A fire was crackling outside his tent. The smoke tickled Caltyr’s nostrils. He quite liked the scent of a wood-fire, and how it clung to his clothes long after it died. It was a comforting scent, and a reminder that some things kept on rippling through the world and people’s thoughts even after they were gone.

It shook him to the core to know that Vermonysis had ever defended him to Sara. He didn’t remember the last time somebody had defended him, and not the other way around. He had been stirring in his cot trying to think of what to say, or what he should have done besides fleeing to have an emotional reaction elsewhere. But he just wasn’t good at this stuff.

He had spent the better part of ten years turning a blind eye to his emotions. It may even have been more.

It worried him that Vermonysis would think he carried too much baggage with him, and would shy away from him for having so many things to still sift through. Was it weird that the waterworks started when he even considered talking about any of it? He couldn’t help but think it would be so much easier for all the people in his school, not just Vermonysis, to befriend somebody who could talk about the weather.

Or somebody who could let other people learn about their past without falling into pieces. The more Caltyr thought about his childhood, the more he realized there were blank swaths he couldn’t even explain to himself, let alone somebody asking about who he was and where he came from. Whole sections of his upbringing were swirling black holes in his mind. And that was just the stuff he couldn’t remember.

Why was he even trying to befriend people again if there was nothing appealing to him, if he had nothing to offer them?

The first answer his mind offered him was to just stop trying. There was a shred of selflessness to the decision, but mostly it felt like cowardice. How would Emily, T’ally and Vermonysis feel if he just sealed his lips and never said another word? He doubted he could go longer than a week without T’allyandria kicking his door down and shrieking about the rare flowers he owed her.

So, he would have to go with the second, more tentative answer. He would have to lean into the qualities that made him a good friend, and work on his own emotional problems and shit.

He just didn’t know how to go about starting on that second option. Maybe there were some books in the library on being a good friend, which was just about the nerdiest reaction he could have possibly had, he told himself. But the sardonic smile on his face after he thought it was better than the crying he’d done the night before.

Caltyr stood up in his tent, which turned out to be a poor decision. It deformed around his scales and threatened to tear. Apparently his tent couldn’t accommodate his standing body, only his sleeping one. He crouched and unzippered the doorway, and shuffled gingerly through.

Everyone else was already up. A fire was gently crackling in the middle of their circle of tents, in a fire pit Fellithe had hollowed out with her earth mana.

The sounds of chewing filled the air, along with the ambient sounds of the local bugs. Everyone was having a breakfast of preserved salted meats and hard, crunchy bread.

“Morning,” Caltyr said. He went to find his armor to get dressed, but he looked down and found it still attached. He had never taken it off.

“Morning,” Verymonysis and Vallath chirped in unison. Fellithe and Shriken both gave him a nod of recognition.

“What’s the plan for today?” the water dragon asked as he unfolded his map to refresh himself on where they were.

But it turned out not to matter.

“Going home. We got all the information Kraven asked for; the patrol’s done.” Shriken shrugged. He pulled a methodical strip of meat off his chunk of jerky and ate it. He ate the rest in strings too.

“That makes sense, I guess.” Caltyr collapsed the map and didn’t bother to fish through his bag for his jerky. Once they got back, there would be better food waiting. Hot food. Instead, he spent his morning collapsing his tent.

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“Are we going to tell Kraven about how Vermonysis got hurt?” a female voice asked, from the only female among them.

“I think the more relevant information is how he got healed,” Shriken stated coolly.

“Yeah. Caltyr healed me up real nice with his light magic,” Vermonysis marveled. He showed off his leg like it was a trophy he had won, turning it so they could see it from every exciting angle.

They nodded along and humored the fire and lightning dragon. Or, he thought they were humoring them. Maybe the others really had been asleep last night, and he didn’t have anything to worry about when he got home after all.

Besides the whole mess with Malika.

“I’ll do the talking with Kraven when we get back. You guys can just get back to class to take whatever tests you missed, ‘kay?” Vermonysis offered, in a way that sounded a lot more like he was telling them what was going to happen, not asking.

But no arguments were made. Caltyr thought maybe the others were still exhausted from last night; it’s not like sleep did much for a draconic body, especially in one night. If something was bothering them yesterday, it was bothering them today too.

Seeing the demons scooping their magic from the veins of the humans and eating them like meat from a snow crab’s legs was horrifying. He knew a bit about how it felt to be a snow crab, now. If he had to guess, that was what was looming over them.

At least they had figured out hitting them in the eye did something.

The flight home was even more wordless than their breakfast had been. The wind whipped past them as they soared with the clouds beneath them, and when they passed through the entrance tunnel, nobody said much else either.

“I’ll go report to Kraven about what we learned. You guys can just go back to your classes. Cheer up, alright? It might not be as hopeless as it seems. Kraven might be sitting on some news we don’t know about,” Vermonysis said with a put-on sunniness, waving his tail behind him to shoo them away.

“We only killed one of them,” Shriken replied matter-of-factly. “And it almost took your leg with it.”

“And I doubt we’ll be getting an award for killing just one.” Fellithe sighed, as if that were more dire than the near-loss of a leg. The scales bordering her face sagged, and she turned away to slink off to class, probably to make up for a test.

“Killing just one is an accomplishment,” Vermonysis insisted, “considering some of the other patrols didn’t kill any of them at all. Some of them didn’t even come back alive. Being back here with all our limbs and all of us alive is something to be proud of, believe me.”

“I’ll be proud when we figure out how to kill more than one at a time, because right now if they just close their eyes, they’re essentially impervious to everything we have at our disposal.” The shadow dragon trudged away then, disappearing down the hallway like Fellithe.

“They’re so negative,” Vallath huffed. “You two are right. We did an awesome job and I’m going to be proud of us. The things being able to die from being stabbed through the eye at least gives us something to go off of. Maybe they have a brain in there somewhere.”

The blue dragon stood in contemplation; he wanted to add some words into the conversation, to engage with the two dragons still left, but he didn’t know where he stood and so he didn’t know what to say. Physically, he was in the entrance hall, but mentally he was elsewhere. Trying to figure out how he felt was like sifting through a tangled mess of vines.

The situation with Malika kept cropping up in his mind, like a buoyant ball he couldn’t push under the water. Images of his former school flashed through his mind, and so too did Miss Tavren. The blue fire that engulfed the body of the one demon they’d felled swirled around in a searing mass inside him, threatening to burn up all his other thoughts. The sheer amount of unknowns the demons presented in his life made his teeth chatter.

He fell somewhere between the two perspectives. He wasn’t feeling wholly negative. And they had only been on one patrol so far, so it was really too early to make an opinion at all, in his mind.

Through all the issues in his life so far, he had come to realize that he was a man of action, and if he couldn’t fix a problem, that was when he withdrew. He didn’t know how to handle a thing he couldn’t fix, or take some tangible steps to improve.

“Vermonysis, I’m going to go with you to speak to Kraven,” Caltyr decided aloud. “I want to hear what he makes of all this.”

Kraven had been through many battles; it was obvious from the gaps in his flesh where the scales used to grow, and from how he needed to sleep the pain away on his worst days. If there was something they could do, an option they hadn’t thought about, he would know.

“Sure thing. Say, do you have any classes you’re missing right now?” The fire and lightning dragon’s face morphed into an expression Caltyr couldn’t decipher, then.

“Nothing I wouldn’t be able to skip,” he shrugged.

“No, I don’t mean—because, like... Because you might miss something coming to see Kraven, I mean, because Malika is walking towards us. Right now.”

Somehow, the news that she was approaching had his eyes wider than even the demon fire had; it was something he didn’t know how to fix, and it was walking right his way.