This post has the following content warnings:
This post's authors also have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
Elodea is getting worried.
It's been three months since she got teleported to this godsforsaken wilderness, and she hasn't found anything resembling a hint of how to find civilization yet.
She is really not looking forward to whatever her curse does to make up the backlog.
Mmm being pet is so good.
A thought occurs to her.
"Can I have a knife? One suitable for woodcarving. For when you're not using me and I want to occupy myself."
"Mm. Sure."
He unwraps his wings from around her and tucks his arm around her waist, squeezing gently. Her cracked rib complains. He scoops up a handful of rocks and twigs, closes his fist around them, then opens it to reveal a small sharp knife with a wooden handle. The blade is white and shimmers like pearl.
She stares at it for a moment, then squeaks with delight and throws her arms around his neck and kisses him.
"It's—" he borrows a word from his native language, then pauses to try to think of a translation. "'Dragonscale', I guess you could say, though 'dragon' isn't any closer to the creatures I'm thinking of than 'demon' is to me. And fake dragonscale at that. The real thing would be prettier. But I do a very good imitation."
"I don't think dragon's scales look like that. You're saying you--have some kind of person in your world that, mm, looks superficially like a dragon?"
"Or something. I have no idea what your dragons are like, I can just feel how close the words are. The ones whose scales look like this, they're..."
He picks up a pebble and concentrates, hugging Havalya again to drink the flare of pain. The little rock reshapes itself into a tiny creature, not pearly-white this time but a brilliant sapphire blue, which does indeed look superficially like a dragon. The body plan is about the same, but the details are different.
"Like that, but a hundred times the size," he says, handing her the statuette. It sits upright in her hand like a cat, with its wings folded to its back and its long tapering tail curled forward around its feet.
"Our dragons...look like this about as much as an orc looks like an elf. They have the same general body structure and they're both reptiles, but other than that...I don't actually know that much about dragons. They're very magical? They at least sometimes shapeshift when they want to deal with humanoids?"
"They're..." He shakes his head. "I don't think I can explain it. Ask my sister when she comes back."
"Okay." She snuggles in closer, heedless of--or at least undeterred by--her broken rib. "I have to admit I'm a little jealous of the wizard. You can't rip my heart out of my chest without killing me, and she doesn't even like it. What a waste."
He considers this for a moment, then says, "Eh, there's no way I'm gonna stop myself from complaining about it—she's cursed to get raped a lot. Which would be fine except that apparently the curse is willing to change my fate or my mind to make me do it, and that's... even if it hasn't done it to me in particular, and it wouldn't really have needed to, it's still not something I'm going to just go along with."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
