Talu and one of his friends were waiting for me at the usual place in the Undersea. I recognized her from my first adventure into the deep blue—Jewel, with the pearls in her hair. My breath hitched when I looked at Talu, though. 

He was the boy from the bonfire on the beach last night, with those same aquamarine eyes. I just hadn't recognized him out of context, with his markings missing. As soon as I met his eyes, I knew he knew that I knew. I opened my mouth to speak, and he shook his head ever-so-slightly. 

"You remember Jewel, right?" Talu gestured towards her. 

"Of course I do!"

"Talu told us about what happened with the sea-witches," Jewel said. "Evie and Lumi are busy with some tasks for their apprenticeships—but Talu insisted on waiting for you, and we thought we'd come along to meet the enigmatic stranger again."

I blushed. "Thanks, I guess."

"Oh, there you are, Pearly." Talu turned to greet a little ivory reptile with fringe on its back and tail like sea-grass, a bright-sea green. It had a pearl embedded into its forehead that glowed—the origin of the nickname, I suppose.

"What's that?" I asked as the creature dropped a piece of driftwood in front of Talu. 

"Oh, Pearly." Talu scratched the back of his neck. "She's a dragonling. I named her when I was still a really little kid, hence the name—"

"A dragonling?" I interrupted. 

"Like, a little dragon," Jewel said. "They've been our pets and companions for thousands of years."

I considered this. "Does that mean that there's big dragons?"

"Once." Talu was so solemn and quiet, I thought maybe I'd heard a little current in the water instead of his voice. "They could shift between the forms of large, majestic dragons, and humanoids not so different from you. But they're gone now."

I frowned. "What do you mean?" 

"It's an old story," Talu said as he threw the conch shell back into the blue. The dragonling went zooming after it, leaving a trail of bubbles in its path. 

"Treasure Divers like us know it well." Jewel winked.

Talu ignored her, staring out at the trail of bubbles Pearly the dragonling had left behind. "It was said that the sea-dragons once lived in a palace at the bottom of the ocean, where they crafted pearl-magic and wove spells out of moonlight."

Jewel blinked. "That's actually kind of poetic."

Talu ignored her and continued. "They say that a tragedy befell their civilization, their palace was lost and the survivors scattered, integrating with the mermaids. No pure-blooded dragons remain in the world."

"So it's a sad story," I muttered.

Talu shrugged. "History often is."

Luckily Pearly returned, sparing me the struggle of figuring out what to say to that while sounding as witty and cool and fun as I did at the party. 

"So those aren't like real dragons then?"
Talu patted Pearly on the head. "No, not quite. I don't really know where they come from—but Pearly is my oldest pet. She's still just as lively and playful as the hatchlings born this spring."

"He has a whole menagerie of them." Jewel wrinkled her nose. "Lava-leviathans and sea-turtles and just about everything you can think of."

"Don't be like that, they're my friends you know." Talu spoke light-heartedly—you could tell that they'd had variations on this conversation before. "Besides, they're really useful. Scales detected that one cave-in on that shipwreck you were working on a while back."

"Scales?"

"The lava leviathan," Talu answered, which gave me nothing really. 

"That's how I met Lumi, actually." Talu's eyes went all soft and glazed over as he stared off after Pearly again. "Pearly's shedding fringe and scales all the time, and those can be useful in potion-making and spell-crafting. I was getting more than I knew what to do with, so my mom suggested I take it down to the sea-witch village. Naturally, I did, and the first mermaid I saw, right through the window—"

"—Was Lumi," Jewel interrupted, a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she lightly elbowed him.

"Yes." He turned his head, but not fast enough for me to see his face turned red.

"You like her," I blurted out. 

He was quiet for a moment. "Yes."

"Does she know?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," Talu snorted. He then turned unusually serious. "Madame Dominique would kill me. She hates me, almost as much as she hates Lumi."

"She hates her?" I was confused now. "But isn't Lumi her niece and apprentice?"

"Maybe, but you haven't really seen how she talks to Lumi." Talu shook his head. "I don't know the full story, but I don't think either of them really wanted the arrangement. Lumi tries to make the best of it, and she won't talk badly about Madame Dominique—but I can see it's not a good situation."

"You want to save her, don't you?" I asked softly.

"First she has to want to leave," Jewel pointed out.

Talu said nothing to all of this. Pearly returned and plopped onto the bank of sand alongside Talu and let out a long sigh, typical of an aging pet. Talu sat on the sand beside her, flipping his fins for a moment. 

"Maybe one day, she'll be free of her apprenticeship contract and will want to see the seven seas," he said. "I just want to be there to help her when she's ready."

We sat there in silence for a time, the three of us. We watched fish swirl past in their rainbows, the underwater grasses rippling in the current. Eventually, we were joined by another—Lumi. 

But she looked incredibly grave.

"What's wrong?" Talu asked as she approached.

"Madame Miranda sent us, she said it's time." Lumi's cryptic words weren't helpful. She shifted to a more openly worried expression, which gave me a better idea of what was going on. "The Queen wants to see you—immediately!"