A cluster of dragons formed around the stage’s exit. The cluster was dotted with a few dragons Caltyr recognized as part of Sara’s friend group, and from the way their muscles were tensed and their necks were curved downward like a hawk’s dagger-like beak, they weren’t happy.

That only got more apparent when Sara shuffled out through the curtained doorway to the left of the stage.

“Sara, what are you thinking? A human?” asked one of the hawks, her lip curled with disgust. “You’re supposed to be here to train to kill the humans, not to let them set up camp in our school.”

Sara frowned and tried to ignore the words being hurled her way; they clearly affected her, but this wasn’t the time or place to get into the meat of this topic with her friends. What would the council think? She started to pry her way through the dense wall of dragons that had formed around her. “Can we talk about this somewhere else, Thellmana?”

Thellmana scoffed, and the dragons around her echoed the sound, standing firm. “No, let’s talk about this here. How could you let this happen? Do you even remember where your mom is right now?”

The lightning dragon’s eyes flickered and went alight with pent up rage. “Of course I know where my mother is right now. She’s my mom. That’s why having this puny pipsqueak here changes nothing. My mom is still locked up and being stripped for her scales, no matter how many human children are running free in here.”

Electricity buzzed around her, sparks congregating at the tips of her claws. She took a deep, measured breath. She forced herself down from enraged to merely frustrated. “You can stay here and yap all day if you want, but I’m leaving. I’m not going to let you get me kicked off the council.”

“You’re turning into a human sympathizer. This is how it starts, Sara, and then they’re going to be living with us and eating us in our sleep. Then what?”

But Sara was already trudging her way through the gathered crowd. “Don’t engage, don’t engage, don’t engage…” She muttered to herself as she pushed through the room with her eyes cinched shut.

Leading her to crash straight into Caltyr.

She snapped her lids open and gasped at the sight of his face; likely the last thing she wanted to see right now, next to Emily herself. “Get out of my way. I need to get out of here so I can go train for whatever fallout your foolishness makes for me.”

“You bumped into me,” Caltyr returned unhappily, holding his ground. He had been about to leave. The assembly was over. But he stood there anyway, stone-faced.

Sara growled lowly and made a show of backing up and swirling past him. He caught a glimpse of Vermonysis making a late entrance, but when his yellow-and-blue friend stormed past him, he shot a questioning look to Caltyr.

Caltyr moved over to join Vermonysis, but by the time he got there, Sara was long gone.

“What was that all about?” he asked with a concerned frown.

“Sara’s friends seem to be coming down on her hard about the human thing like it was her idea or something. Oh, and she’s being a jerk about it.” The water dragon could have used less charitable words to describe the situation, but he got the impression that Vermonysis and Sara were friendly.

“Oh. Damn.” He scrunched his brow ridges together and looked over to the hall she had disappeared down. “I had better go. I might be the only friend she’s got right now. But hey, try not to be too hard on her, she’s going through something right now.”

“I’ve never been anything but kind to her. She just keeps coming after me. I’ll try, but if she keeps attacking me, I’m not going to stand there and take it,” Calyr offered a half-shrug. He wasn’t sure why Sara was so obsessed with running his name through the mud, but he would give being a little nicer to her a try.

Until she challenged him again. Then it was no holds barred.

Vermonysis nodded in acceptance and then flapped into the air, his red body leaving a flash of color behind as he sped after his friend.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

And then Caltyr was alone again. The hallway wasn’t entirely devoid of activity, but nobody was pulling him in any one direction; he had a brief, blessed window of time to himself. His next class would be his light class, but that wasn’t for another few hours.

What would he even do with himself?

Chatter floated by his ear holes as she stood by himself. Eventually, he blinked and found that his legs had taken him to Emily’s room.

It had a small gathering of armored dragons standing outside of it. They tried hard to make it look like they hadn’t been playing a game of truth or dare to pass the time, but he had heard the echoes of their conversation as he approached.

“Did you really sniff one of Kraven’s sets of armor?” Caltyr asked dubiously, in response to the latest ‘truth’.

“Hey, I was like forty years-old and these bozos told me I’d gain some of his power if I did. With the whole humans-eating-flesh thing it didn’t even sound that wild to me.” The guard crossed his arms over his wide chest defensively, but his face held a grand smile. “You want in to see the kid?”

Really, he didn’t know why he was here. The battle to get Emily her place here had been won. She had a room of her own, clothes that mostly fit her, and meals being delivered to her door. And yet…

“Yeah,” he replied.

The four guards shuffled away from the gnarled wood door and swung it open for him.

He found Emily contorted into a pretzel shape in front of her mirror. Half of her dress’s skirt was flipped up and touching the ends of her hair.

Caltyr looked immediately away.

The door shut behind him, drawing the attention of the girl and causing her to fall face-first into the stone floor. “Owwie…” She whined, palming her button-like nose.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Emily chirped, quickly recovering despite the raw spot that had developed around her nostrils. Tiny beads of blood rose to the surface, which she rubbed away with the end of her sleeve.

Yet another piece of clothing to add to the laundry.

“Hi, blue one! Look, I drew a picture of you!” The human stood up and her dress fluttered down to hover her legs.

“Wait, wait, what were you doing when I came in?” He wasn’t about to let the strange behavior slip through the cracks so easily.

“Oh. I was trying to see if I could see my draggy scales. I never look back there, so I thought I could see them good if I used a mirror, maybe?” She scrunched her face in frustration with the reality of their placement on her spine.

“They may spread as you age. I don’t think you need to become the first half-dragon contortionist to get a good look at them. We even have some cameras we stole from the humans, if you need. They’re old ones that spit the pictures out like a big tongue.”

“Oooooo!” she exclaimed excitedly, mushing her face with her hands. “Could you get me one? I really, really wanna see.”

Caltyr went to open his mouth, but the human child talked over what he was about to say.

“Everyone keeps saying I’m a part-draggy, which I dunno if I believe them. I’ve always been a human my whole life! Why didn’t mommy or daddy tell me? How did they ever not know? And why aren’t either of them draggies? Isn’t that how this stuff works?”

“I don’t know if anybody knows how all this stuff works,” he said lamely. He vaguely recalled that Delphine had said they would be receiving some background on human-and-dragon history.

“Well, that’s dumb. I wanna know.” Emily leaned frustratedly against the edge of her bed.

“I can get you one of the cameras, don’t worry. Did you say you had a drawing to show me?” Caltyr asked, searching visually through the room. The papers had spread out even further now, torn from her notebook and tossed wherever they might land. Her coloured pencils had been worn down to short stubs.

“Yes!” she shrieked and went immediately to the piece of paper sitting on her pillow, as if she’d been saving it. “Here.”

He tried to make sense of the tiny paper being shoved in his face. Thankfully she had used coloured pencils, so he could tell the blob of blue was probably him. A lot of yellow was also on the page, so he threw out a wild guess. “Is that when I was in a Battle of Wills with Sara?”

“Yeah.” She grinned happily at the recognition and jammed her finger into his drawn face. “Were you scared? I didn’t know how to draw your face so I just left it blank. But I drew the lightning one’s face.”

Sara’s yellow face had a very angry set of eyebrows drawn upon it, and her mouth was turned downward in a zig-zagged frown.

“I wasn’t scared, no, just determined.”

The human child grabbed a gray pencil crayon in her fist and drew angry eyebrows on him, but added what was probably meant to be a confident smile. He looked crazed. “Like this?”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her she had turned him into the villain of the drawing. “That’s good.”

She nodded and continued to doodle happily.

Caltyr watched as she added more fine details to her drawing. She kicked her feet joyously as she did, paying little mind to the other drawings she was crushing with her weight.

He noticed, as he looked, Emily’s depiction of herself. He hadn’t gotten a chance to check on her much while the battle had been raging on, but she had drawn herself with blue streaks running down her face.

She was crying.