[puffyn]

Coming up on the final turn here... I believe the plan is to host turn 60 as our last one, but not 61? Which means, after turn 59 hosts (which most of us have already submitted), we have but one turn left to play...

--- C'tis, Turn 57 ---

As the army rolled out of Pythium, the leaves of autumn were falling fast. Laph was one of the last lizards to leave the former capital, detained with harried last minute correspondences and other minutiae that fell to her as the senior non-military lizard. It was late evening when she mustered the final few troops, barely more than an honor guard, for the march north. Her mind was filled with a thousand details of things she should have done or might still be able to persuade other people to do for her, and so it was mere happenstance that her eyes caught upon the fountain.

She had walked through this courtyard, between the scholars' quarters in the center of town and the temporary camps of C'tis high command, many times in the weeks following the defeat of the Marignonese squatters, and had never thought much of it. But now that she stopped and looked around, she realized that it had once been quite a grand courtyard. Come to think of it, perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that all the grand boulevards in Pythium converged here; and she paused for a moment, imagining the massed hordes of soldiers crowding the streets, harangued into their final deadly war. The courtyard had been deserted as long as Laph had been in the city. But with the original Pythite residents long since supplanted and suppressed by first Mannish and then Marignonese conquerors... perhaps that wasn't surprising.

It certainly didn't look like much now. The former heart of the empire was now weed-grown, and here and there cobbles had been pried from the streets, probably to rebuild houses destroyed by war after war. Half a dozen stray dogs and iguanas slept in the fading sun. And the fountain in the center, heavily chipped, long since dried of water, though remarkably devoid of pigeons or other nasty scale-leavers so common in these lands, shouldn't have really caught her eye, except for the way it seemed to wink at her as she walked past.

And not a friendly wink, she thought absently, before whipping her head around to get another look. The fountain remained resolutely stony, worn, with no trace of any carvings that could be considered the face of any creature, or even eyes; it was, therefore, completely incapable of winking. But she stared at it nonetheless for a good long while, until one of her bodyguard finally prodded her forward, to the last conflict with Marignon and the inevitable destruction of their forces on this front.

It was just a broken fountain, after all, and Laph had a long march to the Saran Forest. She shivered a little, and blamed the nightfall, and the impending winter.

---

Time weighed heavily on Lugal's shoulders.

Or at least, it really should have. Hema knew he was far and away the oldest lizard in C'tis. He had lived through more wars than he could count, even considering that she suspected he couldn't count past five. To hear him tell it, he had lived through the end of the world more than seven times, and Hema wondered, as so many had before her, just what was the plural of "apocalypse".

He certainly looked scarred and ancient enough for Hema to believe that at least some of his stories of survival against impossible odds were real, even if she doubted that he had single-handedly defeated a million squids in the Caves of Time, as he had claimed just that morning before the council at the High Rock. Last week, he had gone on at some length about how he was the sole survivor of the Silver Forest Massacre, in spite of being set on fire by the great dragon Astairr himself, whom he had then cursed with the total annihilation of his realms. And so forth.

These days, most able bodied lizards were out at the front fighting, or holed up in their towers frantically devising clever ways to liberate Marignon from the tyrannous theocracy of the Inquisition. The council of elder lizards was the domain of the very old, and consisted, on most days, of half-mute revenants. Lugal loved the amount of floor space they gave him to propound his ideas, and how nobody ever interrupted him any more, and Hema had learned more about his past than she had ever wanted to know. He should be well on his way to senile obsolescence by now, barely able to muster up a good harangue.

But he remained remarkably untouched by the ravages of time.

Hema herself had woken up one morning to discover a mysterious wound – and not fresh, but long-ago scarred over, the memory of some distant battle she had been in, except that she had never seen combat in her life. Her most challenging day-to-day experience was surviving the job of Liaison to Crazy-Elder-Lizard, which had, admittedly, brought her close to death on more than one occasion. (The incident with the herd of rampaging dead elephants still stalked her nightmares.) But she had, remarkably perhaps, completely escaped permanent harm. Until now.

It wasn't just her. The streets of C'tis, though mostly deserted, saw more and more newly-made cripples, and reports flew in from all around the world, not just in lizard lands, that the young were aging and suffering maladies far sooner than they should, and the old dying prematurely. She had tried to see a healer, when she had first noticed her own malady; but he merely shook his head. "I fear that wound will never fully heal," he sighed. And he stared sadly at her through his remaining good eye, the other lost to forces unknown.

Laph had sent a cryptic letter trying to make sense of it, that Hema puzzled over. "... and at Saran Polgrave was killed in battle, run down by undead horsemen, but the few Marignonese we could question seemed overjoyed at his death, and cackled about him becoming 'more powerful than you could possibly imagine', before taking their own lives in an attempt to join him. Rumors are that he has been 'born again' in Marignon of all places, but it is hard to determine reality from religious hallucination with these people..."

So perhaps this was one final attempt by Marignon to hurry on the end of the world, and somehow they had sped the hands of time itself for everyone, as they had also hastily precipitated their own demise. Or perhaps Hema had really been in battle, in the AYE wars maybe, and had simply... forgotten her war wound.

It all seemed as likely as Lugal, walking jauntily down her path with a brace of coneys over his shoulders, come to borrow her spices or harangue her into working on his latest doomsday weapon, who could say? Perhaps even time recognized that this was not a lizard to be trifled with, and quietly left him alone.

---

Cole paused in his garden. His agapanthus had grown to such enormous height that even in dragon form he could stop and admire them without stooping too low; which was good, because his back ached these days. Cole's wounds, he cheerfully admitted, were entirely legitimate, the penalty for roasting one too many knight, and gladly paid.

He turned to his roses. He had had great hopes for this breed, a brilliant shade of orange, but the plant seemed on the verge of death. Perhaps a little more fertilizer, he reflected. He would have to remember not to eat all of the cows for lunch, though it was hard. The C'tis mountain cow had such a delicate flavor.

In the fort, where the dragon sometimes resorted to human form, there was a stack of letters from everywhere in his dominion. It seemed the small lizards were marching on Marignon itself, while Man and Vanheim and even T'ien Ch'i (such a cute little civilization, such quaint notions they had about dragons) were marching on all of Marignon's lesser fortresses. Epic battles were being fought, full of derring-do and stunning heroics.

Cole moved on to the gold roses. He had been too negligent of late, and little pyrite weeds were slowly encroaching on his magnificent creations, the finest of all the flowers of his garden. The dragon hummed happily as he puttered. Wars came and went; and after the last knights had disappeared from the land, Cole had frankly lost interest. But roses, now...