“So, I guess I should just ask, then. You guys up for defending Emily, so she doesn’t get squashed like a little bug under Kraven’s monstrous foot?” The sentence was delivered airily, but a graveness hid behind it. Vermonysis looked between T’allyandria and Caltyr.

“I don’t believe you would enjoy the outcome if one of us didn’t at least try to get a good ending for this child. My worry is that Sara will be involved in this meeting; she has been very loudly anti-human in the past. She will not be in a talking mood if we win. If you’re willing to put your friendship with her in jeopardy, I would be willing to be on your side in this simply to see her face when she fails the negotiation.” T’allyandria smiled at the thought. “It has been a long time coming.”

Caltyr turned over the idea in his mind. A silence stretched through the crowded stone room, filled with 3 dragons and a tiny flesh-child.

He wanted to win against Sara, but he didn’t want to get himself into yet another situation where the majority of the student body wouldn’t speak to him for years. At the same time, he found himself eager to be part of a team working towards the same goal again, grateful to be invited. A part of him also jumped at the chance to be put against Sara in battle again.

“I’ll do it if I can be the one to fight Sara, if the opportunity presents itself.” He felt a snake-like squirm travel down his long body when he heard how desperate his voice sounded as it came out of him.

“I’m not sure you’re the best one for the job, Caltyr.” Vermonysis stated, his eyes coming to life with crackling white hot electricity. Its existence created a hum, like a bug, in his ear canal. “Why don’t we go head-to-head right here and whoever wins can fight for Emily if it comes up? She was my friend first, after all.”

T’allyandria and the kid were perched on top of Caltyr’s bed when the fight began, with the kid stuffing its face with the ‘little bit yummy’ section of the food in her dish.

Caltyr lowered himself down to his belly so that he was loose and prepared to pounce at a moment’s notice.

“Why are the draggies fighting again?” Asked the child, crossing and uncrossing its legs restlessly

“Because they want to decide which one will be fighting for you against the council, if it comes to that.”

“Oh.” Emily muttered, and peered at the pair of dragons as they began to summon their respective elements; Caltyr water and light, and Vermonysis fire and electricity. “Will they die?”

“They’re not going to kill each other, this is just something dragons do to make hard decisions. We believe that if you want something badly enough, you’ll fight for it at your best and if it’s important enough, you’ll always win. It’s archaic, but this is how our world works now that there’s so few of us left.”

“That’s because of humans, isn’t it?” Emily looked down at her fleshy hands, soiled with food. “I’m not like those guys. I’m nice to draggies.” She reached up and patted T’ally’s scales.

“That’s why I haven’t eaten you yet,” T’ally stated with a long smile.

Caltyr tossed the ball of ice in Vermonysis’ direction. In response, he launched his spear clean through it, shattering the sphere into glittering shards of frozen water.

The water dragon made a screen of water that flowed like a waterfall and forced the electricity upward. Then, with the biggest threat subdued, Caltyr grabbed the spinning shards from the air and threw each one of the tiny pieces rapidly in Vermonysis’ direction.

The red and yellow dragon screamed as one buried itself point blank into his eyeball.

“OW! WHAT THE FUCK, MAN, THAT HURTS! I surrender, damn, just leave my eyes out of this!” Vermonysis wailed, clutching his face.

The feeling of triumph that began to swell in Caltyr’s chest drained away as soon as he saw blood leaking through the dragon’s fingers.

“I’m sorry, Vermonysis. Take your hand away from your eyes. I know some light magic, so I should be able to heal this much,” Caltyr stated.

With quaking fingers, Vermonysis reluctantly forced his hands out of their defensive lattice.

Caltyr surrounded the wounded dragon’s head in warming light. He pictured himself using the light to heal the skin, filling in the gashes with vibrating particles, and slowly the shards were pushed out by the new growth. They plinked softly to the cave floor.

“Is it done? Am I unblind yet?” Asked Vermonysis in a high-pitched voice that reeked of fear.

“You should be fine now, yeah. You can open your eyes,” Caltyr confirmed wearily.

Both of them felt extreme relief when Vermonysis opened his eyes and everything was back to normal. The world blinked back into focus more and more the more he blinked away the blood coating his retina.

“Okay, okay, false alarm. I can see again.” And then, after a pause to breathe away his anxiety, he looked toward Caltyr again. He looked a little like he’d been crying blood, which was kind of metal. “I guess you won, man. Congratulations. You should use that trick of yours on the Elders. As strong as they are, they all have eyes.”

“So the blue one won?” Emily questioned T’allyandria with a tilt of her head, looking up at the dark dragon’s face. It was so far up she had to crane her neck backward to accomplish some form of eye contact.

“Yes, the blue one won. Which room have you been in?”

“This one. I’ve just been focusing on eating, draggy. My Mommy and Daddy always told me ‘focus, focus, focus’!” The human smiled a big, red smile.

Wait, red? T’ally looked around in search of a wound, but instead she found that the kid had cleared almost two sections of the plate, one of them spicy. Dragon levels of spicy. “Are… you okay?”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Yup! This part’s yummy, but it makes my face cry,” Emily chirped, shoving another handful into her face.

T’ally noticed the abundant trails of snot and tears down the little girl’s face. Yuck. The yuck factor got even worse when she reached down to her shirt and blew her nose into it, and then wiped her hands and face. It came away blazing red.

“We should get her a change of clothes,” Vermonysis suggested with a laugh.

Caltyr’s face contorted into a look of potent disgust. “Agreed.”

“No,” T’ally said and shook her head, “she’ll look more pathetic if we put her in front of the council like this. We want her to look pathetic if we have any chance at gaining their sympathy.”

“I guess you know the ancient old fogies best.” Vermonysis shrugged.

So they were going to go to the council like this, with a baby human in tow. Caltyr felt concerned about the little life’s fate and triumphant about his win at the same time, but he wouldn’t truly be redeemed until he beat Sara in a conflict, not Vermonysis.

And with her on the council, that was just what he planned to do.

***

T’ally was the one who called the council meeting.

To accommodate the large number of ancient dragons, council meetings had to be held in the largest room they had. In comparison, the minuscule human looked to be the size of an insignificant little gnat.

But the response to her presence inside the school walls would be anything but insignificant.

T’allyandria, Caltyr and Vermonysis stood on a platform in the middle of the room while the council members filed in. Kraven, Sara and Malika were all in attendance, along with other dragons who lived in the area but didn’t visit his school often. This had been declared an issue for all of the local dragon-kind, making it far more severe than Caltyr had ever anticipated.

The three of them were dressed smartly, in jewel-lined wrappings and armour that matched their eyes and colors. Caltyr’s was blue and white, a swooping hood wrapping around the base of his neck.

At T’ally’s suggestion, they had left the human in its oversized t-shirt and its single shoe. The platform they were on felt cold beneath even Caltyr’s scaled feet, so naturally the kid was shaking like a leaf. Bits of dirt were tumbling from her hair to the floor as she shivered.

When all of the council members were settled their seats in the arc of the room, a brown dragon with crown-like frills surrounding its face sat at the middle front, closest to them. Their eyes were an earthly amber, which was also the type of dragon Caltyr assumed them to be; earth. He hoped their disposition was as down-to-earth as their coloring suggested.

The dragon wasn’t the tallest or strongest-looking one in the room; the award for strongest-looking went to Kraven, who had stern eyes and several chunks missing from his flesh, suggesting he had seen many battles and left each one alive.

And yet, when they spoke in their clear, booming voice, all eyes turned to face them.

“Be still and listen, my fellow council members.”

Any chattering still happening in the room quickly died down.

“T’allyandria of our very own council; Verymonysis, one of our top students at this school; and Caltyr, another student, have come to us today with a human. You’ve been summoned here to discuss the matter of its fate.”

Caltyr, another student. The ridge of his snout wrinkled in annoyance, the scales gathering in a heap. Just another student, nobody of note. Perhaps if he hadn’t stopped using his flesh magic, they would have more to say about him.

The room burst into uproarious chatter, which the earth-colored dragon shushed into silence.

“Let us hear from its representatives first, before we pass our judgment. Otherwise, there would be no need for this meeting.”

The human squirmed restlessly in place, unable to keep still in front of so many eyes that were many times its size, each one judging it. Eventually, it leaned into Vermonysis, who was apparently the safest-feeling among them. Vermonysis wrapped his tail around the child.

T’allyandria looked in the red-and-yellow dragon’s direction, raising her brow ridge several times toward the elders. “You’re the first one in the timeline. Go. Go.” She said beneath her breath with increasing urgency.

Vermonysis glanced down to the kid, and then back up to T’allyandria. “Alright, don’t tie your tail into a pretzel. I’ll go first,” he replied quietly to her, unwinding the kid from her newly discovered pocket of safety and stepping up to the front-most section of the platform. The child grabbed the hem of her shirt in her hands and stood in exaggerated stillness.

“Hello, Council. First, I’d like to apologize deeply for bringing a human into our safe haven; I hope you know I wouldn’t do so unless I thought it necessary. This is Emily.” Vermonysis gestured with his scaled hand toward the kid, who had busied herself with picking some of the dried dirt from her hair.

She waved softly, nervously, in the direction of the judging eyes.

“I found Emily in the forest just outside of our school grounds. When I first found her, she was caked in blood and the bottoms of her feet were raw from running. She was scared and told me she had been exiled from her home because her parents were killed by monsters and nobody was willing to take care of her anymore, because she didn’t want to eat dragon flesh.”

With a flick of his tail, he pointed to her arms, the skin smooth and unmarred by the magical scarring and bulging veins that came with consuming their mana.

“Do you see? This one has clearly never imbibed in our flesh. Apparently, her kind thought that was enough of a slight to forgo caring for one of their own kin. That makes her an orphan, and an abandoned one, and isn’t that, like, what this place is for? Taking in the abandoned?”

“Taking in abandoned dragons,” Sara barked loudly from the sidelines, every bit of her tense and on edge. Her scales were fanned out like a dog’s neck fur when it was threatened, except all over her was fanned and pointed.

“You will be told when it is your time to speak,” the Council Leader stated matter-of-factly.

Sara folded back into her seat, but her expression of trepidation and betrayal remained unchanged.

Vermonysis looked into the crowd of his teachers, the elders from neighboring hiding places and schools, and a sprinkling of his peers. “I took care of her for over two weeks in secret before she became so desperate she came here looking for me. T’allyandria and Caltyr talked me into bringing her in to see you.

“She already knew where we were staying before she even followed me back, and she says the people who live in her old settlement do too. She doesn’t know of any plans for attack. All she knows is that she wants a change of clothes, a hot meal and somewhere to stay where she doesn’t have to sleep in the dirt. I ask you to consider allowing her to stay here.

“Not all humans, just this one human. She’s been exiled, because she won’t eat us, and what kind of precedent does it set if we just turn her away for that? Her own people already did that to her. She said she went crying to them first and they just told her to come back when she was willing to fit into their society. So please, just consider it. She has nowhere else to go. I think she’s already as much ‘one of us’ as a human can get.”

“With us? Here?” Sara squeaked out, the corner of her lip rising practically to the heavens as she scoffed. “She’s a human, not one of us– a human can’t be one of us. By definition. It’s a human.”

The representative of the council stamped a foot down, shaking the earth. “It is their turn to represent their case now. We can have the floor once they’re done, and if you interrupt one more time, you’ll be removed from here and we’ll make this decision without you. T’allyandria, Caltyr, do you have anything else you wish to add?”