It did not take long to see father again. A week after the whole chaos, a storm formed as he flew through the skies, but it was subdued compared to before and he did not fall like a meteor, rather he landed with a certain grace then slithered up and around mother. Some weird act of affection if I were to I guess.

Thankfully the humans are all inside now, and we are at mother’s lake, which was somehow unaffected by the destruction and by autumn, instead seeming like an oasis in the middle of a recent forest fire… which it actually was. Look, I used to write code, not novels. Regardless of my poor vocabulary, I found this scene sickeningly normal.

That giant, terrifying thing, was currently hugging his mate while giving pretty gentle rubs and pokes to my siblings with his absurdly large hands. As he tried to do the same with me I simply smacked his hand away with my tails and I roared in anger. I don’t know if he understood, but I pushed the rough idea of “You broke my things and I hate you for it!” into my tone, hoping the bit of mana that left my lungs would give the beast enough insight, despite my lacking language skills.

Man, imagine sucking at every language you know. That’s rough, me. That’s rough.

Regardless of my bored inner monologue, I continue observing the situation. They are talking, quite a lot in fact. Mother rarely talks, but I now realize that it is because she doesn’t have anyone to talk to. She seems to be a bit of a chatterbox when someone can reply. Sadly, despite the liberal use of draconic, I can’t understand anything, and isn’t that a weird fact of this language?

It relies on mana to transmit information, but it also relies on association. I associate the word mother speaks to the mana in the rune that appears as she speaks, or to the effect of the modifier. That is how I learned the language so far. Once I realized “Ter” means earth and anything that has to do with earth, I was able to throw all those links together and form my own understanding. So now as she says “Ter” I can see in my mind the particular rock type she means to convey. This means that if I don’t individually figure out what something means, I cannot understand it, in spite of the mana at work.

Simplified, I’d say that draconic speech is a strong form of suggestion. And as such it is entirely worthless to sit here and try to guess what they are trying to say. Thankfully body language is somehow more understandable. From the way they keep nodding our way, pointing up and down, sometimes getting just a bit snappy (literally), I think they are trying to figure out how to parent us. This is probably the time when they would be trying to pull us in different directions, so we’d emulate one or the other. Honestly? I doubt either of their lives really suits me. Mother just sits in her lake 90% of the time doing nothing, which while appealing compared to my old life of 18 hour shifts for pocket change, would become boring fast, and father is just a straight up horrifying slaughterer. I don’t really think I’ll have good role models out here.

With a sigh I step away, only to be tackled by both RT and Spots. Guess they decided to make up for my bigger size by doing a 2v1. I shake them off, then square up. I have to teach them that I am still the big guy around, even after being missing for a bit.

It’s good to be able and just play, you know? It makes thinking about bad things hard.

Still it is not a long term solution. It seems father is content to leave the humans alone. Whether it was from attacking him or from some other cause, he is now completely ignoring them… and I am making sure they are not in his line of sight. However I still have four injured women and a kid that just barely survived pneumonia a couple weeks ago only to now have a good chunk of his torso burned, so I think it is time to learn what to do when wounds are involved. The old woman did her best to try and fix the burns, but all she managed to do was to push them into that bubbling stage early. Her method of healing will leave behind marks, and I need to somehow make up for my failings.

My first thought was to use more mundane methods like plants. That same thought gets thrown out the window because the only plant life around is made up of grass and a few trees that don’t seem to ever change unless mother molds them, and even so I doubt I’d have something like aloe anywhere near even in spring. My next option would be magic, but I genuinely cannot figure out the spell mother used those few times we got hurt. It’s complex, and aside from it being mostly nature attuned, I have no insight on it. How does that even work anyways? Nature seems to affect plants in particular, so how come that heals meaty beings?

Regardless, with that being a bust, I can only go with option 3: learn flesh magic somehow. This one is dangerous, but also the most likely to work. Flesh, bone and blood, the three mana types that seem to be quite common in animals, and that are directly linked to the body. Theoretically I could heal any wound and quite a few diseases if I just know how to tell the body to fix itself, while using the mana to speed up the process.

The reason this is dangerous is that I would be literally manipulating the body of whatever I am targeting. One mistake and a mild wound becomes a severed nerve. What happens if I grow bone instead of flesh? What happens if I try to fix something and the humans in this world have their organs in a completely different configuration? I mean, most of the animals I ate seemed to be pretty normal on the inside, with the exception of having cores crammed in there, but I still need to be careful. There’s a reason doctors require a hundred scans and tests before they decide to do a single surgery.

Sooo, bad either way. Healing is an absurdly hard thing to… Who would have guessed?

A fourth option would be granny’s way. Sure it sucked at dealing with infections, and it can’t seem to fix the marks, but she knew some kind of catch-all healing spell and I already know that I can hold and mold more mana than her, making the spell more powerful. If magic is able to take the wheel once I give it enough nonspecific instructions on how to do stuff, I might be able to use it to fix the scarring. Sadly there are problems with this, like how risky letting magic do too much guesswork is.

There is also the fact that human magic and dragon magic are entirely different things. Sure, all things point to dragon magic being superior, but the fact that I can tweak the effect of a spell by millimetrically shifting the shape of a rune means that dragon magic is reliant on knowledge, even more so than the human one. Say mother is 100 or 200 years old, that means she’s already much older than the granny. She also only really needs a bit of food and some mana to live. She doesn’t need to care about shelter or paying taxes or working the fields from morning to dawn so she’d be able to survive winter… So what is left to do with all her time? She can practice magic and learn how to use it with such precision and power that she can reshape the land to her whims or heal her month old children perfectly after they got beaten up by rabbits.

Basically, I might be fucked if I need to practice centuries to understand how to handle magic well enough for my needs.

I am… exhausted…

Spots is biting and pulling on my left tail while RT is struggling under me, but the weight of things hits me too hard for me to be able and pretend that things are fine. I am not fine. I’ve been struggling with my mind being a lot more callous than my old one would be, mostly from the strong instincts telling me that humans are not equals I should care about. I… cowardly accepted some of those thoughts, put distance between me and them. “The humans” I say, as if I already accepted that I am something different. I have criticized their magic, their frailty, their many needs… I put myself above them because it’s easier to not feel their loss like that.

It’s easier to accept their treatment if I squash my empathy.

But that wall was as thin as paper, because this is not me and never was. I had accepted loss, yet a single teary eyed look was enough to move me, to remind me just how wrong I am and how much I hate this type of thinking. This acceptance of cruelty as part of life. I never wanted to become something like this… so here I sit, looking down at my reflection in the lake, ignoring the nudges from my siblings, and I try to understand who I am.

I am a dragon. My body, my aptitudes, my instincts, everything points to me being a dragon. I look at the hands I grew just by imagining them while sleeping. I look at the sheen of my scales, I look at what I am and my only answer is “Dragon”.

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I look at what I was. A guy, living above the poverty line, but not by much, trying so hard to find passion in living while seeing worse and worse things happen every day. I try to look a bit deeper, but I am met with a door, a rotten, hideous thing that bars my way. Memories I did not want to remember, stuck here, away from all the useful things.

I look at what I want to do. Ever since I realized my situation and the possibilities of my future, I started thinking of things I want to do. I wanted music, something I loved but sucked at in my past, and I got it in a way. I wanted to protect the people that showed up, despite all my dragon parts telling me to eat them, so I grew stronger, I learnt faster, I did all I could to become mother’s favorite so that their treatment would remain fair. I wanted to enjoy this world and explore it, understand the mechanisms of this alien place, so I stretched my wings and figured flight on my own, I also improved my eyes for this very reason… And finally, I wanted to be something better than what I was.

I lay my head on my front legs, unintentionally letting out a sad squeak as I looked at my reflection, the surface of the water being disturbed as mother sank in and came close to me, her large head offering shade. Yet I don’t look up. Instead I focus on my thoughts.

Despite my entire life’s worth of memories being here, accessible at the speed of thought, there is a very clear line between the past and the present. There is a sort of filter keeping all these memories in my library, so unless I am specifically looking for a memory from my human life, I will not be getting them while thinking of things. Or at least, most of the time that is true.

There have been cases so far. Strong emotions, stressful situations and even when something happening was just far too familiar to the past, a memory would pierce that wall and slap itself straight into my brain. Thankfully I have been able to manage it, and I didn’t let my past poison my present… but maybe I need a little bit of the poison. I need to remember who I once was so that I will be able and think straight for once. No more doing stupid shit like throwing myself into a mana filled lake to try and get a real life powerboost, no more attempting to force stronger spells into existence without me having any idea of the result, no more using chaos or some other half baked whim just because I don’t have another easy solution at hand.

So I open that rotting door, raise up a dusty, old newspaper and I start reading. “12 year old girl found headle-” I am hit by pain, but not really. I am simply experiencing the memory. I am experiencing the way my chest tightened as I saw that news in gory detail. I turn the page and I feel the disgust and the fear my 9 year old self felt after seeing a video that had no business being on the internet.

This is what I should be feeling. A death is a tragedy. I do not know what sort of lives these people lived, maybe some of the women were criminals, maybe they were living saints, I cannot judge. Yet the one thing I can do is say that their death would be a tragedy. Admittedly a silent one, for I would be the sole witness, but it would still be a tragedy.

I remember videos, documentaries. Crimes committed by the powerful, later glorified for the “good” they did by exploiting others to raise their own station and feed their own greed. I remember the good humanity can do, thousands of people working to protect endangered species, people inventing all sorts of marvels just to improve life, I remember my reaction to each and every thing. This is how I was, this is what I should be, yet my new self has changed drastically.

Something pops in my mind, not from this horrible room, but from the library. A simple thing, from an amusing place of origin.

“… not of what you are, but what you want to be.” says a memory that makes me nod. Indeed, I am a dragon. But I do not want to be what is more than likely expected of me. Mother, father, they are both conquerors. Sure, one took over while the other just scorched anything that he wanted to scorch, but the idea remains. They are the kind to take without care, living by the law of strength.

I want to be a better me. I want to live following my own dreams and desires, but not in a way that disregards anyone else. I want to be a me that actually makes a difference. A me that doesn’t have to be stuck there, watching things unfold, slowly rotting away until I am out of tears to cry. I want to be someone that suffers no impotence in the face of tragedy.

So I go back to reality and make a silent promise to myself. It might be naive, it might be an unachievable dream, but I need a target that I can focus on, a tangible goal to keep in mind so I don’t lose myself into the life of learning and playing expected of a child. I will take them home. I will have to find out where “home” is, but I will take them all to their respective homes. Or leave them somewhere safe at least. Now that I think about it, they were given to a dragon as sacrifice, so maybe their homes would not be the safest place.

Regardless, I have a goal. A goal that triumphs over my old fantasies and stupid daydreams. This is people’s lives and I will help them get as far as possible from monsters like mother and father.

Fleshcrafting it is.

I get up and I run away. My parents, although clearly looking at me departing, seem to take the hint and leave me be. Time to do some nonverbal communication.

----------------------------------------

I return, an hour later, with what I have been looking for. Flight has helped me greatly with finding prey, since I already had bird eyes prepared, all I needed was the bird’s eye view to become a true hawk. I found one of the animals that mother has been using as prey for us in the early days. Just a normal rabbit with a tinge of every body type mana.

I trotted up to mother, dropped the animal, and as she turned to look at me inquisitively I started moving three strands of mana. Bone, blood, flesh, making pretty ribbons of slightly colored mist. To mother’s eyes, however, it was clear what sort of mana I was moving, but she didn’t seem happy. She raised her foot and trampled it, leaving behind only a paste.

Alright, that’s… not what I expected. I frown and look up, but she turned her head away.

Well shit, either she has no idea what the rune for any of these mana types is, or flesh magic is somehow taboo. Or… using flesh magic might be absolutely deadly for a dumb baby dragon… Ahh, I remember my attempt at a bone breath attack, which rattled my teeth and gave me that awful feeling of being to a dentist.

This is a bust, I should have realized this is one of those mana types mother doesn’t teach since it could be harmful, like death magic… There’s a reason she went from showing off those elements to me to showing off modifiers and then nothing else.

I pace around for a bit, then decide to make her understand my goal. I lift my leg and I bite. It doesn’t go through at first, but I know exactly why. Your body is supposed to stop you from harming yourself, but it is not an absolute thing. I take a deep breath and I bite hard. I have enough experience to not be stopped by something as weak as self preservation.

I start bleeding, as I forcibly stopped my repelling protection from activating. Suddenly all heads around turn to me. Right, fine nose, the one sense I had that was absurdly overdeveloped even as a kid. My siblings are confused and seem to look around for what might have caused this, while mother just looks at me, frozen. Father seems to come in and looks at me with all his eyes… shit that guy is always going to be creepy… Regardless, mother activates her rune and I focus on it. It has nature at its base… wait, no, it doesn’t! Or does it? It’s weird. Ah, there’s a different mana type! That’s how she’s been healing everything, nature seems to be a subset of a different mana type, and that one is taking center stage while nature is used to actually mold the effect and empower the modifiers, and boy are those a lot of modifiers.

She heals me quickly and seems to keep investigating me, I need to get at least a few more looks to be sure… I may have studied and recorded a bunch of her spells, but this one I have seen rarely. Once we got the hang of it, we stopped getting hurt, so it has been a while since she last used this spell.I manage to remember a bit, but I can’t figure out the mana type without her showing it off once more, so I bite my arm as she looks at me, and i point it towards her. She snaps at the air in front of me, but I don’t move.

Come on you lizard elephant thing, you could have healed them 600000 seconds ago and you didn’t, so show me how I can heal them instead.

She activates it, and I sniff as best as I can while focusing on the rune in the middle of the formation, the one thing colored differently. I feel it… and I remember this scent… Life. The very concept of something which lives, a mana type that presumably encompasses anything organic, and maybe things that live without being natural.

And, while failing to memorize all the runes, I managed to catch the most important one. I breathe in, but I do not have the mana type around, not in good amount. So I study my surroundings and start gathering any random strand of life that I find. Mana around here has been a bit more chaotic, probably as a result of someone spitting out fire and lighting and destruction, or probably from the fight, yet regardless of it all, it helps me out. More mana from the things in the lake made it out, and more mana types are available.

It takes me another hour, and it looks like everyone is preparing to go back home, yet I stop them. I make the life rune. In its simplest form, with barely enough mana to power it for moments, yet the results are clear. I have the very concept of life in my palm. Mother roars, which surprises me and causes me to shift the shape of the rune slightly.

The grass within 4 meters of the rune turns to dust, while my body lights up like a christmas tree.

The rune vanishes and I look around me, eyes wide.

Huh… I think… I think I just moved the life of everything close to the rune a bit to the side.

And I think my innate protection is the only thing that kept me from dying right there….

So much for no more dumb moves.