Emily’s room was covered in a mess of puddles, Caltyr noticed as she splished around her room. Her head was tilted downward and she was circling in a quick oval, watching herself in the reflections before she stepped into them.

“The problem is that I don’t really know what I could say to help. Mommy and daddy kept me at home all the time, so I don’t know very much. So I’m just going to stay stuff and let you decide if it’s helpful, maybe.” She waited about half a second for feedback before continuing on, both in her oval and her sentence.

“So I have this story, and it’s going to sound weird at first. Back when I lived in a house, my Mommy fed me lots and lots, and told me I was a growing girl all the time. Daddy said he had to work extra to afford all the food I ate.

“The people—humans where I lived all just worked, and went to work, and used their work moneys to buy flecks of dragon scales. I played with a boy, maybe… I guess, a friend. But I only sometimes remember him now, but one day, he just wasn’t allowed to come over anymore. Mommy was really sad about it, and she told Daddy that he was my only friend, but he said it was too dangerous to keep letting him be my friend.

“I’m guessing now that he had to stop visiting me, because I tripped and he saw my back or something, and he asked a bunch of questions about it, and so that was the end of it. But I never knew about all the scales on my back before, and I’m just guessing, but I could never think of any other reason why they never let me talk to him again, and now I can. So that’s probably it.”

Her words tumbled out like an avalanche of snow. He didn’t know how to stop her or direct her to talking about something a bit more helpful, and he didn’t know if he even could.

“One day Mommy and Daddy had to pack our stuff up, and they wouldn’t even tell me why. I kept asking why, and they just kept not telling me. But then when we had everything in big bags, and we were walking along this dirt road, Daddy said that he wished things were different. And that I was different. He said he wished I had been born different, that the humans didn’t like me for things I couldn’t control. But he never told me what all that stuff I couldn’t control was.”

Emily sucked in a huge, long breath; an entire lungful of air all at once, all in a single breath. “He said that dragons got their scales taken from them, and they weren’t treated nice. And he said that he got fired from his work job, because he kept not using the dragon scales they gave him to get the jobs done. He liked to do things ‘the old fashioned way’, like putting crops in the ground to grow instead of using green scales to grow them better.

“And he said that he wished he could just use the scales, but when he looked at me, he couldn’t think of anything but how wrong it was. And I never got what he meant by that, but I guess I do now. So we had to leave, because he didn’t want to keep using them.”

The metaphorical avalanche slowed to a light snowfall. “I think the humans don’t really treat the dragons nice. Daddy talked to me about his work sometimes, and he’d have hard days, because the scales weren’t working very well, so everyone was really grumpy and talked about how they were going to take more than scales from the draggies next. Because they needed to make money, like the ground wasn’t right there, and they couldn’t just use that.

“But then they’d have to wait for the crops to grow, and apparently they couldn’t have that because it needed to go fast. And he didn’t understand why the fast was more important than their scales. They always told him he shouldn’t ask questions like that. And that he should just think about dragons more like power sources, like batteries. So he cried sometimes. And I think that’s why we left, because he couldn’t keep doing it, using all those scales without the dragon’s permission.”

The human girl turned her face away from him and padded softly over to the end of the room. Her voice was further away, so much so he could barely hear her. “There was a big man who kept asking me questions all the time when I was in my forest, like if I knew anything about the monsters who killed mommy and daddy, or if I had any other relatives. He kept asking me things I didn’t know the answers to, and he said it was impossible I didn’t have anyone, and I must be lying, but I really didn’t know.

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“He kept asking me if maybe I had any dragon parents, a-and if I knew where they were. Said I could come back and live in town again if I told them. But Vermon saw me crying about it when the big man yelled at me one time and scared the big man away, and that’s how we met. I dunno if any of that’s good or helpful in the way you want it to be.”

Emily carefully gathered up something from atop her pillow before Caltyr could see what it was. Her sheets were drenched with water, and pools had formed on the surface, as if she’d waterlogged the whole mattress. And maybe she had. She carefully stepped over him, across a smattering of shallow pools, and held out her hands.

When she opened them, a lone blue scale was sitting in her two palms. His scale. She held it out to him.

“I’m sorry I used your scale, Caltyr. And I’m sorry that the only thing I really know about humans is that I don’t like them very much.”

Caltyr took in the two small human-ish hands holding the scale up to him and blinked. He had found himself in yet another situation where so much information was being thrown at him all at once that he didn’t know what to do with it all.

But Emily, at least, wasn’t going to exile him for his reaction, or his secrets. She didn’t have the power or the option.

“I gave that to you, Emily.” He placed a draconic hand over her two human ones, dwarfing her entire body and pushing the offered scale away. “You have no reason to feel guilty for using it. And it may not be entirely true that you don’t know anything of use to me.”

He combed through the words he had heard from her in his mind, looked through like he was sorting vegetables for the ones with rot. He picked carefully through what she had said in his brain.

The humans were using their scales to perform everyday tasks like farming, and he remembered from when they attacked his old school that they’d been riding on their backs. It seemed as if they’d formed their very society around the use of their fallen body parts, down to using them as a method of travel.

His people were their slaves, living or dead. Even death didn’t free them from their whims entirely, and that was the most terrifying part of all.

From her tale, Caltyr also derived that they were also getting desperate. Why else would they send someone out to question a little girl night after night? It was despicable, their behavior. Their disregard for other life, and their lack of foresight about the future.

Their abject cruelty made what he wanted to do next all the more difficult to justify.

But first, before he went through with that, he’d have to deal with the human right in front of him.

She kept her hands stubbornly raised. “I don’t want to use it anymore. It’s not my power.”

“It’s barely even mine either,” he said, and he tried to sound as detached as possible. “The scale was loose. It would have fallen off anyway, in time. It didn’t hurt me to take it off, and I have hundreds of thousands more. It’ll lose its power soon, and once it does, you can come back, and I’ll see if I have another. It’s no big deal. And I gave you my permission.”

Some of the fight drained out of the brown-eyed kid. Her arms went slack, tentatively. “So the scales just fall off? Then… why do the humans take them, then? If they could just wait and ask you for them?”

“Perhaps for the same reason they don’t wait for their crops to simply grow out of the ground. They’re impatient and obsessed with power, and they would rather do what helps them in the now than what helps them in the future.”

Emily sighed out a big, long puff of air that was almost dragon-like. “What are we gonna do to stop them?”

“I have some ideas,” Caltyr responded coolly.

But he didn’t elaborate to the tiny girl, because even he didn’t know which of his many ideas he was going to choose.

It would depend on how they reacted; if they were being kind, he would be too.

But if they weren’t… Well, he couldn’t think of a single problem in his life that wasn’t human-related, in some way.

It was time for him to be a problem for them, one way or the other.