“Your plan isn’t working, Kairos!” Yisini yelled as she slithered into the oversized temple. The floor was made of gold tiles, and it amused Yisini how she was ruining them with her slimy scales. To the left and right, in between pillars with sapphires embedded in them, were various statues of dragons in powerful poses. “Your plan is never going to work!”
Kairos, the massive wyvern that he was, swooped in and landed in front of Yisini, before changing his form into that of a more traditional dragon with four legs and a set of wings.
“Funny how you claim things will never work when I’m the Whenvern, the Dragon God of Time and the only one of us capable of seeing properly into the future…” Kairos tutted. He led Yisini deeper into the temple, where a huge pile of gems and coins waited for them. Kairos perched himself on top of his glittering hoard, making himself comfortable.
“It ain’t gonna work.”
“It will. You can’t change someone like the Thantophor so quickly. It needs time. It needs space. It needs a bit of life and death as well. The Thantophor is very deeply set in his ways, we just need him to start seeing past that.”
Yisini coiled herself up, hugging her own tail before sitting up straight “Yeah, no, because of him, I can’t try and make immortal kids by screwing you lot any more.”
Kairos shrugged, then started fiddling with a diamond-encrusted watch. He couldn’t remember where he had found it. Someone probably gave it to him or something. “You can still sleep with Epani if you want.”
“It’s a step forward and two steps back!” Yisini complained. “None of this is going anywhere what so ever! Not everyone has the same amount of time you have, Kairos!”
“We have time.”
“No we don’t. Any moment now, the Thantophor could pop and kill everything.”
“I guarantee you, we’d know if that was about to happen. But if we rush things, then an angered Thantophor spreading his deadly wings could become a reality sooner than we’d like…”
Yisini crossed her arms, tutting. “All we’re doing is talking, no actual actions!”
“Exactly! We’re talking Arkadin into becoming more lax, more like us and less of the Death God that he is. We are talking him out of his godly duties, something so deeply ingrained into him, that a fast removal will hurt us all. Get him to want to break rules, so he questions himself.”
The Serpentine Goddess tutted again. “Break rules? After what he did with three mortals, he’s not going to be doing that for a long, long time…”
Kairos looked up. “What mortals?”
“The Dessaron ones.”
“There were four of them…” The Time Lord was confused.
“Yeah, and Arkadin was one of them.”
Kairos’s confusion was not going anywhere. Yisini sighed, then laughed.
“You didn’t know that Arkadin pretended to be a mortal and basically tricked those mortals into stopping you and protecting me and him? That he was disguised as the one called Arkay and basically stopped the three mortals from dying?”
“Really?” Kairos scratched his head. “Uh huh… That… actually makes sense. Explains why he didn’t care when I bombed his little home. And why no one ever seemed to be able to hit the little bugger after I had that battalion shoot off his wings. And why Arkadin doesn’t use those terrifying black wings any more…”
The Whenvern thought to himself, falling silent. While he wasn’t looking, Yisini secretly slipped a couple of red ruby rings onto her scaly fingers.
“You’re not mad, are you?” Yisini eventually asked, becoming bored with the silence.
“No, actually…” the Whenvern smirked. “I’m impressed. I always thought he was completely by the letter, but no, Arkadin will bend rules should he need to…”
Yisini shrugged. “So?”
“He’s broken rules before. We can use this against him…”