Desreal: is it possible to never tell the truth?; LEBANON

Why not? She asks, and at first he hesitates because he realizes that even he doesn’t know the answer.

“I didn’t think for a moment you would be so interesting,” he says, with a shrug of gleaming scales. He adjusts his wings at his sides and shifts his weight. He wonders for a vague moment how on earth Baraqel and Lebanon came to know each other, to associate with each other – perhaps there is a glimmer of him somewhere in the Firestarter, buried beneath the pomp and pyromania and general uselessness.

“Don’t change,” he says decisively, dismissively – his tail (long and narrow, scaly, ending in that classic dragonic spike) folding in a semicircle around his hocks.

If she changed then she would simply be another redemption story and he would simply be the only one of his kind.

Now, though, the line is not drawn so thick as that – she does not have scales or wings or fangs, but he did not always, and the two of them share a certain rationalistic cruelty, latent malevolence that is, in his case, made profound by centuries of watching his spirit and conscience decay like a hewn corpse, until blood and flesh pass away and leave only the skeletal vestiges of what may have, at one point, been mortal. “You are too…” he pauses, searching, “…special for that.” This he means in the original, unbiased form of the word – she is unique, different, set aside because of that.

“I would like to meet Memphis. I’m very proud of Era. It’s fortunate that they are friends.” Era is, essentially, Kurai in a small female form.

Very, very useful.

“Do you love Ni’Srilan?” he asks after a pause.

Is Lebanon capable of it? Does loyalty reconcile itself somehow with her dark character?

Loyalty is something that my Nightmare forgot centuries ago.