Phoenix

"If you want a dragon with neural magic, you should have gone further east towards the farming outposts—they use neural magic to control the livestock. Or even the City of Wings itself—you'll find dragons with every single type of magic there."

"I know, but I don't have time to fly all the way to the farming outposts or to Avaeria. I need a dragon with neural magic today, or latest by tomorrow. After that, it won't matter anymore. This is very urgent."

For the first time, Alstrom turned his head to stare at Sunfire as she walked beside him. His expression was no longer dismissive, but instead intrigued. "You have my curiosity. I do have neural magic, so tell me—what exactly do you want my magic for, griffin?"

Sunfire clicked her beak. "Right! Don't judge, just hear me out first. I have been searching for someone to create a lifebond with—that is the griffin term, but as a dragon I think the closest comparison you would understand is mate. That is my quest. I am searching for a mate."

Alstrom snorted again. "Hmf, really? Are you so incredibly unattractive that no one from your entire civilization would choose to mate with you? And thus you have to turn to a dragon for companionship? That is...pitiable yet impressive. I commend you for your resilience! Most people would just learn to live with solitude."

Sunfire had been trying her best to stay calm and not let Alstrom annoy her, but it seemed like the dragon was doing his best to get on her nerves. "What?! No, I'm not ugly and I'm certainly not pitiable! It's not about being lonely. I am not lonely!"

"Good, because I'm not interested in becoming your mate, Sunflower. Go bother someone else."

This time, the griffin's feathers all stood on end and she couldn't restrain her annoyance. "My name is not Sunflower! It's Sunfire! Just hear me out! It's not about companionship. I am literally looking for a mate—as in, someone to be a parent with."

"If that is the case, all the more reason you should have stayed with the griffins. Obviously a dragon cannot help you with becoming a parent," Alstrom said.

The dragon and the griffin entered a small clearing in the forest where a groundsheet, several equipment pouches, and a small tent were arranged around a burnt-out campfire. Sunfire realized that Alstrom must have been deliberately chasing the vizriak hunter so that he could bring it down near to his campsite, reducing the distance he would have to carry the carcass. If he had the skill to outfly a vizriak and intentionally herd it in one direction before taking it down, he was a highly impressive hunter.

Alstrom dropped the vizriak carcass just outside the camp and shrugged off his flight harness next to the campfire. He took a pouch of knives and other sharp tools to begin cutting up the vizriak carcass and stripping it for its meat, its skin, and other useful components. Sunfire sat down beside the blue-scaled dragon and watched him work. "What do you mean by obvious? If you would reject my offer and leave my experiment to fail by default, I would ask that you at least explain your reasoning," she requested.

"This is basic." Holding a knife in a forepaw, Alstrom gestured between the two of them. "You're a griffin, I'm a dragon. There is...equipment incompatibility. Two different species cannot crossbreed and hope to have some sort of hybrid...hatchling...chick thing that is half covered with scales and half with feathers. Even if I agreed to mate with you, my seed would not quicken in your vent and you wouldn't lay any viable eggs. It's impossible." Alstrom paused and frowned. "I don't think griffins even lay eggs."

Sunfire chuckled in amusement. "Hmf! No, we don't lay eggs. But you think I'm ignorant of biology? Certainly not!" She tilted her head and gave Alstrom a bemused look. "You are...uninformed, but that is not your fault. You clearly are aware of how dragons mate, but I'm not surprised that you have never heard of how griffins reproduce. After all, you are not a griffin. You are a dragon—a fine specimen, indeed—but you are not a griffin."

Alstrom did not return her cheery expression. He continued to deftly use his knife and his claws to cut apart and disassemble the vizriak carcass. He had carefully sliced open its belly and was tugging out the viscera. "Stop talking in circles and explain yourself immediately. I have better things to do than to have my time wasted. Thus far our discussion has been pointless."

The griffin let out a huff of annoyance. "Ffttt. Oh! You dragons live to be two hundred years old, yet you are always in such a rush! I do admire your industriousness, but just be patient."

The drake let out a soft growl in reply. "Rr. You still haven't explained yourself. From the few times I have spoken to griffins, I have come to the conclusion that they always talk too much and yet say too little. You are clearly no exception. Get to the point before I tire of this conversation."

"Alright, alright!" Sunfire said, some of her feathers ruffling up in agitation. "I'll explain, but it's a complex subject that will take some time. To begin—how old are you?"

Alstrom looked suspicious, but he answered the question. "Fifty-one years old."

Sunfire nodded. "Five decades is still young for a dragon, but griffins live on a different time scale. I have lived through thirty-two winters since I was born, but I will not live to see next year's snow. I will not even live to see next week. My death approaches today, or in at most in a few days."

She paused to give Alstrom a chance to respond, but he said nothing. His body language gave no indication whatsoever of what he was thinking as he continued to work at butchering the vizriak carcass. "Dragons can be so dispassionate! Would he be so calm if it was a fellow dragon who had said that she was dying?" Sunfire wondered.

Nevertheless, the griffin shrugged her wings and continued her explanation. "Don't pull out your feathers mourning for me. My death will be normal for my people. The griffin cycle of life is different from all other peoples; it is unique amongst all the living creatures. We live for three decades, at most four if we are lucky, and then we die."

Alstrom finally replied. "What a short time."

"Ah, but it is not as short as you might think, comparing it to a drakken's lifespan. Three decades is more than enough time to know joy, sadness, anger, fear, and everything else. It is long enough to find love, to know hate, to feel disappointment, and to understand loyalty. Perhaps we live short lives, but they are full lives." Sunfire paused as she prepared to deliver the most important piece of information—the key difference that lay at the heart of her quest. "But the most important thing you must understand is that at the end of it, we do not die."

"You don't die?" asked the drake, his voice taking a faintly sceptical tone. "You believe that your soul is timeless and ascends to another plane to live immortal? I thought only the centaurs and the humans entertained such beliefs."

So Alstrom knew about the religion of the other sapient species? Perhaps this drake was more educated than she had assumed. Sunfire shook her head. "No. I mean it literally when I said I'm not going to die. Sort of. It's complicated! As we come to the end of our lives, our bodies prepare to create the next generation, which shall be my next life. Unlike you dragons who can produce eggs throughout your lives after you leave childhood, griffins only give birth once per life. My death will be directly linked to the birth of my offspring, and I will inevitably die during the process. But the juvenile griffin will have my memories, thoughts, and my personality in his or her head. I will die, but then I will live again in a new body. The old body perishes, but my mind lives on. Do you understand now?"

Alstrom no longer seemed interested in cutting up the vizriak carcass. Now he stared at Sunfire with an expression that was no longer just curious—he was fascinated. "What? Are you serious? I have heard stories...legends about griffins being long-lived, but your whole civilization is...immortal? That is incredible if true."

"It is true, but I think it is less immortality, and more like having very, very long memories." Sunfire's gaze went slightly distant as she recalled her memories stretching back further than she could even remember, if that made any sense. "Thirty-three years ago I had feathers that were snowy white in my past life. And tomorrow will be a new day, when I am reborn anew. It will be...different. That is all I know." The griffin gazed down at her current brown-feathered plumage, knowing that this would likely be her last day alive in this body.

"Living forever? To die but yet not die? That is..." said Alstrom, his voice trailing away as he thought through the concept. He didn't sound so arrogant anymore; now he sounded almost reverent. "If I never had to worry about death—if I knew that I would always just have a new body with my old memories..." The drake shook his head. "I don't know if I would do anything different. Perhaps I would? I have never really considered that one day I will die... One hundred and fifty years more seems like so much time, yet it seems like so recently I was only still a young fledgling. But you? If you really can just keep renewing yourself, then you must be ancient. What stories you could tell."

Sunfire could not move her beak to express emotion as dragons or humans could with a smile, but she opened her wings and bowed slightly. "Alstrom, I'm not ancient. Over time, even the strongest of memories will fade and get replaced by new ones. New experiences, new opinions, new skills; all these replace older ones. If griffins held on to every single memory we ever had since time immemorial, we would forget how to live in the now. We would be nothing but...trees or dusty old books, filled with knowledge and wisdom but unable to act. But as for me? I can barely even recall what I ate for a meal last week. Dried fruit and nuts, probably." Sunfire tapped her talons against the grass, wondering how much of her current personality and memories would make it into her new body. Being reborn was like going to sleep, dreaming, and then waking up in a new body that was much smaller and more energetic, but which sometimes had trouble walking around at first. Even though she had died and been reborn countless times before, there was always the thought that one day she might die and not wake up.

Alstrom seemed lost in thought. It seemed like Sunfire had managed to get the idea stuck in his mind, and now the drake couldn't help but think through all the consequences of what she had just revealed. "What happens if... What about the male griffins? If the females griffins like you live again after they die giving birth, do the males just...die? Or do they live longer?"

Sunfire narrowed her eyes and raised the crest feathers above her head—the gesture was the griffin equivalent of a pleased smile. Alstrom didn't seem smug or arrogant anymore. She had intrigued the dragon by explaining the truth about her own civilization. "Male griffins live for three to four decades, just like the females. But even when their bodies are expiring, their minds do not need to die unless they choose it. And if they wished to die, a griffin of any gender can commit suicide at any age, just like a dragon or a member of any civilization could. It's not exactly a complicated process. But such a thing is usually the result of serious mental disease."

"How do the males live on?" asked Alstrom. His voice was already quiet, but it got even quieter. "And what exactly does this have to do with me?"

"Mating is a...complex process. Almost all female griffins chose to become pregnant once we reach adult age. We carry inside us offspring who are fully developed and ready to be born—all that is necessary is for their empty minds to be filled. So for me, the reproductive process has already begun," explained Sunfire. "It was set in motion many years back when I mated with a griffin from a neighbouring eyrie about two and a half decades ago. He impregnated me, and for most of my life I there have been two juveniles waiting inside my womb."

"You've been gravid all your life?" asked Alstrom.

"I'm pregnant, not gravid. Gravid is for creatures who carry eggs," Sunfire said, correcting the drake. "But yes, the vast majority of griffins are female, and if they are adults, they are pregnant. This is how our species survives—if we somehow suffer injury or disease, we can immediately transfer our consciousness and be reborn in a new body, but usually we can wait till we have reached the end of our natural lives and our old bodies begin to fail."

"If you griffins are going around pregnant for most of your lives, it's no wonder you're all such bad flyers. You are carrying so much dead weight—or live weight, technically."

Sunfire let out an amused chirp. "Hm! I suppose that's one way to see it. But as for your question earlier about males—this same male griffin who mated with me all those decades ago was supposed to mate with me again one last time as we were dying, during which we would experience the lifebond—a unique magical and mental link which would transfer over our thoughts, our personalities, our memories; the entirety of our consciousness. And then we would both die and live again in young new bodies. It is the end of this life and the start of a new one."

"Then why are you not with this male? Why are you so far into drakken territory?" asked Alstrom. He glanced down towards the butchered vizriak carcass and made a few more small cuts with his knife, slicing off the leathery hide.

The feathers on Sunfire's neck and her back puffed up in anger at the thought of the male griffin. "I will not speak his name! He had...a change of heart, and instead he decided to perform the lifebond with my sister. Not that she is my sister in the way you dragons might think of siblings. She is actually me from the last generation, but in a different body." Sunfire quickly explained this concept. "If a female griffin performs the lifebond alone, both her two offspring will have identical copies of her mind. This is what I did in my previous life. I had two juveniles—myself, and my sister. This male griffin got us both pregnant, but he can only perform the lifebond with one of us, and apparently I was the less convincing choice. Rejection stings."

"Sounds like family politics would be far more complicated amongst griffins than drakken," Alstrom said.

"It is, Alstrom, it really is. Have I mentioned that griffins come in three different sexes, not two like you dragons?" Sunfire chuckled amusedly on seeing Alstrom's eyes get even wider. "We have males, females, and also herms, who have the genitals of both genders. Males can fertilize females and hermaphrodites. Females produce two offspring when fertilized by a male, but only one offspring when fertilized by a herm. Herms have similar reproductive capacity as females, but they can also produce seed like males. However, herms are less virile and they will only produce one offspring if they mate with a female, another herm, or if they self-fertilize. So a mating pair of one male and one female, one male and one herm, or one female and one herm will give a total of two offspring per pair—one for each of the parents, giving them continuity to the next generation. Male-male or female-female pairs don't work, but herm-herm pairs give up to four offspring in total, which is more than you started with. You might therefore think that our population would stagnate without the herms, but that isn't true because the gender ratio isn't exactly equal—griffin females are by far the most common, followed by males, then herms. Did you manage to get all that?"

"I think I would need to write it down to understand all this," said Alstrom.

"And that's just for a monogamous pair of two griffins! If you have three or more griffins all mating together—which happens a lot—it's a real mess of an orgy. You have to keep track of who's been mating with who, and keeping a chart is not at all sexy."

Alstrom nodded slowly. "Wait, are you a herm? Because I'll be honest—if you have a penis, I am significantly less interested in mating with you, Sunflower."

"You...irritating... Ngggrhhh... My name is not Sunflower!" squawked Sunfire. Her exasperation bubbled into action and she jumped to her feet and ran over to shove Alstrom. She knocked her shoulder against his, trying to flip him over, but the dragon just shifted his weight and fended of her mock attack with ease.

"Hehehe, looks like I ruffled a few feathers," Alstrom said, chuckling with amusement.

Sunfire's feathers were definitely very ruffled. "Sunfire! Not Sunflower! Sunflowers are just some stupid yellow plants that like to point east! Sunfire refers to stellar thermonuclear fusion, the blazing power source which keeps the sun aflame! The ultimate source of all heat, light, and energy! Without the sun rising every morning we'd all freeze to death!" She made one last irritated attempt to shove Alstrom, and then she collapsed against his side. "Oh!"

"Calm down, Sunny." Alstrom chuckled again and used his wing to pat Sunfire's back. "Wow, your feathers are really soft."

Besides the persistent misstating of her name, which was clearly deliberate, Sunfire also felt slightly offended on behalf of her past lives where she had been male. "And what do you mean you wouldn't mate with me if I had a penis? What's wrong with having a penis? You've got a penis, but you don't hear me complaining."

"There nothing wrong with having a penis, but I would not choose to mate with someone who has one. That is my preference."

"Well we're in luck then, because I don't have one. This here griffin is one hundred percent hen."

"Are you sure about that?"

"Do I look like a cock to you?" Right as she said it, Sunfire could tell that Alstrom was preparing a snarky retort. "Actually, don't answer that. Can we focus on the important part? The lifebond. You dragons are known for having all sort of different, exotic types of magic, but for griffins, the lifebond is our speciality. When a griffin transfers consciousness it is not a perfect process—maybe I'll end up calmer, or a bit more impatient, or less chatty, or more energetic, or more sombre, or I'll have a fear of snakes, or a new love for swimming, or whatever. I'm the same person, but just a bit different in numerous ways that may or may not be too subtle to even notice. And when you have two griffins performing a lifebond together—that is the most intimate possible experience. You have two linked minds, and sometimes a little bit of your partner goes into you."

Sunfire paused. "Uh, I meant that in a mental sense. Some of the memories or personality traits may end up copied, swapped around, or exchanged. I didn't literally mean a little bit of the other griffin ends up inside you—although when you mate, that is actually how you it works..."

"I am aware of how sex works," said Alstrom.

"Of course, of course. But I just thought..." Sunfire sighed softly. "Ever since I found out that I didn't have a partner to lifebond with for this cycle, I decided that I wanted to do something different. I could have found some other griffin to link minds with if I wanted, but that's exactly what I've been doing for the past hundred lifetimes, or thousand, or ten thousand. Or however far back the lineage goes, back until the primeval era when griffins first developed this...unique method of reproduction. I just thought that I wanted to do something different this time. Not always the same thing over and over."