"He would kill me now if she asked, I can tell that much."

"I didn't go after her from a vacuum, either. You cannot comprehend..." He shuts his eyes and sighs smokily.

"That's a bit insulting to my intelligence, isn't it? Or my experience. I willingly got myself into a situation where it was likely that I would be raped in order to save several hundred lives. I was threatened with a killswitch in my head and had the wonderful choice of 'set a demon on the instigator and not be able to control what he does at all' and 'probably die, unless she somehow managed to break me and make me do some really terrible things.' Which, as it turns out, didn't matter much, because I got myself shot in the head later. My brother died in prison. My dad took up becoming a drunk after my death. My mom's in an insane asylum. I get it. Terrible things happen, and you want more than anything to prevent them. Right?"

"But you have no experience with being the last dragon left alive, thinking the war that killed your entire family was over, and finding that you were wrong, that there is one left, that all your ancestors' paranoia in trying to track them down and make sure it was finished was for nothing because there is one and who can say how many more left."

"So obviously, their method didn't work. Tracking down sphinxes to make sure the war is 'finished' by torturing them for information and then killing them has managed to get people from another dimension pissed at you. It has made you the bad guy. Okay? So try some diplomacy, she is not her ancestors, she literally had zero desire to go after dragons before you started attacking her. Same with her boyfriend, I'm pretty sure that if left to their own devices their plan was 'learn and then teach magic' and possibly also 'figure out how to make medallions and then hand that knowledge to anyone that will listen.'"

"So I've been told," mutters the dragon, closing his eyes again.

"And I suppose that when she's got a litter of kits none of them will have the slightest inclination to pick up where their forebears left off, either? When she resurrects ancestors she has not met, they will peacefully reestablish the species without any interest in stamping out the last of the once-great race of the dragons?" he drawls.

"Why would her kids have any reason to go after dragons? Why would she resurrect people that want to murder innocent dragons for no other reason than their species?"

He looks like he'd shrug if he could. "She fetches her mother - her mother wants her parents - they want theirs - will she look them in the eye and say no, I don't know those people, I would like to protect a dragon I nearly chose to kill myself? I doubt it very much."

"Okay, fine, then why do you think she would just let them kill people? Actually, why do you think I would, personally I would take offense to sphinxes killing dragons just because, and quite frankly I'm scarier than both of you."

"When there are enough sphinxes it will not be a matter of letting them do anything."

"Actually, it would be, because the person with control over the resurrection can say, 'No, I will not resurrect any more of you, and also, here, meet my invincible scary magic friends, they do not like murder.'"

"You have no idea how powerful she is," he murmurs, "do you."

"I think she must not have learned to control it well yet. I was - hurrying before she managed it."

"They can do - nearly anything."

"That's - really not specific? When you say 'nearly,' what's the nearly include?"

"I didn't live through anything but the tail end of the war myself. I don't have an instruction manual and if I had I wouldn't give it to her friends."

"Fair," she sighs. "But there's - some serious competition, when you say 'nearly anything.' I am obscenely scary. My boyfriend, too."

"I noticed," he says, glancing at the osmium around his left wrist.

"I don't think you actually understand. Where I come from, it is a kill on sight offense to summon an unbound demon, because that is the fastest way to put them back. Because demons are worse than angels. Once there was a rogue angel and it was a smart and strategicly sound decision to nuke him, despite the fallout in the surrounding area. It didn't work. It took months to track down the person that summoned him in a hospital somewhere, because he had another face, was incapable of moving or speaking or asking anyone to kill him and was reduced to mentally being a vegetable, until at last they ran a DNA test and figured out who he was. That only happened because the angel was in a rush, if he'd been more careful there would have been no trace to figure out the man was the angel's summoner and he would have kept running rampant. And do you know what he was doing? Turning people into furniture. Literal furniture, that could think and breathe. But they couldn't move, or speak, or even scream. He force-fed them so they wouldn't die, until the area was hit with the aforementioned nuke, and even then someone had to stop by and mercy kill anyone left. That is what I am capable of, I am obscenely scary."