He looks like he'd shrug if he could. "She fetches her mother - her mother wants her parents - they want theirs - will she look them in the eye and say no, I don't know those people, I would like to protect a dragon I nearly chose to kill myself? I doubt it very much."

"Okay, fine, then why do you think she would just let them kill people? Actually, why do you think I would, personally I would take offense to sphinxes killing dragons just because, and quite frankly I'm scarier than both of you."

"When there are enough sphinxes it will not be a matter of letting them do anything."

"Actually, it would be, because the person with control over the resurrection can say, 'No, I will not resurrect any more of you, and also, here, meet my invincible scary magic friends, they do not like murder.'"

"You have no idea how powerful she is," he murmurs, "do you."

"I think she must not have learned to control it well yet. I was - hurrying before she managed it."

"They can do - nearly anything."

"That's - really not specific? When you say 'nearly,' what's the nearly include?"

"I didn't live through anything but the tail end of the war myself. I don't have an instruction manual and if I had I wouldn't give it to her friends."

"Fair," she sighs. "But there's - some serious competition, when you say 'nearly anything.' I am obscenely scary. My boyfriend, too."

"I noticed," he says, glancing at the osmium around his left wrist.

"I don't think you actually understand. Where I come from, it is a kill on sight offense to summon an unbound demon, because that is the fastest way to put them back. Because demons are worse than angels. Once there was a rogue angel and it was a smart and strategicly sound decision to nuke him, despite the fallout in the surrounding area. It didn't work. It took months to track down the person that summoned him in a hospital somewhere, because he had another face, was incapable of moving or speaking or asking anyone to kill him and was reduced to mentally being a vegetable, until at last they ran a DNA test and figured out who he was. That only happened because the angel was in a rush, if he'd been more careful there would have been no trace to figure out the man was the angel's summoner and he would have kept running rampant. And do you know what he was doing? Turning people into furniture. Literal furniture, that could think and breathe. But they couldn't move, or speak, or even scream. He force-fed them so they wouldn't die, until the area was hit with the aforementioned nuke, and even then someone had to stop by and mercy kill anyone left. That is what I am capable of, I am obscenely scary."

"I'm pretty terrible at lying, I'm not going to pretend I'm not actually terrifying. I'm not threatening you, I'm not planning to do anything in particular, actually, I still want a solution where you're not dead or in a fate worse than death. I'm saying, in most cases, I pretty capable of stopping even scary people from genocide."

"And the sphinx will let you do that to her kin? Over me? What do you have on her?"

"I'm pretty sure she would help, actually, she dislikes genocide, too."

The dragon snorts.

"You don't believe me?"

"I know what sphinxes are like."

"You've just gone into great detail on why she might like you to think so."

"Except. I only recently got here. The 'let's not kill the dragon, even knowing where he lives' idea? Was decided before they found me or my boyfriend. She didn't even know I existed."

"And you have other friends who can, for example, resurrect the dead. It is clear she values the good opinion of - whatever organization operates here."