In Part 3 (Ch. 18-25), our narrator became more comfortable with what she is, now that she knows it. She’s still not ready to fight to survive, but she’s ready to learn how, even if that means telling other people.
As I found out at school on Monday, both of my friends who told their parents where they’d be Saturday morning had no trouble regarding us disappearing from the sky for a bit. Shannon, on the other hand, got home later than usual. And her parents were awake. And now she’s grounded for two weeks. Which puts us in a bit of a rough spot regarding that meeting with Hikari. I guess we’ll figure it out.
Today is day two of my training. The running that Coach Manning gave me to do is rather exhausting; if he ever increases it, I hope it’s not anytime soon. This time, as I walk in, I’m not the first person here: Coach and Murphy are standing by the sideline benches. “Hello!” I greet them once I’m within earshot.
Murphy looks my way, then calls, “Gaschler!” and waves his greeting. When I’m a little closer, he continues, “Hey, uh… I didn’t get to ask last time—the feather?”
“Oh.” I unzip my coat enough that I can pull it out. “It’s… important to me. And if I want to shift, I have to hold it.”
“To… shift?”
“Transform. But it’s not quite the same as you could do, and Dragons only have two forms—human and dragon—so we call it ‘shifting.’” I don’t know that he has any transformation spells, but he could always learn one or buy a wand.
“How’s it different?”
“A whole bunch of ways. Like, I know that if you transform when you’re hurt, then it gets worse.” For a moment I think back to Jess’s wounds. I think that part of the reason I cherish the feather is because she did so much for me.
“And for shifting?” Murphy’s words bring me back to the present.
“Ah—Sorry. For shifting, it’s like the hurt never happened. I’ll still feel the pain before I shift, though, and I’ll remember it afterwards, but I won’t scar. I used to have a scar from when a wolf clawed my arm, but it’s gone now. So, I won’t need to worry about getting hurt during practice, but I’m still going to try to avoid that.”
“That’s good to hear,” Coach responds. “Does that work for both forms?”
“Yes.”
“Noted. Although I expect you need to be conscious to do that, because Dragon corpses stay as they are.”
“… Yes.” This is kind of uncomfortable.
I guess he saw, because he immediately backs off. “Sorry: my boss said we need to prepare for a fight against one or more Dragons to keep you safe. And a lot of what we need is information, not just training you to fight.”
“Coach!” an unfamiliar voice calls. “Who’s the little girl? Your daughter?”
Coach Manning and I turn to the speaker, and I blink. A monster! So many monsters lately! And wow those scales are pretty.
Standing before me is a lizarkin a little taller than me, with mostly-brown scales. But his head sports lines of white scales that continue down his visible sides, changing from white to a beautiful, glimmering light blue where his spine continues down to a tail so long that most of it is on the ground. If I wasn’t a Dragon, the sight of him might’ve convinced me to become a monster.
“Davidson! How nice of you to join us,” Coach Manning greets him. “And no, my daughter is a little younger than Gaschler, here.”
Davidson bows his head slightly. “Sorry about missing last week. Family thing.” Then he looks directly at me. “But I am wondering why she’s here.”
Murphy jumps to answer: “You’d never guess what she turns into.”
Davidson takes a half step back and looks me over. “A… bird?” I guess I am holding my feather.
“Wrong!” I hear from Murphy as my vision fills with blue! The heat nearby tells me that Davidson fell over in surprise, which must be hard to make happen thanks to that tail. And Murphy is laughing up a storm… I step a few feet to my right and look back.
That’s… me? An illusion of it, anyway. I can tell because it matches the shape I’d guessed from heat and looking around, but I’ve never actually flown over a body of water to get a clear picture. But the illusion—wow. If I’d gotten to pick how I look, that’s exactly what I’d choose. A simpler shape than some Dragons, but the most intimidating part is the size. The front legs almost have four-fingered hands, the back legs more like a dog’s paws; my tail is almost half the total length of my body, smooth and unadorned; my wings are enormous, bat-like appendages that run from my shoulders to my hips, with a paler blue membrane than my scales’ color; my front, from beneath my head to the tip of my tail is protected by large, bluntly-pointed chest plates the same color as my scales; the back of my head sprouts two horns curved gently upwards; and my reptilian snout, at least in the illusion, is slightly open, showing a few teeth but in a friendly smile. A slender but strong blue dragon.
Murphy catches my stare. “You haven’t seen yourself before?”
I shake my head. “There aren’t mirrors in the mountains.”
Davidson has picked himself off the ground. Now he looks mad. “That isn’t funny, James!”
“Not a lie, Mark!” Murphy fires back. “We’ve got a Dragon on our team!” The illusion vanishes.
A few slow steps later, Mark and I have joined the group that came in while Murphy did his illusion bit, Coach facing us. “Right!” Mr. Manning starts. “Now, I know we did introductions last week, but if we’re going to make our training effective then I need to know what everyone has to work with. I’ve already done this with everyone else, so Gaschler: what kind of magic Ability do you have?”
I look away and mumble, “Static.”
“Gaschler. Louder.”
“Static,” I respond, slightly louder.
Robertson heard me. “Static? But—”
“Mark’s Static, too,” Murphy interrupts. “There’s more to this than just Mages and Wizards.”
“It would seem so,” Coach Manning responds. “Library records indicate that blue dragons favor ice and fire spells. Is this the case, Gaschler?”
My gaze returns to him. “Nooot really. Dragons have elements by color, and blue is heat. I can’t use the other elements.”
“Heat. So, just fire?”
“No, Coach,” says a boy who I don’t think has spoken before. “She means it in the thermodynamic sense. Right?”
Coach looks at me. “I don’t know what that word means,” I answer.
“Heat flow,” the boy responds automatically. “If something has a lot of heat, we say it’s ‘hot,’ but if it has less heat, we say it’s ‘cold.’ Fire and ice just have different amounts of heat. Nobody knows for sure how Dragons use magic, right? But the way she said it, it sounds like studying physics is a good idea.”
Now the rest of the class is staring at the tall and skinny boy who probably doesn’t fight much more often than I do. “Hey, I wanted to be an engineer. But Dad said, ‘You’re a Mage, you should learn to fight’ so I get to spend Wednesdays with you all.”
“Is Crane right?” Coach Manning asks me.
I shrug. “As far as I can tell?” I think I mostly followed what he was saying. “I can add or remove heat from spaces, or move the heat around. I’m not willing to touch anything I froze because I don’t want to risk frostbite. And I may have accidentally set the park on fire.”
“Hold on,” Crane interrupts. “How cold can you make things?”
I haven’t tested my limits. “No idea?”
“Blue dragons have been recorded making ice barriers during fights…” Mr. Manning muses.
Crane lifts a finger. “Can you freeze air?”
“Yes.” I shrug. “It takes a lot of magic but I’ve done it a few times.”
“That’s incredibly cold!” Crane exclaims. “Do not touch that!”
“Okay!” I respond, surprised by the outburst. “Yeah, I knew that already!”
“How hot, though?” another student asks.
“Well, there was that car that melted last month,” one other student guesses. I look away guiltily. “But that was before—hey.” He moves to squat in front of me, and my face turns red. I can tell. “You did that?”
“I didn’t know there was a car there! I just wanted to keep the wolves away from my house!”
“Well,” Coach Manning says loudly, quieting the class. “It sounds to me like our Dragon needs to learn how to minimize collateral damage. And while the magic is not exactly the same, I think Davidson could still help. Davidson and Crane—” he picks them out with his eyes— “you two will partner with Gaschler. Help her with her specific talents. Teamwork is still my job, but if you come up with ways to work together on your own, go ahead and suggest them to me.”
At first, Crane asked to take me to the university with his older brother so he could get “scientific tests” done on how capable I am. Thankfully, Davidson is a lot more focused. I have a hard time guessing how he feels, though; I think lizarkin express emotions differently. But his frustration at Crane is pretty clear from his voice.
“No, Gaschler doesn’t have to do that! You don’t need exact limits when you know it’s enough for whatever you want! Look, it’s—it’s like a wall on your path.” His voice is slightly calmer now. “Static people would have to find another way to continue. You and me, we’d go over the wall. Gaschler would plow through it whether she knows it’s there or not.” I want to object, but… there was that car. “We’re not going to form strategies with her if we try normal things. She’s a Dragon; just assume she has enough power to do whatever it is you’re thinking about.”
Crane considers and turns to me. “Well, in that case, can you just… set beasts on fire?”
I breathe in. “No.”
Crane frowns at me. “Can’t? … Or won’t?”
I’ve gone this far. If I want people to trust me, and (more importantly) to protect me, I have to tell them the truth. “Can’t. Beasts are too complicated.”
“Too complicated? But—”
I close my eyes and look for a spell. Oh. Fred’s Fire-maker. “I can heat the air enough that things near or in it catch on fire, but I can’t actually light beasts—or creatures, for that matter—on fire.”
Crane nods. Davidson is digging a claw into his right cheek. “So, indirect fire,” Crane concludes. “Why’d you close your eyes?”
“Um.” How would I even explain it? I guess the… word itself…
Now that I think about it, other than the names of people or things, such as the word Mymoir, I already knew every word it used. And when I reread articles after spending time reading a dictionary, the words sometimes changed. Maybe what I read depends on my vocabulary. If I learn more words, will some of the confusing articles make more sense?
“Gaschler?” Davidson prompts, pulling me back.
I blink. “Oh-uh-sorry-um… Dragons share a sort of… library. It’s easier to read if I close my eyes. Part of the library is a lot of explaining what a Dragon is; another part is history, and another is a list of spells.”
“And you can use any spell in the library?” Davidson asks, turning his head so he can look at me more directly with one eye. Come to think of it, I might share some body language with him when I’m big.
“No,” I answer, shaking my head. “Only the heat ones. It’s not like a wand shop—my element is heat.”
“But you can read the other ones,” Crane guesses.
I glance away. “If I want to. They don’t make a lot of sense, but honestly some of the heat ones are confusing. I probably haven’t learned to think the right way yet.”
Davidson spots Crane opening his mouth and cuts him off. “Back on topic, what makes it too complicated to light beasts on fire?”
“There’s, uh, too much… different stuff. Air is a few mostly similar things that all act just about the same, but living things that aren’t inorganic monsters are super complicated. On a smaller scale, ice is mostly just water, but snow has air in the mix. So when you heat ice, then it all turns into water. But when you heat snow, some of it melts and goes down while the air goes up. And if I want my magic to work right then I need to know which is which before I start.” Chén’s Safe Path actually has a section where it makes tiny changes to the temperature just to check what’s there. It checks a table to make sure that most of the magic is going into melting ice rather than heating the air or ground. I bet it could work on snow, but I’d rather not spend a bunch of magic trying it. “I, uh, found that out the hard way. When I wanted to not shovel the driveway.”
“You couldn’t melt it?”
“I made slush.”
Both boys cringe.
“I could’ve melted it if I put in more effort or found a good spell, but my brother was there and I hadn’t told him about being a Dragon yet and—” Crane puts up a hand.
“I get it.”
“How do we even use this?” Davidson wonders aloud.
Crane shrugs. “Well, now we know why there’s collateral damage at all, anyway. Maybe you could try sparring with her for some more practical information?”
Davidson glares at Crane. “I don’t want to fight a Dragon!”
“Neither do I, but I’m better than you at watching.”
“You two do remember that I haven’t sparred with anyone before, right?” I ask. Mr. Manning did ask me that on my first day.
Crane frowns. “Have you fought anything?”
Well… “I guess I fought a wolf once, technically. It was biting my leg, so I tossed it away. It left after that.”
Davidson takes a step back before replying. “You haven’t used your magic all that much, have you?”
“Mostly just to make walls,” I admit. “I’ve only had use of it for a little over a month.”
“Like a Mage?” I nod. “I guess that explains why we never noticed a Dragon until now.” I nod again.
“And that explains why nobody has ever seen a baby Dragon!” Crane exclaims while gesturing strongly. “I was wondering when a new one appeared here. I looked it up—the last time a true dragon lived around here was when the colonists were first arriving. Not a hint of activity since then.”
I frown and look through the Mymoir for this Dragon I’ve somehow never heard of. «Dragons of North America include Martha, Sven, Steven, Brice, Camille, an unidentified blue dragon in western Virginia, and historically, Anagalsgv Goyadv.» I resist the urge to read about myself and focus on the really strange name. I can have a panic attack later.
After what must’ve been a few minutes, I force myself to stop reading and open my eyes to summarize. “There was a Native American man that was a yellow dragon. I don’t know how he died, but it was around the time people came here from Europe. Also, I can’t pronounce his name.” I’m a little surprised I could even read it.
“There’s a lot of info in that library of yours, huh?” Crane notes. “That makes it pretty useful. But not during a fight. Taking that long to read something will just get you and your team killed.”
I nod. That’s a good thing to keep in mind.
“And as for sparring, maybe do it in your current form? I think that’d at least make Davidson less likely to faint.”
Davidson launches a light punch at the lanky teen. I can tell it was light because Crane didn’t hardly move, although he does rub his shoulder afterwards. “I’m not that terrified!”
“If it’s your first time, though, we should probably get Coach to help.”