Vermonysis and Vallath made themselves scarce. Maybe they could feel the shift in the tone of the hall, or they had to get to class, or both.

Malika had something in her maw as she approached. A silk bag, hanging from her teeth.

Malika was a pure white dragon, lithe and long, with a cluster of scales around her face so floppy and flexible that they resembled a human’s hair. They gave her a feminine edge. Her bright scales reflected light in a multi-coloured rainbow scattering and sometimes she looked to be glowing from the amount of sheer light energy trapped inside of her.

It struck Caltyr just how little she resembled their departed mentor, and how much she had grown into her own person. A person who looked too beautiful to be real, even while she was being equally unsettling, considering she had said nothing to him yet. Maybe her appearance even added to how little he wanted to be on her bad side.

She just kept putting one foot in front of the other, with a face so placid he couldn’t even tell if she was bringing hell with her.

“I saw the other dragons that were with you on your patrol in the halls, so I figured you had returned,” she said as she shortened the distance between them to a mere few feet, with a rash of confidence he’d never heard from her before.

“I—”

“No, let me talk,” she hissed, and put a finger up to his scaled mouth. “I know you just got back, but I don’t want to just leave what I have to say unsaid. I’ve been hesitating to speak with you for so long it feels like the default state between us, and I don’t want it to be that way, so I’m going to try. And if you don’t appreciate that, you’ll just have to deal.” Her tail whipped around behind her, kicking up dust in the cave-like opening they were in.

It hardly seemed like the time and place to have a discussion like this. But maybe waiting for the perfect time and place had kept him from doing far too many of the things he wanted to do. Caltyr swallowed his words and gave a single nod to urge her to go on.

“I feel like I’ve been walking on eggshells when I’m in the room with you, and I can’t just keep not speaking my mind because I’m afraid I’ll hurt you. Caltyr, you almost killed me and everyone I ever knew and loved. You did kill the closest thing I’ve ever had to a loving mother-figure in my life,” she hissed again, but this time in the quavering sort of way that let him know she was holding in tears.

Caltyr dug his claws into the ground. A dark shadow began to swirl around his hands involuntarily, drenching the dirt in a cold mist. He felt like he was barely holding on to his composure, a feeling he’d had since flying over his former home. His muscles burned with the desire to flee the situation, or do anything at all, but he forced himself to stay.

Images of his friends’ faces coming apart and dancing around him in explosions of light and fire and electricity and blood flickered behind his eyes.

Miss Tavren’s final look of deep, unending disappointment danced through his mind; the very last thing she had ever done, because he’d killed her.

“But I know it wasn’t your fault. If you could’ve stopped it from happening, I know you would have. Miss Tavren was your favorite person in the whole world too, I know she was. And I just can’t help but think that… if you liked her so much, and she liked you, we might get along. Or we might be able to find something to talk about together, or it’s worth a try, at least. I know we hardly ever talked at all back then, but maybe we could fix that.”

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Her sentence ended in a way he had never expected. The annoyance weaved in with her words and her truly wordless approach had him thinking she wanted nothing to do with him, and that his attempt to reconnect in her class had been foolish.

The shadows dispersed. He tried to blink and realized that he had frozen a fine film of ice in front of his eyes, locking away any tears that wanted to spill. He blinked away the extremely unwise shield and wiped at his face.

“I’m sorry for overreacting yesterday. I think maybe I’ve just been building up the first time I said something to you in my head, and that wasn’t how I wanted it to go. I live with all this pain from where my body didn’t heal right, and so even if we weren’t really close friends or friends at all, talking to you is something that’s crossed my mind a lot. And I just wanted to be less afraid of you, and more eloquent about what I said when we finally spoke, and the flowers were never a part of my plan. But I think I may, perhaps, be becoming less and less eloquent the more I speak, and the more I drift from the script I practiced.”

Malika released a long, haggard breath. And allowed herself some time to collect herself, before even looking at Caltyr. She’d been avoiding even glancing in his direction for fear that seeing his reactions might dissuade her from continuing on, but she needed to get it all out.

So now, she looked.

He didn’t look as distraught as she had feared, but he also wasn’t saying anything.

“Oh, you can say things again,” she tacked on sheepishly.

“Thank you, Malika.” Caltyr found himself speechless for the second time that morning. He struggled to take it all in, all her confessions and truths. “Thank you for bringing all of this up, and thank you for… not hating me. But I’m going to need more time to think before I respond to you, because this is also so much different than I imagined this going.”

The light dragon nodded in understanding. “That’s alright. Thanks for listening. I have something for you; it’s something I’ve been considering giving to you for a long time now, or sharing with you, but I never knew how to approach it and it’s not something you just throw at somebody and run away.”

She unlooped the bag from around her tooth and paled. “Has this been there the whole time?”

Caltyr burst into laughter. He hadn’t noticed it at the time, because of the weight of the situation, but when he thought back to the sight of her speaking mouth he remembered it flapping there beneath her chin. “Yes, but I didn’t even notice it, so don’t be too embarrassed.”

“I spent so long rehearsing what I was going to say, and then this happens.” Malika sighed defeatedly. But then she handed over the white silk bag.

It was heavier than it looked, with what felt like a rock inside. He slipped open the drawstring with the tip of his claw, and a dull shard of crystal was revealed.

“That’s one of the more intact pieces of Miss Tavren’s core. I scoured the field after the battle for anything that looked like hers.”

The grayed gem was so painfully dull in comparison to his light teacher’s former glow. It was like an insult next to the memory of her he had in his head. But now that he held her core fragment in his hand, he didn’t want to let it go, no matter how much it pained him to look at it.

“Thank you,” he rasped out, and his voice broke around the words.

Normally, a dragon’s core hummed with a faint, distant energy. It held the element the dragon had once embodied inside it. Miss Tavren’s core sat in his palm, lifeless and in pieces, just like the rest of her.

“This was nice of you to give to me. Listen, if I’m going to get to Vermonysis and Kraven in time to hear anything about what he thinks of how our patrol went, I need to get going.” Caltyr turned away and adjusted the bag on his shoulder so it was secure. He could feel another spell of emotion coming on, and he’d already had enough waves in front of this girl.

“Okay,” she said with a nod that seemed reserved, even for her. She looked like she had a lot more she wanted to say, but the water dragon felt like he was overflowing after even the words already out in the world. “Just– next time you see me, or I see you, let’s wave or something. I don’t want to go back to ignoring you, okay?”

“I don’t want that either. I’ll see you later, Malika.” The water dragon pushed off a hind leg and moved a little too quickly away from her.

It could have been because he wanted to hurry, but he knew the real reason was much more blubbery than that.