to uphold my father’s honor.”

and sua laughs without humor, without humanity. it slips further. something about her face just looks very wrong. but it’s less unsettling now. it mostly makes your chest ache with a feeling you have no explanation for. “duty. of course. how could i forget?”

you say nothing because the words won’t come, and sua nods, as though you spoke, as though there’s something to acknowledge. “you aren’t the only one who lost someone that day.”

she rises to her feet, legs shaky but somehow holding her up. she smiles at you again, and it’s hard to look at. like looking at the sky in the middle of summer. “i think we might have both gotten so caught up in making our parents proud that we forgot to ask if we were proud of them.”

“what the does that even mean?” you ask.

“what makes a monster, handong?” sua replies.

you stare at her, at her fumbling features and the way you can see her pitching up into the sky and burning holes into the night. all of the things you were ever taught boil up on your tongue, but all that comes out is, “i don’t know.”

“i don’t either. i thought you were a monster, and that’s why i was curious. but maybe you’re not at all. or maybe we both are. i guess we’ll never know.”

“i...guess not.”

“if you want to avenge him, now’s your chance. i’m the last of my bloodline.”

sua looks at you in expectation. you have your knife. you have a quiver of arrows tipped with poison, right next to the bed. 

you nod at her. 

“travel safely, sua.”

she climbs out the window and a moment later you hear the familiar sound of wings beating against the night sky.

your father gives you your knife at nine years old, the day you kill your first dragon.

he teaches you how to do it. how to find footprints pressed into the moss and the wet autumn leaves. how to dip the arrows in wine-purple poison. how to shoot the wings first to take the dragon down from the sky.

your first kill is small, a local nuisance leaving pastures filled up with nothing but blood and wool and the echoes of baying sheep long-since dragged high into the sky. you rip through the membrane of its iridescent wings with your poison arrows fletched with owl feathers. you watch the way that even as it falls, the dragon is elegant, spinning in slow undulations before it crashes to the earth.

it doesn’t take long to find exactly where it fell, and the entire clearing smells like tree blood where the creature ripped branches out on the way down. the brown liquid soaks the earth and the fallen pine needles and mixes with the metallic scent of the dragon’s own wounds.

“put it out of its misery, then.” your father urges. he hands you the knife. the blade is too big for your clumsy child’s hands, your fingers still round with baby fat. you contort them around the handle as best as possible. “right behind the leg. stab straight down, into the heart.”

you do as you’re told, the blade piercing through scales and muscle in a motion that takes every single fiber of your strength.

the dragon shudders, and golden blood flows from the wound and outshines the sun burning above you.

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