"The rest of you don't need to go in with me," Ariom said as he parked the carriage near the enchanter's guild building. "I need to pick something up from the guild archives, and it's not a good idea for Thenio to go in there. That place positively reeks of protective magic. And since you two aren't guild certified wizards, they'll just make you stay in the waiting room anyway. So you might as well wait out here. It shouldn't take that long." He pulled out a small leather pouch and handed it to Seyli. "Here. The dragons are probably getting hungry, so why don't the four of you go get something from the food stalls over there."

They were currently in the guild district, where most of Kamari's guild branch offices were located. It was also sometimes called the guild park because in between the buildings were beautifully landscaped areas with walking paths, picnic tables, and small plazas where food vendors could set up their stalls. Thenio's family had come here for lunch occasionally in the past when his parents had needed to renew their assistant's licenses.

He'd also come here with his parents and Ariom a few weeks ago to get his own license and to process his employment contract. But his magic suppression rate had still been fairly high at the time, and his parents had been rather nervous about the whole thing, so they'd just completed all the paperwork and left without taking any time to enjoy the scenery.

They all got out of the carriage, and then Ariom headed toward the enchanter's guild building while Thenio and Seyli took the dragons over to the nearest group of food stalls. It was late morning now, and the lunch rush hadn't started yet. Some of the stalls were still setting up for the day, and there were only a few other customers there.

"What do you want to eat, Iggy?" Seyli asked as they entered the plaza and started walking past the stalls. "Do you see anything that looks good?"

"Um...um...." Iggy was craning his neck in all directions, seemingly trying to look at everything at once. He also stuck his little black nose in the air, sniffing furiously. After a minute, he turned his head to the left. "There's a nice smell coming from over there!"

"Over there?" Seyli turned to look in that direction. "Oh, are you talking about that chicken stand?"

"Mmm! It smells like tasty chicken!" Iggy said, waving his tail enthusiastically.

There was a stall set up on the other side of the plaza, where a middle-aged woman was tending a rotisserie grill with a number of roasting chickens lined up on it. When they got closer, Thenio could also see a younger woman cutting up vegetables at a counter in the back. The two looked enough alike that they were probably mother and daughter.

"Welcome!" the older woman greeted them with a friendly smile. "What can I get you? The chicken needs just a few more minutes to cook, but it's best when it's fresh off the grill, so I promise it will be worth the wait."

"Let's see...." Seyli consulted the menu that was posted on one side of the stall. "What do you put in your chicken salad?"

"Shredded chicken, cheese, mushrooms, lettuce, and chopped seasonal vegetables. We normally put a tangy honey sauce on it, but we can hold the sauce and add extra chicken, if you want to order it for your little ones."

Seyli looked between the two dragons. "Iggy? Tava? Do you want chicken salad?"

"Mmm!" they replied in unison, both tails swishing happily.

"All right. We'll get a large salad, and they can share. Then...I guess I'll have one of the chicken flatbread wraps." Seyli turned to Thenio. "What about you? We can still look around the other stalls, too, if you don't want anything here."

"No, this is fine. Um...I'll have a flatbread wrap, too."

They waited a few minutes while the two women prepared their order. They had obviously been doing this for a long time, and Thenio watched their well-practiced actions with interest. Iggy also seemed to enjoy watching the cooking process, especially when the older woman pulled out a pair of metal claws that she used to shred up the meat of one of the freshly cooked chickens.

"Thenio, look! We could do that at home! You can cook a chicken, and I'll tear it up with my claws!" he said excitedly.

"I think doing a whole chicken that way might be a bit much..." Thenio told him, glancing dubiously at the tiny claws that Iggy was brandishing. "Let's try it out on a smaller piece first, all right?"

"Mmm! Okay!" The little dragon didn't seem at all discouraged by Thenio's doubts about his chicken-shredding abilities.

When their food was ready, Seyli paid for it with some coins that she took out of the pouch Ariom had given her. Then they carried everything over to a picnic table some distance away from the plaza.

Seyli reached up to unclip Tava's leash and then held out her arm to let the purple dragon climb down onto the table.

"Since there isn't anyone else over here, it should be fine to take their leashes off for a while," she told Thenio. "I know you haven't interacted with magic beasts much until recently, so you're probably not aware of this, but things like leashes and harnesses are really more for other people than they are for the magic beasts themselves." She looked at Iggy with a wry smile. "Well...maybe younger magic beasts need a little help restraining themselves sometimes.... But it's mostly to let other people know that someone's looking after them properly. Magic beasts are protected by law, of course, but there will always be idiots who want to cause trouble for one reason or another."

"Ah...right. I've heard about things like familiar baiting," Thenio said, nodding. "I'll try to be careful."

Since wizards tended to be well-off, there would occasionally be con artists who tried to provoke a familiar into attacking them and then demanded compensation.

Well. That mostly happened with familiars that were known to have more aggressive temperaments, like gryphons or fellwolves. It wasn't likely that anyone would go after an adorable little dragon like Iggy.

Thenio set the salad bowl he was carrying down on the table and then reached up to take off Iggy's leash.

As soon as he was free, the little dragon jumped down onto the table next to Tava and started sniffing eagerly at the chicken salad. "Can we eat it now?"

"Yes, go ahead." Seyli laughed as the two dragons immediately began attacking the salad with great enthusiasm, getting bits of chicken and lettuce on their faces. Then she sat down on the bench next to the table. "Come sit down," she told Thenio, smiling and patting the bench.

He sat down a short distance away from her, feeling a little awkward. He wasn't sitting too close, was he? He didn't want to make Seyli feel uncomfortable. But she'd been the one who told him to sit next to her in the first place. She'd tell him if he was too close...right...? And wouldn't it look unfriendly if he moved further away now? How close were you supposed to sit to a girl that you'd only known for a few weeks but were sort of friends with? He didn't remember anything about this in the etiquette rules his mother had taught him. Formal etiquette didn't really cover things like exactly where you were supposed to sit on a picnic bench in the guild park when there were dragons chomping down chicken salad on the table in front of you....

"Here. Here's yours." Seyli interrupted Thenio's frenetic thoughts by handing over the flatbread wrap she'd been carrying for him.

"Oh." Thenio took it. "Thanks." He stared at the wrap for a moment and then quietly started eating.

Iggy's nose hadn't been wrong. The chicken was delicious. It was tender and juicy, and the seasoning accented the flavor of the meat without overpowering it. Thenio wondered if he'd be able to replicate it. He didn't remember seeing any kind of rotisserie cooking tool in the kitchen at Ariom's house, but seeing how much Iggy was enjoying the chicken, it wouldn't be too surprising if one showed up in the near future....

By the time they had emptied out the paper bowl the salad had come in, both dragons were a bit of a mess. Iggy had even gotten a piece of mushroom stuck on one of his horns somehow. But the two of them took turns licking the bits of food off each other's faces, and Seyli took a cleaning cloth out of Iggy's space pocket to finish wiping them down with.

Thenio gathered up the salad bowl and the paper napkins that the flatbread wraps had been served in. "I'll go get rid of these."

There were some trash bins on the edge of the picnic area. He walked over to them and tossed the things in. Then he paused for a moment, looking up at a nearby tree. Several crows were perched on an overhanging branch, looking back at him with curious expressions. One of them let out a short caw, almost like a greeting, which made Thenio smile.

Those crows would make a nice picture. He did his best to capture the scene in his memory so that he could make a drawing of it later.

"It's getting away! Catch it!"

A sudden shout from nearby made Thenio start a little and look over. Something small and white streaked across the ground in front of him, with three boys running after it. They looked around Lem's age—maybe eleven or twelve.

And the white shape? It was an obviously frightened cat.

Thenio frowned. He really didn't like the look of this....

The cat bolted across the grass and disappeared into an alleyway between two nearby buildings, with the boys trailing after it.

"Hey, it went in one of those boxes!" the boy in front called out, pointing toward the alley and glancing back at his companions. "We can trap it in there!"

"Good," the boy at the rear replied, panting. "That stupid cat! It thinks it can just bite my hand like that? I'm going to burn all its fur off when I get hold of it!"

Thenio's frown deepened, and he started following after the running boys.

When he reached the entrance to the alleyway, the boys were surrounding a pile of wooden crates next to a large door in one of the buildings that looked like it was probably a delivery entrance. One of the boys was kneeling on the ground, peering into one of the bottom crates.

"Can you see it?" one of the other boys asked.

"Yeah...." The kneeling boy's face screwed up in frustration. "But it's clear at the back. I don't think I can reach it. We need to find a stick or something...."

"Hey!" Thenio said loudly, causing all three boys to turn their heads in his direction. "What are you trying to do to that cat?"

Two of the boys looked nervous at his question. But the third—the one who had been threatening to burn the cat's fur off—simply crossed his arms and scowled at Thenio.

"What's it to you, huh?" he retorted. "Is it your cat?"

"No," Thenio said evenly, walking closer to them. "But I don't think it's yours, either. And I happen to like cats, so I'm not going to just stand by and watch you harass one."

The boy sneered. "Yeah? But I count one of you and three of us. So what are you going to do about it? Huh?"

They glared at each other for a long moment.

Thenio obviously knew he was outnumbered, but he wasn't terribly worried. He was several years older and had always taken his physical training seriously, so he was quite a lot bigger than the other boys were. And two of them clearly weren't eager for a confrontation. The negative affect his magic had on the people around him did have the advantage of making bullies like these want to leave him alone. So there was a good chance they were just bluffing and would back off if he asserted himself.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He was just forgetting one important point....

He'd grown up in a non-wizard neighborhood. So he'd never encountered a bully who knew how to fight using magic before....

"You get in my way, and I'll burn you and the stupid cat!" The boy pointed his finger threateningly at Thenio. A spurt of magic fire appeared, wrapping around his outstretched arm.

By normal standards, it wasn't really that impressive. The boy's magic power level probably wasn't any higher than Thenio's was, and his magic fire was about as threatening as the sparks Iggy used to light fireplace kindling.

But even that much was enough to be dangerous if there happened to be a chaos morph nearby.

Thenio took a step back before he could stop himself, although he realized immediately that it was a serious mistake. The expressions on all three of the boys' faces changed, and even the two who had previously acted timid were suddenly wearing derisive grins.

They'd smelled blood.

"Haha! You're scared of that? Here you were talking big, but you're really just a magicless loser, aren't you?" The fire user took a large step closer, his face twisted with perverse delight.

Thenio frowned. Under different circumstances, he might have given this kid a talking to about not looking down on people who couldn't use magic. But right now it was more important to get out of this situation before his own magic went out of control. He still had his insulation bands on, but they were designed to protect him from ambient magic, not direct contact with magic power. There was a limit to how much they could absorb.

He glanced toward the wooden crates, feeling conflicted. He didn't want to abandon the poor cat, especially since the boys would probably be even more cruel to it now that he'd gotten them riled up. But an explosion in this narrow space would be bad for everyone here, cat included. Maybe the best thing to do would be to hurry back to where Seyli and the dragons were and try to convince them to help. Tava and Iggy wouldn't be afraid of that magic flame in the slightest.

Reluctantly, Thenio started backing away from the trio of boys.

"Ha! You're running away now? Idiot. Why'd you come after us and mouth off if you're just a weakling who's scared of magic?" The boy with the fire magic looked over at the other two. "Hey, don't let him get away! This pathetic loser needs to pay the price for messing with us!"

Thenio tried to run, but a ball of fire magic hit the ground just ahead of him, making him dodge to one side. That slowed him down and gave the other boys a chance to catch up to him. Another well-aimed fireball pushed him over toward the wall on one side of the alley, and the three of them rushed to surround him and hold him there.

Thenio gritted his teeth and looked around, trying to stay calm and assess the situation. There was a wall behind him and one boy on either side to prevent him from escaping. The boy with the fire affinity was in front of him, wearing a smug look on his face. He was clearly the leader of the group—probably because he had the best magic ability. Thenio hated to admit it, but the boy did have some decent skills. He might not be putting out that much power, but he was an annoyingly good shot. And the three of them were strangely well-coordinated, which made Thenio strongly suspect that he wasn't the first person they'd trapped like this.

At least they'd moved a little further away from the crates where the cat was hiding. It would probably be safe from magic explosions now....

"Hey, where's all that confidence you had earlier?" the fire magic boy said with a sneer. "You came in here all ready to boss us around, didn't you? So why aren't you bossing us now, you cowardly loser?"

"I wasn't trying to boss you around." Thenio did his best to keep his voice calm. "I was just trying to stop you from torturing a cat. I don't care what you do as long as you're not hurting anyone."

"Yeah? And what if we want to hurt someone? That stupid cat bit me. It hurt me. So I think I deserve to hurt it back if I want to. What are you going to do about that, loser?"

Thenio was tempted to ask what the boy had done in the first place to make the cat bite him, but he held back. Instead, his mind raced through options for how to handle this mess.

Trying to fight was practically guaranteed to result in a magic explosion.

Relying on Ariom's name...probably wouldn't work. He didn't have an easy way to prove that he really was under the care of a grandmaster wizard, and he doubted they'd just take his word for it.

Shouting for help...might work. But if nobody was close enough to hear or willing to come, it might only serve to egg the little psychos on.

Trying to appease them and beg for mercy...would definitely just egg them on....

"Look, if you want to beat me up, go ahead," he said finally. "Just don't use magic. It's too dangerous."

All three of them burst into laughter.

"Listen to this guy," the boy on the right said, still sniggering. "Such a scaredy-cat. 'Magic is too dangerous.' If magic is so scary, what are you even doing in the guild district, idiot?"

"He's probably some kind of country bumpkin who just came to the capital for the first time," the boy on the left chimed in. "I bet he thinks magic is scary because he's never even seen a proper wizard before."

"Right! That must be why he loves animals so much. Because he was born in a barn and grew up in a pigpen!"

"Sorry to disappoint you, but I've actually lived in Kamari my whole life..." Thenio said dryly. "And I'm not saying that magic is dangerous in general. I'm saying it's dangerous to use magic around me. Dangerous for me and for the three of you."

"What kind of nonsense is that? Why would it be dangerous for us?" the fire magic user scoffed.

He was scoffing, but he wasn't attacking. Good.

Thenio wasn't under any illusions that he'd actually be able to reason with them. But there was a small chance that they'd listen to his warning, just out of self-interest. And trying to convince them would help accomplish his real goal: stalling for time in the hopes that Seyli or Ariom would come looking for him soon.

It was kind of a pathetic tactic. But it was the best he could do at the moment.

"Because I have a chaos affinity. It's a rare affinity that's really unstable. Getting exposed to too much external magic power makes my magic go out of control. I got kicked out of the Royal Magic Academy a couple of months ago because my magic kept exploding during classes. Here, look." Thenio held up his hands so they could see the leather straps on his wrists. "These are magic insulation and suppression bands. I have to wear them all the time to help keep my magic stable. But the insulation part is still experimental, and it can't block that much magic yet. So if you keep using magic around me, you'll eventually overload it, and my magic will explode." He looked around at the three of them, doing his best to appear sincere. "The four of us could all get serious magic burns. And magic burns hurt. A lot. Believe me, I've gotten loads of them."

The boys looked at each other.

"Do you think he's telling the truth?" the boy on the left asked hesitantly.

The fire magic boy frowned. "Of course not!" He looked back at Thenio. "My dad's an executive for the enchanter's guild. He knows everything about magic. And I've never heard him say anything about chaos affinities. You just made that up, you rotten liar."

"Like I said, chaos affinities are really rare," Thenio repeated patiently. "There have only been about half a dozen since the Great War. So not many people know about them. I'm not saying that your father doesn't know," he added quickly as the boy's face twisted in anger. "If he's a guild executive, he probably does know. But he probably thought it wasn't important enough to mention to you. There haven't been any other chaos morphs for about sixty years, and nobody knew that I was one until a couple of months ago. There wouldn't be much point in telling you about chaos affinities if there aren't any around, right?"

The boy hesitated for a moment, but then he scowled again. "I don't believe you! If chaos affinities were real, my dad would definitely tell me!"

Thenio suppressed a sigh. "It's on my guild identification badge. I can show—"

"We don't need to see it," the fire affinity boy said loudly, cutting him off. He gave Thenio a sadistic grin. "You said chaos morphs explode when you use a lot of magic around them, right? Then there's an easy way to check."

He held out his arms. A second magic flame appeared, so that both arms were covered.

"Wait...I told you...stop!"

Thenio raised his hands and sent out his own magic power to form an unsteady shield that blocked the burst of flames that the boy shot at him. It was enough to keep the magic from burning him directly, but as the fire surrounded him, he heard a popping sound coming from first one wrist and then the other.

His insulation enchantments had just broken.

Within seconds, Thenio felt his magic power start to swell and distort. The magic power he was using to shield himself shuddered, and the heat around him increased as some of the flames started leaking through.

He glanced around desperately, looking for anything he could use to stop the attack. The two boys on either side of him were watching with uncertain expressions, and the boy on the left was backing away slightly.

Were they unnerved enough that he could get past one of them if he tried to run? If the boy he ran at tackled him, he'd get hurt more seriously if Thenio's magic exploded, but...well. It wasn't like he hadn't warned them. And he was going to lose control any moment now. He was out of time to worry about the consequences.

He was just about to make a break for it, when suddenly....

What looked like a cloud of dark grey smoke billowed down from above. As it hit him, Thenio felt it sweep away all the rampaging magic inside of him.

There was a flapping sound, and he felt a familiar set of tiny paws land on his shoulder.

"Don't bully Thenio, you big meanie-faces!" Iggy shouted, glaring around at the boys and lashing his tail angrily. "Don't you know sending magic at him will make him go boom and get hurt?!"

The little dragon opened his mouth wide and breathed out another cloud of grey smoke in the direction of the fire magic boy, causing the flames on his arms to vanish.

As the smoke cleared, there was a loud growl coming from Thenio's left. Tava was standing a short distance away, snarling at the three boys. The usually sweet and gentle orchid-colored dragon looked surprisingly ferocious, with her ears back and her teeth bared. She had her wings held up in a threatening pose, and most of her scales were sticking out, making her look a bit like a large purple pinecone. Her tail, like Iggy's, was whipping around angrily.

The three boys all froze, staring at Tava with their eyes wide.

"Dragons?" the fire magic boy said, looking shocked. "Oy! This loser is with some real wizards. Let's get out of here!"

Completely abandoning his earlier tough demeanor, he turned and ran down the alley, away from Tava. His two companions followed closely behind him. As they disappeared from view, Seyli appeared at the other end of the alley, panting a little as though she'd been running hard.

She paused for a few seconds, looking from the backs of the fleeing boys to her puffed up and growling dragon. Then she hurried over to where Thenio was standing.

"Thenio! Are you all right? What happened?"

"I...yeah. I'm okay." Thenio let out a long breath and sagged against the wall behind him. "The dragons got here in time, so...I'm okay." He reached up and gave Iggy a grateful pat. “Thanks, Iggy. Tava. You two just saved me a trip to the hospital. And some minor magic burns, at the very least....”

"What happened?" Seyli repeated, crouching down to stroke Tava, who had come over to them. Her wings and ears were back in their normal position, but her scales were still sticking out a little, and she was glancing around warily. "What were you fighting with those boys about?"

"I'll show you." Thenio was still feeling a little shaky, but he'd caught his breath and calmed down some now. "Here, take Iggy for a minute."

He lifted the little dragon off his shoulder and handed him over to Seyli. Then he went over to the stack of crates and got down on his hands and knees to peer into the one the boys had been looking at earlier. Sure enough, he could make out the huddled shape of a light-colored cat in one of the back corners.

Thenio lowered himself to his stomach in order to stretch his arm as far as possible into the box. The cat growled a little as he reached out to it, but he held his hand in front of it and waited patiently. After a moment, the cat stopped growling and sniffed his fingers cautiously. He reached a little further and lightly brushed the cat's cheek with his fingertip. It flinched back at first, but then it relaxed a little as he gently stroked the side of its face.

"It's all right," he said softly. "You're safe now. The guys that were trying to hurt you are gone. I'm here to help you, okay?"

It seemed to be spooked but not particularly afraid of him. It probably wasn't a stray, then.

Thenio slowly moved his hand up to the top of the cat's head and started lightly scratching around the base of its ears. The cat seemed to enjoy that, and it relaxed a little more. With a mental apology to it, Thenio moved his hand a little further back and then quickly gripped the scruff of the cat's neck. It made a small squeak of protest and squirmed a little, but he was able to flip it onto its side and slide it carefully out of the crate.

As it came out into the light, the cat glared at him and thumped its tail against the ground.

Thenio stroked its head soothingly with his other hand. "Hey, calm down. I'm sorry, but I needed to get you out of there. Everything's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

This was definitely somebody's lost pet. Thenio had thought it was white at first, but now that he could see it clearly, it was actually a pale cream color with light brown on its face and paws and rows of light brown spots covering its body. That wasn't a pattern that you typically saw on stray cats. The coat was also soft and smooth, albeit a bit dirty, which indicated the cat had been well cared for until recently.

Thenio carefully raised himself into a sitting position and pulled the cat onto his lap. Then he looked over at Seyli. She and the dragons were all staring at the cat with rather surprised expressions.

"Hey, you're studying to be a veterinarian, right? Do you know anything about cats?"