Why was Qibli here?
He needed to get away. No one else needed to watch Anemone's inevitable death.
The clouds in the sky parted for the first time since Tamarin drowned, and the downpour ceased to become a trickle of water. A single full moon was visible through the thin clouds. Pike lifted his fist a final time, as a look of peace descended on Anemone's face, dripping with blood, sweat, seawater and tears.
"Qibli, leave." Moon said urgently. "It's about to...he's going to..." she gulped as Pike shoved Turtle away. "Leave. You don't need to see this."
"But...you..." The clouds split apart a little more, revealing a second full moon, and a dark patch of sky with a tiny sliver of the third moon. They all glazed silver, and Moon felt her eyes glaze over, with the same torrent of visions from before filling her mind.
The ring on the claw crumbled to dust, instead a bright flash replacing it. Something had changed in a timeline, that wasn't meant to. The universe wasn't ready.
All the clouds drifted away. There was nothing stopping Pike now. Moon felt her eyes well up with fresh tears as she turned into Qibli, desperate not to witness Anemone's final moments.
She waited for the scream.
It didn't come.
Anemone's lips moved silently, hand clutched around something for dear life.
A single shudder, a knot in the timelines. It unravelled. Something was about to happen.
Her dragonet sat up, eyes glowing.
She looked up at the moons with renewed fervour.
"Stardust." Moon breathed, as the first star, and the second and the third blinked into the sky, before crumbling to dust.
The beach lit up with a burst, as bright as the cosmos, hot as the sun and endless as the universe.
As quickly as it started it ended, the power sucked back to it's source. A tiny dragonet, watching in wonder as stardust floated away on the wind.
Two bodies lay slumped on the sand, a grey one and a pink and blue one. Pike opened his eyes and they glistened with hatred.
"How ironic." He whispered to himself. "You went through all that trouble to enchant her feelings, and all that effort has been laid to waste." He chuckled regretfully. "Karma." The tip of his tail went numb, and the feeling flooded through the rest of his body. He realised these were his final moments. Not as spectacular as he had predicted. A volcano would have been better. An irate club, ready to blow him to smithereens. The arsenal of endless Halo weapons everyone seemed to have.
"I am now ready to leave." He reminisced. "Princess, you're well aware of-yes, Pike." He chuckled again, as the stardust began to consume him. "I'm aware of the dangers of telling her.
But Princess, when you tell her...
I'm aware of those dangers, too.
But the one thing more dangerous than dying, is dying without ever having lived at all."