The human was a child, and it stood there quaking not from fear, but from the sobs racking its small body. Fat tears pooled at the edges of its light brown, sand-colored eyes and its wails echoed through the muddy tunnel. It was wearing a white t-shirt with globs of dirt and muck stuck to it, dripping to the ground in unsightly splats.
“Well, it looks like we won’t have to go very far to find a human after all,” Caltyr commented with confusion in his voice, “and a child might be easier to question.”
“Except we can’t trust a word the thing says. You hear the humans talking about making an alliance with us and this thing just happens to show up on the same day? It’s clearly some kind of trap.” T’ally turned a skeptical nose up at the thing.
Upon seeing two dragons, many times its size, the fleshy human’s crying quieted. With wide, curious eyes, it began to approach. “Draggies…”
Caltyr observed the child as it took one small step after the other. It had only one shoe, its auburn hair was streaked with crusted dirt, and its arms were devoid of mana tracks; a good sign, but the other two signs screamed of neglect. “I’m not sure about that. The dirt on it looks old and dried in places. Could they have set this up in only a few minutes?”
“Nice draggies?” the human child asked. It was close enough to touch Caltyr now, and he allowed the thing to reach out and touch his scales. Up this close, he could see how twiggy its limbs were. It would take no pressure at all to snap the thin filaments, the poor excuses for bones that sat beneath its flesh.
The child’s dirty hand reached out and ran over his warm, smooth scales. Two of his scales were the size of the tiny hand that moved across him as if it was petting a cat. The human did the thing where it tried to pet the cat with four times the force necessary.
“You have a point. But why is it here? Why is it not back with the humans; isn’t it one of theirs?” T’ally took a few disgusted steps back from the unclean biped.
Caltyr could hear its sniffling stopping. There were scrapes along its wrists as if it had fallen, definitely more than once from how some of the scabs were in ‘x’ patterns.
“Let’s just bring it inside and ask it. It’s not like it can really lie, you can just tell it to tell the truth.”
T’ally looked like she wanted to argue. The space between her eyes wrinkled, but in the end she gave a tense nod. “Fine.” She moved in and the air around her became thicker, chillier, and when she began to speak again there was a hard edge to her voice. “Human, thing, get in Caltyr’s bag and don’t make any noise.”
The face beneath the auburn hair turned placid and the child obeyed, lifting the flap of Caltyr’s bag and climbing beneath it. The bag was large enough to comfortably fit at least one more human of the same size. He didn’t know much about humans, but he guessed this one was somewhere between 8 and 20. Wait, at what age did humans become adults again?
“Let’s go. Lead me to your room; it’s closer and the students are unlikely to visit you.”
“Ouch,” Caltyr said jokingly, but chuckled sadly in agreement. He turned around and led the way to his room, which was indeed closer to the entrance than hers.
They sped through the halls as non-conspiratorially as possible, but he felt very conspiratorial with an entire person hidden away in his pack.
Once they got to his room and shut the door silently behind, locking it with a provided metal bar for additional privacy, Caltyr carefully plucked the human out of his backpack by the shirt.
He put it down extremely gently, guarding its joints because he didn’t want to snap any of its twiggy little limbs. “Okay, here it is. Just– it’s a kid, so don’t be too hard on it.”
Caltyr put some space between himself and the child, allowing room for T’ally to step in.
T’ally gave Caltyr a look like he was being ridiculous, and then crouched down so her head was closer to eye level with the intruder’s. “Tell me, without a word of a lie, why you’re here.” She commanded.
Some of the glimmering light in the youngling’s wide eyes was sucked away with the spell.
“I… Um… The mean pink girl told me to get out because I don’t wanna eat dragon sandwiches and get the arm marks. Mommy and daddy came with me because they didn’t want to either and then the big monster—It…”
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The child tried to keep talking like it had been magically compelled to, but its eyes filled quickly with tears and its words were soaked with wetness. Its lips quivered with each new word. “-- it killed them, and I heard the dragon orphans live here, and I thought maybe… now that mommy and daddy are g-g-gone, I might count too?”
T’ally’s shoulders visibly sagged. “Oh.”
“I don’t think it’s lying,” Caltyr observed with a heaviness in his chest.
“It isn’t,” T’ally decided, sitting down fully in front of the child and releasing it from her magic - or, it seemed like it, because the child sat down in the same way T’ally did, mimicking her pose.
“So you’re here to see if you can stay here,t” the shadow dragon scoffed, but Caltyr could tell her heart wasn’t in it. There was a hint of sadness in her eyes.
“Can I? Pretty please? I’ll give you—” The child pawed itself, but frowned when it realized it had nothing to offer. “I’ll be your best friend.”
T’ally burst out into laughter. “My friendship is pretty popular today. I don’t know, are you worth the trouble, kid?”
“I won’t be trouble!” promised the kid fervently.
Caltyr knew that the child’s mere existence in these parts would be troublesome, with how many of the dragons around them had been orphaned by the blades and magicks of the humans. But could they be swayed to take in a fellow outcast?
“Tell me,” the deep purple dragon began, her breath blowing past the small one’s face and causing its hair to move, “why did you come here instead of going back to the other humans, and how do you know about this place?”
She was no longer using her spells to draw the information from the human, allowing it to answer freely.
But it looked nervous as soon as it was asked about how it knew where they had been hiding.
“Because the dragon who gives me snacks is much nicer than the old men who come ask me questions all the time. I’m not listening to them anymore. But, um… I don’t know if my dragon friend will be mad at me if I tell on him.” The small one frowned and squirmed about indecisively.
“You already have another dragon friend? What if I’m the jealous kind of friend? Tell me about them and I won’t be mad at you.”
Even though T’ally was threatening an adolescent human with her wrath and manipulating it, he found it interesting how she was tapering off using her powers on the auburn-haired child the more they talked. Was she becoming attached?
The child began to chew on its lip. It looked between the onyx-and-purple dragon’s face and the door, but quickly realized it was at the combined mercy of the two wyrms present. “Don’t be mad at meeeee,” it whined in a high-pitched, bubbling tone, “I’m just trying to keep him secret like he asked me to… But okay, if you’re not mad at him too, he’s big and red and yellow and he lets me call him Vermon because his full name has a lot of isisisis and I can’t say it good. He’s been bringing me food to keep me alive since Mommy and Daddy died, but I finally ran out and had to follow him back today.”
Vermonysis, Caltyr thought. So Vermonysis had been helping this child stay alive for some time now.
“And did Vermon tell you not to tell anybody about him helping you?” T’ally tried to think of whether she’d noticed significantly more food going missing from their shared dining hall, but it would be easy for Vermonysis to pare down his portion, especially to make just enough for this one’s tiny mouth.
“Yes.” The kid frowned deeply at at its own admission. “He said the other dragons might get mad if they knew, because they don’t like people like me. But I’ll be good!”
The dark dragon’s amethyst eyes became slits. After a pause, she turned those slits over to the blue dragon still sitting by the door.
“What are you thinking?”
Caltyr’s brow ridges rose. He didn’t know what T’ally’s opinion of the youngling was, but from what he’d seen, it seemed to be in genuine need. Without them, it could wither like a flower in a drought.
It had been abandoned by its people, a feeling he knew well. So regardless of what she was thinking, he answered honestly. Was there any other option around someone with truth-telling powers? “I’m thinking we should go visit Vermonysis and see if he’ll be on our side when we go confront the Elders.”
T’ally’s face scrunched in premature weariness, the heaviness of what they had to do falling upon her. But the edges of her mouth wiggled upward into a slight smile.
“I was thinking the same thing.”