~~~
“Alright, Scamp-.” Mayflare started.
“I’m… Wyrmwood!” Wyrmwood interrupted. He’d been getting better at speaking and could already speak more than one word. It was actually pretty impressive for a dragon, given how young he was.
“Of course ya are, ya lil hoard of gold.”
Wyrmwood huffed and pouted like the irritated hatchling he was. This adult dragon seemed to be constantly teasing him!
“As I was saying, ya whippersnapper.” Mayflare started once again. “The two main enemies of dragons in this world are the gryphons and the unicorns.”
“Why?”
“Gryphons want to be the lords of the sky, they can’t do that with us around. As for the unicorns?” He leans in close to whisper conspiratorially. “Don’t tell anyone I said this, but I’m pretty sure they’re all specist against us.”
“Why?” Wyrmwood asked once again.
“Because they always side with the humanoid heroes! Even when they don’t actually get anything out of it!” He roars. “That dark lord had offered me a hoard’s worth of magical tomes! A hoard’s worth!! Any true dragon would have taken that deal! But nooo, Fae Dancer just had to tell that stupid elf hero how to sneak past me while my guard was down! No magic books for a failure of a guard! I told her about that weakness in confidence , dagnabbit!”
“Who Fae Dancer?”
“My mortal enemy now.” Mayflare growled. “Just remember that while they call themselves pacifists, the unicorns are generally against us in every encounter.”
~~~
For two more days, Mayflare taught Wyrmwood various things. He seemed to especially enjoy making the hatchling hunt things for him while he just watched.
It wasn’t easy, Wyrmwood was told to hunt things that were at about his skill level. Which was hard to figure out without a system window! Overall the experience just taught Wyrmwood that things were generally huntable if they tried to flee, and an actual danger if they approached him instead.
Three times he had to be saved by Mayflare when he was pounded into the dirt by creatures he couldn’t yet compete with. First clay dolls battered him, their forms indistinct yet powerful enough to shatter bones. Wyrmwood laid in the healing pool for the rest of that day. Then he had been saved when the same gryphon from before made a go for him again. Finally, he had to be saved when he accidentally slithered right into a pygmy thornet hive. Pygmy thornets were a magical race of intelligent plant thorns. They had bodies that looked like tiny pokey ents mixed with wasps and they were an absolute scourge on anything that found its way into their territory.
Mayflare actually had to torch the whole area just to get them to back off for a bit. He didn’t seem annoyed or even disappointed with Wyrmwood, which was relieving, but he was aghast at just how many times Wyrmwood seemed to unknowingly start to slither in the direction of danger.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Yer like a magnet for the few things out here that can still kill a dragon.” He chuckled. “Why the last time I met a dragon so directionally inept must have been Gia, the nature wyrm, one hundred and thirteen years ago. The lass had wandered right into a herd of fluffergish if you can believe it!”
Fluffergish were strange mammalian monsters that looked similar to bison with fish shaped heads. They look very fluffy, but if you startle one their hair straightens and hardens to be tough as steel! Many predators have impaled themselves on the strange herbivores’ quill-like hair.
“She’d gotten herself sliced to ribbons by the time I’d scared 'em off. Thankfully, her regeneration was especially strong for her kind. She was right as rain by the next day, so sent her on her way.” Mayflare sighed fondly as he did lazy loops in the air.
“I imagine she’s had a clutch or two since then, provided she hasn’t wandered off the edge of the world, that is!” He guffawed loudly.
Wyrmwood didn’t care about whoever this Gia was. He just wanted to stop getting attacked wherever he went.
“Hide better?” He asked Mayflare.
“Oh? Hide huh, I could teach ya a bit of magic that might’d help with that. Look here…”
~~~
“...And that's three.” Sidney says as he lays in the muddy earth, completely exhausted. “You have no idea just how tired I feel right now.”
Their second ‘request’ from the hag was to catch a troglomite. Troglomites are large, apish mites. They are solitary hunters and, according to the hag, quite useful if one wanted to keep the glk`sphr away. Glk’sphr are an ultra-rare, high-level evolution of slimes. All that is known about them by the humanoid races is that they are hypothesized to be made entirely of highly concentrated primordial mana, and thus, are supremely dangerous. Even more than true dragons and their peers!
Sydney has no idea why the hag would worry about an entity that has only been recorded to have been spotted thrice in history, but the implications that she not only worries about it, but also knows how to deal with it, do make him a little nervous. That being said, catching the troglomite ended up going surprisingly smoothly. The hag had been generous enough to give them a direction to look in, and once they located one sleeping high up in a tree, they had been able to set up a trap surrounding it before it even awakened.
The problem was with the third task. They had been told to mediate between two tribes of greblins. Greblins were a horrendous mixed breed of goblins and gremlins. They were known to have the worst traits of both races. Short, ugly, and cracked out of their minds by nature, to the sapient races it was a commonly known fact that a good greblin was a dead greblin. Even the two races that had spawned them absolutely despised them!
Sidney couldn’t help but ask the hag why they couldn’t just waltz in and just destroy both tribes. She then told them a long story of how, long ago, when this bog had been a lake, she was the beautiful and wise lady of the lake. She had ruled the lake fairly, creating many bonds with the inhabitants of the forest. This included an ancient pact of protection with a certain tribe of gremlins and a certain tribe of goblins. Not caring to hear another long-winded story from some powerful old fogey, Sidney mostly stopped paying attention at around that point. Something, something, disaster, something, something, lake drying up, blah, blah, promiscuity from both tribes. And now here they were, two tribes of greblins watched over by a bog mother who didn’t care much for the descendants of perverts, who were in turn the descendants of two actually decent tribes of goblins and gremlins.
When Sidney’s party found the two tribes, no one was surprised that they were both mad at the other for various love scandals. The whole situation being explained through gestures was especially unpleasant for the humans as the greblins seemed to tend to go into excruciating detail on how their tribes wrongfully “intermingled.” By the time the ugly little greblin chiefs had pointed out and explained the fiftieth shade of grey scar tissue on the other’s body, they had all lost their lunch at least once. After a short break for some fresh air, Saintess Bethany suggested to the two chiefs that if both their tribes had been intimate for so long, they could just merge into one tribe now.
The ensuing arguments and discussions took days of the adventurers needing to puke from the gestures made even in argument and days more of pulling their hair out from stress and frustration as they thwarted the constant yet sporadic attempts of the greblins to prank them in ways that greatly varied from just silly to horrifically lethal, with no warning in between. By the time the tribes had come to an agreement and finalized the merging, they had sent the tired and disheveled adventurer party back to the bog mother with a thank you letter and a live explosive hidden on Ella’s person.
Briad had thankfully found and disposed of the explosive in time when he and his betrothed were off “taking a break” together.
With the final task done and the letter to prove it, it was finally time for the hag to tell them what she knew about the quarry the party was supposed to be hunting. Sidney couldn’t wait to be back on the trail again.
~~~