Chapter 5: Chapter Five: The Bro Hike

Hugh stared at Leo, his whole fearsome-dragon aura ruined by being on his back, like an adorable kitten. His clawed feet paddled through the air.

“So, do we have a deal?” Leon repeated.

“Yeah,” Hugh said, “it sounds really fair, actually. For a frail little mortal, you’re pretty resourceful. It’s a deal!” He brought his tail around and then frowned at Leo. With a sigh, he returned his tail to its original position.  “You wouldn’t have the tail clasp to seal deals, of course, sorry. All the younger dragons in the Storm Vale use it. Well, the cool ones do.”

He then offed one of his clawed hands, and Leo grasped Hugh’s claw with his uninjured right arm. They solemnly shook.

Hugh laughed. “You look so cute when you get all serious before shaking.”

“Yeah, well, upside down dragon gives me kitten vibes—maybe tiger kittens, but still.”

“I just said, cats are dumb.” But Hugh laughed and waved his feet in the air again before rolling over. “I can’t actually sleep like that, and it’s getting late and I’m really tired. Let’s go to bed, my new friend. Tomorrow, we will continue the quest for my sire’s hoard.”

“Yeah,” Leo said. “Sure.”

Before going to sleep, Leo ripped one pants leg off and bound it around the claw wounds.

Leo curled up on the ground, then scooted over closer to Hugh. It was super awkward, but since he was wounded and hadn’t prepared a fire, he figured he would need the warmth.

The dragon didn’t say anything, but he scooted over toward Leo as well.

There was another long pause.

Then Hugh gave a forced cough. “So, um, pretty cold out tonight.”

“Yeah, a bit chilly,” Leo replied.

There was another long pause, then the dragon scooted closer still, until he was up against Leo. His body radiated heat, far more than Leo would have expected. He had known, based on a variety of factors, that Hugh was most likely warm-blooded despite his scales, but the warmth seemed far too high even for that. He was putting out quite a bit of heat.

“So, um, goodnight, new friend,” Hugh said, his breath disturbingly awkward in Leo’s ear.

“Yeah, um, ’night, Hugh,” Leo replied.

On that thought, Leo laid his head down on his arm and tried to sleep.

***

            Leo woke up for roughly the twenty-third time and decided to give up trying to sleep.

His arm hurt notably, which had kept him sleeping on one side or his back. And Leo had mostly been half-frozen the entire night as well—whichever side was facing away from Hugh, usually his right side.

And I would kill someone—well, at least badly maim—for a cheeseburger right now.

Once during the night, Leo had woken up with the dragon’s arm over him. He would take that little factoid to the grave.

            And Hugh snored. Dragon snoring was… impressive.

            All in all, he had slept for about five hours and woken every twenty to forty minutes of that limited time. Leo wasn’t in the best of moods.

It was still dark out, with the moon’s light providing a tiny bit of illumination as its beams filtered through the sparse forest around the river’s edge. But each tree was still a patch of shadow Leo couldn’t see into, and after the last couple of days, each felt like potential danger.

Rising, Leo walked a couple hundred feet down the boulder-strewn edge of the river carefully, never going into the dark patches. Once away from Hugh, he relieved himself and then walked back.

            Just before he returned to Hugh’s side, a familiar wolf poked its head out from the shadows around a tree about twenty feet from Leo.

            “Whoa!” Leo half-yelled as the giant wolf emerged from the treeline. “You make me glad I already went to the bathroom.”

            The wolf rolled its eyes again but just waited patiently.

            “So, um, I’m down for this whole elusive and mystical wolf buddy thing we have going, but seriously, what’s your deal? I’m new here, and I don’t really know anything.”

            The wolf walked toward Leo.

            An earsplitting roar pierced the predawn calm, and Hugh charged over. “Shoo, vile mutt! Back, or I dine on canine! And if you’ve hurt my new friend, I’ll start with your back legs!”

            The wolf unhurriedly turned and loped into the forest with a glance back at the dragon’s charging form.

            Hugh skidded to a stop next to Leo and then smashed his tail against the nearest tree. “And don’t come back!”

            “Whoa, dragon—I said, whoa!” Leo rubbed his head after all the noise. “It’s too early for you.”

As Hugh’s voice faded, Leo heard the flapping of bird wings, and somewhere nearby, an annoyed creature gave a yowl. The whole forest seemed to be echoing Leo’s irritation at the dragon’s exuberance.

            “I saved your life!” Hugh said, huffing. “That was a ghost wolf. They eat hatchling dragons and mortal people. They’ve been doing it ever since their pact with the elves broke when my sire killed the old king around here.”

            “Wait, your dad killed the old elf king and broke a nature pact?” Leo asked. “And now nature is hunting man and dragon?”

            “And elves and stuff, yeah,” Hugh replied. He tilted his head slightly. “Why?”

            “Well, don’t get all huffy, but I’m getting the vibe that your dad is the villain in this story.”

            Hugh tilted his head back and forth. “Well, I mean, he is a dragon. A little bit of mayhem, destruction, and lust for treasure comes with the territory. But it’s not like the elves were the good guys. They nearly took the entire Storm Vale from us, hunting us storm dragons to the edge of extinction.”

            “Yikes. That’s a lot to unpack.”

            “Right? At least, that’s what Mom said. They got her clutch-mate, Xochikalkcho. Although I suppose he was kind of a bastard from what Mom told me, and he might have provoked someone. Still, the elves made him into armor.”

            Leo sang out, “It’s the circle of life!”

            “What?”

            “Nothing,” Leo muttered, faintly embarrassed. “It just seems there’s a lot of killing going around in these parts. Back and forth.”

            “Well, yeah,” Hugh said, seeming surprised at the comment. “When they were on top, the elves killed a bunch of us. And when the dragonflight happened, my sire paid them back.”

            Another sign about this world’s morals that bodes poorly. A giant neon sign flashing in my face that says, “Leo, my boy, you probably won’t like it here.” At least my plan is to leave.

            Leo sighed. “I’m gonna take a quick dip in the river and wash, and check on the arm wound. You do whatever morning beautification routine dragons do, okay?”

            “Heh, you’re a funny one.”

            “Thanks.”

            The dragon settled down on the rocks as Leo stripped his pants off and waded into the frigid water just as the first lightening of the dawn began. Shivering, Leo gave himself a thorough rubdown to clean everything off, then stood in the waist-deep portion and examined his arm.

            It still seemed like a nasty wound, and while it wasn’t pouring blood, even taking the bandage off had caused it to bleed a bit. Idjit dragon here did a number on me.

            He gently rubbed the river water along the outside of the wound, trying to clean it. The edges felt warm, and he couldn’t remember if that was a sign it was healing, or that it was infected.

            I need to find whatever passes for a doctor on this world. A sudden thought struck Leo. Or just get magic. That elf woman healed a broken arm in seconds.

            “Hey, Hugh, can you heal people?”

            “No, of course not,” Hugh said with a snort, knocking a medium-sized rock back and forth between his paws as he talked. “I told you, I only have Earth magic.”

            “And Earth isn’t the healing magic, I take it?” Leo asked as he finished cleaning himself in the water.

            “What? No, of course not.” Hugh’s voice became a touch condescending. “Only Body and Wyld magic have healing. Sheesh, even I know that!”

            “I’m from a different dimension, remember?”

            “You guys don’t have magic there?” Hugh asked with a tsk.

            “No,” Leo replied. “No, we don’t.”

            “Wait, seriously? No magic? Everyone is stuck at Level One their whole life, and you just all grub in the dirt and stuff, like, forever?”

            Leo was about to launch into a detailed defense of his home dimension and technology, but then thought better of it. I’m too tired, it won’t help anything, and I need to learn about what’s here. I’ll explain cars and stuff if he follows me home or something.

            “Sure, dirt grubbing,” Leo said.

            “Huh. Hard life. I’m sorry, man, I didn’t know. No wonder you’re so plucky. Nothing left to lose, right?”

            Plucky?

            Leo rolled his eyes so hard, he almost sprained something. People around here are too much.

“So, different question,” Leo said. “Why is the hoard so incredibly important to you that you would kill random people to make sure you get it?”

            Leo scooped up some water to drink.

            “Polly,” Hugh whispered.

            “What?” Leo asked before drinking from his cupped hands.

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            “Tail,” Hugh shouted.

            Leo laughed, inhaled some water into his air pipe, and coughed explosively, shooting the water in a spray across the river.

            After a moment, Leo recovered. “Tail? Seriously? You mean hooking up with female dragons?” Weird that ‘tail’ has the same slang meaning in both Earth human and Toth dragon culture. Unless it’s an approximate translation my brain came up with.

            “I mean mating, you cretin,” Hugh said. “Among other stuff. It’s prestige! The bigger your hoard, the more respect you get. From everyone. When you have prestige, people don’t pick on you anymore. And the more prestige you have, the more you impress the ladies!”

            “And that’s it? Biggest hoard equals most tail?”

            Hugh sighed. “No. A lot of stuff matters. How old a dragon is—the older the better. But I’m young—I’m only sixteen years out of my egg, which us dragons consider to be practically a baby. Most dragons, if not slain, don’t stop growing until they’re a thousand, give or take depending on sub-species, and can then live forever after that as well.”

            “Huh.”

            “And power matters,” Hugh continued, swishing his tail. “More power attracts mates. Magical ability as a sub-category matters, even more than raw power. And sometimes it’s just compatibility. People get together for a lot of reasons. For dragons, it usually comes down to power of one sort or another. But it can be anything.”

            “What did you say the first time?” Leo asked. “You said something I didn’t understand.”

            Hugh shifted his bulk awkwardly, knocking the rock he had been playing with away. “I said ‘Polly.’ Short for ‘Polixocatlicae.’”

            “Who’s that?” Leo asked.

            “The best dragon ever,” Hugh said. “She’s the dragon next peak, and we both got taught history and stuff at the knee of ol’ Poct, our local long speaker. She was way better than me, super-smart, and I can’t remember her ever getting lashed with Poct’s tail for screwing up an answer.”

            “Oh, so there’s a special someone. It’s not just tail.”

            “Yeah, okay, I just said ‘tail’ to sound cool,” Hugh said. “I just want Polly to like me. She really is the best. She’s graceful, beautiful, smart, and she can already vivisect a deer with a single claw swipe.”

            “Huh,” Leo muttered to himself. “Just like the girls back home.”

            Hugh ignored him as he continued. “She’s more wonderful than the stars in the sky! But she won’t talk to me at all. I get made fun of by the other dragons, and I’ve got my defect, so it makes sense. But if I have a hoard, the other dragons will respect me, and Polly will fall for me! I need that hoard to win the dragoness of my dreams!”

            “But having a hoard leads to people coming to kill you, out of revenge or greed, right?”

            “Well, yeah, of course.”

            “Huh,” Leo said again.

            Hugh snorted. “You keep making that noise. Huh, huh, huh. Why?”

            “Well, it just feels like this is close to the peacock tail problem.”

Hugh raised a single eye ridge.

“W-Well, you see, peahens mate with whatever peacock has the largest tail,” Leo said. “But tails don’t help peacocks survive—it wastes resources and slows them down. So, what’s good for the individual peacock—having a great tail to attract mates and make babies—is bad for the species, which gets less able to avoid being food with every generation as they lug around ridiculous tails.”

            “Huh,” Hugh said with a goofy grin and crossed eyes, his voice an obvious sarcastic mimic of Leo’s.

            “Smartass.” Leo climbed out of the frigid river after he’d finished all of his washing, shivering as he put his pants on before going to lie against Hugh’s side. “The point is, dragons are breeding up a species that gets in more and more fights with other species as the lust for treasure grows with each generation. Maybe you’re right, and the hoard proves they can fight better, but at the same time, why get in these fights at all? It still kills dragons, and the only upside is breeding. So it’s just hurting the species, even if it’s good for the dragon himself.”

            “Look, Leo, I don’t want to be that dragon—but so what?” Hugh asked, a slight tremor to his voice. “Maybe you’re a freaking genius and have deep insights on dragons. But none of it helps me.”

Leo lay against the dragon’s warm side. He’s way warmer than he should be, even for his size, just like last night. Higher metabolism? “Well, it’s interesting, you know? Food for thought. Maybe you can consider it when trying to find your own special someone someday—perhaps even Polly.”

Hugh continued as if Leo hadn’t spoken. “My problem right now is that I’m a flightless dragon with the wrong magic for his species. To stick with your peacock analogy, I’m like a peacock with a few nub feathers and also three feathers made of flowers tied to my body, and they’re wilting. I’m not exactly attracting Polly without a hoard, buddy. And she’s the most peahen of all the peahens.”

He still seems shaky on this analogy.

“Yeah, sure,” Leo said. “That makes sense. We’ll get you what you need. And I hope I can attend your and Polly’s wedding someday. Despite trying to eat me only about eight hours ago, you seem like a good guy.”

“To Merdrek’s Ear.” Hugh snorted. “Have you cuddled enough, by the way? Or should I curl around you again? ’Cuz we should be going. It’ll become apparent to everyone soon—other dragons, the remnants of the elves, the orcs and goblins, the inner sea corsairs, Steelport, the Havi Imperium—just all of them—that my sire’s gone. And we can’t fight most of them, trust me.”

Then how do you plan to hold on to the hoard, buddy? Leo thought to himself. But he figured they could address it later.

“Sure,” Leo said as he stood, trying unsuccessfully to not shiver. “Let’s go.”

***

A couple of hours later, under the thankfully blazing noon sun, Leo and Hugh stared at a massive river—far, far larger than anything Leo had ever seen, except for that one time he’d seen the Mississippi. The river was bare of trees on its far side, even though it still had thick forest on this side. Leo saw the outlines of a few stone building foundations near the water’s edge but had no idea what they had been, and the stones looked weathered and half-destroyed.

“How large is the river?” Leo asked, impressed.

The fifty-foot-wide baby river they had followed to get here disappeared as it joined this monstrous river without noticeable impact. Leo thought the new river had to be at least a mile across.

“I don’t know,” Hugh responded. “Why do you care? It’s a stupid river. And we’re not crossing it anyway. We’re just heading down the east side—this side—to the south.”

“Why is the river stupid, of all things? Did it fail algebra?”

Hugh was silent again for a bit before talking again. “I can’t tell if you have a knack for bringing up subjects I don’t want to talk about, or if there are just a lot of them, but this huge river is where my mother dropped me to prove I could fly. And where we all learned I couldn’t actually fly, including my clutch mates, who laughed their dumb snouts off.”

“Wait, dropped you?” Leo asked. “What?”

“Well, before she took me to ol’ Poct and we learned I had Earth magic and not Air magic, my clutch mates were all already flying. She said I could as well. So, I guess ’cuz she loved me and was kinda nice, she flew out to this river before trying to prove it. Trust me, it could have been worse. Someday maybe you’ll meet Zun.”

How could it have been worse?

“Does the river have a name?”

“It’s called the Blue River.”

“Why?”

“No idea, and if I’m gonna tell you my story, I want to tell it without random interruption.”

“I mean, I think I know where this is headed,” Leo said, wincing slightly.

“Yeah, well, you’re right,” Hugh said, staring out across the river with eyes that weren’t moving. “She dropped me over the river, from super high up. I broke several ribs and a foreleg, and everything hurt for weeks after, even though my mom used an actual healing potion from her hoard to partially fix me, which, again, shows how nice she is.”

“At least you didn’t drown,” Leo said. She doesn’t seem like a nice mother.

Hugh turned and glanced at him irritably. “Storm dragons can’t drown. We can breathe underwater. Everyone knows that!”

“Different dimension, remember?”

“Yeah, well, that dimension is almost as dumb as this river. And it’s a huge river, runs nearly five hundred miles from the Inner Sea to the Ten Lakes, connecting two entirely different sets of civilizations, and was the heart of the old Kingdom of Averia. I’m sure we’ll have to see this river the whole time we’re getting the hoard, since the palace that’s my sire’s lair is only about a mile from the riverside near where it empties into the inner sea.”

“Do you know why there are far fewer trees on the other side?” Leo asked.

“Sure, and since you don’t know anything about magic, it’ll be cool to explain. But we should walk while we talk. We have to cover a lot of mileage next to this dumb river.”

I wonder how many times he’ll call this a ‘dumb’ river?

Leo turned and walked south along the shore.

Hugh ambled after him. “So, nodes are—”

Something caught Leo’s attention, at the edge of his hearing. Shouting, and metal on metal.

“—the sources of different magical—”

“Shush! Can’t you hear that?”

Hugh stopped talking and cocked his head. “No.”

Leo heard a faint scream.

“Let’s go! Someone is in trouble!”

Leo started running in the direction of the sounds, away from the river. As he ran, the yells and clangs of metal on metal grew louder.

“You don’t have a sword!” Hugh yelled from behind him, then, from the sounds of it, he started to run after Leo.

As Leo ran into the forest, he started to see more foundations, then small partial walls. Ruins of the outskirts of a city? Leo thought as he ran.

His new elven body wasn’t as resilient as his old human one, and despite his insane Agility, he sucked wind. But he could move easily among the dense woods and ruins, even if running was winding him.

And Hugh, who had been keeping up fine at first, fell behind as Leo hurtled logs and tiny dips in the earth, ducked tree branches, rolled over walls, and generally conducted himself like a nature-focused parkour expert. He heard Hugh cussing behind him as the terrain worsened.

It was still a horridly exhausting two minutes—a sad commentary on his current body—before he thought he was close.

Just as Leo was nearing the fighting, he thought only a couple hundred feet out, he heard another scream—a masculine scream of agony. He passed into a clearing, rushing toward the far side. As he reached the tree line, a short, extremely thin woman—girl?—ran from the trees full-tilt into him.

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