After going to the specific rental shop just outside of town that Waver sometimes visited, he stopped ten paces away from the road to have a conversation with Benet, the libel dragon he wanted to work with. Of course, he’d walked Valor home first, to Valor’s chagrin.
Benet was somewhat larger than a drake, and in exchange for having two powerful legs instead of four, he had four slightly transparent wings. His scales were a much purer blue than Waver’s hair, and shone like a mirror in the sunlight; he must have recently had them polished. His eyes were huge and black on a normal day, but they grew even wider when Waver explained the mission he’d been entrusted.
The libel snorted and shook his round head.
Humans at the highest echelon of human scholarship held spirited discussions now and again about what counted as a dragon. Must they have six limbs? Must they have scales of a certain quality? Must they have a gland that produces some sort of venom, or might have at some point in the past? For most humans, it was enough to say “I’ll know a dragon when I see one”, but for others, words must always carry consistent definitions tied to empirical criteria, or they would lose their meaning.
For dragons, it was much simpler, and much more complicated. To be a dragon, one must form and wield dragon words.
Within a dragon’s brood, sometimes one would be born who could not speak dragon words for one reason or another. In that case, they would be considered “kin of dragons”, and treated with the same compassion as the rest of their brood, if not the same respect. Waver would have been content -- even honored -- for dragons to treat him as a dragon’s kin. He already considered Valor like a sibling to him, or even closer. However, dragons he met for the first time, almost as if they’d all decided together beforehand, invariably recognized him as a dragon in his own right. He put up a token resistance when he could.
Benet twisted his body and experimentally flapped his four wings.
Waver watched the libel’s eyes sparkle. Internally, he berated himself. Thinking dragons should form a united front, that they should desire harmony with other dragons... was he looking down on them? Waver certainly didn’t get along with other humans himself, and as a child of a military noble he heard plenty of stories of rivalry and ambition that made his heart quicken.
Benet craned his neck to stare sharply at the boy, and narrowed his eyes, his opaque secondary eyelids sliding smoothly over the membranous inner eyelids.
Waver winced, and replied in the human tongue.
“I can’t argue with you there. Then let’s be accomplices for now, until you have to go back.” He thought about simply paying to free the dragon... but that would be getting his priorities mixed up. He knew he didn’t have the money to do something like that, and everyone with both the resources and the will to free dragons were tied up in too many contracts and obligations to act. That annoying Dame sure wouldn’t help me.
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When Valor was a hatchling, Waver was an extremely confusing existence for them.
Their sire’s rider, the knight Granise Cove, had brought her young child with her to see the new hatchling. Normally, it would be unthinkable for a human child to play with a dragon hatchling, but the child of a knight could not be so fragile.
Even before either the boy or the drake could speak, Valor understood from their father’s behavior that touching a human was not acceptable. And so, they let him play with their wings, even though it annoyed them. He was just a pesky untouchable human child, and as they played, the two made little noises at each other, as small children do.
Gradually, though, the boy changed. Valor learned to use the same words as their father, Valse, and Waver learned from his mother, but when the two of them played together, Waver would sometimes repeat Valor’s words back to them. When Valor asked their father about this, his expression darkened.
But Waver wasn’t just making noises. It wasn’t long before Waver could have halting conversations with Valor, answer simple questions, and even connect dragon words with human words in play. Sometimes, Valor even thought they caught a glimpse of white scales -- not the boy’s scaly dry skin, but real dragon scales -- when Waver spoke, only to blink their nictitating membranes and see that he was the same weak, annoying kid as always. No... not annoying anymore, Valor realized. He had become caring.
So, was he a human, or was he a dragon? Valor didn’t really know. He talked like a dragon, but they’d known him before he could. At the very least, he seemed to think he was human, and Valor privately thought that a human who could speak to dragons was a precious existence indeed. They privately cherished him.
Valor watched Waver grow up, and watched as Waver’s relationships began to complicate.
The young human began to ask questions about how his first and best friend was treated. Why could the two of them not have sleepovers, like other children? Why must the gate to the pen always stay locked? Why do you call Valor an “it” when Valor is a “they”?
Waver was used to seeing people bowing to his mother, but he could tell there was something different about how Valor’s father acted toward her. And one day, he asked the worst possible question.
“Mother, why do you never respond to what Valse says?”
And with that, the secret was out. Waver, not realizing how outrageous it was, kept insisting that he could communicate with dragons, and his family gradually lost patience. Valor could only watch. They begged their father to intervene, but their father only shook his head. The opinion of a dragon was worth less than nothing.
Through all this, Waver kept visiting Valor, and the two would talk about all sorts of things. Valor tried to convince Waver to pretend he couldn’t understand them, to only meet in secret and quickly salvage his family standing.
According to Waver, though, it wasn’t just his “delusions” that made him a mockery. He had his skin problems, he would explain, but much more importantly, he had no talent for combat. Swords, pikes, bows, crossbows, all would elude him. He had some talent for scholarship, but his wasn’t a scholar’s family. “Figures and letters won’t defend the commons from invaders,” his mother would say. So, Waver had decided that if he couldn’t win their approval anyway, he wouldn’t compromise on his values.
One day, it came to a head, and Waver didn’t return.
For a while, Valor wondered if Waver had finally taken their advice. It took too long before they realized he’d done something outrageous and been kicked out.
Afterwards, Valor wouldn’t eat. They wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t train. Even their father couldn’t reach them. Their insides burned with the injustice of the best human they’d ever met being cast out of his brood. Drakes can’t breathe fire, but at that time, Valor felt like they could have torched the whole estate if they ever opened their mouth.
One day, Valor became visibly weak enough that the Cove family became complacent, and someone left their pen unlocked. That was all the excuse they needed, and they summoned the strength they’d been carefully hiding to break out.
It wasn’t long before they were catching rats in gutters in town, which was how Waver found them.
The barn life was modest, but Valor was happy to be with Waver again. They frequently wished Waver would have more human friends, but a part of them selfishly rejoiced to monopolize his attention. After all, they wouldn’t find another like him in the world no matter where they looked.