A Benevolent Evil Dragon

We sit in silence, with Edith nibbling on her skewers while being the one averting her eyes. This entire day went out of control from the moment I opened my eyes. I firstly messed up by scaring her into starting a forest fire and injuring herself to escape, because I got stuck in the darker colors like an idiot while running on leftover adrenaline from my hunt. The second mistake I made was being unprepared for the fact that she'd need to dry out her clothes after finding herself submerged in a shallow river. She had no qualms about it, probably thinking of me as little more than a witty dog, but some sense of shame remains in me even though I feel nothing but worry whenever I look her way.

She looks thin, ragged, bruised… She looks like a survivor, for that is what she is. Meanwhile I sit here, plump on two whole hogs, just recently woken up from one of my longest naps. I am grateful I can at least help her with the food, because I have a big debt to pay, considering how hard she worked to keep me living…

The silence is killing me, evident by the way my tails smack against the ground in an asynchronous rhythm. The fact that I can talk, using my own vocal cords instead of finely tuning magic, is a godsend. For some reason I cannot pull just sound out of the chaos mana inside me, so I need to breathe it out, take only the mana I need, then let all the other mana, which is many times the amount I use, just dissipate. Basically, I never realized the downside of chaos mana until I was no longer in a mana rich environment.

The problem with being able to speak, though, is that I just spoke much more eloquently than I ever had using magic, and I think Edith is processing that in her own way. There's a difference between being near a parrot that's copying your words and being near a parrot that is speaking perfectly without being prompted or trained. I looked her way for I don't know how many times today, looking at the bruises she got from the fall, at the way her body shivers from the wind, the way her breathing is uneven and alert… I extend a wing, covering most of her body with it. She doesn't even flinch.

"So… you understand me..? I know you understood a few commands and requests, Ayrah kept gushing over you whenever we were on the topic, but I never thought you understood… this much…" She does not look my way, and she takes a few breaks as she mulls over her thoughts, but at least she saves me from having to figure out an icebreaker. Ayrah… is she even alive? It's not something I can focus on, so I turn to more immediate matters.

"Five people in a small room, all having nothing to do but talk… It wasn't hard to learn once I decided I wanted to. I still need to guess the less used words, but it is comprehensible." Finally, she turns to look at me. I meet her with only two eyes, as the others slow down my thinking too much. I am unable to figure out what the emotion behind that expression is.

It takes minutes before she finally says something, and even then it is just a choked up "Thank you. For everything…" I offer my best impression of a smile, then get up and stretch, though I keep mostly around her. I should have brought back the boar skins, but It is kind of late right now. Plus, I licked those things clean, to the point where there was barely anything left of them so I doubt they would last.

"This is.. awkward… Look, I'm sorry but it's been a while since I had a proper chat with anything… The way I talk to my siblings is wildly different from this. These words are so constraining compared to dragon speech… it feels wrong." I feel my whole body shiver from that wrongness. Once again, you don't realize how good something is until you lose it. Draconic is so convenient despite its problems, and it feels like poetry from the soul. Meanwhile these words I speak feel cold and heartless…

"I see…" Edith looks confused, which is understandable. Try and explain sight to a blind man and you might understand my situation. "I am sorry…" that gives me pause. Why is- ah, I lost my family. Mother was wounded enough that she couldn't fly by herself, but at least I think she survived since I saw our mountain just fly through the sky. Even if I think of it that way, my siblings are another thing entirely. Spots is likely dead, having bled out from his wounds. My other siblings had rough chances of making it out of that madness… For all I know my mother is deathly wounded in her floating lair, while my siblings were butchered and skinned by that army.

I somehow am still unable to process that. I took note of everything consciously, but I do not feel the loss. I do not feel the pain I should, the terror of being alone in an unfamiliar environment, with only myself and this frail, human girl to count on. It might be because this is the second time I am put in this position, or it might be because I lack that strong empathy I am used to… no, that's wrong too. One more thing to unpack later.

"I am not capable of properly dealing with this in a healthy manner right now. But I thank you for your sympathy." Wow, stiff much? Why am I speaking like this? Ah, I do have less words to work with, and most of my modern words don't have a translation. I don't know how to say 'unpacking' or anything like that… My mouth is faster than my mind, that cannot be good. "Regardless, I think we need to talk more about this situation…"

Edith keeps a complicated expression during my emotionless statements, but she does at least start when prompted. "I do not know where we are." Well, that wasn't useful… "We are far enough away that the sky looks wrong though. My mom taught me about that. She said the sky becomes a bit tilted if you move north or south, and we're somewhere more northern, but that's all I can say…"

"Huh. Your mother is well traveled, then. I doubt this is something you can normally learn in a small village that a dragon oversees…" It was certainly helpful that I did not need to teach her such things. The fact that she also knew just enough to survive this long also helped immensely.

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A silence falls on us, which reminds me that we are in some forest decently far away from home. She goes back to eating and I take the opportunity to get a good look at her, this time with my other eyes. I mix my previous mana sense with my sight and I focus in on all the fire inside her chest. She has more than before all this, and it flows wildly, lashing out at nothing before returning to her core. The next thing that draws my attention is the flow of chaos mana that is spread throughout her hand, following tiny pathways only to explode and diverge, uniting again at the tips of her fingers. It's imperfect, but it is following the flow of a rune. She has a chaos rune carved in her arm, which explains the rapid healing I noticed before. Maybe if I memorize it, I could figure out how it works…

Interesting magic mutations aside, I need to do something. My body feels jittery, probably from staying stuck for… "How long?" I ask, with a bit of fear. "How long did I sleep..?" No matter what the answer was, it meant that I had no way of getting back to anything. Not only was I far away, with no idea how to get back home, but everything was probably long done.

"A month. More or less. I was worried…" She did not need to continue. I understood. From a human perspective, sleeping for a month straight meant you were in a coma. For a dragon though…

"Once again, thank you for keeping me alive during that time. I was out, but I remember that you fed me and carried water specifically for me to drink. You made a whole clay pot and everything. Plus, you protected my body... I would have probably not been alive without you." She laughs at that, which is a bit odd. Ah, it's the crazy kind of laugh…

"You saved me first, you know? Saved me from The Mistress, saved me from wolves, saved me from the soldiers, saved me when that Duke and the Goddess were looking to murder me… Gods, Lady Meredith and Yvonne… if not for you I would have ended the same…" She leans back and I prop her up with my body. It feels nice, in a way. She looked cold before, but her torso is very warm from her mana.

"I guess so…" I wrap my body around hers properly, letting her rest. Her eyes are closed, but she's not trying to fall asleep. "It is alright to relax now. No predator nearby. And even then there's nothing in these parts stronger than a wolfpack." Paradoxically, she becomes more alert at that.

"How do you know that? Mom always said dragons are great at anything they do, but still…" In a way, her implied words are right. Dragons are great at what they do but they also have time and magic on their side. I am a child still, with mana reserves lower than that duke and a few of the magic users.

"I can smell it. I got used to the scents of animals, and while there's a difference from individual to individual, all members of a species smell roughly the same." She nods and closes her eyes again, seeming relieved.

"That's useful. You're like- ah, no, you're a dragon, it'd be bad to compare you to an animal…" She's still tense, so I laugh it off, moving to rub the side of my head into her shoulder.

"You don't need to be so tense around me. I can guess what sorts of stories people tell of dragons, and I can guess that they're not too far from the truth, but despite having some innate pride issues, I don't need you to be stiff and reverent."

"I… alright… I am just a bit…" I chuckle and nudge her with my snout, taking her by surprise.

"You're afraid I'll eat you, or something of that sort?" The embarrassed nod makes me laugh out loud, before taking a joking tone. "Mother and father both tried to get me to eat you. It's been about a year, I don't think I'll be eating you now after going to so much trouble to keep you alive."

She relaxes a bit more, then gets up and goes to look at her clothes. Still damp, still ruined. I know how to sew and how to knit, but I don't have material or tools on hand, so there is not much I can do. Actually, I am wrong. Searching through my random trivia, survival section, I find a few videos and an essay on how to process animal pelts. It will take a while, but it is better than nothing. Time to be a carpenter.

Edith looks my way once I get up, showing at least a bit of interest in why I started searching the ground again. By the time she finds the courage to question me, I am already fixing together a large frame. "So… what now?" That does give me pause. Firstly, why she's asking me that, second, what now indeed…

"Shelter, clothes, food, water, not in that order. There's a lot that needs to be done even if just temporarily. It's still warm, but winter out here might be deadly. The forest can provide what we need for now, but the best bet, especially for you, is to find a town." Her look lets me know exactly what I expected. Any sort of settlement would meet me with pitchforks and torches. "I wouldn't follow you in, don't worry. I can make it out here, but you-"

I stagger. Something is wrong. I look around and see nothing out of the ordinary. I focus on my supernatural senses and find nothing. I focus my eyes, speed up my thoughts by locking myself in place, try to see any possible danger… and I am tired. I've been awake for maybe two hours total. Why would I be tired? The answer comes from inside… I'm running low on mana. Immediately I collapsed on the ground, curling up. I am using up mana just being awake. Speeding up my thoughts, using my new eyes, detecting mana, keeping parallel thought processes, everything is using mana. Earlier, when I was rushing through the woods, killing with incredible swiftness and might, I was using mana. My venom and acid sacks are filled up as well, my skin shifted colors, I was using up a resource that so far was limitless. But how am I going to recover that now?

"Edith, dumb question, how am I alive? Before you answer that, I need you to know a certain thing. I need a lot of mana to live. I woke up brimming with it, so where did I get it from?" She looks alarmed, but then just nods sadly. She knew.

"You make it. In the first few days you had a small storm around you… after that it became smaller and smaller as your body changed so rapidly… For the past week you kept draining it, then recovering it. My arm tingled whenever you were full.

"Alright… I make mana. I guess I do it constantly… Ah, my heart. The chamber that energizes my blood, that must be making mana constantly. The problem I have right now is that I make much less mana than I use. I can find food, water, I can even make a shelter myself… but how do I find mana? This place is barren!"

Edith takes a long pause, then looks into my eyes resolutely and speaks in a cold tone. "The same way any dragon does. You find a town."