I stopped in front of a gawking hydra – who clearly was not expecting me to be wandering through town.  “Can you tell me where, uh, Gia is?”  I hoped that was the correct name.  I hadn’t paid too much attention to hydras other than Mark and Bill, to be honest, but I was pretty sure that was her name.  Okay, a little sure.  I hoped it was.

The hydra managed to pull themselves together.  “Uh, sure, she’s, uh, at the – oh wait, is she there today?  I can’t remember.  Um, so she works at the nurse’s office.”  When I looked at them blankly, it seemed to dawn on them that I wouldn’t know where that was.  “Take a right down that street,” they pointed towards a nearby street, “and it’s on the left a ways down.  Small office.  Um, if she’s not there, she’s probably at home.  She lives down by the lake.  You’ll have to take the frontage road.”  They pointed in the opposite direction, closer to the lake.  “It’s, uh, easy to miss, looks kind of like an alleyway, but if you see an empty store on the corner, it’s the right place.”

“Thanks.”  I was actually a little surprised that they’d been so forthcoming.  I didn’t recognize them, though, so maybe they didn’t realize I was associated with the kapra side of town?

We headed towards the street they’d pointed out, turning to go towards the nurse’s office.

“No doctors?”  Toph asked.  “I know you said everything in town is split, so people can’t necessarily afford everything, but doctors seem important.”

“There’s no way they’d share.  A hydra wouldn’t trust a kapra doctor and vise-versa.  Maybe a neutral party, but it was hard to get anyone not born here to stick around – most people don’t want to be in the middle of a war.”  I grimaced a bit.  “Kapras had a couple of nurses when I was here, one close to retiring.  It doesn’t surprise me that hydras had the same.”

We reached the nurse’s office, but I didn’t recognize the person in the office and she just shook her head when I asked if Gia was there.  So we headed back out of the office and towards the frontage road.  Toph found the road he thought was what the hydra meant, looking at it a bit doubtfully.

“I mean, it does just look like an alleyway.  Think it’s the right one?”

I shrugged.  “Let’s just follow it for a bit and find out.  If it’s the wrong one, I’ll fly overhead and find it that way.”

“Good idea.”  Toph fell into step with me, glancing around us as we followed the narrow street.  “The entire town is a little poorer than I’d pictured, but I guess that makes sense, if they’ve been at war constantly for decades.  Considering how long it’s been around, I’d expect to see things more established, but the town looks like it’s lacking paint, proper paving, that kind of stuff.  Not exactly a shanty town, of course, but definitely not wealthy.”

“People have been too invested in the war to think about stuff like that,” I agreed.  “And with basically duplicating efforts on each side of town, there’s a lot of money being spent that could probably be better utilized if the town came together.”

The path opened out near the lake, which meant we were probably on the right path.  It wasn’t until I saw the water that it dawned on me that the hydra hadn’t told us which of the houses along the lake was Gia’s.  Oh well, we might be knocking on a few houses, then.

 “Have you seen any signs of change yet?”  Toph asked, a little hesitantly.  “Like…anything at all that might suggest the town is trying?”

I thought about that and was about to answer when I spotted the person I was looking for.  She was outside one of the houses, pulling weeds, it looked like.  I immediately headed in her direction.

“Gia?”  I asked a little hesitantly, once we were closer to her.

She startled a bit and looked at us, her eyes going wider when she recognized me.  “Winter?”  She asked, clearly not expecting me, of all people.

Gia, the hydra who’d once commiserated with me about how the war had affected her family, was the only person I knew for sure other than Mark who’d felt the same way as I did about the war.  I was kind of glad to find that she hadn’t left town and there was someone here that might tell me the truth.

“Hey,” I said a little awkwardly.  “I, uh, came back to see how things are going.  I was hoping you might give me the most impartial look at what’s going on in town now.”

She wiped her hands off on what appeared to be a gardening apron, then took it off and laid it on the little picket fence.

“Come on inside, then,” she started for the door.  “There’s a lot you need to know.”

Gia poured us both tea, then some for herself, as we sat at her little dining room table in a room overlooking the lake.  I liked the room, it felt cozy and peaceful, more than I’d expected for anywhere in Terium.

“Okay, so the short answer is…yes and no.  Basically, there are more factions now than there used to be.”  Gia sat down with us, petting her cat as it wandered in to investigate the guests.  “Both sides now have two factions, those that are happy about the new way of life and those that are upset about it.  Most of us who are happy about it – on both sides – are trying to work together.  We’re trying to integrate the town, actually make things change now.  Since we don’t have to be scared of anyone’s magical power anymore, we can actually speak up.”  She sighed deeply.  “That said, we don’t have a lot of political power.  That still lies in the hands of those who’ve been in power for generations – ones like Bill and Marilyn.  Those ones, naturally, are the ones most outspoken about how unfair the curse is and how much they’d like to see you dead.  Just, you know, as a warning,” she added, with a glance at me.  “I don’t think they’ll actually do anything, because some of the elders pointed out that your death might mean the curse was permanent with no solution, and I don’t know if they could do anything even if they wanted to, but I’d be careful around them, just in case.”

Her expression turned curious.  “You’re really a dragon?  And no one ever knew?”

I took a sip of the tea, enjoying the fresh flavor, before answering.  “Mother realized that Dad would have used her being a dragon and tried to force her to destroy all the hydras or at least make them surrender,” I said slowly.  “That was why she left, really.  She didn’t want to be a part of the war and knew Dad would try to make her.  She knew he’d probably make me help, too, if he knew about me.  But young dragons don’t have much magic until we get our dragon form, which is usually around puberty.  So she thought it would be safest for me – despite the war – to stay with Dad and grow up more normally than I could with her.  She was having trouble holding onto her human form by then, and she wanted me to have as normal a childhood as she possibly could.  So she gave me a necklace with enough of her magic in it that it would help me read kapra, and I did have some water and air magic.”  I shrugged.  “I couldn’t tell my family, or anyone else, because if they knew, especially before I had my real dragon magic, I could have gotten trapped into helping like Mother was afraid of.  Even once I got my magic, initially, without learning how to properly use it, I would have been at risk from being killed by skilled hydras or kapras, so I couldn’t even count on getting my dragon form as a way out of it.  So yeah.  No one could know.”

I looked out at the water, remembering.  “The only person I regret not telling was Mark.  I wish I’d told him.”

“Mark.”  I could hear the confusion in her voice.  “I remember – the day you left, the day the curse was placed, you said something about Mark.  I wasn’t there, but I heard the story several times from those who were, and all of them mentioned something about you seeming to be upset about Mark’s death and blaming Marilyn for it.”

I turned to look at her again.  “Mark was my soulmate,” I explained simply, her eyes widening at this revelation.  “We’d found out a few years before that but could only hang out secretly and never tell anyone.  Other than Mother,” I amended.  “She knew.  But we would secretly talk and plan for the future and stuff.  He wanted to be an astronaut.”  I could hear the wistfulness in my own voice.  Eight years might have passed, but that didn’t make me miss him any less.  Mark had matched my soul, and part of my soul would always miss his smile, his rants, his hopes and dreams.  It was unfair that his life had been ended so early.  It was the biggest regret I had about my time here, that I hadn’t had a good way to prevent that.

I’d talked to Diana about it, and she’d gently pointed out that I hadn’t been in a position to prevent his death.  If I’d tried standing up to Marilyn before I got my dragon form, it likely would have ended just the way we’d predicted – with me dead.  Diana also guessed that Mother had formed the curse when he died, as her last gift to me, which was part of why she’d died a little earlier than I’d expected – she’d wanted to give me a way to stop the war I’d hated, the war that had cost me my soulmate.  So she’d formed the curse and let things fall out the way they would, perhaps guessing that my grief over the death of both of them might lead me to actually confront Marilyn – and thereby trigger the curse when she responded with violence.

“Your soulmate.”  Gia seemed stunned.  “I’d hadn’t heard of hydras and kapras being soulmates – well, that’s not entirely true,” she admitted, her expression becoming more drawn.  “As things started to change, we kind of took over the record keeping.  We being the faction – from both sides – wanting permanent peace.  Wanting change.  We’ve found some old records that reference soulmates from opposite sides, very vaguely.”

I nodded grimly.  “We looked into it when we found out we were soulmates, as best we could.  Near as we could tell, they’d likely been killed for being allied to the wrong side, in a sense?  It’s possible they were just run out of town, but either way, they were definitely never heard of again.”

“Now that’s a disgrace,” Toph interjected, looking a bit put out.  “Soulmates aren’t necessarily easy to find and then killing people just because of who their soulmate is?  That’s genuinely awful.”

It dawned on me that I hadn’t actually introduced Toph, so, feeling a bit embarrassed, I decided to fix that.  “This is my cousin, Toph.  From my mother’s side.  Toph, this is Gia.  She and I talked once and kind of, uh, agreed on the issue of the war.”

Toph raised an eyebrow.  “Once?  I’d have thought you were friends.”

“Anyone who agreed with you back then was a friend,” Gia clarified.  “Or an ally, whatever you wanted to call it.  I admired Winter for not being bothered when people attempted to bully her over her name, and not letting them say things about her mother.  I also had a split home because of the war,” she explained briefly.  “So we related.”