As Caltyr moved through the burrow that led to the entrance of his school, he couldn’t stop thinking that he didn’t want to tell Kraven about the news.
He didn’t want to move again. He had just gotten his mattress into the right groove in his bottle caps. He’d just started considering putting up posters and wall hangings.
But would it be right to keep such important news to himself just because he wanted to cling to the place that was rapidly becoming his home?
The blue dragon kept his maw carefully sealed around the delicate skull, which was still holding on to some of its meat, and resolved to deal with preparing his peace offering before he made any rash decisions.
He still needed to boil the skull so he could pry away the last of the cooked bits to reveal the smooth surface underneath. In his water classes with Mister Terumin, they had been learning how to superheat water by speeding it up in their mind. Caltyr was able to boil water while it was still in the air by shaking it rapidly back and forth, and that’s what he was planning to do.
He sealed himself away in his room and conjured a sphere of water, clear and buoyant, which he pushed the skull into. It found the middle of the wet orb, bobbing slightly before he began to heat the water and the bob became more of a tremble. The bits of skull flesh quickly became so tender they melted off, and with just a few careful pushes of the water, the skull was entirely clean.
Caltyr stepped backward and slipped a bowl under the water, letting it fall inside and begin to cool. He picked it out with his claws and inspected it, steam rising up from between the eye sockets. His method of boiling the skull quickly rather than for hours had preserved the landolotl frills well, making it almost cute– at least compared to other skulls.
It was a lot more yellow than he expected. The ones he had seen T’allyandria with were bleached in appearance. Maybe she would know how to deal with this better than he did, and he’d already done the legwork.
He wrapped the freshly cleaned skull in cloth and placed it gently at the top of his pack, folding the top flap over it. It was evening by now, so T’allyandria wouldn’t be teaching any classes.
Even though he had made an agreement with himself to leave the decision-making until after he’d prepared his gift, he’d all but decided he was going to present his information to T’allyandria instead of Kraven. She was most of the way to being a faculty member and if she deemed it necessary, she could go to the principal herself.
But he hoped she wouldn’t.
Confiding in her might also make her warm up to him again. There was nothing a shadow dragon enjoyed more than a shared secret, and boy did he have a juicy morsel.
When he arrived at her room, it was closed. Their doors were made of panels of dark wood sealed together with metal bars. He knocked at one of the wooden parts and waited.
The door cracked open so quickly he wondered if she had been standing behind it waiting for somebody to visit. One amethyst-colored eye shone brightly through the crack. “And who daaaaares to bother T’allyandria Morriganha D’Llarkhen during her resting hours?” She asked, drawing out the ‘a’ in dares dramatically.
“It’s Caltyr,” he began nervously, unsure if the mention of his name would lead to her shutting the door in his face, “and I have something for you.”
There was a pause, but also no slam.
“Come inside.” T’allyandria pulled the heavy door open and ushered him between the gap.
He was surprised to have been invited in so soon, but as he padded his way into the room, he thought she might just be doing this so nobody would see them associating with one another. She had a reputation to protect now, right?
“Give me your offering.” The shadow dragon wasted no time with niceties like welcoming him in, and sat on a silken purple pillow that puffed up under her weight.
“I was hoping we could talk first,” Caltyr sighed, placing a hand over the bag that held the skull to check that the frills were still intact.
“The quality of your offering will determine how much of my time I am willing to use on this encounter.” T’allyandria nodded as if her words were totally reasonable and not at at all bitchy.
In the artificial purple lighting of her room, up this close to her, he noticed he could see the faint seams from where he had ripped her apart all those years ago. They ran erratically across her scales in veins, shadows of the pain she must have experienced at his hand– accident or not, being torn into pieces must have hurt like nothing else before.
He supposed her ‘bitchiness’ was warranted. Reaching under the flap of his bag, he pulled out the well-preserved landolotl skull, freed of its meat and cleaned.
He presented it to her in two scaled palms, supporting his weight with his back legs. “I got you a landolotl skull. I saw during the move that you collected skulls, so I thought it might be one you didn’t already have.”
“I have one already.” Injected the shadow dragon immediately, but her expression softened microscopically.
She waded further back into her room, which gave him a moment to look around. Her room was lined with purple fairy lights that hugged the walls, and she too lacked a roommate, but she hadn’t left half of the room vacant as he had. Her skulls were sitting in neat rows at the back of the room, atop bookshelves that receded into the cave walls, carved from stone.
She slept on a bed flush with the floor, a mattress-like cushion draped with silks, so many that he wondered if they might be a secondary hoard.
T’allyandria reached up to the third shelf from the top and pulled down a white, minuscule landolotl skull much smaller than the one he had in his hands. Notably, it was missing its left frill, which had broken off at the base of the branch-like pattern.
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“That one is in much better condition, so it’s not entirely a waste,” she admitted while looking between the two.
“You forgot one thing - the accompanying flower crown. I’ll need something suitably rare, to be a companion flower for such a rare skull.”
“You’re giving me homework for my gift?” Caltyr asked incredulously.
“Yes. Don’t think I don’t know that you’re just here to buy my friendship back.” Her eyes narrowed and she approached haughtily, her shoulders raising with each step. “Fortunately for you, I’m not opposed to that, but my friendship isn’t cheap. Since I didn’t mind your company once upon a time, I will allow you a friendship advance until you bring me a bouquet of fresh flowers to go with this.”
She reached out with dark claws and plucked the pristine animal skull from his hold.
“You may call me T’ally until you inevitably fail me. Now, you said you wanted to talk to me about something?”
Huh. Caltyr felt waves of anxiety washing off of him like the waves in a river. He was relieved at how easy that had been, but he supposed that wasn’t the last of it, since he now had to search out an unusual type of flower as well.
Her saying he would inevitably fail her stung, but he didn’t argue. Something told him arguing with her wouldn’t put her in a friendship mood. “Uh, yeah. While I was out tracking the landolotl pack I got your skull from, I stumbled upon some humans who seemed to be following the same landolotls. They said something I was considering telling Kraven about, but I thought I should tell you first.”
T’allyandria’s face, or rather T’ally’s, broke into a toothy grin. “And what did the humans say?”
“A bunch of stuff,” he responded honestly, “but what I gathered was that they know where we are, they know it’s a school, and they want an alliance with us against - get this - ‘the demons’.”
The shadow dragon threw her head back in sudden, cackling laughter that bounced off the walls. “They want an alliance? With their food?”
The mirth began to fade from her eyes, but the razor sharp grin remained. “So they’re fine with consuming our very flesh but they want our help now that they’re the ones on the menu. Hah! I wonder if the demons are accepting applications, because I would much rather side with them.”
Caltyr pursed his lips as much as a dragon could. “The demons want to eat us too, T’allya– just T’ally.”
“I know, I know, we’re magically delicious and everybody wants to eat us to gain our power,” T’ally returned to her spot on her purple cushion, flopping her butt down into it with a dramatic sigh.
“Well, it’s good that you brought this to me.” T’ally stated thoughtfully. “Kraven is so focused on protecting the student body that he tends to overreact. He already knows about the demon problem, so that’s nothing new, but that the humans know where we are - that would drive him crazy. We would have to move again. I think we can both agree that we don’t want that to happen.”
She looked to him for agreement, and he nodded once.
“I will need to tell him the news if it turns out there’s something to worry about, but for now, let us deal with it in our own way. Caltyr, go get me one of the humans.”
Caltyr quirked a draconic brow. “Go get you a human? How would I do that? And what are you going to do with them?”
“I want to interrogate them and see how much they know,” she stated breezily, “and that other stuff is your problem, since you’re the one fetching one for me. Aren’t you a water dragon? Just freeze one of them in a block of ice and push it back here or something.”
“Oookay… and how would I get them past the front gates?”
“Well,” T’ally began, but paused, simmering with annoyance. She pushed a puff of dark air through her nose and returned to her usual cold demeanor. “I guess that’s a legitimate concern.” She shrugged and rose up from her place on her pillow. “I can wait outside in the woods for you, then. It’s probably better we don’t bring them back here anyway, because then we would definitely have to kill them.”
“If you leave now, do you think you could catch up with the humans you heard talking?” The dark plum-colored dragon asked, stepping away from her resting spot and approaching the nearby shelf to place the precious landolotl skull down.
“If I flew maybe, but there were two of them. Both of them had mana tracks.”
“You don’t think you can beat two measly humans? Just sneak up on them and freeze them. You have no business learning here if you can’t deal with just two people, Caltyr.”
T’allyandria was full of frank remarks, but it was refreshing to see her speaking less formally with him. Somehow, it seemed like she was nicer to the people who weren’t her friends. Her being so free with her words meant she was opening up to him, for better or worse.
“Fine. They were in the woods west of here, so wait for me by the lilablossom grove. Hey, speaking of, would those be good? The landolotls do eat them.”
T’ally shook her head in the no direction. “No. They’re too common for how prized the skull is, and I don’t pair animal skulls with the food they eat. That would be too easy; it’s like cheating.”
Caltyr succeeded at not groaning aloud, since this was the price of her friendship and he was the one who wanted it, but he did want to. “It’s like cheating.” He repeated incredulously, but nodded to confirm. “Got it. Are you ready to go now? If I’m going to catch them before they get back to the other humans, I need to go now.”
“Let’s not dawdle then.” T’ally replied, and swiftly moved past him through the door.
They exited together, moving through the halls side-by side like they once had when they were mere adolescents. T’ally was taller and longer now, but her limbs had thinned out considerably, losing most of the baby fat of her youth. Her scales were shinier and bore less of the candied purple color they had when they played pirates together; they were inky black now with the tiniest bloom of purple at the ends, like ink fading into tar.
They both moved through the halls at a pace that made it obvious to any onlookers that they were in a hurry. All the others in the tall, yawning hall lined with marble architecture gave them a wide berth.
Which made it all the more surprising that, when they got through the double doors of the entrance and got out past the entryway, there was somebody standing in their way.
A very small somebody.
And they were human.