“I am not talking until you tell me who you are, where we are and what is going on! Now!”
“We will after you can prove to us that you are not a threat,” Shea wearily asked the girl again, tapping her boot against the damp ground as she grew more irritated.
“And you’re the ones who brought me here anyway! You first!” the girl yelled back with fists clutched, her dark brown eyes glaring and the tawny skin of her face flushed with anger.
Off to the side, Jason sighed as the two went round and round in this circle while he and the others watched, waiting for one or both of them to lose their voice since it would sooner start raining gold than one of them yielding to the other. Quil could have ended this a long time ago, but since Shea was still angry with him over what had happened in the tunnel, she had not only refused help from him but told him that if he interfered she would burn him just short of dying, heal him and do it over and over again until she ran out of fire. Quil had actually seen her do this once to a dragon who had tried to harm a group of hatchlings and kept it up for over a week and it took a month for the smell of burnt scales, bone and muscle the clear out of the Monarchs’ stronghold. So Quil had decided to stand guard. At first, he was nervous the girl would reveal that she was a Layan, but after almost an hour of this, he was fairly certain that was not a piece of information she was going to give up and was content.
Jason and the others, however, were fed up. All the dragons were in their human forms to avoid giving away their actual identities and even though the girl was a fire hatchling, the pouring rain and increasing cold made it nearly impossible for her to smell them, or they anything with their noses numbed and anything not covered by their cloaks was soaked. Jason had thought that the forest canopy would have shielded them from the rain, as it did the previous morning while he slept. After a few hours though, the trees had collected enough water in their branches to start their own heavy downpour while the unceasing rain above them fueled both the tree’s rain and the groups’ collective irritation.
After another thick, cold drop plopped into his eye, on top of having to wear the waterproof but extremely itchy cloak, Jason finally blurted out, “Oh would one of you please stop and just answer already!”
Shea whipped her head around at Jason, just as annoyed as he was with standing in the wet, chilly weather and snapped, “You will not take that tone with me unless you’d want me to scold you!” And by scold, she meant literally.
Jason made a face but kept silent and slouched forward on his elbows, scratching at his irritated skin under the cloak.
“I take it that he’s your kid,” the girl stated with her eyebrow cocked up.
“That’s none of your concern,” Shea returned coldly.
“That just made it even more obvious and since I’m annoyed as hell too I’ll take you’re a mom and that’s your brat as an answer, so I’ll tell you something too,” the girl said with sly grin since she had technically won.
Shea narrowed her eyes at the girl, but respond to the taunt, “Alright, your name?”
“Amaya,” she said flatly.
“Amaya what?” Shea pushed, while Quil cautiously turned his head their direction, his heart now pounding at what her answer would be.
“Nothing else. Just Amaya. I even picked it out myself,” she said proudly, but there was still an edge of bitterness to her tone.
“And you could be making this all up for all I know,” Shea bounced right back.
“Well it was either Amaya or go with ‘girl’, ‘runt’ or ‘gutter rat’,” Amaya replied sarcastically, “So if you haven’t guessed it by now I live on the streets. Now it’s my turn, what are a bunch of dragons doing out in the middle of nowhere and so far north that it’s freezing cold in the middle of summer? Seriously!”
Everyone, including Shea, were all too cold to visibly react to what Amaya said, but their lack of an answer betrayed them just the same as Amaya continued, “Do you all think I'm stupid? I’m pretty sure you already knew I’m a dragon too and I can see your kid’s scales every time he scratches them from here.”
Jason, who was indeed still scratching finally looked at his skin to find it was covered in both large and small scales of silver and gold covering his arms and as he quickly discovered his neck, back and face too.
“What the freak!” he started to exclaim, twisting around carelessly on the slippery log he was seated on and with a sudden swoosh, slipped off the log backward and right into a pile of waterlogged moss and dirt.
Amaya cracked up, laughing at Jason’s blunder while Shea and Sarre who was seated next to him, checked on him.
“Are you ok? Why didn’t you say something?” Shea urged, annoyed with herself for being too caught up in arguing with Amaya that she would miss something this important and apparently obvious.
“I didn’t know! I thought it was the cloak. Ugh, just help me up,” Jason grunted.
“Watch your tone,” Shea reprimanded as Sarre grasped his arm and helped Jason back up and Shea tried to clean off the dirt that splashed onto his face. Instead, she ended up pushing some of the gritty, bitter sludge into his mouth which he promptly spat out and exclaimed, “Mom, just let me do it!”
“Tone!” Shea said once more, handing him the cloth she had used and hiding that she was overwhelmed with joy that he finally called her “Mom”. It was enough that she forgot most of her anger and finally called Quil over, “Quil, I’m going check Jason over. Speak with Amaya while I do so.”
“Certainly,” he replied while Shea took Jason off to the side with Amaya still giggling behind, prompting him to glare at her over his shoulder before Quil blocked his view.
Shea guided Jason, still scratching at his newly formed scales, over to a small cluster of trees where the rain fell less densely, worried, annoyed and exasperated at the whole of everything going on, as was Jason. He could tell the others around him were hiding something about what was going on and he knew it had to do with more than Amaya. Jason knew it had to do with him. It was already painfully obvious that the type of fire hatchling he and likely Amaya were, was not normal like Joyce, but instead of telling him they kept going out of their way to keep him out of the loop. He had already been through this kind of roundabout, most notably when the King of Avonous had asked his parents’ permission to take him into the King’s Guard. For two weeks his human parents had acted the way Shea, Quil, Marion, Sarre, Manus, and even Joyce were right now.
Poorly pretending as if nothing important had happened and they presumed they were sparing him by not telling him, whether it was good or bad. It was one of the things he hated most back then and it had made him decide not to treat new King’s Guard knights that way. He knew his knights, though courageous and smart, still needed to learn how to guide their own lives. But apparently, even the long-lived dragon race didn’t see it that way either, as Shea hastily pulled Jason’s cloak off of him and grabbed the arm he had been scratching to examine it.
Jason wanted to pull away and tell her he would have taken off his cloak and shown her himself if she had just asked, but when he saw more of what had been happening to the skin on his arm, hand, and fingers, it caught him off-guard. Without Shea needing to ask him, he held out his other arm in front of him and saw the same thing. All along the topside of his arms, hands and fingers were thick golden scales, arranged like the ones he’d seen on crocodile skin but smoother with smaller ridges and some overlapping like pieces of armor. In-between the golden scales and the insides of his arms, hands, and fingers were small light-silver and translucent ones that allowed his muscles and joints to still bend and flex among the heavier ones and perched on his fingertips were something more claw than fingernail-like.
It was the same on his face, neck, and back, only he could feel some of the scales’ ridges changed into small spines along his cheekbones and the golden, armor-like ones were much thicker along his neck and back with three ridges that also raised up into spikes that he could feel.
For what seemed like an eternity, Shea examined Jason in silence, her face as serious and hard as a monument’s before Jason finally pulled back from her and spoke up, “Enough with the poking and prodding! Just tell me what is going on!”
“I told you to-,” Shea began, but Jason needed answers.
“Just tell me. I already know this isn’t normal, even for a dragon…What is going on?” he asked, calmer, but no less serious.
For a moment Jason thought Shea was going to tell him he didn’t need to know right now or she would tell him later, but instead, she looked at him with a heaviness that rested not just in her gaze. A burden she would be passing onto him, “No, this isn’t normal and it hasn’t been since I became your mother. When I gave you my fire, like Joyce, you should have taken on your natural dragon form. A hatching, but still in no way human like you have been. You shouldn’t even remember your human life. At first, both Quil and I thought it was a delayed reaction or maybe that my fire hadn’t saved you and instead of turning into a dragbeast, you were turning to glass stone, like the many who died in the Old Country, which is where we are headed now.”
Jason took a moment to take in what Shea had said, both grateful and fearful why she had decided to be this forthcoming, and now somewhat missing being kept in the dark, “Why are we going to the Old Country…Do you know what is wrong with me?”
“We don’t think there is actually anything actually wrong, but we still don’t know what is happening. In the Old Country, Marion believes that the Hall of Torvin will hopefully have some answers. It is normally forbidden to enter the Old Country, but even Quil, who you already know is a pedant when it comes to rules, says we need to go there,” Shea explained, hoping what she had said would be enough.
“But why there?” Jason insisted.
Shea took in a deep breath, not knowing if she would be able or know how to explain when Marion walked over and spoke up, “Because you share the same power as Torvin, the Great Guardian, first to unify the dragon and human races, and provide all of us protection from the Plagued. But unlike the other Ancients’ Halls, his is not a monument to honor him, but the place where he died. Quil will be able to tell you in more detail later, but Torvin’s power, his protection within the Monarchs’ immunity, the gorn root, your Torvis armor even, is almost completely gone…but we believe that you may be the one who will restore it.”
Jason stared blankly at Marion and Shea who looked expectantly at him, but the only thing that he could think to say was, “Um…can we go back to the ‘you’re dying’ theory?”
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