6.6

Written: 4/17/2024
Word Count: 1,534

A soft, wet snout prodded at the back of my neck. I could no longer tell if it was still daylight, like when I'd arrived in this Goddess-damned ruin, or if the sun had begun to fade out at the corners, descending to its nightly slumber. I also couldn't tell if the Dark Elves stood there, watching me in disgust and pity.

But that nose. I recognized that nose.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

"Get away from me!" I screamed, voice raw and high-pitched. It was more a shriek, more the pitiful wail of a bird being torn into pieces by a panther.

The nose retreated in a flurry of creaking floorboards and claws scraping against the hard wood of the entryway. The baby dragon fled back into the clinic. It was the third time I'd scared the yewing hell out of the thing.

Just how many more times would it come back to me, looking for a different reaction, only to be disappointed, once again?

"Get out. Get out. Get out!"

The pain didn't recede. It didn't ebb and flow like the savages of time. Rather, it crescendoed. It spiked. It heightened to considerable lengths.

Shadows from the vines and shrubs on the property splayed out against the gravel circle. I was at the end of the line, now. I almost felt like I could feel the angle of the mountain, pulling me down, down, down. Still further down, to some inescapable place.

Was I still screaming? Where was my broken hand?

Were my eyes open? If I saw shadows, then they had to be. Right?

Right?

A glimmering sheen sparked to life on the first step up to the deck's surface. The familiar shape of the sun icon I'd followed around the spirals of the great volcano, Disastraveritous, all the way up the mountains and twenty-five cliffs to where the Dark Elves called home and the Haspa Mines resided.

Fuzzy shapes darkened my peripheral vision, but this single, glowing shape was clear to me. No shadows criss-crossing its surface like clouds. No whitening, lightening, or dark.

I stared at the thing until I felt the shape had tattooed itself across my irises, imprinting it like a cookie cutter.

"Get out," I whispered, my brain catching on one phrase and taking control of the part that decided what came out of my mouth. "Get out. Get out."

Slowly, the pain in my hand receded, tingling more strongly than the excruciating burn that had previously electrified it. Instead, with each throbbing pulse, the thing almost...itched. It was incredibly uncomfortable. Ridiculously so.

But it was better than agony.

I placed weight on my banged-up ankles and knees. Digging into the ground with my elbows, I steepled myself on the porch, only to see a familiar white creature peering at me from the safety of the doorway.

The baby dragon hadn't left me.

A sudden wash of emotion stirred in my gut. I didn't know what was all mixed in, but I didn't like it. The one that was easiest to recognize was the intense desire to be left alone.

I snarled at the creature. "Get. Out."

The thing's thick black brows rose as it did that head tilt that animals do when they can't comprehend something. The sheer innocence of it rocked me to my core, and I spat, spit and blood spraying from my mouth as I howled, "Go away! Just go away, blast it!"

But the creature didn't move. Maybe it had realized that I was nothing but vitriol and fire. A quick spike of heat, but nothing more devastating than that. I wasn't the ever-lasting, eternal flame of elven heritage or the unrelenting waves of the ocean.

I wasn't scary anymore.

"You think you've got me all figured out." I heaved myself to my feet, my legs trembling to support me on their own without using anything to propel me up. I bared my teeth at the little thing. The sheer curiosity shining from its soft-blue gaze was enough to make me want to throw up all over again.

I couldn't stand that look.

"You're wrong," I told it, placing my bruised ankle on the lip of the entryway.

My whole leg turned numb as it slid in a way that felt like someone slashed it off in one quick slice. Quickly readjusting my body so my weight didn't fall fully on my damaged ankle, I stared down at the little thing.

The baby dragon's wings were larger than its body, and it didn't know how to wear them. One of the fluffy white things was crooked up, fanned out with soft, downy feathers, while the other one was bent the other way, trailing behind its fox-like tail on the floor. With two fox-ish ears and that tail, paired with the giant wings, its body was much larger than one would expect from its childish face.

It was going to grow into a panther-sized thing, probably. Not a behemoth or a bear. I'd never guessed there were small dragons. Not like I paid much attention in class when learning about their classifications.

I hadn't expected to set foot in the Western Sector, so why would I care about knowledge I'd never use? That was logic straight from Charlotte Swanmere.

I smiled, the feeling of it sitting thin against my lips. "How many times will that little girl be the ruin of me? I just can't get away from her."

The baby dragon let out a low, keening mewl. It tipped its snout down, and if I didn't know better, I'd thought it was about to charge at me.

"Now, what?" I limped past it, somewhat hoping it would turn violent and just finish me off. If this was a carnivorous beast, all the blood I was spilling on the hardwood must have been a potent beacon. "Didn't you hear me? I said: get lost."

The keen took on the whining note of a teenager, and I tried turning around to glare at the thing before I thought better of it. My ankle really hurt. For now, the pain in my hand had fallen to the back of my mind, but its pulsing was driving me nuts. How long would that last before the pain returned?

I needed to find medicine, fast. Then, a bed. Nothing else mattered.

"You're hungry, huh?" I mused, inching back into the kitchen. The scene was less horrifying this time around. Now, I just shrugged at the blood spatter. "Same old, same old. Hello again, crime scene."

I walked to the baby's hidden den. The room attached to the kitchen. I figured that was where the vet supplies were. Hopefully, Aunt Rosetta used similar tonics on dragons as for elves because I was going to down them, even if the dosage was too much.

"Just coming into my own," I chuckled, narrating for the dragon following closely behind my unsteady ankles, "in a family full of addicts."

Using only the emergency green flame lighting to guide me, I saw an entryway filled with overflowing shelves. A sink sat to the left of the giant wall of supplies, but beyond that, I couldn't see much. It looked just big enough to be a walk-in closet, not an examination room for giant beasts.

Ah, well. I didn't care about that right now.

"Gredania?" I shook one bottle filled with a pea green powder. "Ugh. It's not in pill form. What's this?" I riffled through the supplies at eye-level, each glass jar tinkling against one another at my intrusive movements. The things had labels, but I couldn't read them in just the emergency lighting. There were no windows here for extra illumination. Only the shadows coming in from the doorway, but that wasn't enough to read my aunt's chicken scratch. "Oooh, ross root. Gross to just eat it like this, but at least it'll make me pass out."

Exiting the medicine closet, I made my way back across the kitchen, moving at a third of my usual speed. The more I walked, the harder it was to keep putting weight on my ankle. The buzzing pulse in my destroyed hand was wearing off. Whatever mental state I'd hypnotized myself into, it was only a matter of time before it failed and my imaginary safety net disappeared.

The dragon keened again, and I pointed a disinterested finger at the basket upended across the welcome room. "You're hungry? Go eat that. Or go outside and eat butterflies, for all I care. And let me be very clear: I don't care. I want nothing to do with you, so stay out of my way."

Without bothering to look behind me to see if the creature discovered the food or not, I opened the first closed door I stumbled into. A study of some kind with a giant, purple rug splayed out in the middle. Collapsing to my knees, I took the medicine, pouring that disgusting powder down my throat and washing it away with the violently bitter ross root before laying flat out on my stomach and passing away into oblivion.

If the Goddess had any mercy at all, I wouldn't wake up.

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