Xanthor
Xanthox slept soundly in his cave at the base of Mt. Nori. He was fairly content with the temperature even if his companion was not. It was, after all, not his choice that the Bleeder suddenly appeared, dripping its toxic blood down his chest. It had just, well, appeared. It wasn’t his fault that he hurt after IT happened.
Within the many years Xanthox and Xanthor had spent together, they learned much about each other and now the two seemed like they got along wonderfully.
Xanthor was awoken, yet again might she add, by Xanthox’s noisy snoring. Soundly was right! You would think a woman would get used to this after 300 years, but you would be wrong. Xanthor is too much of a light sleeper, and had already been forced to change her sleeping habits several times throughout the years.
Firstly, where she slept. The shoulder-thing wasn’t cutting it after about 100 years, she didn’t much enjoy crouching either, being it caused massive cramps in her back. So, she transferred to nesting in a corner of the cave. When that didn’t work, due to a painful tugging feeling on her skin from the distance, she decided to simply curl up between Xanthox’s shoulder blades on his back.
Right now, however, her problem wasn’t the position or even the heat so much as the creature’s snoring. It seemed that the whole Volcano should shake with the noise, but Xanthor knew that was ridiculous. The noise couldn’t be heard at the end of the long winding tunnel Xanthox had dug as his home so many years ago. It was a long winding cavern, sloping downward slightly, and very steeply at some points, allowing his nest to be nice and heated a mile beneath the earth’s surface.
At first Xanthor despised the heat and wanted nothing but to return to Xanthox’s heart where she belonged. But then she discovered the wonders of the “backyard springs” as Xanthox liked to call them. They were but a little farther back in his massive nesting area at the end of his tunnel behind a boulder Xanthox had rolled in place. “To keep in the steam,” he explained when Xanthor had asked him about it. They consisted of two fairly large pools of bubbling water, filling the room with steam. Four small pools of the same liquid, and three large, two small, areas of bubbling tar. The latter was only enjoyed by Xanthox, for he was the one with all the protective scales. All of these pools surrounded an active geyser, oh, how amazing when it erupted.
Privacy, friendship, immortality, amazing living arrangements, no publicity but a fickle legend told to the generations about “a Battleheart named Xanthox, doomed to life eternal”, what was there to be displeased with in this life? Something was missing, for the reason Xanthor was still with Xanthox was not because she chose to stay, but because Xanthox was still grieving IT.
