"Okay, I get that this might be a sensitive topic, but can you be a little more precise, here?" Scythe Girl was explaining her unique reproductive situation to me as I prepared to lift her up into the sky. Or rather, reproductive origin. History made it sound like I was talking about her previous partners.

"Like how did that work? Mechanically, I mean. Like do Void Wolves legit straight up ejaculate? With flagellated sperm and all that? Or was this more of a weird wibbly-dibbly fairytale magic kind of affair?"

Scythe Girl claimed to be the child of a human mother and an Anathema father, specifically a Void Wolf—which was just absolutely boners—I mean bonkers—but I believed her.

"I—I don't know?" Scythe Girl sounded like she'd already crossed the boundary from embarrassed or offended to plain bewildered. "Does that really—"

"And like, what kind of dynamics are we talking about?" It was obvious that she wanted to move on, but there were important questions that demanded answers. "Like, I need you to understand that there are many different ways something like this could play out."

I proceeded to list them. "So I think the obvious question is whether it was consensual, but even then… So if it was, then was it the normal kind of consent, or was it the kind of thing where you have to clarify that you just kind of presented yourself and let the dog choose whether it wanted to be involved?"

Scythe Girl tried to interrupt me, but I was too clever for that. "...And if we go the other way, there's even more options. From what I understand, rape is a spectrum. Wait, make sure to hold on tight."

Scythe Girl was now in position, clinging to the ridges of my spin at the base of my neck. Based on my understanding and experience with my own dragon-shaped body, I could confirm that the classic base-of-the-neck position for a dragon rider was correct.

Raising and spreading my wings, talons extended and body coiling, I sprung upward. A single heavy beat of my wings flung us dozens of feet skyward, and a second propelled us over the tallest nearby rooftops.

"...And we have to be careful of an implicit assumption about who was assaulting whom," I continued. "Like was your mom one of those freaky urban fantasy ladies?"

"I don't know?" Scythe Girl's voice was strained, and I realized it was because she was squeezing the natural handholds of my ridged back hard enough to deform the silver-gray metal. Riding me had never been comfortable, something that bald guy learned before my wings had even grown in. "Please stop asking about it!"

With a few more lurching flaps upward, I brought us high enough to be just out of reach of the Handy-Dandy. Keeping my feathers vibrating, I hovered there, my tail dropping downward and my long, long neck twisting around backward to peer at the tiny little half human perched on top of me.

"But it's important."

The white-haired woman scowled at me. "No it's not."

"Yes it is." At the same time, my mind snagged on that observation—white hair. That's not natural. She could have bleached it, true, but…

She squinted at me. "Are you a child?"

I noticed only then that her eyes were a brilliant, pale purple. White hair and violet eyes. Void Wolves… don't they have white fur? Fuck, she looks like the protagonist of an edgy YA dark academia novel.

Also, wait. Did she just call me a child?

"A-ha!" She smirked. "You definitely are… Oh my god! You're a baby dragon!"

My mind slowed to a crawl. Baby… Dragon… I was so offended that it stopped feeling like I was offended. The worst part was that I didn't think she was trying to insult me, or even to tease me. She genuinely thought I was a baby dragon, and worse, she was excited about it.

"I—what?" My mind was still struggling to catch up. "Sorry, but no. Yes, I know, I'm super awesome and cute, but I'm not a baby. Why would you even think that? I'm an adult dragon. I'm quite large, if you haven't noticed."

"Pfft." She blew out an amused breath. "Yeah, sure." Then, stretching her whole body to reach, she booped me. "Cutie."

Her little tiny delicate half-human finger—she reached out with it and booped me on the tip of my snout.

The fucking audacity!

Immediately, I yanked my head away from her, blinking my eyes and working my jaw in a vain attempt to get rid of the awful phantom sensation that lingered from where her finger touched me. "You booped me," I accused. "You—you booped me."

"Yup!"

I am going to fucking eviscerate this bitch.

Both of us were ignoring the Handy-Dandy by this point. That was fine—I'd already gotten what I wanted from it, and there were plenty of higher tier Anathema roaming around by this point. "Do that again," I warned her, "and I will find the right concentration of sulfuric acid to just barely counter your regeneration, rip all your limbs off, and give you a nice soak. Understand?"

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Scythe Girl just pouted, and it was infuriating. "Aww, but you're so boopable!"

That does it. This bitch is even worse than Katherine. I only tolerated her this far because of her unique origin.

Honestly, the whole thing was starting to get ridiculous.

Originally, like most reasonable people, I thought that there were Guardians, true Star Guardians, and the Anathema that they fought. Then, there was the big reveal that I was an Anathema, created by a faction of Star Guardians as an experiment.

Freaky enough already, but then I learned that there were also people who got infected with an Anathema seed the natural way and just—stayed in control? And the faction of Star Guardians who created me weren't already aware of it?

That was starting to get complicated. And now, there was a third thing running around that wasn't an Anathema or a human but the natural offspring of both, and also somehow a regular Guardian?

Can't the universe—multiverse, I guess—just decide on a consistent mechanic and stick to it? Please?

Come to think of it, I had no idea how much this new girl knew about all of that. It was possible that she didn't know there were hybrids like myself running around—the Bouquet certainly didn't.

And while I might have implied something like that when I first asked her what she was, it didn't seem like she had been paying enough attention to those details, and if she had, she hadn't mentioned it.

I decided to ask. Normally, I took the commandment to not reveal my true origins with uncharacteristic seriousness. But in this unexpected and unique circumstance, I wagered that my supposed Star Guardian allies would overlook it when I was telling it to someone like this.

"So. I'm not just a random Anathema that can somehow talk and also just happens to be chill for some reason."

"I mean, yeah, I figured that," Scythe Girl replied. "I assume you're—wait. No, that's—wait, what?"

I blinked. What? I didn't understand what she was confounding herself about, and now I was getting secondhand confusion. "Slow down. What are you going off about?"

Scythe Girl paused, and while I wasn't looking at her anymore, but monitoring what was happening down on the ground, I could tell that she was thinking through her confusion while preparing to speak.

"I assumed you were a manifested spirit that got sucked through the breach with all the other non-manifested spirits, and you're not going crazy because you still have a familiar bond with a sorcerer in a realm with higher anima saturation?"

Despite not having expected anything specific, I also didn't expect that. She knew about the true nature of Anathema and incursions—and she assumed that I was—wait. Previous pieces of the puzzle clicked together.

"That's what your dad was," I realized. "A bonded familiar. Which is why he had the mental capacity to, you know…"

"Yes," Scythe Girl confirmed. "That's why I assumed you were in a similar situation, but apparently, you're not. And you called yourself an Anathema, but you also said you're not like me. So on one hand, I would assume you're a normal spirit, but then you wouldn't have called yourself that, because only people from this world have that mixed up."

The longer Scythe Girl spoke, the more my confusion grew. The older puzzle pieces might have clicked, but she kept throwing new ones at me, and I was struggling to keep up.

"Wait, stop. You—what do you mean about Anathema? I mean the word. You're saying you're an Anathema, which makes sense, but then you make it sound like Anathema aren't actually Anathema? I mean yes, I'm a spirit, and I know that Anathema are spirits, but…"

I trailed off. For several seconds, Scythe Girl remained silent—again, even though I wasn't looking at her, I could tell that she was sitting there with a puzzled expression likely on her own face.

"...You're wrong."

I blinked. "About what?"

"Anathema. You and everyone else here, even the Star Guardians. That word, Anathema… It's a misunderstanding. My dad told me that the Star Guardians probably misinterpreted something that one of them managed to recall from when the Profane Architect seeded them."

What the fuck? I still wasn't understanding, but that was only half the problem. The Profane Architect? I'd never heard the phrase before, but I could hear the capitalization. And at that point, another piece slid into position…

"Okay, so I've never heard of this Profane Architect before, but… Is it by chance the spooky cosmic god-thing that chucks Star Cores to people and then says some cryptic shit before vanishing?"

It was Scythe Girl's turn to be stunned. "I—if you didn't know the name, then how… Are you telling me you've seen it?"

Well that answers that question. "Yes," I said dryly, "I had the misfortune to be bleeding out from a gunshot wound while some other bitch got chosen for special magic powers right next to me. It was some real intense shit, and that was before it noticed me and said some creepy shit about hatching."

"It spoke to you?!" I winced as Scythe Girl shrieked in surprise. "What did it say?"

I wanted to brush off the question and continue with my own, but I had a strong feeling that we were approaching a mutual understanding of something new—and maybe something big.

"Yeah," I answered, "It noticed me right after it gave the Star Core to the other girl, and then it asked if I was an Anathema, which didn't make sense at the time, because I thought I was a regular human. Then it said some creepy shit about me hatching, and that's how I found out that, uh…"

I trailed off. I knew I was going to continue, but I had to work up a bit of courage. The warning to not give away the big secret was one of the few things that had really gotten to me. "I'm an artificial hybrid, not a natural one like you. A faction of the Star Guardians have been doing experiments on creating us."

"...Holy shit." Scythe Girl sounded shocked, which was convenient because it told me that she wasn't in the know about a lot of the secret stuff. "That's—not actually surprising, to be honest. It makes sense. It also explains why you thought we were half Anathema."

Well, at least one of us understands what's going on… but I'd still like my own answers, please. "So what are you saying? You keep implying that Anathema aren't actually Anathema."

"Right, right." Her voice made it sound like her thoughts were still distant, but then she cleared her throat and continued. "That's right. They're just improperly manifested spirits. The term Anathema, or Abomination, or Chimera, or Mongrel, or… I mean there are a lot of variants. But regardless, it was never meant to describe spirits during beast tides."

She took a breath. "It's a very negative term, and our world is kind of unusual in that there was no existing hatred for us, and now it's kind of the opposite… Because it was meant to describe creatures that exist as a meld between a spirit and a material form.

"Creatures like me. Or like you…. Or like Star Guardians."

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