>Somewhere in the Kingdom of The Sea_

Cuttlefish grunted as he hauled himself out of the water, having already tossed the scrolls and small sealed claypot of ink be brought with him onto the rock outcropping he was clambering onto.

He was here, on some meaningless rock in the middle of nowhere, to do something that he'd never done before, but had wanted to do for a while.

He was going to write a scroll.

A scroll about scavengers.

Well, he was going to try to, anyway.

He brought with him a single blank scroll he'd managed to pester Mako into getting the last time she went with the enclavers to market their deepwater fish to a more mainstream SeaWing settlement.

He brought a small thing of ink to use to mark on the scroll.

And he brought the Scavengers: Everything You Need to Know! scroll so he could use it for reference.

He wanted to make a similar, but shorter, version of it exclusively about the boat-things that he and his friends came across. And that got him into so much trouble.

He flopped onto the sun-baked rock with a sigh. The other reason he came all the way out here, alone, was to catch a break.

His mother had decided that, since he had nothing better to do, it would be best for Cuttlefish to start joining in on the fish hunts more often.

Something that was way, WAY more exhausting and difficult than he would have anticipated.

Since when are those big fish so fast? Or strong?

At least his experience so far had been better than it had been for Clam and Oyster, who had practically begged Barnacle and the usual hunt lead Sailfish to accompany Cuttlefish.

Oyster had already been attacked by a small shark, which she barely warded off with her tail. Clam had already made a right fool of himself when he dove headlong into a giant school of small fish, as if he actually expected to catch some of them doing that, and ended up getting smacked by a sailfish they were actually trying to hunt. And then he got smacked by Sailfish for screwing up.

The only embarrassing thing that happened to Cuttlefish so far was that he got outmaneuvered by a tuna. Something they were apparently pretty good at.

Now though, he had some time to himself. And he was going to try to use it to write.

He unfurled the small blank scroll on a flat part of the above-water rock outcrop and fangled the claypot until he got it open. He set it down and stared at the blank scroll.

Now what?

He'd never written anything like a scroll before. He wasn't sure what to do first.

He knew he wanted to write about the boat-things, which he would be doing entirely from memory, but he didn't know how to start.

He kinda figured scroll-writing would be easy.

Well, kind of easy.

He examined the blank scroll closer. It was made from parchment, nothing unusual there. All dragon scrolls were made from parchment.

Basically dried, treated animal skin. In other words.

A random thought occurred to him. Is this scroll made from scavenger skin?

He'd never read of scavenger skin being used for that purpose, but he supposed it was entirely possible.

Cuttlefish sniffed at the scroll. It didn't really smell like the scavengers he saw and smelled- the ones on that boat-thing.

On the other talon, parchment never tended to smell anything like the animals it used to be.

On the third talon, those scavengers also had a really strong smell. He figured there was a good chance he would be able to still detect it, if they were a baseline for how scavengers usually smelled.

On the fourth talon, if all scavengers had that distinct of a scent, he didn't really know how they all hadn't been hunted down by now. It would be almost impossible for them to hide.

That aside, the idea of writing on a scroll possibly made from scavenger skin made him slightly uncomfortable for some reason. He couldn't pin down exactly why. Perhaps it was because he was intending to write about scavengers?

He shook his head. What was he supposed to be thinking about?

Eventually, he heard a splashing and spluttering noise coming from below him.

“Pfft, pleh! Hi, Cuttlefish!”

He looked over and watched as Oyster popped her head above the water and spat out water.

“What're you doing all the way out here?”

How did you find me all the way out here?

“Uhh… writing.” He replied.

She clambered out of the water and sat down beside him, peering at his blank scroll and dripping everywhere.

“Huh. Invigorating.” The dark blue dragonet remarked. She looked over to the other scroll he had with him, the scroll they read before setting out on their whole metal boat-thing hunting trip.

“Wait, are you still obsessing over the scavenger thing? Cuttlefish, that was forever ago!”

“Hmph. It wasn't that long ago.” He retorted.

His friends and the enclave at large had long since lost interest with the scavenger-boat-things. Pretty much once the small one they dragged over here left on its own and never came back.

It was a little bit strange, if he thought about it. How quickly everyone else stopped caring. To be certain, he knew that scavengers were just useless everyday animals to dragons, but that hulking metal-boat-thing was anything but ordinary.

Surely just because something was made by, or has to do with scavengers, doesn't mean that it's automatically not worth bothering about?

He wasn't sure. Not many other dragons seemed to share that opinion. Perhaps he was simply the weird one in that regard.

He was broken from his thoughts when he saw the water beside their rock becoming agitated. And was that dim flashing he saw?

Instinctively, he dropped from his sitting position flat onto the rock. Just as a light blue blob shot out of the water straight at where he just was.

“-THOUGHT YOU COULD HIDE FROM ME, HA!” The blob roared as it collided square on with Oyster.

“CLAM-!” She screamed as both her and the blob smashed back into the sea on the other side of the rock, creating a massive splash as they went.

Cuttlefish rolled his eyes as he was sprayed by water droplets. This was precisely why he tried to sneak out here alone.

The siblings may be his only other dragonet company at the enclave and his friends, but they were just that. Dragonets.

Even as soon as he resumed his normal sitting position, did Clam scramble out of the water and onto the rock.

“Ack! No fair! You know what mother said about slashing at wings!” he hissed back at Oyster, just reappearing from the waves herself.

“‘Anything goes in a fight, except losing.’” She snarled back.

“Well you-! …Oh, hey Cuttlefish. What're you up to?” Clam turned away from his irate sister, pointing his attention instead to the scrolls and inkpot that somehow hadn't been dislodged or ruined by their antics.

“Wait… scroll stuff…? EW, WHAT!? Are you doing scrollwork!? VOLUNTARILY!?”

Cuttlefish tried not to roll his eyes at his offended friend. “No. I was trying to write about those scavenger-boat-things we found.”

“Ugh. Cuttlefish, no!” Clam flopped down and rolled onto his back dramatically. “You can't become boring! Please don't be boring like Oyster.”

The dragon in question stamped his tail with a talon, causing him to recoil violently and flounder around like a fish stranded on land with a yowl that could be heard for miles. Immediately tumbling back into the water with an unceremonious splash.

This time Cuttlefish did let himself roll his eyes. He had no chance of being able to write anything at all with this.

Oyster resumed her sitting position next to Cuttlefish with a huff. Apparently he must have looked more forlorn than intended, because she poked him with her tail.

“Hey. You alright? Sorry about a certain dragon being so annoying.” She shot a pointed glare at her brother, who was once again clambering onto the rock, muttering something about nasty-tasting mollusks.

He sat down on the other side of Cuttlefish with a splat, continuing to drip seawater everywhere.

He peered at the blank scroll in front of them.

“Huh. Where'd you get the blank scroll anyway? These things aren't cheap, according to father.” He said.

“Mako got it from the last market trip.” He replied.

“Oh, alright.”

For the first time since the siblings' appearance, there was a quiet between them.

“Oh! Speaking of Mako, did you get any news from the Summer Palace about your father?” Clam asked.

Cuttlefish withheld a sigh. He kinda hoped that topic wouldn't come up, but maybe it would be good to talk about it a little bit.

“No. Same as last time. Mako said she asked some guards at the market they went to, not being able to go all the way to the Summer Palace again. She said one of them actually recognized his name, but didn't know anything about his current situation. Or that anything of note had been said about him.”

“Oh. Is that good, or bad?” Oyster asked.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

This time Cuttlefish did let himself sigh. “I don't know. Mako said that response isn't any different than the last one, or the first one.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She said.

“Don't be.” Cuttlefish replied. “It's not good news, but it's not bad news either.”

Besides, none of this was even abnormal in the slightest for the relatives of SeaWings who are pulled into the general army. If anything, he was lucky to have even received an ‘official’ response at all. Even if it was little more than a non-answer.

Still, there was something about this that had him, and especially his mother, nervous.

There wasn't anything he could do about it, though. Just go about his life, hope his father is safe, and hope neither he nor anyone else close to him gets pulled into the army as well.

***

>Nearby a scavenger den_

Argonaut was starting to get angsty.

He had come to suspect he was playing a game of sorts.

Or perhaps it would be more apt to say a game was being played with him, he wasn't fully sure.

But then again, there were a lot of things he wasn't fully sure about anymore.

Not least of which was his sanity.

But there was one thing that Argonaut was still sure about. One thing that he was growing increasingly sure about every moons-cursed day he was stuck here.

One thing that was beginning to gnaw at his wingtips and make his tail twitchy. Something that both his waking mind and now dragon instincts themselves were beginning to yell at him.

That he needed to escape. And soon.

He hated it here.

Today was a day identical to many days prior, and he suspected it would be identical to more to come. He once again woke to find himself chained to the dirt, once again received a fish and bucket-thing of clean water, and once again was pestered for most of the day by that freaky mimicking scavenger.

He kind of regretted that day when he responded to and even reciprocated the sparse, strange dragon sounds chattered at him by that original scavenger. Because now it spent much of the day almost every day trying to pester more words out of him.

To make matters worse, there were now a BUNCH of scavengers that ganged up and joined in. And they wielded a bunch of strange stuff with their paws. Some of them had seemingly endless amounts of those white flat things with simple pictures to show to him, others had weird tiny blackish sticks that they held against these small flat pad-things and moved rapidly, as if scribbling something. There was also this one that always had a weird box thing with a line-thing coming out of it, with a weird intricate metal-looking-thing attached to the line that the scavenger held in one paw. That scavenger seemed to have made a habit of pointing the metal thing at him and doing something to the box that made small shapes inside it spin around whenever he said anything. He couldn't fathom why.

As usual, Argonaut spotted the small group of mimicking scavengers approaching him. He rolled his eyes.

As usual, the original mimicking scavenger approached him first. The ‘haanss’ scavenger. The loud one.

That scavenger was seemingly incapable of shutting up whenever it was around him. It was almost always jabbering about something. Either it was stringing together a bunch of mimicked words from him back at him, or it was spluttering out its natural noises at him or at the other scavengers.

And it made its noises really fast, too. Fast perhaps even for the normal rate scavengers made their noises at each other. It was almost as if the lanky ape had an endless waterfall of energy. Annoying.

Maybe it's a mammal thing? They tend to be more hyper than reptiles. Or maybe it's just a scavenger thing. Or maybe again it's just a THIS scavenger thing.

Argonaut sometimes liked to imagine the other scavengers were even a little bit visibly tired of the first mimicking scavenger’s constant chattering. He knew that was just him projecting his emotions, though.

Argonaut realized that he'd still been referring to the first mimicking scavenger as just that in his head. Despite said scavenger seemingly trying to wheedle him into making that ‘haanss’ sound almost every other day. He couldn't really think of a logical reason to do otherwise, though. Unless the mimicking scavengers grew so rapidly in numbers that he wouldn't be able to keep track of them anymore.

He shook his neck and head out with a snort. What a terrible thought.

The scavenger immediately started making its noises:“(Hallo, Wasserdrache! Hallo,) Arrrgo-naut! (GUTEN TAG!)” It practically shouted, peering at him with the strange wide bright-blue, almost cheerful eyes it had.

He shivered involuntarily. It still felt so wrong to hear a dragon word, his name no less, pronounced by a scavenger. Not just that, but pronounced directly after it made a bunch of its own noises in a series only made it sound weirder.

The scavenger quickly plopped itself onto the ground, crossing its two lanky legs across each other in front of it in a way that looked painful to him, but didn't seem to bother the scavenger at all.

He shook his head. So weird.

As the scavenger started pulling out small white things with pictures scrawled on them, as usual.

But something was different this time.

With a chill shooting up his spine and crawling across his wings, Argonaut realized it had sat down closer to him than it always did. Close enough that he could reach it with his teeth.

The scavengers had finally made a blunder in their routine.

A blunder he could, should, exploit.

He could thrust his head forward and bite down hard before the scavenger could react.

He stared hard at the scavenger as he ran through his options in his head. His entire body and mind are now on high alert.

On one talon, he could sink his teeth in and throttle the scavenger pretty quickly.

He didn't know exactly how long that would take for the scavenger to suffocate. He'd mostly hunted fish and other sea creatures all his life. But there were plenty of SeaWings at the palace who certainly knew. Either way, it surely couldn't take long.

After that, then what? Throttling a scavenger wouldn't get these chains off him.

However, doing that would certainly prompt a response from the other scavengers watching him. If he pounced, there was a very good chance that the other scavengers would finally act like reasonable prey animals for once and flee.

If that happened, he could probably free himself from these chains. Many of the metallic links holding him down had been loosened or even removed in a few cases after he started getting regular visits from the mimicking scavengers. Allowing him enough freedom of movement to keep his joints from stiffening.

If the surrounding scavengers all ran away, he could use that slight range of movement to leverage the small poles holding the chains down out, freeing himself.

Alternatively, the scavengers could try to attack him. Entirely possible, given their race’s track record.

But if they want to do that, they should carry weapons more dangerous than those silly wooden sticks they're always holding. At least the metal claws LOOK sharp!

Even scavengers aren't dumb enough to think they can bludgeon a dragon to death with thin wooden sticks.

And if they were, he was certain he would be able to break free from the chains before they could so much as bruise him.

As a plus, he could even get a meal more substantial than the daily small fish the other scavengers always produced.

All in all, The SeaWing patroller was finding his prospects of escape pretty good.

Better than he could probably hope for in the future.

All he had to do was take the opportunity.

Right?

Even as the muscles in his neck were already tensing, preparing to strike, Argonaut did something that no good dragon should ever, ever do at a time like this.

He hesitated.

The scavenger finished arranging the small white sheets into a neat square formation on the ground and looked up to him with gigantic eyes. Waving its little harmless paws at the sheets and jabbering at him.

At the final moment, Argonaut heard a voice. A small, almost imperceptible, unfamiliar yet intimately familiar voice in his head- or perhaps more accurately, in his heart, telling him not to do it.

A tiny voice that made his chest twinge told him- pleaded with him- not to kill the little scavenger.

A small voice that went against Argonaut’s only means to escape this torment.

A soft voice that went against his only hope to get back to his fellow SeaWings at the Summer Palace.

A faint voice that went against what felt like every dragon instinct he had.

And he listened.

He listened as the voice told him the scavenger he is about to kill hadn't done anything to harm him… only given him his only source of entertainment since he woke up here.

He listened as the voice made him remember how… cute the scavenger looked whenever it got so wing-flapping excited every time Argonaut begrudgingly repeated one of its own noises back at it.

He listened as the voice made him think about how much the scavenger’s… admittedly pretty eyes reminded him of the beautiful blue scales of his beloved mate.

He watched as the voice made him imagine what the little scavenger before him would look like with its body ripped open… its life pouring out into the dirt.

And so the great apex predator was at an impasse. Either follow his roaring survival instincts, a part of any dragon as important as even their scales and wings to their identity and status as such a magnificent, powerful creature; and pounce on this chance at freedom.

Or listen to a still, small voice that sounded suspiciously similar to the one that said it was a little weird that a scavenger could string together small sentences when it was only supposed to be mimicking what he was saying like a parrot.

A voice that said to spare the hapless creature.

A voice that sounded as if it wasn't listened to very often.

What does he do? He'd never experienced this before! He hadn't been trained for this at the barracks! He'd never felt this kind of… confliction!

His frill raised, ears pinning themselves against his skull.

Thoughts of flying through the sky flashed before his mind's eye.

Vision of traversing the sea currents filled his head.

He thought about his victorious return to the Summer Palace, triumphantly proclaiming his survival and victory to his fellow sea dragons.

He thought about seeing Dolphin and Cuttlefish again.

He thought about himself taking back his rightful place as the most powerful creature on the face of this world, sticking it to these pathetic monkeys.

Thoughts of blood filled his head.

He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.

He felt as if every muscle in his body was quivering.

He… He… He…

He obeyed the voice.

Something seemed to go snap inside him.

He wasn't going to try and take back his freedom.

He wasn't going to fight back.

He wasn't going to kill the little scavenger.

WHAT KIND OF DRAGON ARE YOU!? The instincts furiously roared.

Shame burned hot like a fumarole within him.

What kind of dragon am I?

The small voice gave no reply.

All over his body, Argonaut felt taut muscles loosen. He realized he'd been staring hard at the scavenger that caused this whole mess the whole time he was having his internal ordeal.

A wary sounding bark coming from one of the other scavengers drew the little scavenger’s, and Argonaut’s, gaze out of the staring contest he didn't realize he was having.

It turns out that the surrounding scavengers had been staring pretty hard at Argonaut as well. Maybe somewhat aware of his internal war against himself. One of them performed a small motion with one paw at the little scavenger, eliciting an almost disappointed sounding “oh” noise, before it then backed up until it was certainly out of his potential reach.

Huh. So I guess they do seem to care about each other’s safety.

He closed his eyes.

Argonaut shivered. But he didn't feel cold.

He couldn't quite put a claw on what exactly he felt.

He'd just surrendered what was possibly his only hope for escape. He should be feeling cold, shriveled, enraged, defeated.

Alone.

But he didn't feel those things. He felt confused, overwhelmed, strangely exhausted. Lost, even.

He almost felt as if there were a gaping space within him. Like an air bubble, filled by nothing, suspended within a sea of himself.

But as he watched the little scavenger he almost killed awkwardly scoot and reach over to bring the small white sheet things closer itself one at a time, he also felt a weird warm-y feeling in his chest.

A feeling that said that, somehow, everything would be alright in the end. Even though he couldn't see how.

A feeling that told him that he wasn't alone.

How could things turn out alright? He'd just given up his chance at freedom.

And he was alone. Unless these scavengers counted.

The SeaWing sighed and tried not to hang his head. If his wings weren't bound, they'd definitely be drooping.

“Ey, Wasserdrache!” A familiar barking sound met his ears.

Argonaut opened his eyes again and looked back, this time with a much softer gaze.

The little scavenger picked up one of the white sheets, showing it to him as it had many times before. This time, however, Argonaut decided to take a closer look.

The white sheet had a simple depiction of a dragon, like himself- and a scavenger, like the one before him- standing across from each other. Both the simple dragon and scavenger had a single talon and paw respectively held up facing each other.

Argonaut tilted his head, not getting it.

The little scavenger pointed a thin digit at the drawing, then pointed the digit at him, then unfurled the paw and waved it back and forth rapidly.

“(Hal- er- Hello! Hello!)” It barked.

The scavenger once again pointed at the drawing, making a point to emphasize its apparent corresponding figure on the sheet.

Then it pointed that digit at the dragon depiction, before turning to point at Argonaut again. The scavenger looked at him expectantly.

He looked back at the scavenger. He still didn't get it.

The little scavenger seemed to pause for a few moments, not moving at all. Until it suddenly made an “Ah!” noise and backpedaled a few steps.

The SeaWing stared in confusion as the scavenger seemed to mime turning an imaginary corner and seeing him for the first time. It stuck its whole paw out again and rapidly waved it back and forth. Making that same “(Hello!)” noise again.

What could this scavenger possibly be trying to accomplish?

Argonaut realized he was watching a small hairless monkey act out a game of one-sided charades with him. For seemingly no reason.

He realized that's what they'd always been doing, this entire time. But why? What purpose did this all serve? Why do scavengers do these things?

What is going on? Why is he here? What the point of any of this? Why didn't these scavengers just kill him when they found him?

Maybe the little guy is just trying to say hello.

The little voice once again emerged from his subconscious.

Something inside Argonaut’s mind finally seemed to go click!

As if a film of sea algae had been rinsed from his eyes, this entire interaction suddenly began to look a lot different.

As if he had lit up his scales within a dark cave, everything the mimicking scavengers had tried to do with him suddenly started to look a lot different.

As if the water had cleared from his vision after emerging from the waves, everything with the scavengers, the way they stood guard around him, their strange tent formations, their even stranger hulking metal things, it all suddenly started looking a lot different.

Oh, dear…