"Who are you?" Maddox asked, becoming slightly defensive again. Protectively, he held the dragon close, finding a comfort in the anomaly as strange as him. The man rolled his eyes in thought, shrugging his shoulders.

"I figured you'd ask eventually. My name's Kadri and I'm a moonshadower, just like you."

"A what?" He asked. Penny jumped onto the cuff of his shirt, dragging sticky purple footprints across his pristine white uniform. Maddox instinctively let his hand hover above the lizard to protect it from harm, oblivious to the stains that would never come out. He hardly even cared.

"A bender of light and darkness, but...we don't exist." Kadri grinned, holding a finger to his lips like a middle-school kid hiding the name of their crush. He was so peculiar, even without mention of magic and dragons. Maddox tilted his head in curiosity, unsure what to trust, but also trying to remember that he had a dragon curled up over his heart. "What I'm more curious about is how one of us ended up all the way in Arizona. You on the run or something?"

"Or something." Maddox answered, the curiosity turning bitter at the mention of his past. "It's a long story."

"I've got time." He grinned,  giving a tilt of his head with an odd smile while wisps of sloppy hair fell into his eyes.

"I tell you, will you tell me about the...dragons and stuff?" Maddox asked his heart growing rampant with the thought of answers. He would finally get to know what he was...

" 'Course kid. Just tell me what you want to know."

"It's a bit complicated, but I light fires and stuff." He started, staring at the dragon. Penny glanced up at him, her mouth stained a deep purple from the fruit, but a bright grin decorating her face.

"Light fires and stuff." She echoed before curling up again.

"Thanks for rubbing it in Penny." He joked mindlessly, the words feeling empty. "The thing is, I'd just light on fire spontaneously, no pattern no cause, and no one knows why. I'd do it with my mind. My parents didn't really like it."

"So you're human born?" Kadri piped up, his eyes bent in a curiosity dotted with confusion. "You know that's pretty rare, right?"

"Of course my parents are human." Maddox bit, the words harsh and dripping with aggression. He hated how it sounded, how he wasn't human. "What else would they be?"

"Well, I was thinking moonshadowers." Maddox rolled his eyes as Kadri shrugged his shoulders, a teasing grin spreading across his face.

"Anyway, they thought it was emotion-related, but I knew it wasn't. They tried to keep me away from anything that might make me scared or nervous. I was home schooled and pretty much lived inside my room because they though I would get startled by tiny things. They thought they could stop the fire by keeping me from being scared."

"Did it work?"

"Sort of." Maddox ducked his head at the memory, holding the dragon close. It felt so nice to have someone to hold onto... " If I concentrated hard enough, I could hold it in, but it always hurt."

"Last week, there was an accident, and I ended up setting a building on fire. No one was hurt, but they still weren't happy." Maddox paused, keeping the dragon close. He didn't want the dragon to fly away. He didn't want to be scared she would leave, didn't want to be alone. Not again. "My parents said it was getting out of hand, so they decided to send me to a school for 'gifted kids'."

"And that's when you chose to run." Kadri finished, but the words hardly sounded like anything anymore. Just words.

"No. I didn't run until there was no school to go to." Maddox felt tears push at the orders of his eyes, but he refused to cry. Crying made him weak and the last thing he needed was another reason to be called weak. "They told me all about this wonderful school they toured called Mr. York's boarding school for unusual children. Unusual like children who could light things on fire with their minds. So we met this guy who said he'd take me to the school. Halfway there, he told me there was none. He just wanted to know about the fire. So I ran."

Kadri sat in silence, unsure how to respond to Maddox's strange declaration of his past. It hurt. It always hurt to talk about his past, even if this was only a small fragment of what had actually happened. Holding the dragon close, Maddox tried to convince himself it was only a nightmare. Nightmares were always easier to forget than the pain of reality. 

"You know, this isn't your fault." Kadri finally raised his voice, despite Maddox deliberately avoiding eye contact. "Fire's a natural moonshadower thing. It's not your fault no one could figure out what was going on."

"Natural moonshadower thing." Penny echoed the words into Maddox's ears like a gentle reminder of his hidden flaws. Still, he kept his eyes drawn on the sand coated ground, unable to meet Kadri's eyes. 

"And I don't think it's really your parents' fault either. People like that are constantly trying to catch us...trying to prove us moonshadowers are real...he probably convinced them there was a real school too, but he's gone now. You're safe." Kadri's voice had grown heavy as the childish excitement disappeared. He seemed so lost...so broken...Maddox couldn't help the bit of assumption that told him Kadri had been through something similar and maybe even worse.

"You owe me some answers." Maddox bit as he tried to shake the sadness from his shoulders. He needed to know what he was, and now, he was only moments away from unlocking the secrets he had been looking for for years.