A Benevolent Evil Dragon

After managing to showcase the rules of the game, It took me embarrassingly long to realize that playing in the dirt outside the room isn’t exactly an easy or fun task for human fingers. That is why I ended up gathering some roughly sameish pebbles, scratching X’s and O’s on them, then carved a board on the wooden floor inside the room. And thus I became the creator of the first board game! (probably not, board games are older than the medieval era after all).

However, tic tac toe is not something that can entertain people forever, even if it helped most of them think less of their new scars, bringing a few smiles from the younger folk. It’s also a solved game and I know every single possible variation of the board… That is why I decided to make more. Got a bunch of pebbles, burnt half of them, made a checkerboard and taught them checkers. I thought for a bit about making chess too, but that is a bit beyond my sculpting capabilities. Also way beyond the kind of mind I should possess. I think I saw mother peek in at us when she was passing through, bringing food. I kinda gave up appearing normal, but making a game with pieces shaped like towers and horses when I have yet to see any… yeah…

Endpoint, games were the best idea I’ve had in a while! Especially since I finally managed to let go of some rather overwhelming built up stress about my rate of progress. I wanted so many new things… I wanted explosive learning, I wanted to live up to being a prodigy, I wanted to know everything there was to know about something as esoteric as magic! And now I am here, relaxing on my back while watching the kiddo, Alek, completely demolish Ayrah in checkers. This is nice.

Also my time was not exactly wasted, since father started teaching us how to fly the day after I made checkers… somewhat. Mostly he’s been teaching my siblings how to beat their wings. Why did he not teach me? Because I already know well enough apparently. Truthfully, I have copied the movements from my memories of birds and bats, choosing the ones with wings most similar to my own, then adding a bit of correction using my knowledge of aerodynamics and biology. This results in me just flapping my wings a bit, showing I can get some lift if I jump, then curling up and observing the others.

Guess there’s no advanced course for this. Still, I do learn something after all is said and done. He does use magic to fly, but I don’t see a rune. When he flies he exudes the tiniest bit of wind mana, so it’s likely he uses it to compensate since his biology shouldn't actually allow flight, but I don’t know how he does it. Well, whatever the answer may be, I will learn it eventually.

Days pass pretty fast when you’re not stressing about every second after all.

All in all, another week came and left before something more interesting happened. Father pulled me aside and showed me how he cast his spell without having a rune flying near him. I knew that eye inside of him was weird, turns out it’s meant to hold in runes! Well, maybe also meant to do a bunch of other things, but what he’s been doing the entire time is form a pretty complex rune inside of his eye, which was well within his body. I have no clue how he managed to keep it in however. There’s a bit of a double edge to every single cell in my body reacting to mana. I can brush away a formed rune with one of my claws, dissipating it. This also means that it is next to impossible to form a rune inside my body, as even the tiniest twitch would shift it and break it.

The eye might be the answer, a space filled with fluid meant to not interact with mana, walled in by cells that do interact. It would keep the rune firmly fixated and properly fed since he wouldn’t need to breathe out a cloud of air mana whenever the rune was running low on fuel.

As interesting as his absurd biology might be, the most interesting part for me is the rune itself. I managed to get a pretty good look at it since he was keeping it intentionally visible for me. It’s not too complex to understand, like mother’s communication rune, but it does bear a very strange few properties. I can recognize “wind” and “control”, as well as two other separate runes that were layered over. Now, one of them is some kind of wind based modifier, but the other rune is the thing that really messes with my brain. It’s lightning. It’s not the lightning rune, but it is a rune that uses lightning mana, combined with 3 wind based runes.

I have yet to properly figure out rune combinations with different elements. Sure I managed to use nature mana as fuel, or air mana to gather more flammable air and improve any fire I try to form, but I’ve only done that with my breath attack or with a separate rune. Layering different elements together tends to break stuff, the only exception so far being the “wind to sound” rune being slapped on top of the normal sound rune, but I wouldn’t really call them different elements since they’re both a result of air moving.

Bottom line, I need to figure out what the runes he uses do. I summon the wind rune, layer on the control one, then strain as I try to somehow shape the flow of mana into the third rune. I fail, of course. Using three modifiers, while possible, is always hard. Using a modifier without having a vision of what it is meant to do? Now that’s impossible. I know that this should help me fly somehow, but I don’t know the “how”. Is it controlling the wind around me better? Does it lighten me up? Speed me forward? No clue because the damn thing is so inconspicuous that I can’t see the difference. Even when using it by itself it does nothing… which is probably just me being bad, but hey, at least I now have something to practice.

I think I have a skewed sense of what magic study is like. So far I have been able to look at something and almost perfectly replicate it. The only thing I still suck at is conjuring stuff like mother does, since I have so little mana. However everything else has been easy, with repetition only leading to improving my speed of forming the runes and my minute control of their results. Plainly put, I already knew how to use most basic magic, no second tries needed.

This might take me a while…

I wish I could just make something like Catan… Oh well. After another week of playing checkers, I made a Go set, trained my earth rune control by shaping pebbles into spheres, basically creating marbles to play with (sadly only Alek took to them) and managed to figure out how to make chess without making it weird. After figuring out how to reshape stone, I made disks and simply carved a drawing on top of them that described their movement.

It took me half a day to make sure everyone understood the rules, but I managed and now I was off to see them figure it out. After a while though, someone unexpected came and nudged me. Meredith used the pieces to build something akin to a cube… Dice? Did she want dice? Well, dice games were some of the earliest games ever conceived, so it made sense she’d be more familiar with that than what I am making.

Actually that’s a great idea! I can make backgammon with that. Now that’s a blast to the past and the perfect motivation to finish them almost immediately. With this everyone has more than enough ways to pass the time, whenever they’re not dealing with their basic needs or doing their strange meditative training, or whatever it is they’re doing with their mana crystals.

The forest was healed just in time for the first snow. Turns out it’s winter already, or at least very close to it. That’s… odd I think. If this planet follows my old one in seasons somehow, then we were born around early summer, so I am somewhere between five and six months old. I think the exponential growth has finally calmed down, or rather has already calmed down since I am still half a year old! A human baby would literally barely move around by now, yet I’m the top predator around if you ignore mother. Life’s weird.

Speaking of growth, my body changes yet again, even if in minute ways. My new hands, for example, have been developing to be better in every way, resulting in me being able to actually carry around heavier stuff with them. I can also shape most basic and single modifier runes either by speech or with my hands in under half a second. My mana capacity also grew a bit to match my slightly better size, though it is still negligible.

Really the best part of these past few weeks has been the fact that I cracked magic, at least a bit more. I finally get what exactly father was doing with his rune, even after he left a while back to who knows where, I kept trying and cracked it. Two important things I had to note, firstly, the meaning of that one wind rune turned out to be “movement”. It refers to any form of movement, just like direction refers to any form of direction, path or orientation of something. Which makes the spell look something like “Controlled movement through air”.

As for the lightning rune? That was a whole dictionary shoved into one simple shape. Or rather a multitude of similar shapes that are all spoken the same. It literally means “Like”, though more appropriate would be “X like Y”, with X being the idea you give and Y being the element you use. I say the rune has a lot of similar shapes because based on what idea you give it, it will end up looking a slight bit differently, though thankfully I don’t seem to need to shape it myself.

Yeah this one’s just a cheat code. I can basically use any idea that is even remotely connected to an element, though the closer it is the more powerful the result. Fast like lightning? Absurd speed boost, though it is a mana hog. Hard like stone? Turned a tiny flower I made into a DIY lego piece. Yes, it actually hurt when I stepped on it. Fluid like water? Mud. I uh… I controlled mud. The earth wasn’t mud when I started though, it just acted like mud despite being dry. A lot of weird spells can be made with this, though for now, I made the complete flying rune all of twice.

Both times I crashed. I can fly fast, very, very fast, but I run out of lightning mana after a couple minutes. My first attempt was a 70-20 air to lightning spread, my second was a 30-60, with 10% being other types. End result each time? Crash. I either consume the lightning too fast, or I have lightning but I run out of air. Both end in me falling since the whole rune implodes and I don’t have time to shape it back.

Yeah I need better mana reserves for this… Good news is that I can fly from home to mother’s lake in these minutes. I think I am already faster than her, but I have the endurance of a cheetah… Well, all in due time. Right now I have a whole new slew of combinations to try out carefully and humans to care for.

Right, humans, people, new occasional conversation partners. I started learning the language, while also getting better at Ayrah’s language. My brain is a literal sponge and I am pretty sure that I will eventually figure out most words, but for now I am limited to only a few that I can make reliably with my sound rune. They have also been healing well. Sure there’s still some scar tissue, but Ayrah looks the same as always, Edith simply seems to have her mutation advanced, with literally zero normal scars. Yvone doesn’t even have warped skin left as a thin layer of wood crawled over and helped her truly recover. Alek already had a tinier wound than most and he’s young enough that he’s recovering well enough.

It’s really just Meredith that still has a large wound, but she found her own way of dealing with it. Her elements are darkness and poison, the latter being useless when it came to fixing scars, but the former was simply the absence of light. One day she managed to form a continuous spell that placed an unnatural shadow over her face. It’s pretty impressive, but it’s clearly just a coping mechanism that might become unhealthy…

A pity I really can’t help with this. Mother has been very keen to not teach us any overtly dangerous magic. Dangerous, of course, meaning something that could directly affect our bodies, bypassing our natural protections. I was lucky I was so stressed back when I used the life rune, because if not for my fight or flight state, I would have died. Turns out that the defense isn’t absolute. It took weeks of testing and I finally figured out why I couldn’t use it at first, but I could later: feeling of danger. I needed to register something as dangerous, and wouldn’t you know it, despite my instincts telling me that a rabbit is dangerous, I didn’t believe that I would have my bone cracked by one kicking me.

Haven’t made that mistake since, but if I were to use magic without realizing that it could be dangerous, I might be vulnerable to any backlash. Which sucks, but is an understandable limit to what is basically a second chance at life every time I get hit badly.

I stretch, yawning as I feel my mind being tired. It took a while but I think my brain finally figured out how to feel exhaustion. Took it long enough. Or it might just be from all my attempts at different spells… Whatever the reason, I just want to get back to the nest and relax in the pile of gold. That is why I walk through the ornate hallway, into the side tunnel that leads home… then take a step back and look on further.

Why have I not checked out the other end of the hallway yet? Sure, every time I thought of it, a crisis came soon after… but I had days after. Once or twice? That’s the normal amount of ADHD coming in to mess up my day. But I had so many chances, so many times of passing right by it, looking at it… and nothing? Something is odd.

I ignore my slightly tired brain, instead taking a step towards the other end of the hallway.

A few steps later I reach the gold pile and curl up.

A few seconds later I get up, blink, then run out of the nest and back to the hallway.

Once there I try to go forward, keeping my eyes peeled, focusing on my ever improving mana sense to see if some supernatural fuckery is afoot. I see it, for a moment, for a split second before the mana reached me… and I was on my back, almost asleep in the nest. It’s mother’s mana, a single part of her whole, but it is her mana. The mana type I did not understand… the type that was so complex I could not figure it no matter how much I tried…

Mind mana. Mother has mind powers and she apparently wants that hallway to not be accessed… That’s worrying. Well, actually it might not be. Parents usually have stuff locked up out of reach of their children, but children rarely can reshape any sort of box to get what’s inside, so making the door a literal cognitive hazard might just be the draconic version of a locked door. Still, I thought I was just losing myself in other stuff, but she's been messing with my mind? Well, it was good while it lasted, but I think I want to be a bit of a menace again. Mother has something locked up and my inner child is eager to find out what!

Now… how does one bypass brainwashing?