Word Count: 1,074
Written: 3/6/2024, 3/8/2024

A quiet snuff forced me from my thoughts. Dancing spots fuzzed out my peripheral, so it took a couple of moments for me to process what I was seeing.

The baby dragon had walked up to me while I was lost in my daze, and now it was sniffing at my leg, its black snout brushing up against my pants.

A scream got choked and lost within my sore throat, but I managed to shoot my other leg in the air in a fantastic high kick before plummeting to the ground. Immediately, my hand reached into something sticky. I dared not look.

Startled, the baby dragon cowered again. The movement was enough for me to see the red lines on its chest, like old injuries that had closed up. But white fur had not grown in their places yet, either because hair could no longer grow or because the wounds had only just healed.

The baby had been injured. And possibly abandoned, since there hadn't been any giant-winged creatures out sitting in the courtyard.

"I'm sorry," I whispered, unsure why I suddenly felt the need to lower my voice. "Did I startle you?"

The baby dragon stared at me with those eyes softened by the essence of youth, before retreating, all at once, a flash of white fur and fast movements, click, click, clack, back from the darkened room adjoining the kitchen. The Goddess only knew where it was heading.

I knew it would become my problem at some point, but I wasn't quite ready to venture into the beast's safe space. Yet.

The little interaction had proven one thing for me. The baby was scared. If it'd been alone this entire time, then it was probably hungry. Definitely confused. Had it even...witnessed what happened? I could only imagine what a healing little baby with a dragon's hearing was thinking when all those loud, terrifying noises erupted all over the place.

But after I'd stopped singing, the baby dragon had stopped cowering. The growl hadn't come back. Maybe it had just been startled when we'd first met.

Already, my first test had arrived. I'd anticipated holing myself up in Aunt Rosetta's home for a few days, crying if I wanted and soaking in the world she lived in before attempting to reason with Resinee one more time. I hadn't made a strong case for myself. Like a fool, I'd given them the belief that I really could do this.

One little white fur ball raised serious questions on the veracity of those claims.

Oh, how ignorant. I'd never even met a dragon before, and I'd thought I could stomach pairing up ripped wings and giving pain shots to creatures that made my knees feel weak? This one was even a terrified baby! Definitely not the scariest thing around.

I couldn't do this. I couldn't even wrap my head around it. Was I supposed to get on my hands and knees and scrub the remains of my aunt's life from the floor, the cabinets? Was I supposed to stand up and say, "Alright, time to take care of the little one"?

What was I supposed to do? I couldn't even take care of myself. I'd gone straight from the Swanmere estate to University, never once learning how to fend for myself or interact with the real world. What had I done? Endured parties where I was always the villain? Holed myself up in my room poring over books I wasn't all that interested in?

What had I done with myself all these years? What were my skills? What were my strengths?

I didn't know. I didn't even know how I had made it this far, eating only the snacks packed for me by Cauline, following the suns laid out for me by the Goddess's messenger. Counting on Runy, until I'd sent her back home.

I couldn't take care of myself. Within twenty minutes of meeting the Dark Elves of the Haspa Mines, I'd ended up a prisoner. How could I possibly live with a recovering baby dragon? How could I take care of it?

Fuzzy spots outlined my vision. I knew, somewhere in my subconscious, that I needed to cool it. Stop turning round and round in circles. Stop focusing on all the things I didn't have the answers to. Take it one step at a time. Focus on one thing, complete it, then move onto the next thing.

I knew, and yet I couldn't follow up. I suddenly didn't want to. No eyes peered at me with confused or disgusted slants. There were no mocking coughs or folk putting on airs.

There was just a single, useless elva. A single Loon of the East standing at the scene of a murder. An elvaniac, with not one person in the world who loved her.

And whose fault was that?

"Mine." I fell to my knees, each one squelching into the spray of blood arrayed in a vaulting arc across the ground. "It's mine." Hands scrubbed at my eyes, turning their burning into a pounding ache. Until I saw nothing but blue.

Good.

My shoulders trembled uncontrollably, billowing like my poncho in the wind, like I wasn't made of bones and cartilage, but the leafy green of the Goddess's Femur. Willow branches and ivy vines, just tugged loose by the gales that swept across the land. Spasms erupted in my biceps and neck from the tension stuck in my body. The pain was both a welcome surprise and also unbearable.

I cried, but it wasn't a cry. It was a hiccup that turned into a gasp, which ended on a scream. I screamed and screamed, uncaring of the baby dragon no doubt terrified by my loud noises. I didn't care if the people staying at the nearby inn heard me, or if those Dark Elves making sure I didn't run away could tell.

I knelt in my aunt's blood, surrounded by the visages of her terror, her fear, her final moments where no one, not a single blasted elf, had helped her. My vision was completely blue. I couldn't tell the kitchen island from the walls heading to the hallway. My muscles had locked up too much for me to do more than fall, like stone, to the ground. Body frozen in petrification, just waiting for the passage of time to take me. To bury me in vines.

I lay in my aunt's blood and screamed.