Anyone who ever complained of being bored just didn't know where to find all the fun.

"My job here is done," Fantredala laughed again, lifting her face to the rain that drizzled down out of an overcast sky. "My job here is done! Oh, what a line, I need to use it again in the future!"

If there was one thing Fantredala loved, it was meddling in other people's lives--working for them, working against them, none of that mattered, as long as she was having fun. She had just, for example, engineered the bonding of a rancid little spirit named Constantine at a most fascinating clutch of vampire-dragons, and it certainly looked like the little ghost was going to have an interesting un-life from now on! To know it couldn't have happened without her...oh, such a wonderful feeling. Fantredala made a mental note to check in on him in a year or so, and see if bonding had made him happier, or more miserable. Either way, she still won.

Fantredala gave her ethereal mane a toss as it danced about her face and neck, despite the rain and current lack of any kind of wind, and started to walk again. Though it was several minutes past midnight and the bonding she had brought Constantine to was over, she did not feel inclined to leave the place called Lantessama Isle just yet. Having shifted out of her human guise as the "fortune-teller Madame Fantredala", she was enjoying the feel of the rain upon her dark fur and feathered wings. Though she would never stop calling the spaceship Abstract Destiny her home, she would also never stop enjoying visiting real worlds and experiencing real weather.

"In fact," she mused aloud, looking around at the fields of green grass turned blue and black by the storm and darkness, "the only thing that I'm missing here is something to eat."

::Truer words were never spoken,:: answered a dark, telepathic mutter, and Fantredala turned her head about curiously.

Though the stormy night was a dark one, no amount of darkness could conceal glowing red eyes like the pair that now regarded her. Fantredala's attention was immediately captured, and she turned towards the eyes with keen interest. The eyes appeared to hang in the air as darkness itself coalesced around the crimson lights, and shadows as unaffected by the rain as her own mane billowed around its body like a foggy cloak.

Fantredala clicked her tongue against her teeth, half-lidding her own luminous yellow eyes. "Tch, poor little shadow. Do the Laedryses not keep you fed?"

::Not as well as I should like,:: the shadowling scoffed, arching his neck as Fantredala lazily padded nearer, regarding her as much as she did him. His gaze lingered on her mane as it danced in an unfelt wind. ::If you are part shadow yourself, you should understand.::

"Not a shadow, but still a spirit," Fantredala chuckled, pausing before the shadowling, then turning just enough to start circling him. The shadowling turned in place to follow, and neither's gaze left the other's eyes. "But I can still imagine. You feed on life, do you not? Death is my meat."

The shadowling snorted. ::Is that not the case for all creatures? Do not all others take a life to feed their own?:: The creature seemed to swell for a moment, as if inhaling, and all the grass in a small circle around it suddenly withered. ::Any one life feeds on the death of another.::

Fantredala chuckled lowly, closing her eyes. "You misunderstand." Opening her eyes again, the half-spirit opened her mouth as well. As the grass under the shadowling died, and she breathed in the trifling bits of energy each blade's death gave off. "Mm. Flesh and blood are dust in my mouth. Something must die to feed me, but it is not its body I partake of. I consume the death itself."

::Your complaint of hunger is nothing to my own,:: replied the shadowling. ::A meal for my kind is an entire island, a continent, a planet. Plant and animal, all things from the greatest dragon to the smallest microbe.::

The shadowling suddenly swelled, then, what mass he had thinning out even further, and Fantredala found herself wrapped and enveloped by the shadow. Her eyes widened, though not with fear, as the dark creature's red eyes drew closer, muzzle to ethereal muzzle with the shadowling. ::I could consume you in a moment,:: he hissed, but though his words echoed with malice, Fantredala did not feel threatened by them. :: I could turn this world to ash in the span of a few days, and still hunger for more. Your hunger is nothing to mine.::

Fantredala laughed then, and the shadowling's eyes drew narrow. ::You laugh at me?:: he hissed again, darkening until Fantredala could see nothing but his shadow and his eyes.

"I laugh at your conceptions," she purred, spreading her wings and then cupping them, as if holding the shadow to her. "You think the death of a patch of grass is a meal for me? Where I come from, there are people that think the occasional death of a child is what I subsist on, but even they are wrong. A death here, a death there, they are merely single mouthfuls that keep me going but leave me hungry." Her own eyes flashed as she smiled back at the shadowling. "My banquets are wars, massacres, genocides...and plagues and natural disasters, too. Life is my starvation."

The shadowling seemed to consider this, and pulled away from Fantredala, condensing back into a darker blot against the dark night, though he remained close.

"You," Fantredala added, "sound like just the kind of creature I would love to follow around. Your feasts would be my feasts--every life you absorb leaving a death I could consume."

::Who are you?:: asked the shadowling.

She smiled again. "I am spirit and I am daemon, and I am the blood-sung soul who lives on the destructive half of Balance. I, then, am Fantredala. And you--what are you called, outside of True Chaos?"

::I am Wunelzstou,:: he answered, regarding her thoughtfully. ::And you, are fascinating.::

Fantredala spread her wings wide, and the rain cascaded off her dark feathers in a series of tiny waterfalls. "All this talk of food has made me hungry, and if you are so starving...you should come with me. I know worlds upon worlds where we could feast as we desire, Wunelzstou. You could...even call it a dinner date," she added, chuckling softly.

The shadowling's eyes were wide and bright. ::A tempting offer.::

"But do you accept it?" Fantredala asked in turn, and beat her wings against the air, leaping up into the stormy sky.

As the island dropped away beneath her, she turned her head to look back at the shadowling, and waited to see if he would follow.

He did.