I scratched my green-scaled belly as I tried to find any hint of the scars left behind from my brief battle in the marketplace. My final bandages had come off a few days ago, which had seemed premature from my hazy memory of how quickly wounds healed back on Earth. I would have expected the deepest to take a few weeks to fully recover from, but here I was, not even able to find any of the scars after less than half that amount of time.

"Mom!" I called into the kitchen from the bathroom, "do you think that lady we saved is ok?"

I had expected my mother to simply holler back at me, since I was pretty sure she was busy cooking at the moment, but instead I heard the sound of something dropping loudly to the floor followed by rushing footsteps.

"Why!? Have you heard anything?? Did she say something about what happened??"

I turned to my mother with my jaw hanging open, hands still clutching my belly and my shirt pulled up over my head.

"Uhhhh... what? No, I meant her shoulder, do you think it healed alright? It looked pretty deep, and I was wondering if..." I paused in the middle of my struggle to pull my shirt back down over my head, careful not to get it caught on my small growing horns. I had been about to ask if it might have been infected... when I realized that I didn't actually know the word for 'infected' in our language. Then I tried for 'sickness', but that drew a blank as well...

My mother's voice was strained as she replied, but I couldn't see her expression as I was still slowly working my shirt back over my head (my horns curled backward, so getting shirts off was easy, but getting them back on could be a real struggle).

"Wondering if she has gone to the authorities, betraying our trust? This is why you can never do something like that again, Heller! Commoners like her simply cannot be trusted!"

Holey Moley, what was that all about? I finally got my shirt back in place, only to see that Mom was glaring past me at the wall, clenching and unclenching her fists.

"Um... no, I meant that I was wondering if her shoulder had... gone... bad?" I said. I already knew that Mom was worried about the authorities coming, and she had already coached me on what to say, which was along the lines of 'I don't know what happened, I just know that the birds attacked me and the baby, and some kind of fire came from nowhere to save us.' Unfortunately, my mother was still very determined that I not learn what actually happened, even though I had a pretty good idea on my own (she had undoubtedly used a flame power to save me, and probably one she wasn't supposed to have, or use), but the flip side was that she clearly had no idea that I also possessed secret powers, and had used them in the same encounter...

To be honest, I found it almost a relief that she was so adamant about keeping secrets from me, because it made me feel far less guilty for keeping secrets of my own. Fair play, right?

And as far as I knew, the lady whose baby we had saved was the only witness to both events. I was privately concerned she would rat me out as well, but anything I had done should have been subtle enough that it could be explained away due to the chaotic nature of the encounter.

Now it was Mother's turn to be surprised, as she looked at me in puzzlement with her lips parted, "Gone... bad?"

Yikes, not the reaction I expected, and explaining it was difficult since I didn't know what the words for sickness, infection, bacteria, or virus were (they had just never come up), "Yeah! I mean, if there was some... badness... on the monster's beak, and the 'badness' went into her shoulder and made it... bad?"

Somebody shoot me, because oh my lord did that sound dumb...

"Do you mean... a flesh-rot, or a ragthhnoh?" she chuckled, "Heller, that only happens to animals and beasts, not to people!" She smiled at me, shaking her head.

Wait... what? After extensive questioning, I figured out that 'ragthhnoh' was our word for a kind of wasting sickness, or disease, that could be transferred from animal to animal, potentially decimating entire herds. Yet, strangely, it wasn't considered dangerous to eat meat from an animal that had died from a sickness, it was simply seen as a shame because a new source of food would have to be found if they all died out.

Well then... that would explain why I hadn't gotten sick yet, I suppose. And here I had attributed it to good luck and clean air!

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My body was still that of a child, but as time went on and I learned more about the language and culture of our people I found it increasingly difficult to play that role. My strangely 'mature' mannerisms eventually gained a reasonable amount of acceptance in the circle of people who interact with my parents, although it had been a difficult battle at times.

There had initially been a great deal of amazement, for example, when I decided to try revealing how capable I was to the men and women who worked in the Smithy with my father. I was fairly sure that I had done a decent job of slowly ramping up my abilities (such as walking, talking, and manipulating simple tools) to make myself seem like a genius child rather than a demon-possessed baby, but many of them still had difficulty accepting that I could converse at an adult level when I wasn't even five years old yet. My goal at the Smithy was to gain acceptance and work my way into a position where I might be able to convince Jaws to let me actually use the facilities, especially if I could get everyone else to agree that I was capable of doing so safely and without interfering.

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Why was I doing this, you might ask? I'll be honest... I was bored. Being a kid here was very boring most of the time, and I simply wanted to somehow gain access to all the cool tools and equipment at the Smithy ten years prematurely. The normal Apprenticeship age was 14, and while Assistants started at 7, they were not allowed to actually work on anything independently - and I fully agreed with this rule, in fact, because most of them were way too young and immature to work unsupervised!

So, with that goal in mind, I did my best to gain acceptance and have them view me not as a child, but more as a short, safety-conscious adult. It was much easier with my parents, who were adjusted to me by now and more or less took any of my eccentricities in stride. They had seen me develop from a newborn who didn't really cry (or make any noise that wasn't directly related to a need), to an oddly thoughtful toddler who picked up complex linguistic concepts quickly, and was also responsible enough that they felt comfortable having me babysit an infant (Zephyr) who was only a few years my junior. I didn't have much experience with kids myself, so I didn't really have a clear grasp of how out of the norm my behavior might have been, but the more I interacted with people outside my mother's small social circle (which was basically just me, Dad, Anime-eyes, and Zephyr), the more I suspected that my behavior was, in truth (and despite my best efforts), shockingly aberrant.

There was one particular Blacksmith, a gigantic woman with lumpy red skin and cattle horns (curved up like a bull's), who was amazed all over again each time I visited the Smithy. I suspected she might even have been a little bit afraid of me, but she was always pleasant enough after the initial fright wore off. Perhaps she had children herself and was more familiar with the normal developmental cycle that kids were supposed to go through, but luckily everyone else seemed able to accept (or adapt to) me quickly enough after the first few times we met.

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“And then The Merrik, Sky-Fallen and Sun-Born, slew the Black Serpent of Shadow Vale, its blood pooling deep into the ground and causing an Eternal Spring to come forth! Legends say it is this very spring that spawned Eastwind River, flowing forth from the Valley of Shadows all the way to the Endless Ocean,” Mother said as she raised her hands upwards in the air, fingers spread and hands rotating wildly to mimic the Eternal Spring shooting up out of the ground and spraying everywhere. I watched her intently, enjoying the theatrics as she wrapped up one of the many folk tales she would recite from time to time.

I smiled and clapped once she was finished. It wasn't a Hollywood movie, maybe, but her stories were the closest thing I had here. There were apparently theaters and professional actors in the City who Mom claimed told the tales much better than her, but they wouldn't leave the safety of the walls to perform elsewhere (unless they were paid for and protected by a powerful noble, maybe, but events like those were rare and exclusive, so they didn't really concern me).

"Can we actually see the Eternal Spring?"

Mom smiled and patted my cheek, "Unfortunately, such sights are beyond the reach of mortals such as us, Heller, and the mists that shroud the Valley of Shadows are thick. Very little can be seen from the barricade that Great House Runetail maintains around the Vale."

“Mom, how do people remember these old stories so well? Won’t we just forget them sometimes if we have to remember everything?” I asked, hoping to solve one of the mysteries that had been bothering me. I had been expecting someone to bring home a children's book (or at least something with words on it) for the first few years, but contrary to my expectations my parents never showed, or even mentioned, books of any kind to me.

“Heller, my clever boy, what an intelligent question!” Mother said to me, clapping her hands together in delight, “You are so much better than any of the other children in the village!” It was a phrase I heard quite often, and rather disliked because it only highlighted how 'different' I was… and, to make matters even worse, if I took her compliments at face value I would have to be careful or I’d become an overconfident twat...

I simply smiled, waiting for her to get back on topic.

She continued after kissing my cheek, “Well, you know the symbols that your father uses to keep records in the Smithy? There is a giant collection of even more complicated symbols kept by the Four Great Houses in the City, which record the entire history of our people!”

I opened my eyes wide in feigned amazement, “Can anybody look at them to learn our history?”

Mother shook her head, “Only members of the Great Houses are able to use them, Heller,” she turned her gaze to a point off in the distance over my head, and had an odd expression that I hadn’t seen before, "and it is... forbidden," she was gritting her teeth as she spoke, still not making eye-contact with me, "for us to even learn these symbols, beyond what is necessary for our vocation. Common..." She took a deep breath and closed her eyes before continuing, "Common people like us can only hear these legends at Academy, which you will attend as well in a few years’ time.”

I had heard this 'Academy' mentioned before. Apparently, parents were responsible for teaching their children the basics of language, history, and culture, but once they were ten years old everyone was supposed to attend a place called Academy for a few hours a day to refine their knowledge and learn a more detailed history of our people until the year they turned fourteen (which was old enough to be considered a young adult and begin a proper Apprenticeship).

Of course, by the age of ten a young person would already be involved in a trade or profession of some kind, since kids were expected to start working as Assistants (who helped Apprentices with their duties) between the ages of seven and nine (with the exact details and timing determined between the parents and those who agreed to teach their children). Things were simple in my case since my father was also the Master who would be in charge of my training as a Blacksmith. I just hoped that Academy wouldn't be boring...