“Hey, how have you been since you got here? How are you… doing?” Caltyr asked, shuffling uncomfortably in place. It felt weird to be asking her about her feelings so directly. But he would have to get used to talking about feelings if he was ever going to approach Malika and say more than a single word to her.

He had spent so long now repressing his own, though, that even the words ‘how are you’ felt foreign passing through the spaces between his fangs.

“Good.” Emily looked up thoughtfully, as if checking the top of her brain for the answer. “But also a little bit bad.”

“Why a little bit bad?” Caltyr asked, shuffling up against the side of the bed as much as he could without poking her with any of his scales.

Emily’s drawing hand stilled.

She looked up toward Caltyr as if she was considering her options. She looked down toward her pillow, where she had been keeping the piece with he and Sara dueling. Slowly, she reached underneath the pillow and pulled out a squat stack of crumpled paper.

Wordlessly, she flipped through it and handed him a piece without daring to make eye contact.

Emily was not skilled with the arts. Perhaps that was a human thing, but Caltyr almost couldn’t decipher what was going on. There were three two-legged blobs connected at what might be their hands, and they had smiles so wide the smiles jutted off either edge of their heads. There was an obvious height difference between the blobs.

“Are these your parents?” he guessed.

Her response was to deliver him a second piece of paper. This time, the same characters were present, but their faces were crossed out. Both of the tall figures had grown what could be perceived as horns, but it was hard to tell under the very bold ‘x’. They were also covered in a field of question marks, and the smaller figure was keeping her hands to herself.

“I dunno who they are anymore, and I can’t ask them because they’re gone.” Emily’s voice was quaking as she forced the words out.

“Emily,” Caltyr said, his voice dripping with exaggerated empathy. He sat down, because he might be there a while. The tiny bed shook when his butt connected with the floor. “What kind of people were your parents? Did they love you? Were they nice to you?”

The little girl kicked her feet, this time much less happily. “They were nice to me. It was everyone else who didn’t like me, and I never knew why. Guess I know why now.”

She considered the second half of the question. “Mommy was nice. She stayed home to take care of me and teach me stuff at home while Daddy went out to work.”

“So, would you say that they played with you a lot? Did they say they loved you before bed and tuck you in?” Caltyr was reaching a little. He’d never known parents who did such things, but in the human fiction books he had flipped through, it was a common behaviour.

“Yes.” Emily frowned tearfully.

“Then I don’t see why this news changes anything. They were your parents, and they were good people who took care of you until they couldn’t anymore.” He raised a hand from the floor, bringing a few crumbled papers with it. He patted her back, which was facing up, hopefully in a comforting way.

The human girl shook under his claws and began to sob.

He tried to pull away, but she grabbed his thumb in a vice grip with her arms and held it there. He let her.

“I miss them.”

“I miss mine too sometimes, even though they died when I was very little. I get the impression yours didn’t die very long ago?”

“Vermon says it’s been a month since I started living in the forest. So about that long.” Emily released Caltyr briefly to palm at her eyes. “I didn’t think mommies and daddies could die at the same time.”

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Caltyr nodded solemnly. He didn’t know what to say to that one.

Since he was young, he had been being raised to combat the humans. Death had always been a possibility, and he had even tasted it once - but both of her parents getting snuffed out at once seemed cruel, even to him. And all that followed by being abandoned by her whole species and being made to live alone in the woods for a month? Did they really hate dragons, or part-dragons, that much?

“What happened to you wasn’t fair, Emily,” he managed. “I hope that we can start to make life more fair for you now that you live here.”

“Thanks you… for winning the big fight for me,” the human girl hiccuped, a bubble of wetness popping as she spoke and startling her into laughter.

“It was the right thing to do. Don’t make me regret it.”

“Do you think I’ll ever be able to fight, if I’m part-draggy?” A sliver of curiosity broke through her sorrow, and she tilted her neck all the way back to look up at him.

Caltyr remembered the faint tickle of magic he had felt yesterday. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“Yes,” Emily assured him instantly, without even thinking about it.

“I think you already used some magic on me. When you told me to go to sleep yesterday, I think I felt my eyes drooping.”

“That’s barely magic.” The girl sighed, as if she had been expecting something more grand than this.

Caltyr went to explain how useful the power of suggestion could truly be, and how T’allyandria had used it over the years to her advantage, but he stopped himself.

T’allyandria didn’t want anybody to know about her abilities. He wasn’t so sure he should be babbling about them, even to somebody who might share the skill.

Instead of divulging that info, he compromised. He grabbed the tip of one of his tiniest scales and tore it from its place amongst its brethren on his forehead. He held it out with his free hand.

“For me?” She tilted her head in confusion.

“Yes, for you. With this, you should be able to use water magic, even if you lack the affinity for it. Or that’s how I’ve heard humans work, anyway. Why don’t you try it?”

Emily reached out and grabbed the offering carefully, as if it might shatter under the slightest pressure. She moved it gently around, examining it. “It’s like a rock,” she observed, delighted. She held it up next to Delphine’s brown one.

“It is. Do you want to try using it?”

“Yeah!” she exclaimed, jumping off of her bed excitedly. A small tornado of paper kicked up around her.

“Okay. Can you clean this paper up so we don’t turn it into paper sludge?”

Emily nodded and simply kicked the bulk of her drawings underneath her bed, but she did take a moment to pick out a couple of her favorites and stash them under her pillow. “Done.” She decided, even though the majority of her ‘tidying’ had been stashing the mess away somewhere they couldn’t see it.

He thought of correcting her, but he wasn’t here to lay down the law. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he wondered if relocating a mess was most of what cleaning was in the first place.

“Alright. So, put the scale in your pocket and put your hands out in front of you.”

Emily obeyed. She stuffed the scale down at the bottom of her dress pocket and outstretched her hands dramatically.

“Now, picture a stream of water shooting from your palms. Really picture it, like it’s really th—”

Caltyr paused mid-sentence and realized he was gurgling his words. He touched his chest and his hand came away wet, and only then did he realize the kid was shooting a concentrated stream of water from both of her palms. Into his mouth.

“I’m doing it, I’m doing it!” the part-dragon screamed, right before taking off in a joyous run and shooting water into the air about a hundred more times. A puddle formed under her feet as she ran in a wide circle.

“You are,” he breathed, perplexed, as he spat the water out. He didn’t remember how long it had taken him to summon water from nothing the first time. It had probably been before he was even forming reliable memories, but something told him he hadn’t succeeded the very first time he had ever tried.

It was both amazing and horrifying to watch a human child pick it up so quickly.

“Can we learn another one?” Emily asked, putting her hands at her sides and pausing to wait for the dragon’s answer.

Just as Caltyr was about to reply, a noise chimed through the door. A familiar gong-like bell.

It was time for class.

“Sorry, Emily. I’ve got to go to class now. Can I trust you not to turn your room into a lake while I’m gone?”

The water dragon turned toward the door, though there was not much turning to be had in the tiny room.

“I don’t think sleeping in a lake would be very comfy,” Emily decided after a short period of consideration. “Okay. I’ll see you later, draggy.”

“Caltyr,” he corrected her. He felt closer to this small child after their talk, at least enough to insist she called him by name. He supposed this was the power of talking about things; he’d have to remember this for later, when Malika’s class was over and it was time for him to approach her. “Caltyr,” she repeated, and nodded happily.

When he left through the door to her room, she was splashing in the puddle she made. On her very first try, with powers that weren’t even hers to begin with.