Emily flitted between four activities after blue-one-Caltyr left: pressing her shell-like ear to the door to listen in on the draggies guarding her room, trying to get a good look at the scales everybody, except for her parents, said she had, drawing new pictures, and trying to use the scale the big brown draggy had given her after Caltyr’s battle.

It was waaaaay more difficult to use than Caltyr’s blue one. As soon as he had told her what to do with it, the water flowed freely out of it like a waterfall. It practically wanted to be used to do water stuff.

But she didn’t even know what this brown one did. It was way more stubborn. Maybe if she had paid full attention to the battle like mommy and daddy had always told her: calm down, pay attention, focus, and maybe then she would know what a brown-scaled draggy could do.

But it wasn’t like being calm and staying focused had kept them alive, so why should she even listen to them?

The auburn-haired girl frowned and blinked her light brown eyes at the thought. They got wet whenever she thought about her parents, especially the part where she wouldn’t be able to see them ever again.

As mad as she was at them for not telling her stuff, she missed them. She kept thinking that if she missed them hard enough, they would come back, because it would just be too unfair if they didn’t, but it hadn’t worked yet.

Thud, thud, thud, rumbled a sound from outside her room, which rustled her brain out of her blue thoughts.

She froze. Those were some big footsteps. She knew there were lots of big dragons around here, but this felt excessive. The ground complained with each new thud. She felt it quiver and whine, and stared wide-eyed at the door until muffled, booming voices began to converse right outside her room.

Emily scurried over to the entrance immediately, but she didn’t even need to lean up to the door to hear what was being said this time.

“I need to speak to the human,” came a voice she could describe as bored, or like a bored-annoyed combo, sorta. It sounded like she sounded when mommy or daddy asked her to do a chore she didn’t want to do, but she also knew she didn’t have anything better to do, so she just did it anyway.

“Sir,” the three or four dragons outside responded curtly. This had to be someone important, because usually they were more jokey than this.

She heard lots of shuffling around in the following moments, and then three tap, tap, taps on her door, which rattled the boards like teeth.

“Hello? Are you a monster?” Emily asked uneasily, but she still reached out for the doorknob.

A chuckle shook the door again. “That’s a complicated question. I’ve certainly been called one before. That said… I don’t dote on kids like yourself day in and day out because I don’t have a soft side. Now, will you open up so we can talk face-to-face instead of through this door?”

Emily turned the doorknob and pulled it laboriously open; it was huge, and even when she got ip open, she could only see part of the face of the draggy on the other side.

The draggy she’d been sitting near in the council place was staring at her with one big green eye, and even his eye was bigger than her whole entire body. A cut ran across it, or at least a cut that had been healed, and he had all sorts of other marks on his face too. He was big and red, or red-orange kinda, and he smelled like warmth.

Like when a blanket had just finished in the dryer, but like, yuckier.

“Hi. What do you want?” she asked the humongous face curiously.

“Hi. Delphine sent me over here to make sure you were telling us the truth, kid, so here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to change into something you don’t care about. Then, you’re going to lead me to the place you were staying, and to where, uh, your parents…. died.” The dragon paused before ‘died’, probably because he wanted to find a nicer way to say stuff, but in the end he just said ‘died’ anyway.

She preferred it that way, because it wasn’t like she didn’t know it had happened or something.

While he talked, she stared at the sharp teeth in his mouth and imagined herself wrapping her arms around one. She would probably be just the right size to hold on.

“Kid? Did you hear me?”

“Oh,” she breathed, “sure. You said something about clothes, right? And… going to where I was staying? It’s really not very fun out there. I don’t like it. But I guess if you need to know I was telling the truth, okay. I’ll take you there.”

***

When Caltyr tried to walk into his usual light class, he also smacked his head into the door trying to open it.

It was locked.

A note was pasted to the outside, comically small next to the gigantic door that had to fit even the largest of dragon bodies.

It read: Gone on a patrol. Miss Malika’s class is two classrooms to the left, and she will be teaching you today.

So his usual teacher was gone. It felt almost like some kind of fateful lightning bolt striking down, urging him toward the difficult conversation he had to have. He’d been hoping to approach her between classes, or just at the tail end one. He had never intended to join her class properly.

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Today, he didn’t have much of a choice. Maybe she would even know he was coming; something he hadn’t had the benefit of before. She would be expecting him. Maybe this was a good thing.

Still, as he walked the mere two classrooms to the left, his core rattled against his ribcage.

The door to the classroom was unlocked, hanging open. It was also stuffed far past capacity, with some dragons who didn’t even have white in their scales yet. Were there a ton of newbies today? Had dragons from other types of elemental classes been shunted here as well, or was this just a normal day for the light dragon Malika, who had become Miss Malika?

Dragons were spilling outside of the designated seating area. At least ten didn’t have desks, and were sitting in the designated sparring section instead. They had a flat slab of rock hosting their books and writing supplies in place of a desk, like a dinner tray.

As he stood there in the doorway, three more students had piled up behind him without him realizing it.

“Excuse us,” the three of them said tersely.

“Sorry.” Caltyr stepped hurriedly into the classroom.

As he entered, Miss Malika waved the four of them in, gesturing sheepishly to the sparring area. “Go ahead and take a seat wherever you fit, please. You know how it goes. The trays are all stacked up in the usual spot.”

As she took in the faces of who she was speaking to, her calm, welcoming smile faltered. She even pulled her hand in and clutched her chest at the sight of him.

Caltyr could see the fear in her face, her alabaster eyes wide and shaking more with each second that passed. Her fingers were protecting a particularly large groove in her scales, where her seams had healed poorly.

But she recovered quickly. She sucked in a deep breath and gave him a special, but shaky, nod of recognition.

Her initial reaction hadn’t been one of excitement, but he couldn’t blame her for that. The nod was promising, and he returned it in kind and then crossed the room to the stack of trays. They were thin and planed smooth, like a perfect water skipping stone but about 1000 times larger. Back when he had been choosing what hoard, flat stones like this had been on the list.

He took a seat on the outskirts, well into the battlegrounds area.

“There are some snacks at the back of the room, if anybody would like some. Please help yourselves,” Malika said, and pointed to a table at the back of the room he had somehow missed. Cupcakes, or what humans might just describe as cakes from their size, were lined up side-by-side with fluffy white icing on the top.

While physiologically, nobody in the room needed sweets to live, almost everyone’s head perked up at the mention of free dessert.

A line of students quickly began to form at the cupcake table. Perhaps this was the true reason her class was so popular.

“While everybody gets their snacks, I’ll start our very short lesson for today. Or, more of a review? I see we have many new faces here today, so I wanted to explain what we’ll be getting up to today and the rules involved, so none of you get injured or hurt on my watch. That would be awful, and unacceptable.” Miss Malika’s voice was soft, almost so much so that he couldn’t hear her from where he was sitting.

“Miss Malika, you’re doing it again,” one of the students sitting at the front warned her.

She cleared her throat and grabbed an invisible knob on her throat, turning herself up like the volume knob on the ancient, stolen boombox that floated from classroom to classroom. “Is this better?” she asked, approaching an audible level this time.

“Yup, that’s better.” The student at the front of the class, one of the ones with an actual desk, nodded.

“Thank you. Please always let me know if I’m speaking too quietly. It’s kind of a habit of mine. Now, those of you who were here yesterday will know that today was planned to be a free casting day. It still will be, but as there are so many of you, we’ll have to do this in halves. Half of the class will cast, and half will spectate, and then we’ll switch.”

A free casting day. Caltyr had other classes with free casting days, but each teacher’s rules were a little bit different. They were basically just days where they could practice their elements with the teacher there to offer pointers. Some teachers allowed them to use any and all of their elements and encouraged them to combine them, and others wanted them only using the element the class focused on.

“Please offer suggestions for improvement only after asking if your fellow classmate wants them. No backseat casting. I will step in if somebody is doing something truly dangerous. As usual, I want you to form into groups with anywhere from two to four students in them, and spar with each other using any elements as long as you primarily use your light magic.

“You will have to decide amongst yourselves who the victor of each round is, but I will be here for any disputes. Nobody is to cause any permanent or lasting damage, and if somebody’s scales are penetrated or anybody’s scales blister from the heat, the battle ends immediately. Do you understand all that? New students, you had better be taking notes,” Miss Malika said, the final words full of mock anger.

Caltyr hadn’t been taking notes. He picked up his pen and started to scribble down the basics. Use primarily light magic, groups of two to four, don’t injure anybody.

He looked around the room. The only person present that he even kind of knew was the teacher.

“Okay. Please form your groups now, and then I’ll choose which half gets to spar first. But I won’t know how to split everyone until I see how big the group sizes are.” She nodded to herself as she considered whether she was missing anything, and then sat down to watch who ended up with who.

The class went alive with a flurry of activity.

Hundreds of colors zipped across the room. Even though many of the students were new to this class, it seemed they knew each other from other classes or hung out in their free time, because clumps formed quickly.

Caltyr looked left, and then right. The only ‘friends’ he had to his name were learning other elements right now, and they certainly weren’t in Miss Malika’s light class.

When all of the commotion stilled, the water dragon found himself predictably alone. It wasn’t like he hadn’t expected it, but it still stung.

“Caltyr,” Malika called from the front of the room in a strained, mouse-like voice. “Since you don’t have a partner, I’ll be yours for today.”

Oh. Suddenly, he wasn’t so unhappy to be the last one out.

“Cool,” Caltyr replied, noticing he sounded anything but cool at the moment, “thanks.”

Malika split the class quickly into two halves then. To his surprise, he and Malika’s group were in the ‘sparring’ section. With their roles assigned, everybody weaved through the space to their designated spots. Half of the class lined the wall; the other half scattered throughout the battlefield.

Caltyr found the light dragon in one of the corners with her eyes closed, mumbling to herself. He could barely hear her at her normal volume, so he certainly couldn’t hear her when she was mumbling.

“Are you ready?” he asked her, taking his spot across from her.

Her eyes shot open in horror. “Uh…” She stared at him, frozen.

Other students were starting their duels already. He could hear them shouting ‘get ready’ and digging their claws into the ground. Some groups were running in circles.

But his sparring partner was looking at him like he was a monster she was trapped in the same room as. Hadn’t she put two and two together? That if they were paired, they would have to lift a claw to fight each other?

Caltyr saw her pupils widening. She was falling deeper and deeper into her fear, tumbling down a deep chasm she couldn’t climb out of. He decided he would offer her a hand.