As Caltyr left the classroom, his bag stuffed to the brim and his chest puffed with pride, he spotted a glimpse of red and yellow intermingling into fiery orange in the hallway.
Vermonysis.
Caltyr pushed through the other dragons filling the space, determined to catch Vermonysis before he slipped into his next class. Caltyr only just managed to grab the tip of the dual-colored tail between his claws before the other dragon disappeared around a corner. “Vermonysis!”
The red and yellow dragon slowed his pace as soon as he felt his appendage being tugged. “Huh?”
Caltyr watched him turn around to face him, and he waved a clawed hand as a greeting, suddenly feeling self-conscious having interrupted him on his way to his next class. Others around them were lagging to stare.
“I didn’t get a chance to thank you for stopping things from going too far during the fight yesterday. I don’t know what would’ve happened had you not been there.”
Vermonysis’ guarded face softened at his thanks. “Oh, you’re welcome, man. It’s the least I could do, considering you’ve been taking some of the heat off me lately.”
Caltyr tilted his head in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Oh,” the orange-tinted dragon chuckled, “Sara was always up my butt trying to do better than me at everything. She would stare me down at lunch while she tried to eat twice as many mice as I did. She really cannot stand anybody scoring better than she does, in anything. Anyway, since she started obsessing over you being ‘evil’, she’s pretty much left me alone.” He put exaggerated air quotes around the word ‘evil’ with his sharp, elongated nails.
“Ah,” Caltyr replied unenthusiastically.
“But hey, while we’re here, I just wanted to let you know that not everyone buys into that evil stuff. I think you’re a perfectly nice guy. You’ve never given me any reason to think otherwise, so I’m going to keep treating you with respect until you give me a reason to do otherwise.” Vermonysis held up the end of his tail.
Caltyr couldn’t believe his earholes. He lifted his tail up and double slapped it against Vermonysis’ in a gesture of solidarity, much like a human fist bump.
“Thanks,” he replied lamely, completely stunned.
“Hey, I’ve gotta get going to class. I’ll see you around sometime,” the dual-colored dragon said, before speeding off into the sea of dragons shuffling between rooms.
Caltyr felt a stinging gathering in the edges of his eyes.
Now would be the time for him to go to his next class too, but he had other plans.
Caltyr passed the end of the hallway and turned down the stairs, heading down and pushing past the front doors. A cool breeze greeted him, fluttering through his scales and whipping up the scarf he was wearing around his neck.
He could already see Kraven decorating the top of his usual hill. It served as his office, and right now, it was empty of any other students, which boded well for Caltyr. He started to approach the incline.
His question wasn’t exactly school-related, and he was skipping class to ask it, but he hoped the old guy would help him anyway.
Kraven was asleep, or at least the slow rise and fall of his chest made him appear to be.
But when Caltyr reached the bottom of the hill, Kraven’s eye opened just a crack. “What did you do this time?” he asked jovially, in a booming, echoing baritone.
“Nothing,” Caltyr replied defensively. But then he forced himself to laugh. “I just have a question, and you’re the closest thing we have to a leader, so I came to you.”
The elder dragon rose his head, which was as big as the entirety of Caltyr’s body just on its own. “You’ve got my attention.”
Kraven watched Caltyr with what looked like genuine interest. Caltyr took a mental note that complimenting Kraven before asking him for something seemed to have good results. He could replicate this again later.
“I challenged Sara to a Battle of Wills.”
“A Battle of Wills,” Kraven repeated, in the way that adults just repeated everything kids said but in a higher pitch. “And what was important enough to challenge her to a Battle of Wills for?”
“She keeps saying I’m no good. I wanted to shut her up, but I lost.” The last few words eked out in a bitter whisper, and Caltyr rose a draconic hand to touch his opposite elbow.
“Well, according to tradition, this means that you’ve proven to her and everyone else that you are ‘no good’,” Karen stated bluntly. “But a Battle of Wills can be redone if there’s evidence that the verdict reached was wrong, or the situation has changed in some way. So all you need to do is go out there and do something good, and you’ll be able to challenge her again.”
He reached a dark, razor-sharp talon out and pressed it to the azure dragon’s chitinous chest.
“But no matter what happens, tradition is overrated. Whether you’re a good kid or not is based on your actions and what’s in here, Caltyr, not how good you are at winning in a fight stacked against you. I heard about your tussle, using water against an opponent using electrical magic is suicide. You’d have to be twice as good as her to win.”
Caltyr bit back the words he wanted to say, which were something along the lines of ‘I would have used my flesh magic if it wasn’t forbidden, and then I would have won’.
Instead, he said, “I know. I thought maybe if I used ice magic to redirect her strikes, I could stall her enough to get some good hits in.”
“I hear it almost worked,” Kraven boomed. “Now, you have your answer. Shouldn’t you be in a class somewhere?”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“I should.” Caltyr turned to start on his way back toward the school. “And thanks.”
The elder dragon flattened himself against the hillside once more. As Caltyr made his way down, Kraven spotted something. Caltyr’s scales were darkening and taking on more of a crimson hue near the tips. Or was it just a trick of the light?
“And Caltyr…”
“Yes?” the younger dragon asked, tilting his head back to regard him.
“Have you been doing more of that flesh bullshit?”
Caltyr swished his tail behind him as he started on his way back toward the building. “No, sir.”
“Good.”
But Caltyr knew that he had been practicing every night.
*
“And you’ve got the human money?” Caltyr whispered with his eyes on the prize, a vending machine with a clear glass panel on its front stood across from them, two streets away.
“Yeah. I have a secondary hoard of human coins, so one of these should work,” T’allyandria whispered, handing over a small silk bag of coins.
It was a mere pittance compared to the hoard she had back in her den, but it held a good variety. Combined, the coins would be enough for at least one of the drinks Caltyr wanted.
They were in an adjacent human city. Sparsely populated, but well-stocked enough to include a vending machine in one of its alleyways. Maybe there was a human living in this city that enjoyed his strawberry boba drink as much as he did.
Caltyr looked left and right. They seemed to be alone, and he could hear no footsteps echoing throughout the streets. Slowly, he inched toward the vending machine.
It was cutesy, outlined with pink and blue, with some sort of character on the front. It looked like a puffy rabbit, and he’d caught himself trying to draw it when he was alone in his den and practicing his magic wasn’t enough to stave off boredom.
Caltyr opened the tiny silk sack and pulled out a few coins. He pushed them into the slot with some difficulty. His claws made the process a clumsy one.
The numbers ticked up. $1.20, $3.10, until he got to the $5.00 the machine wanted for his beverage.
He watched in wonder as the mechanisms whirred and moved, knowing exactly which compartment to retrieve his drink from. It rattled to the bottom with a deep thunk, and he pulled it out with a draconic hand.
The bottle cap on top was new, pristine, completely untouched. It had not a scratch on it. Each tiny gem was laid perfectly in place.
“So that’s the drink,” T’allyandria observed neutrally, attempting to drum up some energy and falling short.
“Yes,” Caltyr breathed, taking it in.
It was a short, squat bottle with clear popping boba sitting at the bottom. The liquid inside was mostly opaque, infused with a strong, slightly artificial strawberry flavor. He opened the bottle so cautiously that he could tell T’allyandria was starting to get antsy.
“We need to hurry up, Caltyr. We can’t get caught, or the whole plan falls apart.”
She looked left and right, still no trace of human activity, but they couldn’t be too careful.
The azure-colored dragon lifted the bottle to his lips and tilted it up, downing the whole thing in one gulp—save for the bubbles. He kept those isolated and crunched down on them, savoring their distinct pops.
He tucked the coveted bottle cap into a tiny pouch of his own and then slotted the pouch safely into a pocket in his bag, where it would be safe.
“Okay, okay. I’m done, we can go.” He dropped the now-empty bottle into the recycling bin beside the machine.
Caltyr returned to T’allyandria’s side.
“So the next step is to find somewhere to hide while we wait for a human to show up,” she said, searching the street for any signs of life.
But for now, they were the only ones.
“That looks big enough,” he said, pointing to the dumpster at the end of the road. The option was unappealing, but not as unappealing as leaving empty handed.
So the two of them stuffed their bodies into the heap of garbage contained within the metal box and waited.
Then, they waited some more.
Caltyr liked to think of himself as patient and self-assured, but when it had been what felt like at least ten minutes, he started to get restless.
Just as he was about to ask T’allydandria if they should just leave, a faint, repetitive noise began to ring through the air.
Footsteps.
The person who owned the footsteps was tall, putting lots of space between each slap of their feet against the pavement. They were reading as they walked, with their thumb tucked between the pages of their book.
T’allyandria nudged him as the human started to walk past the dumpster they were hiding in.
Oh right, he thought, the plan.
It was now or never.
Caltyr lifted his head, and the lid of the bin creaked open. He blew a puff of air from his mouth to get a banana peel successfully dislodged from his head scales, and then freed himself from the box, planting his feet on the ground.
The human turned around at the sound of his skin scraping against metal. They opened their mouth to scream at the sight of a whole ass dragon appearing out of nowhere.
“Stay quiet,” T’allyandria told them, with such a weight to her words that Caltyr could just tell there was magic behind them. “And stay still.”
The human stopped moving, standing in place like a complacent doll.
“And don’t scream, even if it hurts.” T’allyandria moved to scrape her hair-like scales from her face, but realized a foreign goop was stuck between her fingers and stopped. “The human is ready now,” she urged.
She probably thought he was going to chicken out, and she was correct that he was wary, but he wasn’t going to turn tail and leave.
He just hadn’t used his powers on such a large subject before.
Caltyr rose his hands and began reaching out with his magic. He pierced ethereally downward at the top of the human’s head, right where its hair parted. He began to peel the skin away from the human’s meat in four sections, much like one might peel a banana—but with many more working parts.
He had to work his way around arms and legs, which he was certain most bananas didn’t have. He expected a shriek of pain, but T’allyandria’s spell held true, even when it was obvious the person wanted to cry out, wanted desperately for their pain to have an outlet.
Human bodies, apparently, bled a lot more than mouse bodies. A truly shocking amount of blood sprang forth and coated the ground with buckets of slick crimson.
Even though he was just pulling the outer coating away, the body’s redness spurted everywhere dramatically.
When he had the skin off, which happened after a minute of careful pulling, he still had to form it into ribbons. He did so, parting the skin like a sheet of fabric. It took concentration to make them into something more than merely a shadow of what he was picturing in his mind, but he tried his best.
“That’s fine, Caltyr. They don’t need to be perfect, just good enough for them to wrap their puny brains around.”
He felt his wakefulness fading. He knew he could only do so much more. “I can’t keep going for much longer. Where do you want me to put them?”
“Just stick them up on the wall,” she suggested hastily, her words in a forceful whisper. “News travels fast here. They have whole jobs for it.”
And so he did. He slapped the flesh-letters up on the wall, the coarse texture of the bricks making it simple for him to get them to stick.
Once the message was firmly in place, the two of them turned tail and left.
STOP EATING US, OR ELSE, the skin letters screamed, placed above the freshly peeled corpse of a human body.