Her name was "The Ship Lists Slowly through Glassy Seas", and her birth had been an auspicious omen. Or that was what the sailors had told themselves, anyway. It wasn't unheard of for a baby to be born ship-side, but most voyages were short and close to land, and most expectant mothers preferred to have their babies on land. Not her mother though, he hadn't even known he was pregnant until the babe was lying in his rather confused arms. There had been some questions after that, which education should have already cleared up, but it was what it was.

The ship had become becalmed shortly before her birth, the wind dying down to almost nothing, leaving their ship drifting far off course, until there was nothing around them except water, smooth and shiny as molten glass.

It was exactly two weeks to the day from their initial stranding that the wind picked right back up and carried them back to shore, longer than any of the sailors had thought possible. It had been a lazy two weeks of swimming and fishing and worrying about water, and the sailors, initially confused and wary of the new babe in their midst, had by the end of it become quite fond of her, declaring her a blessing, rather than a curse.

Of her own part in the story, she remembered very little, but the crew had stayed together as she had grown, and her childhood had been one of boards and lines. The hum of magic all around her, permeating every breath, the whispering creaks of the living ship her lullabies.

That was why her current life rankled a little, being so far inland the roar of the waves was almost inaudible except for on the stormiest days, but you couldn't sail forever, and the tides were always changing. The way they had done things when she was a girl wasn't the way they did things now, and wouldn't be the way they did things in ten years, and she had gracefully aged out of the profession, doing as all good sailors did eventually and settling down on shore.

She had always been strange for a sailor, anyway. She was even a little strange for a mage, and boy, did ship mages have a reputation.

She had gone to school at a later age than most, and that was a story all on its own, but the result of all of it boiled down to one thing: Glassyseas was trying to write a letter to an academic associate, and she had been struggling with it now for over a week.

The idiot man had some sort of new-fangled ideas for how to grow sails, which she didn't agree with. He didn't want to use the old method of cloth sails anymore, which was fine, the ships produced up north had been using grown sails for almost a decade now, but he had gotten together along with several others in what she considered her field and was now trying to modify the ship seeds of their own vessels beyond what they had ever been designed for, in some sort of misguided attempt to... She wasn't sure, do better?

She was rather irritable about it, both because it was stupid, and because he hadn't credited her at all in his latest paper, despite her being the superior source and the original teacher of half of the now-adult mages in his little group.

With an angry hiss, she rose suddenly to her feet, stabbing her pen into the desk, spearing through two sheets of paper, bending the tip irreparably out of shape and leaving it standing proud from the wood of the desk.

Maybe she should suggest that as a solution, she thought as she glared at it, the ink slowly seeping out from between the tines and soaking into the paper, absorbing the few words she had managed to write. A ship of polished metal, sailing on a sea of ink.

She was about to head to the kitchen, to see if there was anything for lunch, when the bell above her front door tinkled.

She really ought to remove that thing, she thought as she scrambled away from the desk. The sound of bells always still made her a little jumpy, even after all this time on land. A lifetime of ships and schools had merged to give her a sort of involuntary reaction.

It was because of this that, as her feet started to move, she also hurled the closest thing to hand at the door, if it was one of her students, then that should slow them down! Ships and Their Sails was a boring book, but a useful reference when you were trying to put down academic subordinates who were trying to do things way above their station, and a heavy one, when you were trying to slow them down.

There was a squawk as the book impacted its victim, she was a good shot after all, and then, just as she managed to escape through the back door, a whole rush of Something ran through her home, hissing across her skin like acid.

Stopped in her tracks for only a moment, Glassyseas turned around and marched right inside.

-

The damage wasn't as bad as she'd feared, from that initial burst. Most of her books were old and set in their ways, dense and bound to survive the rigours of a hard life, and they had only crisped up a bit around the edges.

The floor, on the other hand, had been laid only the year before and the wood was still rather green. She had enjoyed that about it, the whisper of growth under her feet, but now, rubbing the shoots off it with her toes, now she wasn't so sure it had been a great idea.

The area near the front door had been hit the worst, Ships and Their Sails was a goner, and everything a few feet into the room was still resettling itself, crumbling or creaking, finding its new equilibrium. Still, the wave was over, and anything of any value was up in the loft, kept safely locked away in an old sea chest, so she hadn't lost anything irreplaceable.

She would miss some of the papers, but… Maybe it was for the best.

She frowned down at the young woman, who was crouched in the doorway to her home, sobbing, tears streaming down her face, one hand on her head, and the other trying to comfort what appeared to be one very upset dragon.

Well, this was different!

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

-

It took a liberal application of handkerchiefs, half a pot of tea, the loss of an old dress suit ten years out of date and a small piece of liberally buttered pork, before the two of them were in any state to talk to her.

Littleshy gave a sniffle. The bump on her head had been healed, and should only be a distant throb now, but one hand still kept reaching up to touch it. "I just wanted to ask a question!" she gave another sniff, and rubbed her face with a fresh cloth, trying to scrub away the remnants of tears, "My pet lizard-"

Glassyseas gave a huff at that, "if that thing is a lizard then I'm a hammerhead, and you better throw me back in quick!"

This apparent non-sequitur got her a stare, and she rolled her eyes, "I didn't spend my life at sea to not know what a dragon looks like, girl," she reached out to touch it, but the creature glared at her with sleepy eyes, baring sharp, cat-like teeth, "and I dunno where you picked it up, but you obviously have no control over it."

Littleshy glared at her, clutching the dragon to her chest, "she's not a pet, she's a friend!" well at least that was the right attitude, "and she's-" another sniffle, "she's sick and I dunno how to look after her and I've screwed it all up."

As the girl buried her face into the animal's side, Glassyseas was struck suddenly by just how young her bludgeoning victim was. She was tall for her age, and her hands were those of a hard worker, but her voice and posture were at this moment those of a lost child.

In another academic, it might have sparked some display of empathy, but Glassyseas had always been good at ignoring that section of her own emotional scale.

"You're gonna have to let me look at her then," she held her hands out patiently, until, with extreme wariness, Littleshy placed the animal into her hands. The teeth were still bared, but quiet words soothed its fear.

From the moment she touched it, she knew it truly was a dragon, if she had even doubted it before. It wasn't like any animal she had ever held, and she had held a fair few of them over the years. Most of her professional life had been as a Growth mage, but she had done a fair bit of Change too, even if she didn't have the artistic bent needed to do truly great things with it.

The thing in her hands was not an animal, it was pure, resonant, Magic. It was what you would get if you took a cat and pared it down to the essence of Cat, a dog to the essence of Dog, magic to the essence of Magic. It was lightning against her fingers, and, if she hadn't already figured out what a terrible idea that would be, she could have written so many papers about this one moment alone.

With this amount of power behind her, she could have revolutionised the whole sailing industry. She could have grown whole buildings, whole cities.

Gently, and without words, she handed the dragon back, where it snuggled itself into the girl's chest, Shifting itself until it was in the most comfortable position.

"I'm gonna need to know where you got it." Her voice was soft with badly concealed awe and the air in the shop around her was electric, filled with static. There was a ringing in her ears as if she'd been standing too close to cannon fire, and every hair on her body was standing on end.

"If the mother's gonna come back for it, if they even have mothers-" a lot had been written about the supposed origins of dragons, but it was all speculation, "that can't happen within the city. People will die."

Littleshy looked back at her, arms around the dragon still, unaware of the sheet power she held, and her face streaked with dried tears. "I don't think she has a mother," she squinted in recollection, "the, uh, others didn't know where she was from either…" she trailed off for a moment, stroking the green-blue scales, "I was just a pin, hired to take her one place to another, I wasn't meant to have her…"

Glassyseas waited in silence, listening to the story and mentally cataloguing the damage to her shop as the debris behind her continued to shift and settle.

"-Then I was meant to take her to a boat-"

"A boat, girl? Like a canal barge, or a rowboat?"

Littleshy screwed up her face for a moment, pushing the tears back, before taking a deep breath and carrying on. "A ship, then, a blue one, it was in, uh," a moment to recall the location, "dock nine, by east-winds, almost two months ago now."

Glassyseas frowned, thinking this over. "Was it a Brig, flecked hull, with a seventh iteration-" the designation went on for a moment longer, but Littleshy's expression showed that of the confused layperson, and she realised that line wasn't going to cut it, "big ship, blue, captain arrested for kidnapping?"

"That's the one," she nodded and clutched the dragon closer, if such a thing were possible. "He wanted to put her in a cage. I didn't... I couldn't. Not for all the money in the world!"

Behind her, one of the bookshelves collapsed, showering the floor with various journals and research texts, but whilst the two women looked up, the dragon didn't react, face still buried in the girl's chest.

"She was so active at first, but now," a small sniffle, "she just keeps sleeping. I can't even get her to eat somedays. She used to fly and talk to me and now she just… Sleeps."

Littleshy closed her eyes, and took another deep breath, "I just wanted somebody to take a look at her, make sure she's alright, you know, inside…"

Glassyseas reached out and took the dragon from the girl's arms with gentle hands, once again, looking for something other than magic this time. "What've you been feeding her?"

They conversed for a minute, about the diets of carnivores and herbivores, but her mind was only half on the conversation, the other half somewhere deep inside herself, listening to the voices only she knew how to hear.

The thing in her arms wasn't, as she had assumed at that first touch, pure magic, that would be ridiculous, it was still a creature which required sustenance and love and affection, and as far as she could see, it was getting all of those things. Her cells were built correctly, as much as her body wanted them to be, and all the organs were in the correct places, as far as she could tell. The shifting, settling nature under her fingers was strange though. A being in flux, too full of its own power, the scales flickering between green and blue as she ran her hands over them, colours of the sea, above and below.

Nothing she did would ever be able to touch the sheer wonder that that tiny creature produced with every breath. Her body was a masterpiece, perfection in every scale, and Glassyseas couldn't have Changed her if she'd tried. She also knew, instinctively, that any attempt to do so would have sucked her dry, draining her of all magic, perhaps forever.

They sat in silence for a while as she did her diagnostics, but in the end, all she could do was shake her head. "This is beyond me, I'm just a ship-mage, but-"

She stood, handing her charge back and turning around to face the wreckage, hands on her hips. "I can get you to a friend of mine, she might know better how to deal with this.

As she looked around the wreck of her front room, running a hand over her shaved head and searching for writing materials, she frowned, "I don't suppose you have a pen?"

-

Out in the street, her dragon around her shoulders and a letter hidden carefully inside her shirt, Littleshy leant back against the shop wall, and let out a deep breath. Tomorrow there would be a ship leaving for the isle of Vocil, the largest of the barrier islands, and Glassyseas had already left to arrange her a place on board.

She would have to work whilst she was on board, no trip was free, but she would have food and shelter until they arrived at their destination. It would take almost a month, but together they would make it there, and there would be experts there who knew how to help.

There was no promise that they wouldn't take her friend away, but what other options did she have, at this point?

With the thought like a sinkhole inside her stomach, she hoped the dragon would hold out that long.