A Benevolent Evil Dragon

Branches and leaves creak, wind rushes by and the scent of living meat fills the air. It’s easy, you know? It took a bit to figure out all the inputs and what they mean, but now it’s oh so easy to follow my nose. I leap, spread my wings, then collapse them again as I sink my claws into bark, leaving deep cuts in it, the wood groaning under my weight ever so slightly, but it holds strong still.

It’s been a few months, I think, and it seems that autumn exists here. Basically any tree not close to a pocket of magic is already naked, no evergreen to see anywhere around despite the small mountain our cave is in. Ah, I am losing focus.

I jump again and again, scaring away crows while trying to get into position. I get to a good spot and hunker down, my head aimed down as I hug the old tree I am currently on. My tails, now fully split, wrap around it for extra grip. I still have some time, so I make sure to not stand out too much with my bright blue scales. I close my eyes and with difficulty I speak, pushing out earth mana infused air.

“Terobe-”

I fail, getting a coughing fit instead, as I thought I would. My body still trembles from speaking a single word in draconic (seriously, what else should I call the magic dragon language?) and while it helps me with doing the basic magic even quicker than I could before, it is a pain in the ass when trying to use it for more complex things. Mother has been teaching us both magic and words, but it seems that just speaking consumes mana because of the way language works. As I said before, mother’s chants are basically only three syllables long, and it turns out it’s not because of the spell chants themselves, but because words are absurdly broad in dragon tongue. There’s a word for fire, which is used for any sort of flame and even any form of heat or warming up. Then there’s a word for nature… which is used for any plant life. So wood that is burning would be nature fire, “warm leaves” would be, nature fire and setting fire to a tree would be… no, idiot, it would be fire nature. Just kidding, the order doesn’t even matter. It’s stupid and nobody would understand anything, right? But after learning the words I was able to understand what mother means when she uses them. That’s the magic.

It costs a decent chunk of mana, and takes some decent control whenever I use one of these words because apparently dragons just speak in .rar archives, to the point where even body language can be translated magically. Ah, right, back to the spell. It collapsed because I failed, so I try to build it up instead.

“Ter.”

The rune of earth manifests in front of me, a simple thing, really, especially now that I understand where complexity comes from. Next I weave a second, different rune. Just like mother turned a light source into a beam of light, I turn the rune that lets me move chunks of earth around into something much more wieldy and fluid. From below me I see pieces of dirt rise towards me, then spread thinner and thinner until I am left with a layer that just about fits me. I move it to stick to me, and while a bit of it falls as I dispel the rune, most of it remains and I am now a magical chameleon sticking to a tree.

It only takes a minute before the stampede reaches me. I look through my sharp eyes in the distance, between the branches, and I see the dust rise and the deer running for their lives, spooked by a predator. Spots is good at that, scaring them in such a way that they all run as far away from him as possible. I look on to the sides and I see my siblings, RT and Crown, as they run by and pick off prey from the sides. No babies to slow them down means that they only catch three, one each with a well landed bite and another from Crown’s liberal use of a boulder. What use is running at 60 km/h when you end up faced with a sudden huge rock at head level?

My prey however isn’t the mothers or the young ones. Leading the rush is one of two bucks, and I want him because unlike the other this one is pretty damn magical. I can see the earth mana that gave him rocky antlers and a hardened, deep brown coat, move to the front to create a perfect path for them to run. No tripping hazards, no blockages. The rest of the herd is mundane but he’s one of the stronger mutants around, and a perfect meal for me.

He gets close, directed here by my siblings, and I leap. By the time he notices me it is too late, I am already directly above him, falling with my jaws open. I cannot stop his charge with my weight alone, sadly enough, since I am decently sure the giant with huge rock horns is heavier than me, but the bite to the back of its neck as I fall on its spine is enough to make it lose its stride. He ends up running into a tree and collapsing, throwing both of us to the ground, as the rest of the herd rushes by, going around us.

I groan and get up, shaking my head and spitting out tooth fragments. I can feel a deep lack of them, but no pain. It’s like sharks, really, the way I will just grow them back even if mother doesn’t heal us. Though she does speed things along so I hope she will fix them. Looking over at the buck, as he tries to get up, I notice a few of my teeth stuck in his skin and fur. Damn thing was so thick it kept them.

I try to jump at its throat again, but I am met by a swipe of his horns, which hit my scales and explode me backwards. Things are strong, and sharp, they might actually do me in if they puncture my head or even my lungs. And considering that my body’s 30% lungs, I will need to handle that. I take a few deep breaths, then gather my remaining earth mana. I can’t make a strong enough spell quickly enough with this, earth mana is notoriously slow compared to others, but I can do a breath attack.

Even with these months of learning I have yet to learn something stronger than what I get by just using a proper breath attack, so as the buck rushes me, sharp horns aimed straight at my body, I let it all out.

For half a second nothing comes out. No cloud of dust, no rain of sharp stones, and the buck is just about ready to impale me, then the breath hits him.

Those giant weapons of death, that sign of power and superiority that the beast boasted… they’re gone. The stone cracks, then explodes into pebbles, the force sending the beast back on its side. Below the stone there were still the normal horns, which were also injured. I see blood on them, their frailty being a direct cause of the stone protection the beast got used to. I see it let out a horrible, loud yell, and the pebbles start trembling, rolling towards it. Not its first case of vulnerability, it knows how to fix it, but I won’t let it. With the leftover earth mana in the air I weave another simple earth rune, my word echoing between the woods.

“TER.”

And the pebbles stop approaching, just shaking as we struggle for control. Before me stands a beast that has controlled earth for years, climbing to a position of power that no other buck around can even challenge. But I’m a dragon, and this world is unfair as shit if you’re not one. While the animal is stuck trying its hardest to pull, I can still move while the rune does most of the hard work with keeping the rocks still. By the time it gives up I am already leaping at its neck, letting electricity flow between my jaws until it hits its body.

The male keeps struggling still, despite taking voltages that outright killed mutant boars and wolves. It hits me hard with its hooves, it even gets a good stomp on me, but I don’t even need my mana to repel those hits, I need to focus everything in killing it, so I drop the now useless earth rune and instead focus on my breath attack. I gather a more complex combination and visualize what I want it to do, but the buck manages to shake me off with a stomp so strong it forces my innate protection to activate. I roll on the ground as ice, fire and air mana moves through my lungs, towards that important part that shapes my breath attacks.

We are alone. The other deers escaped, my siblings are too far away, enjoying their meals, and I am standing here, facing a once mighty beast that’s now ragged and bloody, with twitching muscles that would make it impossible to escape at this stage. My vision solidifies as the beast gathers stones on its horns again. They don’t take that sleek, almost sculptured aesthetic they had before, instead they look exactly like a vaguely horn-like pile of stones should be. They won’t hold more than an attack, but it might be enough to hurt me. I won’t let it.

It charges me and I let out my breath, cold air rushing forward, covering the animal in a layer of frost that just barely slows it down, but just behind the cold is air so hot its already expanding its surroundings, but as it touches the frost on the buck, it doesn’t melt it or warm it up… it explodes straight into steam. The creatures shrieks and almost hits me as it crashes, but I manage to jump to the side, getting extra propulsion from my wings.

It’s silent. Only heavy breathing and the faint wind still make sound. I approach it, watching its chest rise and fall slower with each passing second. I won. A part of me wants me to just start enjoying my meal, but I first go over to its head, holding a large stone in my tails, and with a simple twirl I bring down the sledgehammer, splattering its head and putting it out of its misery.

I let out a sigh and then dig into my meal, going for the best part first, the core. After cutting through the meaty part with my claw, I see decently large brown crystals covered in blood and viscera. After cleaning them with my tongue I see just how nice they really are. I came to learn, after studying a few larger cores, why I don’t get the urge to eat the gems from mother’s hoard like I do with these.

Simply put? These are alive. There’s a spark in them, something… different. I take a tiny bite of the crystal and I let myself delve into my senses. A steady path of dirt, packed together tightly after being beaten into submission by a thousand hooves. I feel the weight of horns that could impale and crush any threat, the very mark of pride that comes from the strength of stone.

I am back to normal, and I nod to myself as I continue my meal. Yes this is the kind of mana you don’t get from those simple cut gems. There’s a uniqueness to mana, just like how mother’s mana invokes the sight of the overgrown lake, the calmest place I can imagine, while actually being just nature and water mana, this is the same. Apparently every being has a slightly different taste to their mana, and that alone makes it more special. It holds knowledge and power, and by devouring this crystal I get just a bit more of an idea, a bit more control of whatever I absorbed.

It’s a marginal improvement, but it is an improvement worthy of having dragon kids kill their own prey after a few months of life. The more you wait from killing to eating it, the more of this identity vanishes and the crystals grown in the core become bland again.

I walk back to mother’s lake, one of the spots that still has greenery and flowers like we’re mid spring, and I lay down in front of our half asleep mother, opening my mouth. She notices the poor state of my teeth and immediately heals me. I can’t use her healing spell yet, but I at least have it memorized after seeing it so many times. Really, I managed to get a good amount of runes for my library, but so many of them feel like trying to do a headstand while threading a needle and playing a piano with my feet.

Well, so long as mother doesn’t kick us out soon, it’ll be fine. While I learned how to glide (and wasn’t that a fun few hundred faceplants), my siblings are still landlocked, so I fear that when they get to learn proper flying, we’ll be kicked out. After all this time I have yet to see mother being too.. motherly, really. She makes sure we are healed but has stopped providing us easy meals for a while now, making us learn how to actually hunt. At least she has the decency to let us return to high mana concentration places as we please, and she made sure we understand the lay of the land before sending us out, but still…

I sigh and wait for her to take us back to the cave. Sadly I wasn’t able to get more food for the others than one leg of the buck. Its meat was filled with enough mana to recover what I had lost, and then some, so I needed to eat my fill at the time. It should still help, at least a bit…

No, I’ll need to hunt again in the evening. It’s fine, really, after all a great hunter is on my side. Whatever agreement mother came to with the now released women let them keep their freedom, but not leave the cave, at least if I’m not around. If I am there they can go anywhere I accompany them to. It took them a while to make me realize that, but yeah, I’m basically their handler now, despite being months old. Great parenting there, mother, great parenting.

Regardless of poor choices, that gave me an edge when it came to adapting to hunting. After all the beas- Ayrah.. Her name’s Ayrah and I should stop thinking of her as the beast woman after she went through all that effort to get me to understand her name. She’s a great huntress and while she couldn’t talk logistics, just by mimicking her I’ve been able to handle hunts pretty well, despite having lived in cities most of my human life.

After the short flight I am once more in the cave, walking with the deer leg in my mouth towards the human room. I enter and I see the grim faces. Really, they seem to have gotten rather close, despite the frictions that existed at first. The young girl and Ayrah take the leg, the girl giving me a grateful bow like she has been doing since I started bringing them meat. While they’re doing that I see what was once a noble assisting the old lady in caring for the child.

He’s dying.

I think I saw the old woman pleading with mother once to heal the boy. Mother activated her rune only to say “NO.” and that was that. Even after I made sad cries and nudged him she seemed unmoved.

It makes sense. She’s probably annoyed they’ve been alive for months when they were supposed to be food. Now what was supposed to be a fresh core of ice is so muted that there’s barely a reason to consider it as a meal.

The boy is sick and will die. There’s no two ways about it.

It’s sad that they’re wasting their time and energy on a lost cause like this…