“They should be okay with it. I mean, it’s just one teensy human, right? Those grumps in the aliusist party bring skinnies for dinner basically every week, so a single little tallthing shouldn’t be seen as any weird, even if he’s coming willingly. At least, I think so…”
I look over at Fr. Moonlight, trying to understand whether or not he can also hear Goss. Considering that we’re currently a few thousand feet in the air, each of us held in one of Goss’ massive hands, it’s impressive that I can hear the dragon’s words at all. Fr. Moonlight meets my inquisitive gaze with a light shrug, which probably means that it’ll either be okay, or I won’t have to answer Moleman’s message. A win-win, in other words. While I’m trying not to fawn too much over the speed and altitude and holy shit I’m kind-of-almost riding a dragon, Fr. Moonlight shouts out over the roar of the wind, “Don’t forget that we have feast in an hour!”
Goss blinks. “Feast? O—oh, yeah! I almost forgot…” Suddenly struck by a thought, he turns to look at me, a new, predatory glint in his eye. “Father, do you think a human would count for the—”
“Is he smaller than a dog?”
Goss pulls his lips tight, turning back to look at the air ahead of him. “No, he isn’t,” he grumbles. “But I’ve been so busy! How am I supposed to find a share if I’m in the middle of ascending from the rungs of the merely two-winged?”
Fr. Moonlight makes the understandable decision to not grace Goss with an answer.
“I mean, isn’t self-fulfillment more important than grub? And, sure, I’m still a whelp, but I barely get hungry anymore, so—whoa!” Swerving mid-air, Goss quickly takes a right around a cliffside, bringing us into the shadow of an immense mountain. “Whew, that was a close one! I keep forgetting where the entrance to this place is…”
Despite his casual words and general aloofness, Goss has proved himself to be an adept flier, so even though I feel about as safe as a parent going test-driving with their kid for the first time, I don’t think I’ll die here. Probably.
As I’m trying to make sense of where I’m going and what’s happening, Goss zips in and through various tunnels and openings, eventually lunging into a hole that almost looks as though a laser melted a hole straight through the rock. Once we start flying through tight tunnels and cavern systems, Goss begins to keep his mouth open in a strange way, producing a whistling sound between two of his teeth. This practice appeared completely senseless until I began to hear a similar, lower-pitched whistle, the sound making Goss abruptly land, squeezing his body to the floor of the cavern, letting another, larger dragon pass by overhead. With the speed that thing was going, they would’ve no doubt collided had Goss kept going.
Getting back in the air, Goss flew us the last bit, at which point a number of other tunnels began to merge with ours into one big one which finally ended at the entrance of a large, dome-shaped cavern. The cavern, in turn, connected to various other tunnels, but I wasn’t looking at that.
No, the real center piece of this room isn’t the size of it—easily rivaling a stadium—nor is it the various vibrantly colored dragons lounging around it. Rather, I’m drawn to the beauty of its design. Someone, I don’t know who, must have spent months upon months in here, carving intricate patterns out of stone, chiseling out statues and horns and various intricate details to create a splendor that easily rivals the sun emperor’s palace. The roof, which has been rigorously shaped into a perfectly smooth ordeal—only broken by a small opening at the very top letting in a stream of light—is fully painted, depicting what I think might be the genesis of dragons. There are two central characters, an intricately detailed dragon and a small female goblin held in the dragon’s hand. The area around these two is split, the haloes protruding from their heads basking goblins and dragons in light. Funnily enough, the goblins are on the side of the dragon, and the dragons are on the side of the goblin woman.
The art continues down the sides, becoming so detailed and descriptive that I can barely make out what it’s supposed to be. Every dragon painted is unique and detailed, whereas the few goblins present outside the centre piece are either drawn with little detail, or presented as straight-up ugly. From what I can see, the overall piece is split into a number of smaller ones, often depicting battle, or romance, or winged goblins, or… flower petals, I think?
While I’m trying to crane my neck to look at the art, Goss puts me and Fr. Moonlight down, which makes me stumble a little before catching my footing. Fr. Moonlight follows my gaze to the ceiling. “The pride of dragons—a testament to their foolishness.” He smiles bitterly. “I can only hope that should dragons ever go extinct, this will be our legacy, rather than the spiteful atrocities scattered across the world.”
Goss looks like he wants to disagree, but I’m quicker. “I hope you get remembered for how awesome you look,” I mention off-handedly, which luckily gets Goss happy enough to not pick a fight with a priest.
Fr. Moonlight chuckles lightly, turning to me. “It’s been a while since I could converse with someone at my own level. You’ll join Goss for the feast, won’t you?”
“I still don’t know what that is,” I say, “but okay.” Feast means food, food means I eat, and eating means yummy. Also, it doesn’t hurt to get to talk to more dragons. Dragons are good. I really like dragons.
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Nodding, Fr. Moonlight turns towards the room, his eyes following the stream of light shining in through the hole at the very top as it hits a specific place on the wall. Now that I’m looking at it, someone has painted a pair of bows running across the floor of the room, numbers from one-to-twenty-four painted along it. The stream of light hits a spot between sixteen and seventeen. “Looks like we have about an hour and a half until the feast. As I’ve told you before, unless you bring your share before seventeen, I won’t be able to skin it in time, which means—”
“I won’t get to eat, I know, I know,” Goss huffs. He looks more annoyed than he did finding me functionally immortal. “I’ll find something, okay?” Without waiting for a response from Fr. Moonlight, Goss grabs me beneath my armpits, lifting me up again. “And now, I have to go show Kitty my—erm, look for grub. Goodbye, father.” He’s just about to turn away and fly away when a look from Fr. Moonlight stops him in his tracks. Goss gulps. “Oh, and uh…” A stubborn blush forces its way onto his cheeks. “Th—thank you for helping me catch a human. And also for, um, letting me use your garden. Highly appreciated. Or—or something.”
Fr. Moonlight’s stern face melts into a genuine smile. “You’re welcome, Goss.”
“R—right!” Goss stutters, turning his back on the priest. “I’ll be going now. Bye!”
“I’ll see you at mass, Goss!”
“You won’t, but ok!” Goss shouts back as he beats his wings, getting back into the air. I only have time to wonder about why he left so quickly until I spot the small, gentle smile on his lips.
I look up at him. “...Are you sure you’re a type seven?”
Goss jerks in surprise, accidentally clutching his hand enough to break all of my ribs at once. “What do you mean? I—I have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“I’m just saying that,” I choke out, feeding myself my own fingers to heal the broken ribs, “if you’re supposed to hate the divine, then I understand kidnapping priests or whatnot. That’s sure to get the gods upset. But you don’t even know the gods, and Father Moonlight…” I take a small break to swallow down the bones and tendons. “I’ve only known him for like an hour or two, but he seems nice. More than that, you don’t seem to dislike him in the least. If you’re supposed to hate the divine, I’d imagine you were also supposed to hate the lackeys of the—”
A high-pitched whistling approaches us in the tunnel, lasting for a little more than two seconds before we smash into it, Goss going tumbling atop another dragon, only barely larger than him. “Oh, hey Goss!” the dragon beneath him, coloured a light green with blue spots, chirps. “Did it work with Father Moonlight? Did you get to fight a human?” It smirks. “Are those arms I see? Shame to hear that the ascension attempt failed. Better luck next ti—” The dragon’s eyes fall on me. I smile and wave at it.
Before I have time to shout ‘Howdy neighbor!’ at the top of my lungs, Goss covers me with his hand, sealing away both me and my pranks. “S—sorry, no time to talk, I have to go find something for the feast, bye!” And in a flash, the world becomes weightless and he speeds again, the other dragon’s shouts echoing down the tunnel, telling him to bring the skinny to the feast. But even after we’re away from the dragon, he still won’t unseal me. It’s hard to tell exactly what his emotional state is since the feathers hide the tell-tale smells of fear, but I can tell that he’s far from calm.
It takes close to seven minutes—I counted them—before he finally lets me see where I am and what’s going on.
“This is my room!” Goss says as he lets me down to see the magic. And… Uh… Honestly, going straight from the splendor of the hall we were in just now to this feels a bit jarring. So, for one, it’s only barely big enough to fit him. There’s a groove in the middle of the room that’s shaped like a curled-up cat, filled with animal hides. I’ll assume that’s his bed, but he doesn’t spend any time on it. “There’s my wall, and here’s my hoard! So far I only have a few pieces of armor that I got off of a rose knight down the side of the mountain. I kind of wish he’d been alive so I could’ve gotten something to brag about, but it’s okay. All hoards have to start somewhere, right?”
I approach his little hoard. Can this even be called a hoard? Then again, he’s only gone at it for a few years, so it makes sense. While I’m looking through the sad excuse of a dragon’s hoard, Goss lumbers up to one of the walls, puts his face close to it, and shoots fire at it until it starts melting. Then he simply grabs the molten piece of wall, fashions it into a hook, and sticks the signed wanted poster onto it. Once it’s properly affixed, he takes half a step back—as far as he can step without his body bumping into something—and hums at the sight. I nod at the barren wall. Yup, now there’s a sight for Better Homes and Gardens.
When he turns to me, I make sure to assert my approval by giving a thumbs up. His face splits into a smile. “Hehe!” he laughs, turning away from the wall to begin picking through his horde himself, mumbling about whether or not bones count for the tribute. As for me, I’m left with a very strange feeling.
…Is this what it feels like to have a younger sibling? With my older sister, I was kind of like this. Always seeking her approval, not always getting it, but once I got it… Hoo, boy!
I let my eyes rest on Goss for a few moments. “What are you looking for, anyway?” I ask.
“Huh?” Goss pulls his face from the hoard, emerging with a helmet stuck on his nose. “Oh! Yeah, right, you don’t…” Making a slightly annoyed face, he plucks the helmet off, flicking it back into the hoard. “It’s really just a thing for us whelps, but… Every day, we have a little feast. Everyone brings something they’ve caught, as long as it’s smaller than a dog, and then Father Moonlight prepares it and we all share whatever we caught. I usually keep a few rabbits around just in case I forget to go out to find some, but I must have eaten them yesterday for a midnight snack…”
“Happens to the best of us,” I say, nodding as I recall my various midnight snacks across the past three years. All those goblings… Ah, now I’m drooling again. Wiping the drool off my chin, I’m struck with a thought. Frowning, I look up at him. “...A rabbit is enough to feed you for a day?”
He pauses briefly. “Oh, um, we don’t actually need to eat, it’s more of a comfort thing. Once we mature into full dragons—which I’ll do in less than two years, for the record—we swear off needless goblin pleasures like eating and sleeping. Some dragons also choose to do a sort of fast, like never speaking or never using their arms, but I think that’s weird and dumb, so I’m not doing that.” He glances left and right, even poking his head into the tunnel leading out of the room for a moment before turning back to me. “Between you and me, though…” He grins. “I might not even stop eating.”
“How controversial,” I say knowingly, even though I actually don’t know what’s so wrong with eating. My fake confidence gets through him though, and he snickers uncontrollably, like some kind of villain sidekick. However, my mind is elsewhere. “So, what you’re saying is that if you have something to bring to the feast—hopefully something smaller than a dog—then you get to eat?” He nods. I purse my lips. “Do you think there’s any chance that if I also brought something, they’d let me join in?”
“Well…” Humming, he taps his chin, eyes sliding from me to the wanted poster hung on the wall and then back to me, where his face erupts into a grin. “Sure! You’re basically a dragon in all but form, so I don’t see why not!”
I fight the urge to sob violently at his compliment. This… might be the greatest compliment I’ve ever gotten. Turning away from him I wipe at my face, snorting down the last bit of gratitude before returning my eyes to him. “Okay, that’s good, because I think I might know what to bring to the feast…”