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. "Who would have thought that I
should be hunted by such as this? Or that you should hunt
them?"
The king's voice was low and halting. "True. They are
vile, and we were proud. But for once, we both have died
for something besides ourselves. And when you have been
dead as long as I - " he wavered, and said in a last breath -
"a little variety in one's chosen way of dying is not such a
bad thing."
And as the stag joined the king in final death, he
thought sleepily that after a thousand years of nightly
betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death
and more painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant.
He cradled his head against King Peris's stomach, and the
two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.
No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they
disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and
powdered under the pressure of weather and vines; time's
best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient
crown and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains.
For reasons no one living knows, it does not crumble. Go to
the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.
Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade
and stood before the single draconian
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