I barely kept from vomiting as the ground seemed to drop off from below me. The dragon carried me up beyond the treetops, to an insane height where the air was freezing and the trees below looked more like grass. My ears popped with the rapid ascent, to my surprise and dismay. I felt dizzy and nauseous looking at the ground far below, so I closed my eyes and tried my best to think, though it was difficult in the cold and howling wind.

It seemed very likely that I was going to die as soon as the beast reached wherever it was going. I still didn’t know for sure that I’d communicated with it at all. Perhaps it was only saving me for later, or feeding me to some other dragon. But, I thought, if that was the case, I was dead no matter what. I might as well pretend that I had some chance of surviving this, and work from that assumption.

If the dragons truly had their own language, I had to learn how to speak with them before they got tired of me and decided I was worth little more than a quick snack. They must view us as inferior to them, I thought, they hunt us the same way we hunt beasts for food. I thought about what I would do if I were hunting rabbits, and one of the rabbits started talking to me.

Although, I hadn’t really been talking to the dragon. I’d just been repeating everything it said. If a rabbit started mindlessly repeating everything I said, I would find it strange, but I would still hunt rabbit. So I had to convince this dragon I knew more than just how to repeat sounds, that I could actually speak and think on my own.

Despair hit me nearly as hard as the biting wind as I thought that I must be going insane. Almost certainly, this dragon was just a dumb beast that made strange sounds sometimes, and had decided for whatever reason not to eat me right away. I kicked myself internally. Even if this was true, there was no harm in trying.

I would have to remember as many “words” as possible, and ideally be able to replicate every sound I had ever heard this dragon make, and switch up the order to show I wasn’t just repeating.

With nothing else to do to distract myself from the fear and the onslaught of wind, I began babbling, repeating all the words I’d heard in random orders. I was aware that I must have sounded like a madman, but at this point I didn’t care.

======================================================

“Escape you?” asked the human. “Cannot out, talk you!” it declared, in that strange squeaky voice it had. I could barely hear it over the whistling of the wind, but what I could hear made no sense. “Can come cannot?” it asked, then it started laughing again.

The human still wasn’t making any sense, but it was talking without prompting, which was new. I listened with interest to this inarticulate babbling for a few minutes, until it started to become annoying. “Silence!” I told the human, even though that made no sense because it clearly couldn’t understand me.

“Silence!” it replied. “Silence talk can out? Silence come!” And so it continued. “Silence!” I told it again, shaking it a bit. This time it worked, and the human fell silent. But its initial response to my prodding got me thinking. Every word it had said so far was something I had said to it, and it seemed to be trying to say different things than I had said, but it was just talking nonsense because it didn’t understand anything.

All this made me wonder what kinds of strange tricks I could teach my human to do. It didn’t seem like it would be all that useful, but it would be fun to try. Maybe we could teach humans to hunt humans or other animals for us.

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My head spun from being rattled around by the dragon. I promptly stopped speaking, as I figured this was likely what brought it on. I supposed “glar” meant “stop” or “be quiet” or something like that.

I opened my eyes, then quickly closed them again as the blurry view of the ground far below made me even more nauseous. But I noticed one thing. The mountain range I had always seen far in the distance was not so distant anymore. I had never been this near the mountains before: humans tended to stay away from these lands. This was not a good place to live, unless you wanted to be eaten by the dragons who lived in the mountains.

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I opened my eyes once again, after I regained my bearings, as much as I could while in such a bad way. The lands below were gray and largely lifeless, dark in the shadow of a large mountain, which loomed ahead and above us. It had already been late in the day, and the sun had been blocked out by the mountain ahead, leaving me in near darkness, and terribly cold.

I shivered uncontrollably, and my head swam. I had to remind myself to breathe more heavily, as the air up here was thin. That was when I realized I would probably die up here, even if the dragons didn’t decide to kill me. I would be marooned high up in the mountains, in the freezing cold and snow, without even enough air to breathe.

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After a long while of flying, I arrived at my destination, my home, a natural platform of stone. My family and I had been living here for several years. It was a nice place to live, and its remoteness was irrelevant given our ability to fly. It gave us excellent view of the surrounding lands and a convenient and out of the way place to sleep, and that was all we could really ask for.

My family and I had continually cleared the snow and ice off of the platform, and we had built a fire pit, to combat the cold of the high altitude. On the other end of the plateau, there was a large store of firewood, a pile of felled trees that we occasionally flew down to the forest to replenish. As I landed and set the human down on the ground, I noticed that it was shivering so much that it couldn’t even walk.

Now that I thought about it, I supposed that something as small as a human might well have less natural resistance to cold than we dragons did. I’d never considered before the idea of keeping a live animal in the home, since it seemed like kind of a useless thing to do. Since it was getting to be night anyways, I supposed I might as well get a fire going. I set the human down near the fire pit, then tossed a few logs onto it and set it alight with my breath.

“What have you got there?” asked my mother. My parents were both already home, and I had to assume my male partner was still on the hunt.

“Just something strange I found out in the wild.”

“It just looks like a normal human to me,” my father responded. “Is it still alive?”

“It’s a talking human,” I said. “It repeats things you say to it.”

The human was still shaking on the ground as we spoke, but it seemed to be calming a bit from the fire’s warmth. Before long, it stood up and looked around frantically at the three dragons surrounding it, before staring wide-eyed at me.

“Watch this,” I said. Looking at the human, I said “I’m a human, hello!”

“Watch this!” said the human. “I’m a human, hello!”

My mother began laughing uproariously, and my father grinned. “That’s strange!” he excitedly replied. “Do they all do that?”

“That’s strange!” the human responded, “Do they all do that?” My father let out a chuckle at that, and my mother laughed even harder.

“Only this one, I think,” I replied. The human continued copying me, of course. “I was thinking maybe we could keep it and see if we could train it or something.” The human couldn’t keep up with that, and its speech devolved into confused nonsense after the first few words, prompting another bout of laughter.

“What do you think we could train it to do?” asked my father. “It doesn’t seem very strong or useful…”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “But we should probably start by teaching it to stop talking, although this is funny, it could get annoying.” Again the human broke off halfway through the sentence, spouting nonsense words before giving up.

“Maybe we could teach it to trap other humans or something,” my mother said, still laughing a bit. “I don’t know, it just sounds so ridiculous! It’s kind of cute!”

Just then, my mate arrived, carrying two large bulls he had speared with his talons. He dropped them off near the fire, and we all greeted him, and thanked him for finding us a decent feast for the day.

“What are you all laughing about?” he asked, then began laughing himself as the human repeated what he had said. “Wow, there’s something you don’t see every day!”

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Terror seemed to threaten to rip my heart right out of my chest, and I nearly lost my breath trying to keep up with the dragons’ game. But I had to keep playing. Four dragons were giving me their full attention, and I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, or what to do. I could be killed at any time if they decided they were bored of me or my stupid game.

The relentless interrogation continued for far too long as the dragons cooked their animals over the fire and ate. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the night began to wind down, and eventually the dragons lay down by the fire to rest, apparently having decided they would not eat me today, for whatever reason. I collapsed onto the ground, exhausted, and the last thing I could think before I lost consciousness was that I had no guarantee of waking up.