"Let's make the river go around the castle! There was a castle like that in one of Seyli's books. It had a river around it so that the people inside could go swimming!"

"That's called a moat," Humerus said in an exasperated tone. "It's not for swimming. It's to help keep enemies out. You're supposed to have crocodiles and stuff in there to eat people who try to go across."

"Oh." Iggy tilted his head and considered their construction-in-progress for a moment. Then he brightened again. "I know! We'll make the moat-river extra big, and then I can hide in the water, and Humerus can make the soldiers go across, and I'll jump out and eat them all!" He bounded over and started digging furiously in front of the sandcastle they'd been building. "Come help me dig, Tava!"

Thenio sat on a bench next to the large sandbox and watched the three of them digging and building. Their architectural skills were a little questionable, but they seemed to be having fun. He had his sketchbook open on his lap, and he would occasionally lift his pencil and make a quick sketch of their antics. Iggy's head poking out of the castle doorway. Tava digging Iggy free after he'd gotten himself stuck in the half-finished moat. Humerus puppeting a small troop of toy soldiers to make an ill-fated attack on the castle that ended in the jaws of Iggy the moat monster.

But Thenio spent most of his time just sitting and watching. The discovery that his chaos magic was probably the cause of all his social problems had upset him enough that Bero had decided to increase his magic suppression rate for the rest of the day. It wasn't high enough to completely knock him out, but it was enough that he didn't feel like doing much. Ariom had told him they wouldn't try to do any more testing or training today, so he was here keeping an eye on the dragons while Ariom was doing something or other in his workshop and Bero was helping Seyli with one of her school assignments.

Well, maybe it was more accurate to say that the dragons were keeping an eye on him. They seemed to be taking turns coming over to check on him while they played. Iggy and Humerus did it under the guise of wanting to look at Thenio's newest drawing or to ask his opinion on whatever they were building in the sandbox.

Tava was more straightforward. Seyli hadn't been kidding when she said that the purple dragon was sensitive to people's emotions. Every time Thenio started dwelling on dark thoughts and getting worked up again, she would almost immediately pause whatever she was doing and run over, whimpering and rubbing her head against his arm or trying to lick his face. She also looked at his sketchbook and sniffed it curiously, but he wasn't sure whether she understood what the drawings were or not.

Sometime during round two of the Battle of the Sandcastle, Seyli came over to them. Tava was monitoring the mock battle and occasionally stepping in when Iggy or Humerus tried to do something she thought was too reckless. When she saw Seyli approaching, she chirped happily and trotted over to meet her.

"Hi there, sunshine." Seyli bent down to rub her dragon's head affectionately. "Are you having fun?"

"Mmm!" Tava hummed and chirped in affirmation, waving her tail.

"Good." Seyli patted her back. "You can keep playing. I'm going to stay here and talk to Thenio for a while."

Tava chirped again and then turned to head back to the sandbox.

Seyli straightened up and watched her go. Then she came over behind the bench where Thenio was sitting. "Is it okay if I watch you draw for a few minutes?"

"Uh...sure. I don't mind."

That wasn't exactly true. Having a pretty girl watching over his shoulder while he sketched made him extremely nervous...or at least as nervous as he could get with the suppression bands making him tired and fuzzy-headed. But it was hard to think of a reason to turn her away when Humerus had been here watching him just a few minutes ago.

Thenio lifted his pencil and did his best to focus on his partially completed drawing—a scene showing Tava and Iggy working together to make castle repairs after the first battle.

"You draw really well," Seyli said after watching quietly for a few minutes. "And you're so fast! You must have put in a lot of practice. I used to try drawing dragons a lot when I was younger, but I'd usually start playing with the dragons who were acting as my models partway through and end up never finishing the drawing." She laughed. "Well, I guess that just means I was more interested in dragons than I was in art. So I'm impressed that you seem to be good with both."

Thenio stared fixedly at the tip of his pencil, feeling embarrassed but happy at her praise. "I've mostly just done a lot of drawing because it helps me relax and think. Capturing something on paper...it feels sort of like putting a bug in a jar so that you can look at it. It makes difficult things seem less overwhelming. It's funny...I didn't even want to learn to draw at first. I wanted to learn to carve wooden animals like my friend Eteon does. But I was only four years old, and my parents really weren't keen on the idea of letting me use a knife. So Eteon said he'd teach me to draw instead. He told me that if I used drawing to learn about animals and how their bodies were shaped, I would be able to learn to carve a lot faster when I was older. And...well. I tried it and ended up liking it."

"Eteon is the one who made Humerus' new puppet, right? He seems to be really skilled, so it's no wonder you were inspired by him." Seyli smiled playfully. "So what about woodcarving? Did your parents ever decide you were old enough to use a knife?"

Thenio let out a small laugh. "Well, yeah. I've done a little. I'm not very good at it, though. By the time I started, my parents were pushing me to spend as much time as possible studying magic, so I couldn't practice that much. My mom wasn't crazy about me getting wood shavings all over my room, either, so I mostly just did carving when I went to visit Eteon."

He frowned a little at that thought. All the times his parents had scolded him or told him he couldn't do something...how much of that was because of the influence of his chaos magic? He couldn't stop wondering about it. About how his life might be different now if he'd just been born with a normal magic affinity....

"Hey," Seyli said after a minute, breaking the silence. "Do you know why Tava understands people so well?"

"Huh?" Thenio blinked, surprised by the question. "Isn't it just that you've trained her well?"

"That's part of it. But a lot of it is due to the fact that she's hand-reared. Her parents abandoned her egg, so she was hatched in an incubator. I was ten, and it was the first time my grandmother let me take care of an egg and hatchling by myself." Seyli gave Thenio a slightly sad smile. "It's not that uncommon, you know? Dragons are naturally very sensitive to magic. That's normally an advantage, but it causes problems once in a while. If a baby dragon's magic is too different from its parents', the parents sometimes stop recognizing the egg as theirs and won't take care of it. That's what happened to Tava. She's a genetic throwback. You see the darker shade of purple on her feet?"

Thenio nodded.

"Her whole body was supposed to be that color. Our hatchery raises flare-type dragons. We have three breeds. There are Azure and Sunset Flares, which are old, established breeds. But our specialty is Violet Flares, which are a newer breed that my grandmother developed based on the first two. Tava is a purebred Violet Flare, but her coloring and magic are a throwback to her Sunset Flare heritage. She has a light primary and fire secondary. Violets should be the other way around. They're deliberately bred to enhance their fire magic. So from a breeding standpoint, she's pretty much a total failure."

Thenio looked at Tava, who was currently brushing sand off of Iggy's face with one of her wings. It was hard to think that a sweet, beautiful dragon like her would be considered a failure.

"Iggy was kind of the same, actually," Seyli went on, coming around to the front of the bench and sitting down.

"Iggy was?" Thenio raised his eyebrows. "Oh. Now that you mention it, he's not a flare-type, is he? Does your hatchery raise void-type dragons, too?"

Seyli shook her head. "That's the thing. There aren't any void-type dragon breeds. Iggy is a morph. Have you ever heard of silent eggs?"

"Uh...no. I don't actually know that much about dragons. Iggy is the first one I met."

"Well, you mostly wouldn't hear about them unless you're a breeder. It's something that happens occasionally with high-magic dragon breeds. Purebred eggs are usually pretty consistent in color and texture, but once in a while a breeding pair will produce an egg that looks completely different. Violet Flare eggs are smooth and white with violet and gold marbling. But Iggy's egg was black with a rough surface. Ariom still has the shell in a display case in his room. Anyways, these differently colored eggs are what we call 'silent eggs.' Because they usually don't hatch. They're not dead. If you look at them with magesight or a scanning device, you can see the baby dragon developing inside. But at some point, the development stops, and the baby dies soon after. There were some records of people getting silent eggs to hatch successfully before the Great War, but the technique was lost, so no one was able to do it for a long time. Iggy is the first silent egg to hatch in centuries. At least here in Kafron. It's hard to know for sure about other countries."

"Seriously?" So the genius grandmaster wizard really did have an extra special familiar.... "How?"

"It's a special type of familiar contract ceremony that's performed while the dragon is still in the egg. We knew it was something like that, but Ariom is the one who finally managed to piece together enough information from the old records to get it to work. He can explain the details better than I can. But the important point is that, in the process, Iggy took on Ariom's magic affinity. And since there aren't any naturally-occurring void-type dragons, most dragons see him as a foreign creature and don't want to have anything to do with him. Familiar dragons can get over it if you explain to them what he is. But Tava is the only natural dragon who treats him normally. That's partly because I've put in a lot of effort to socialize her with different types of magic beasts. But I also think she understands, at least on some level, that he's been rejected just like she was, and she feels a connection to him because of that."

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Thenio didn't say anything. He had finally realized why Seyli had brought this subject up.

There was a brief silence, while they sat and watched the dragons playing.

"Actually...Ariom knows a thing or two about rejection himself," Seyli said slowly. "That's why he was willing to put in the work to figure out how to hatch a silent egg. He was reluctant at first, even though my grandmother offered to give him the baby dragon if he could help it hatch successfully. He said he had too many other projects to work on. But he changed his mind when he heard that Iggy's parents had kicked his egg out of the nest and refused to take care of it." She turned and looked at Thenio. "Did you know that Uncle Bero and Aunt Tilia are the ones who raised Ariom?"

"Really? No. I know they're really close, and Bero told me that Ariom's parents were both in-patients at the Stability Center when he was a child, so I figured they must have taken care of him then. But Bero said Ariom's father was still alive, so...."

Seyli nodded. "He is. But...." She hesitated. "Well, understand that all this happened before I was born. And I've only met Ariom's father a few times, so I don't know him very well. But from what my parents have told me....he's not really a bad person, but when his wife died, he just...lost it. He lashed out at everyone and everything. But especially at Ariom.... Oh, I don't mean literally," she added hastily, seeing Thenio's expression. "He's never physically hurt Ariom. I understand he's said some pretty harsh things...but mostly he just doesn't want to be involved with him. My father thinks it's because Ariom reminds him too much of his wife."

Thenio grimaced. "No wonder Ariom doesn't like to talk about his parents...."

"That's part of why I'm telling you this—so you know why it's a sensitive subject for him. But also...." Seyli paused, apparently choosing her words. "I was just...thinking about how it must feel. To find out that your own magic had been sabotaging you all this time. That it was actually making people dislike you. It just seemed...really lonely." She looked down at her hands. "So I thought maybe it would help a little to know that someone else has been through something kind of similar. That's all."

Thenio opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He blinked a few times, trying to ease the slight sting in his eyes. "Thanks," he finally managed to get out, in a slightly hoarse voice.

While they were talking, several battles had taken place in the sandbox. The castle was now in rough shape, and Iggy was looking tired. He crawled out of the moat with a toy soldier in his mouth, dropped it into the hole that had been designated as the castle dungeon along with the rest of the defeated troops, and then sprawled on top of the remains of a ruined tower, panting.

Seyli stood up and went to the edge of the sandbox. "Iggy, honey, I think maybe you've had enough playing in the sand for right now. Why don't you clean up, and then we'll go to the library to read some stories. Okay?"

Iggy nodded, still panting. Then he slowly got to his feet and stumbled over to the side of the sandbox, accompanied by a concerned-looking Tava. At the edge of the sand, he shook himself to get rid of some of the wet sand that was caked into his scales. Then he went to a metal box that was sitting on the ground nearby. It was large enough for Tava to fit in easily, and there was a hanging flap in one side. Iggy pushed the flap open with his nose and went in. A minute later, when he came back out, he was clean and dry and free of sand.

"Good boy." Seyli picked up the tired little dragon and cradled him in her arms. "Your turn, Tava."

Tava chirped and obediently went in. While she was inside, Thenio saw Humerus give the cleaning box a furtive look. Then his body shimmered a little bit, and all the sand and water on him fell off onto the ground. He floated up out of the sandbox, managing to make it over to the bench and land on Thenio's shoulder just before Tava came back out.

"Do you want to come read stories with us, Thenio?" Seyli asked, giving him a dazzling smile.

Thenio couldn't help smiling in response. "Sure."

----------------------------------------

They spent the rest of the afternoon in the library. Iggy fell asleep after a couple of stories—which Thenio suspected had been Seyli's plan to begin with—and he and Tava took a nap while curled up together on one of the sofas, while Humerus looked through some of Iggy's picture books and Thenio and Seyli talked.

Since Thenio was feeling pretty tired himself, he let Seyli do most of the talking, while he asked questions here and there. Their main topic of conversation was magic beasts. As you might expect from a girl who had grown up in a dragon hatchery, had an uncle with a spectral beast farm, and was studying to become a veterinarian, Seyli knew a lot about magic creatures. With dragons in particular, she was practically a walking encyclopedia. Thenio's experience with magic beasts was mostly limited to looking at pictures, so he was interested in hearing what some of them were like in real life.

Overall, his first meeting with Seyli went better than he had expected, Thenio thought as he held Iggy up so that he could wave goodbye to Seyli and Tava as they left. He'd been pretty nervous about it, considering his poor track record of interacting with girls.

After dinner, Ariom carted Iggy off to give him a bath. Humerus, despite proclaiming loudly that revenants didn't need to take baths, somehow ended up going with them. Thenio headed to his room, planning to go to sleep early.

"Thenio, wait a minute."

He turned to see Bero coming down the hall toward him, carrying a thick book in one hand.

"First of all, I wanted to say I'm sorry," Bero said when he got closer, giving Thenio an apologetic smile. "I completely forgot to warn you about Seyli's princess mask. I could tell that she surprised you, but you handled it well. You must have had some formal etiquette training."

"'Princess mask'? What do you mean?" Thenio asked, puzzled.

Bero chuckled a little. "That's what we call it when she dresses up and uses fancy manners like that. She acts that way when she's nervous."

"She was nervous? Really?" Thenio found it a little hard to believe that Seyli's poise and elegance were actually a sign of anxiety.

"She was meeting Ariom's new assistant for the first time, wasn't she? She doesn't show it much now, but Seyli was extremely shy when she was younger. She only really relaxed and opened up around animals and magic beasts. But all the children in her family are taught high-class manners and dress, since most of the hatchery's customers are aristocrats. Seyli latched onto that as a way to cope with uncomfortable social situations. But she seemed to like you, so she should act more normally in the future."

"Oh." Not only was she nervous to meet him, but...she liked him? This wasn't some kind of joke, was it...?

Thenio's incredulity must have shown on his face because Bero smiled sadly. "You're a likable person, you know? Living all this time with your magic having a negative effect on the people around you must have given you a pretty warped self-image." He glanced toward the doorway into Iggy's bathroom. "I really hope Ariom's insulation device can make a difference. You deserve better."

Thenio looked away. He had no idea how to respond to that....

"I also have something to give you." Bero held out the book he was carrying.

Thenio took it, grateful for the change in subject. "What's this?"

"A copy of the files that Ariom got from the Association. Logs of their research on chaos affinities. You don't have to look at them now...better not to, actually. You've already had enough shocking information for one day. But whenever you feel ready...well, there they are."

Thenio stared down at the book in his hands with a complicated expression. He suddenly thought back to his dream the other night, about the boy hiding in the alleyway who the dream beast said was later killed by his own magic. He wasn't going to read something about that boy in here...was he? No...of course not. That was just a dream.

But he already knew there would be stories about similar boys. Who died in similar ways....

"Hey, Thenio," Bero said suddenly, his tone a bit brighter than it had been a minute before. "What's something fun you'd like to do with magic?"

Thenio blinked and looked up. "What?"

"Let's just assume for a minute that everything's going to work out. Our treatment plan will be successful, and you'll eventually be able to completely control your magic. We've talked before about how chaos magic seems to have the potential to be really amazing, right? So just assume that someday you're going to be an amazing wizard who can use any kind of magic he wants to. What would you do then? Is there anything you think would be fun to try out, if you had that sort of ability?"

"Anything...fun?"

Thenio was a little taken aback by the question. He'd spent most of his life being told that magic study should be serious and practical. It wasn't for playing around and having fun. That was something that other magic users got to do. Ones that were smarter and more talented than he was. Ones that didn't fail their entrance exams or get kicked out of magic school. Ones that didn't have stupid, unstable, dangerous magic affinities.

There were aspects of magic he enjoyed, of course. Like working out enchantment designs or learning about magic beasts. But actually having fun using magic...?

"Um...can it be anything at all? Even something really silly and impractical?"

Bero gave him an encouraging smile. "Even better if it's silly and impractical."

"Then..." Thenio began, looking back down at the book he was holding and fidgeting with the cover a little. "Well...when I was little...my dad took me to a magic circus one time. And...um...they had magic acrobats there. I thought...I thought that looked really fun...." He glanced up tentatively as he finished, wondering if Bero was going to laugh at him.

"Magic acrobatics, huh?" To his surprise, Bero nodded, looking thoughtful. "That's a good choice. I know someone who does that kind of thing, actually." He gave Thenio a playful grin. "He's a bit of a grouch, but maybe I can con him into giving you some lessons sometime." His expression grew a little more serious. "All right, magic acrobatics. Try to focus on that. Believe that it's really going to happen someday. It doesn't matter how silly it feels. What matters is that you have something to look forward to. I know you've been having a rough couple of months, and the bad news about your magic affinity seems to just keep getting worse. So you need something to hang onto, even if it's just a silly dream. All right?"

Thenio nodded, biting his lip. He could see Bero's point, but...it felt pretty hollow to talk about dreams for the future when he was holding a book filled with the records of his dead predecessors.

After Bero left, Thenio went into his room and leaned back against the door with a sigh. He simply stood there for a few minutes, holding the heavy book in his arms and staring absently at the ceiling. Then he walked across the room, opened one of the drawers in his desk, and shoved the book into the back of it. Then he closed the drawer and went to bed.

Bero was probably right. It was better to hold onto dreams a little longer.