While the others slept, I remained half awake. I didn’t feel the need to take another ‘extended nap’ right now. There was a vague feeling that things inside of me needed some time to settle before I’d need to sleep deeply. If it weren’t for my companions I would have gone to explore the night.

  Visk began to stir against Sanguine around midnight. A quick check confirmed that they weren’t awake. Something in their dreams had disturbed them. Despite how weak the elf’s arms were, they were squeezing me tightly. As carefully as I could manage, I curled my tail under my wing and pressed it up against Visk.

  The elf turned in their sleep and latched onto my tail with both arms. I could feel small shivers run down their body. While I wanted to comfort them, I was unsure of what else I should do. Visk was not open about their problems, more so than my Cassia or Edith. They tended to startle away from me at the slightest hint of trouble.

  I was fairly certain they’d already take issue with me in the morning when they woke to find themselves wrapped around my tail. The desperate way that they clung to me said more about their troubles than most of our conversations to this point. No other way for me to help Visk presented itself for the moment. Like Cassia had told me before, Visk had a lot of problems that they’d need to sort out at their own pace.

  At some point, they stopped shivering and settled back down.

  ○ ○ ○

  Against my expectations, Visk did not recoil from me in the morning. If anything, they seemed to hover uncomfortably close to me. They didn’t say anything about the position they’d found themselves in. My Cassia certainly noticed, but held off on commenting on it for now.

  Cassia made the necessary adjustments to Visk and Sir Kenneth’s harnesses and prepared a light breakfast. No one wanted to vomit while dangling underneath a dragon hundreds of feet in the air. Just before we broke camp, Visk approached me.

  “Boss… can I ride on your back today?” They said carefully. Cassia was close enough to overhear, but waited to see how I handled the request. “I know that’s… Cassia’s spot, so…” The elf looked down at the ground.

  “... I did promise that you could ride up there,” I said slowly. “But there isn’t room for two people to comfortably sit there at the same time.” Visk visibly deflated even from my gentle rejection.

  “But… how about this. We will be crossing the ‘hump’ of the Cloudshears today. The winds will be at their most powerful there. I will need to stop and recover earlier than yesterday. You and I can glide around after we make camp and do some light scouting.”

  Visk took a moment to realize that I’d continued speaking. Once they refocused on what I was saying, their mood brightened considerably. “O-oh! Yeah! Sure thing Boss. Thanks!”

  When I glanced over at Cassia, she gave me a small nod and a smile. A gentle feeling of approval for how I’d handled the situation washed over me through our connection.

  Once we’d finished breaking camp, it was time to return to the sky. As I’d expected, the warm winds blowing across the Cloudshear mountains intensified as I approached the ‘hump’. The slope down towards the Coil River funneled the Summershore winds though a series of mountain passes.

  If I were by myself, I could likely have flown across the upper peaks. The thin air would likely be dangerous for my two legged passengers. Therefore I was forced to fly right into the winds. Each gust attempted to blow me back towards the Barony. I got more practice flying by negotiating around those gusts than I had most of my life previously.

  By the time we reached the ‘hump’ that served as a barrier between the Barony and the ‘Inner Continent’, I was exhausted. We’d needed to land more than once over the course of the day just to take breaks. The harnesses holding Visk and Sir Kenneth needed to be repaired and we’d lost one of our supply bags when a particularly harsh blast of air had ripped it from my flank.

  I spent the last couple hours of the flight carefully gliding around the peaks of the lower mountains. When a reasonably safe looking campsite presented itself on the far side of the peaks, I headed right for it. Visk and Sir Kenneth were unceremoniously dumped on the ground. Cassia slid down from my back on shaky legs.

  No one bothered to complain to me about the rough landing. We were all thoroughly spent.

  “Cassia, get this… stuff, off of me, please,” I growled irritably once my companions had recovered somewhat. “If I have to wear it for another minute, I’ll rip it off.”

  Some people might have taken this as whinging, but my Cassia could feel just how earnest I was across our connection. The goblins had done their best, but the harness was a rush job. I’d never known that my body could chafe with the scales covering my hide. When the supply bag broke loose, it had made the weight distribution uneven towards my hind legs.

  Flying with a slight twist in my lower back for hours caused both an ache in my spine and the straps to chafe my soft underscales.

  My Cassia stumbled over towards me and did her best to free me from my burdens. Her hands fumbled with the buckles several times before she managed to slide the entire apparatus off of my body. She’d had to hold on for dear life during several tense moments today and had a white knuckled grip for the remainder.

  Sir Kenneth laid down flat on the ground nearby, his face pressed into the soil. If I listened close, I suspected that I could hear him praising the gods and promising to never fly again.

  Visk, out of everyone, seemed to be in a chipper mood. They’d slid out of their harness with little effort and started setting up camp while the rest of us were recovering. The reason for their good mood eluded me for several moments until I finally remembered the promise I’d made that morning.

  The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was fly, but a dragon’s word had to mean something.

  “I need to go hunt,” I announced, mostly to Cassia. “I burned a lot of energy crossing the mountains. A deer or two will suffice.” My feet stepped out of the harness straps laying on the ground and I took a moment to stretch my sore muscles. A lingering burning sensation in my wing joints was particularly uncomfortable.

  By the time I’d finished stretching, Visk was standing next to me. They were pulling double duty, by both standing where I’d notice them, while also trying to act like my departure was of no great concern. The camp had been set up in record time, leaving them completely available and without anything to do.

  “... Good job setting up the camp Visk,” I said wearily. My voice was low enough that only Visk would hear it. Cassia watched, just like this morning. Her lips were pursed and her eyes hooded. I felt a distinct prod across our connection. We’d definitely be talking about this later.

  Visk’s ears shot skyward at my quiet praise. “O-oh, yeah. Right Boss. I figured I should, since the other two were-...” Sir Kenneth was still face down in the dirt. “Busy. I- uhm- I know you’re about to go hunting but-”

  “Get on my back before I pick you up in my claws, Visk.”

  The elf scrambled forward and deftly climbed up to the depression behind my wings. They were just as light as I remembered. Their presence wouldn’t make hunting any more difficult than normal. I could feel their heart pounding quickly where their inner thighs pressed into the scales of my back.

  I flicked my tail and pushed off of the ground with my hind legs. We had made camp on a flat section of the mountain’s slope. Below us was an open section of rock studded land which eventually gave way to grass and then a low scrub forest. With my wings spread wide, I could glide down the side of the mountain with relative ease. Most of the hard winds were deflected away from this region.

  Visk clung to the spine that ran along the back of my neck. Their initial grip felt nervous, but eventually they settled in and relaxed. While I didn’t have a connection to the elf like Cassia, a glance over my shoulder showed that they were enjoying themselves.

  As I approached the scrub forest I turned my gaze to the surrounding landscape. My nostrils widened to let the scents of the area flood my senses. I shouldn’t have been surprised that there were a relatively different set of scents from those of the Barony.

  To describe it visually, scents in the Barony tended towards earthy ‘brown and green’. Even the Redstone Hills and its eponymous red hued earth had a lot of the deep ‘green’ tones that I associated with ancient undisturbed wilderness. There was a distinct wild and untouched edge to the region.

  On the Inner Continent side of the Cloudshear Mountains, I could immediately detect that the land was more well traveled. Even at this seemingly random point in the wilderness I could detect faint traces of livestock and humans. The woodland beneath me had been cleared at some point in living memory and didn’t have the same ‘edge’ to its scent profile.

  If untouched wilderness was a combination of ‘deep brown and forest green’, then the local scrub forest was closer to ‘tan and olive’. It had regained some wild qualities as compared to tilled earth, but still bore signs of human presence.

  Visk grew curious when I continued to circle over the top of the trees and eventually patted on my neck to catch my attention. When I looked back at them, they pointed with one hand into the middle distance. My gaze looked in that direction and I spotted what they were probably pointing at.

  A small collection of animals were rooting around in an open clearing. I’d not seen that kind of creature before, but it resembled the ‘boars’ that Cassia had once described to me. Rotund bodies sat on top of short legs. Short tusks sprouted from the front of a flat face. Wiry tails continually flicked flies from their backsides.

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  They were not what I was hunting for but would make a decent enough meal.

  The pigs didn’t know what hit them. I’d gotten a little cocky and tried to snatch four of them up at the same time, one in each foot. They had been huddled together and rooting at a specific patch of dirt.

  One just so happened to look up when a sudden shadow fell across them. It gave a squeal of alarm and darted away as I dropped down from the sky. My fourth foot closed on empty air, but the other three snapped closed on bristle covered boarflesh. Each talon was sharp enough to pierce through with ease.

  Blood welled up from where I’d latched onto each boar. They were surprisingly tough creatures and fought back as best they could. Deer tended to fold up and die when I landed on them in this fashion, but the boars continued to writhe around for a couple of minutes. One even managed to twist its head around enough to try and gore my scales with its tusks.

  Unfortunately for the boar, the scales around my legs were heavily armored. Its dying act proved fruitless.

  Visk held tightly onto me as I beat my wings. Hopping around on one foot would be far too undignified. Once I’d made sure that I had a good grip on my prizes, I took back off into the air. Infuriated squeals from the surviving boars indicated that now was a good time to leave. One particularly deep roar of anger drew my attention.

  Across the clearing from where I’d caught the boars was another one. It was much, much larger than the ones in my claws. I’d frankly been a little underwhelmed by my first boars until I spotted it. Cassia had described them as dangerous and highly territorial creatures, but the ones I’d grabbed didn’t seem large enough to be a threat.

  The one bellowing at me fully validated Cassia’s warnings. While it didn’t quite match my height, the sheer bulk of the creature was impressive. I’d thought the smaller boars were rotund, but this one was built like a wine barrel with legs. What was even more shocking was the sheer amount of malevolence I felt from the creature.

  My sibling Third was a dragon, a ravenous monster full of hate and hunger. The sheer amount of raw fury I could feel from this massive boar gave Third a run for his money. Its maddened squeals only got louder as it started lumbering towards me.

  I would never admit it to anyone alive, but I decided it was better to leave with my meal rather than fight for more.

  My wings beat at the air, pulling me up into the sky. The small boars in my claws were still fairly heavy compared to my human passengers. It took a lot of work to get far enough above the trees that I could glide away in peace. Visk had been nervously shifting atop my back and only settled down again once we were safe.

  Rather than immediately return to the campsite, I found an open stretch of ground several miles from where I’d caught the boars. There was a field of grass for me to lay down on and a pool of standing water to drink from nearby. I dropped the boars in a pile within walking distance of the water and settled back onto the ground.

  Visk dropped down from my back in short order. They pulled out a sturdy knife and stepped towards the boars, but held back when I gave a low rumble at them. The elf seemed unsure of if they’d done something wrong. I sighed and dipped my head down to the boars.

  While it supplied me with more Vitae to drain their bodies with my teeth, I’d received three small injections of energy when the boars had died. Now I took the time to pick up each body by the throat. More Vitae still lingered in their flesh. I’d learned that draining their blood into my mouth and eating their heart and liver could make up for some of what I’d missed out on by killing them with my claws.

  Visk watched with fascination as I drained each body and used my claws to expertly cut out the heart and liver. The morsels went down my throat without issue. I thought the elf might shy away from blood and the crack of splitting bones, but they seemed more interested than disturbed. I lifted one of the boars and placed it down closer to Visk.

  “Do you know how to butcher an animal?” I asked them while licking the blood from my teeth.

  “...Oh!” Visk snapped out of the trance they’d been in. “Yeah Boss. Not as good as jang, but I’ve had to do my fair share.” They pulled their knife out from where it had returned to its sheath and got to work.

  I found that I didn’t care for the bristled hide of the boars. Scarfing down a deer didn’t take much thought at all. Even the antlers on the males provided a pleasant crunch between my teeth. Something about the smell and texture of boarhide made it distinctly unappealing. Rather than peel it off, I consumed the remaining two bodies from the inside out.

  It didn’t take me very long to finish eating them. The creatures had been rather dense. Even with just two I felt reasonably stuffed. Visk was still working diligently on butchering the remaining boar. As I’d suspected, they didn’t seem to mind being up to their wrists in boar blood.

  In the meantime, I discarded the remains of the boars I’d eaten by digging a small pit with my claws. Leaving signs of a massive predator devouring prey from the sky seemed like a bad idea. The less people that knew a dragon was around, the better.

  Visk finished their task not long after and dutifully tossed the scraps in the hole I’d dug. After I’d covered the evidence with soil and tamped it down flat, I looked over at the elf. They were standing and watched me expectantly. Their hands had been scrubbed relatively clean with the coarse grass, but a smear of blood sat on their cheek from where they’d presumably touched their face.

  My head dipped down towards the elf. They started to flinch away but hesitated. I looked into their moonlit eyes for a long moment, saying nothing. Then the forked tip of my tongue flicked out and dragged across their cheek, wiping away the small red stain.

  Visk sputtered, unable to process what just happened. I gave a light chuff and turned away, strolling over to the nearby pond to clean off my claws. By the time I returned, they had regained some of their nerves.

  “Boss!” They said urgently. When my head moved down towards them, they hopped up off of the ground. Their slender hands latched around two of the horns on my lower jaw and they pulled themself upwards. Visk tried to awkwardly press their lips against my scales, but mostly ended up bumping their teeth into a hard ridge.

  They gave a small yelp of pain as they let go and dropped to the ground, before they started sprinting away from me.

  It took Visk a little while to remember that we were in the middle of nowhere and to start walking back to me.

  Me and Visk didn’t talk about what happened. They simply collected up the butchered boar and climbed onto my back without a word. I could still feel their heart pounding against my back. Their ears had gone strangely still. I wondered if that ought to worry me, but the strange way that they gently ran their fingers across the scales of my back suggested otherwise.

  When we got back to the camp, Sir Kenneth had finally gotten up off the ground. He was performing a series of strikes with his sword, swinging the blade in the open air. While I was no knight, I could tell that his movements were unsteady. There were large pauses in the routine while the man muttered to himself under his breath.

  Visk slid off of my back once we landed and immediately brought the butchered boar over to the campfire. They focused intensely on setting out chunks of flesh to be cooked. It took me a minute to figure out that they were now avoiding Cassia with their gaze.

  My Hunter-Princess quickly noticed that something was going on. I’d barely sat down on my haunches before she came over to me. When she jumped up and grabbed onto the horn-nubs along my jaw, she was considerably stronger than Visk had been. She successfully yanked my head down to her level. I was surprised, given that she wasn’t normally that heavy. For a split second it had felt like her weight quadrupled.

  “Sanguine. Over here. Please,” Cassia hissed to me as she forced my head around to the side. The last time she’d been able to haul me around like this was when I was a hatchling. I was too caught off guard to bother resisting as she dragged me by my jaw a dozen meters away from the campsite.

  “Sanguine, seriously,” she hissed to me once we had a modicum of privacy. “What is going on with you two?” Her free hand gestured vaguely in Visk’s direction, who was determinedly staring into the fire. “I know you do as you please, but you and Visk are… I don’t know what you’re doing and that’s the problem!”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing either,” I responded as honestly as I could. Something about the elf bothered me. Every time they skirted around an issue, it made me want to push my way forward and catch them. I fell silent as I thought about that.

  ‘I want to catch them? Is it because they keep triggering my hunting instincts?’

  Cassia seemed to grasp that I was processing the issue through our connection. She was irritated, but she gave me enough time to respond properly.

  “It’s like… Visk wants to be close, but I scare them?” I offered slowly. “But when they dart back… it is like… a game. They stay just close enough that I can move forward and catch them.” Though my words were mostly speculative, they felt correct. Or close enough to correct to not be an intentional lie. “They like to be praised… a lot, but seem to not know what to do when I do praise them.”

  Cassia blinked at me several times. “It really is baffling, Sanguine, how you’re sharp as a knife some days. Then you’ll turn around and be duller than a rusty spoon.”

  “Humans are confusing,” I protested. “Elves are… probably even more confusing. Visk is like you and Edith in some ways, but there are hidden depths to them.” I’d promised not to tell anyone about certain things Visk had told me. Cassia could feel me holding back and narrowed her eyes at me. “Elves also have… ‘young lady things’, even if they aren’t young ladies.”

  That turn of phrase seemed to make something ‘click’ inside Cassia’s mind. Her eyebrows shot upwards towards her hairline and she turned to take a long look at Visk. The elf had been watching us out of the corner of their eye and startled before acting like they’d not been caught in the act.

  “Do they now?” Cassia muttered under her breath. She turned her attention back to me. “Sanguine, you remember how Edith told you to trust her judgment and hold yourself back a little, with me?”

  “Yes,” I rumbled. We’d not done a great job with that, but I chose to not comment on that.

  “This is… probably something a little similar. I think Visk is trying to… figure out what they want with certain things.” I rumbled in annoyance. That was an incredibly vague statement from Cassia. She sighed and continued. “Think of it like this. Almost everyone they knew died not too long ago and someone they were close to betrayed them.”

  “My life got turned upside down when you came into it, but I was already alone for a while before that. Living with you has made my life better in many ways… but we’re both still dealing with the pain that’s come about lately, right?” I was happy that Cassia was back to viewing my presence as a positive in her life. My head nodded to her question.

  “Visk hasn’t had a lot of time to themself to… actually think through what happened to them. I could be wrong, but I think they might be trying to ignore that pain by… latching onto you, kind of. That’s not really healthy for you or them.”

  I didn’t really understand and let Cassia know that by emitting a deep thump in my chest. Her fingers rubbed at the scales along the top of my head reassuringly.

  “Edith would be much better at this,” Cassia admitted. “I’m really just parroting some of the things she told me about how to handle my own anger with you, while you were asleep for a week. I wasn’t being fair to you by running away so much. You were right when you asked me to… trust you more, when we are angry with each other.”

  Cassia tilted her head back towards Visk. “So with Visk… try and give them a little space, maybe. Don’t shy away if they do try to get close to you, but don’t go chasing after them. I know it’ll be frustrating, especially if they are… baiting you, like you say. But trust me, my dear sweet dragon… you don’t want to form something more lasting with them until you’re both absolutely sure that’s what you want.”

  “Our connection and troubles are proof enough of that, yeah?” she asked me sweetly. I nuzzled my head into her in response. While I didn’t fully grasp much of what Cassia had told me, I could sense that she was certain of what she was saying. Edith was smarter than the both of us put together when it came to handling people. If these were her words, she was probably right.