A Benevolent Evil Dragon

Well, this is my life now. I am active for at most six hours total, though technically I could last longer, even a full ten hours if I needed to, but I would be borderline useless during that entire time or sleep for a full day after. If I try to cut something with my claws or my tail blades without consuming mana, they get dulled. The only way to move without using mana is by walking. I can't control my tails or wings correctly if I don't burn a bit of mana to feed my brain. There are so many things that I took for granted are now gone because I have the battery life of a microwaved smartphone from the late 90's.

In the end I decide to bite the bullet and live the large predator lifestyle so I can put my energy into making sure Edith has her needs met and that we are overall safe. For all that I am suffering by being stuck in a place without ambient mana, she still has it worse by virtue of being a human stuck in the wilderness.

I managed to set up a decently extensive tanning corner, using my tongue to clean off any bits of meat from the pelts and simply leaving them tied to frames by the river to dry under the sun. From this I managed to get an amazing crafting material that I will use until the end of our little isolation. I made her a primitive dress, which really is a glorified deer pelt tunic with a bit of frilly skirt so everything down to her knees is protected, made her some shoes, shin and arm guards out of boar, using thin strips of rabbit hide and some dried tendons braided together as ropes to keep things together. Her body was a mess from walking around barefoot and getting cut up by branches and bushes, so this should help for a while. The only problem is that they're warm clothes, but it's better than not having any and her heat resistance is amazing enough to not bother her too much.

In parallel I made a water filter for her. I made sure she boils all the water she drinks, but before even making it into the boiling pot I built a simple filter out of a hollowed out tree trunk, using river rocks and sand, activated charcoal and whatever scraps of textiles were left of her clothes combined with some moss and grass. It's not the best, but it works well enough. It is strange how the scarcity of materials flipped completely. It's easy to make charcoal and I can use air mana to saturate it with oxygen, but getting cotton for a filter is impossible.

Material sciences aside, the other important thing we worked on was shelter, which really was more of a fox hole I expanded and reinforced. It has multiple holes for a proper ventilation, which I carefully protected from the elements by using tiny wooden coverings. The bedding is just a collection of fur scraps put on top of dried long grass. During the night I end up being the door, turning my body to look a bit like a rock. won't fool anything that gets too close, but it's better than nothing. I am completely unbothered by the elements and I'd rather her not get attacked while I am in deep sleep.

Now for a bit of fun, in the little time I have left after making all these things I have been testing out Edith's chaos rune, and I have made some observations. Firstly, any damage she gets to her arm is healed in moments, at least after she is no longer being hurt. With her consent I carefully stabbed her arm with my tail, which she felt, but the damage vanished in three seconds after I removed the blade. I then kept the blade in and it only healed once I removed it, so no danger of healing with stuff stuck inside. Interestingly, I made a cut in a part of it, then poked my nail in a different part. It did not start healing at all until I removed my claw, so it is very particular in how it functions.

Secondly, if she uses magic the arm reverts to what it was like before, and worse of all, the wounds I gave her appeared again, though as old markings and scars rather than as actively bleeding wounds. This isn't healing. Maybe it's based on healing, but the effect I see is that the rune splits off her arm into two states, healed and damaged, and anything that disturbs it gets thrown into the damaged pile, to be brought back whenever she uses magic. Using magic with this arm also turns the spell into something unforeseen, but strong. Gambling. It's a magical gambling arm that gets somewhat healed. She can at least still use her other arm as a medium to cast normal spells, which still reverts her state mind you, but because she is not used to it and human meat is apparently a shitty conductor for mana, her magic is incredibly weak and dare I say cranky in its behavior.

Thirdly, the thing that I was most concerned about was her mana supply, but it seems the chaos mana somehow feeds from her flame reserves if it ever runs low. Honestly, I could mess with the spell, my siblings proved that I could easily order the mana in her body to leave her completely and break the rune or alter it in there, but I fear that she would be hit by whatever damage she accumulated or maybe something even worse could happen. For now I need to understand the rune before I ruin it. She does seem happy when she looks at her reflection, so it is at least helping her mind despite the troubles it causes.

Now for the elephant in the leafy forest. I need to get money fast. I didn't confirm or deny if I would end up raiding whatever town we come across once we start moving, but I asked her about how money works, and while she's a kid from an isolated town whose only source of outside information was her apparently well traveled mother and the occasional trader from the bigger town by mother's river, she still knows more than me.

Overall, it tracks with my knowledge of medieval times somewhat. Main coin's copper and silver, which means I am shafted. Gold and platinum make mana. Crystals make mana. Copper and silver don't do that. From my tests, copper just accumulates mana from the air, so it's good for stockpiling ambient mana, but not much else. At best I could try to syphon mana from well traveled coin and hope it's loaded, but that's like a vampire eating rats in the sewers, barely a stopgap and probably will make my cravings for mana worse. As for silver, it felt like it "cleaned" the mana, whatever that means, instead of emanating it and even that is a very rough feeling that I didn't get to properly study.

I need gold, but apparently only nobles and the biggest merchants ever see the damn thing. It makes sense, in a way. It's like steel in these times, a military resource rather than just a commodity. A pretty earring is no longer just a rainy day fund for noble ladies, but rather a source of power beyond what would make sense in the middle of a medieval battlefield, and an enabler of supernatural capabilities for the best soldiers. That Duke was positively loaded in precious metals and jewels, and that monster could have incinerated me alive if he had not been so keen on wearing my skin to taunt my mother.

I have so much stuff to unpack… I hope there's therapists in this world.

Back to pillaging, I need to either turn to being a bandit that goes for high profile targets, which I wouldn't be too opposed to on principle, if not for the high risks, or I find a profession that pays extremely well and use Edith as a proxy. Really, that is all reliant on her not turning me in at the first chance, which I am sure would earn her a pretty penny, but then again she was almost killed the last time she just wanted to live a normal life, so I figure she's more keen to trust me than some random humans.

Which reminds me, where even is that girl? I got lost in my work, which currently consisted of making a normal sling and a staff sling for her. One of them should fit her since she can't keep trying to fight stuff using sharp sticks and gambler's funky fire. If she dislikes these I could make her an atlatl and some javelins, though I'd like to get something good for the tip like glass, or maybe some particularly good bone… Ah bones, how I miss being able to digest them… Two days after waking up I ended up choking them back out since my body refused to waste the energy and magic to consume them. Now at most I can lick the marrow from them…

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Damn, ADHD hitting me in full now. I'm restless because of how little time I spend awake… Very well, back to reality since I am done with the slings. New quest: find Edith. At least she's still as obvious in the way she traverses, I just need a second to catch her nearest trail since the area overall smells a lot like her now. It takes me maybe a minute to find her path, and another six to find her. She seemed to have gone through a few bushes, then came out on a wider part of the river and is now just skipping rocks and eating berries.

"I used to do this with my dad when I was younger." She speaks and I startle a bit. I wasn't stalking her, but I am still more silent than my frame would indicate. Then again, our surroundings are quiet because of my slaughter of anything with a good pelt on their skin, so it wouldn't be too hard to notice me… "We had to stop when I showed promise for magic. Any time that I had free after that was spent locked away, trying to gather mana and learning how to use it."

I stare at her back. I, for all that I tried in the past days, do not feel particularly lonely. I am sad that basically anyone other than Edith and maybe mother are likely dead, but that sadness is muted. One person keeping me company, watching my back, occasionally talking to me, that was enough…

"He still reminded me every so often… Sometimes he would skip a rock on a filled bucket, though mom would end up scolding him if she saw it, saying he's dirtying the water…" She turns and I see that tired sadness again. Her eyes are red from blood, not magic, but I know she has long since run out of tears. She lived in a town, she must be used to a small, tight community.

"One day…" She continues, turning to throw another rock. "... I got mad. I was frustrated, bored, angry that no matter what I tried I was failing… There were only two older witches, and I failed to learn from them so I ended up being pushed aside in favor of my friend and that damned Tanja…"

"I scorched my own hand, was pushed out by any teacher I could get, was ridiculed and shunned by everyone that looked my way, even if not openly… but I wasn't allowed to stop either. They tried forcing me to learn any other magic since there was nothing I was good at with my fire… even made me swallow a tiny crystal of nature mana… I ran right after, sick of it all."

She throws another rock, this one ignites with a purple flame. I look on and I see the rock itself turn into a splatter similar to oil, that keeps burning on the surface of the water. She just sighs at this and sits down, back on a young tree. I walk forward and sit my head in her lap, letting her pat and scratch my head just to have something to vent her frustration on.

"I ran into the woods. I ran past the trails used by hunters… I ran all the way until I got to that pond where dad first taught me how to skip stones… and I threw every rock I saw. I just did that over and over again, for hours on end. I even threw a boulder just because I was so sick of everything… And then I was tired. And then I fell asleep. And then I woke up in the middle of the night. Monsters don't often roam our way, but this time one did. It wasn't even a strong one, just a slightly smarter wolf with a small family to care for, and I was looking a lot like dinner."

I can feel my instincts try to trigger my defenses as her nails dig in the seams between my scales, but I just let her have her way. I do my best to pat her shoulder with my wing arm, but I doubt she is too focused on what I am doing.

"I poured out all the fire I had in me then I ran again. I got a scratch on my leg, but I could still run, even if I felt it burn as hard as the flame I was escaping from. I heard how the pack recovered and followed me anyways, I thought I was dead, but then dad appeared from nowhere, axe in hand, killing the monster. More men were there, throwing sticks and rocks, stabbing at the animals with pitchforks and hoes and whatever else they had on hand… I cried so hard in his arms that night…"

Her voice was trembling by now. I could hear the heart beating so swiftly in her chest. I could smell so many things that I could only describe as a fear response… I can feel my eyes focusing on her expression, seeing it in all its colorful beauty… And then I feel my own body going colder as she continues.

"My dad loved me, so he saved me. The villagers needed me and invested a lot in me, so they saved me, even treated me better after that just to keep me in check! You… YOU saved me… Why did you save me? Every time someone helped me, it made sense. Even miss Yvonne and lady Meredith, they helped me to merely pass the time and because I could help them in turn with other tasks… Yes, I helped you this past month, but you saved me long before any of this, multiple times! Took care of so much without any reward in sight! And now you've made me clothes, shelter, weapons… you bring me food you do so much and there's nothing I can do in turn!"

That… is a lot. And it's also a very good question. I saved her, true, but why? Because I'm a human in here and killing humans is wrong? Not really, I had no issues murdering people in self defense, and I have at least a few tens of bodies to my name just from the dust explosion. Was it because I wanted to be a hero? As much as I wanted to believe that, I was given the chance to become a literal holy hero and spat at it. Was it… "Because I wanted to… would be a cowardly thing to say, even if it is a simpler answer."

She looks into my eyes. She's desperate for something, but I don't really understand what. I get up, shaking me away from her and looking on at the calm river, taking a deeper breath than normal, tails tapping against the ground.

"I think… I don't want to kill intelligent beings needlessly. The wolves often attacked me and it would be a kill or be killed situation. Sure, I hunted a few monsters that might have been highly intelligent, but even those were reduced to a survival situation, as the other would have no issue killing me for its own growth. Neither you, nor any of the others actually wanted to hurt me, when we met. I do not wish to cause needless suffering or to allow it to be caused in my vicinity. That is why I rescued you from the humans."

That was a good answer, or I think it was, but there was something more. Seems Edith is also unsatisfied with this, so maybe I should push out a bit…

"Additionally… You were smart. You knew things and I could observe you to learn more. I learned a lot from all of you, so my effort was hardly without reward… plus you have saved me in this past month just because I helped you. You look into my eyes and see a monster that could raze down a town in moments if it was the best outcome for myself. You see a beast that could kill battalions of common men. You see a thing, yet you cared for me when I was most helpless. Your mere company these past days has already done plenty to keep my mind from being devoured by fears and doubts, stuck in a storm of my own voices screaming nonsense ideas. I could have lost years stuck here if I was alone with myself. So for that I thank you and I hope you will stop letting yourself be taken by those storms as well."

I take a stone in my tail. For all that my arms are much better, my body is still not built to throw things like a human, so I must keep using my strange tail for that. I swing with my whole body and send the rock flying, skipping twice before ending up on the other side of the river, stuck in the dirt. Edith simply laughs, then gets up and taps my side a few times, which I take as a sign to move towards home.

"You talk even stranger when it is about yourself, huh. If this is what you say, I fear what your mind might actually sound like… no wonder you have a chaos affinity…"

I laugh, slapping her back with my tail, just hard enough to startle her. "Such rude words from someone who was crying tearlessly mere moments ago."