ORIGIN

He stood, flanks heaving, trying to figure out what she meant. Make places to put my feet? his brain echoed, confused. Did that mean dragging more logs-? But no; she wason the ground, leading the way, and behind her the shallowest of the marsh-water was cracking into ice. It made it easier to walk on, though in deeper places his hooves still punched through, splashing in the mud. Overall, though, it provided substance; and with her deliberat efforts, some traction.

Abaddon struggled not to slide and slip, mostly focused on his footing. The prints he was stepping in were left that grip, though, and it wasn't wide sheets of ice, so he didn't take any tumbles.

Nostrils flared in a snort here and there as he walked.

"A dragon," he repeated. He'd seen one, he thought, before. Maybe two-? That would explain things; a flying fish didn't make as much sense. "Fish belong in the water," he reasoned, aloud, without context. "Dragons... fly." This distinction solidified in his mind, he now turned his attention to the terribly important topic of names.

"Abaddon," he grunted. She said 'sorry,' and he puzzled over that. Was that something people said-? Did? They said 'sorry?' And he wasn't sure why she was mentioning getting mad, either. He did that all the time. He was always mad.

He was mad now. Mad at this swamp, and dull red eyes glanced around again, furious with it. With the mist, the mud, the darkness, the clammy air.

"Why do you live here?" he asked, bluntly, making no comment on her apology or introduction--if Carja was awkward, Abaddon was oblivious.

This place sucked, and that's all he was thinking about.

Abaddon half missed everything Carja said about dragons--he wasn't sure why she was telling him all of this. He already understood what dragons were.

They weren't fish. They lived in the air. Ish? Something like that.

He plodded along, focused purely on his footing. Cepheus, though--that sounded... pleasant. Abaddon could not have said why, but something about castles and flower trees sounded... good. He snorted, but it wasn't a derisive sound; more a thoughtful one. "Where is... Cepheus?" he asked.

A tangle of grasses caught at him, and he turned, ripping into it with his horns, tearing them away from the marsh, roots and all. It took him a moment to get the stuff off his horns, again: shaking his head, droppping it low, rubbing against still more grass.

"I don't live... anywhere," he answered at last, lurching back into a slow and heavy trot. Which, of course, wasn't true at all: it'd have been more accurate for Abaddon to say that he lived "everywhere," instead. He was, as Carja had guessed, a wanderer... but more in the sense that he was perpetually lost.

As he moved along, something Carja had said clicked, a little. "A family... you have... more dragons?" he surmised. He'd never had a family, before; but that's what that meant, right-? Cepheus must then have a castle, and flowery trees, and a lot of dragons, Abaddon assumed.

He took a moment, in silence, to commit that to memory: beyond Polaris, a glowy cave with a spire in it. It-

-Carja stumbled.

Abaddon stumbled, behind her, from a trot to a dead halt--if only to avoid smashing horns-first into her backside. For a moment he peered dully at her, confused--but no, she had only fallen, it was nothing more dramatic than that.

She was asking for help, then, and he plodded over, around her to one side, to investigate. It only took a moment for him to realize that she'd frozen herself into the mud. He wasn't quite sure how to handle that; he'd never done anything like that before, never really messed with his magic overmuch. Not to say he didn't have some.

It was that realization that stopped him from just shoving his shoulder into her and pushing, which might've ripped some scales free. Instead he plodded closer, and stood silent, looking for that old magic that he'd hardly ever touched.

"Here," he said, and then stood quietly chewing cud for a beat. A hiss arose from beneath his massive, cloven hooves; he shuffled closer. "Lean away," he advised simply--so long as her body wasn't in the way, he'd be able to get his feet where she was stuck, and just melt her free.

Abaddon made his way around her with slow, plodding steps, careful not to trample, made relatively docile purely by the necessity of focus: his dull mind had to concentrate on his movements, on his magic, on not accidentally burning or stepping on the dragon.

With luck, he'd easily melt her free.

For a long, slow moment, he worked the last of the ice into melting; his magic faded as he stepped away, and then irritation again (in the loss of focus) began to blossom. He wanted out, he remembered, and it was almost disappointing to Abaddon to realize that now he was angry again.

Given the choice, he wouldn't have been. It seemed to just... be a thing.

"...I will... try to remember," he managed, struggling to think past all those words that made up Carja's directions. But he hated the mental battle it took to try and sort them all out, to hold them long enough to commit them to his memory. He was annoyed all over again. He snorted and shook his head a bit, and then started off at a slower walk, pausing to look back, to wait for Carja to again lead the way.

At least they were--according to the dragon--nearing the exit; that was a relief, and Abaddon swung his head back to squint that way. He couldn't see it; all his awful eyes could make out was mist and foggy shapes.

He considered Carja's question, then. "Yes?" he agreed, hesitating--and then, "What is a house?"

He eyed Carja's lights, and did his best to follow. "...How do you... cut down trees?" he asked. He had butted up against and shaken his fair few, but never ripped one down. They were too strong for that. Did the dragon just bite through them, then-? (Abaddon had never seen tools or weapons capable.)

A surge of black velvet muscle took him up and over the crest of mud, along behind Carja, closely.

He wasn't sure what to think about this. Usually if he spoke to someone--a rare thing on its own--he'd simply go his own way, after. He felt... awkward, like there were things he was supposed to do, but didn't know what they were or how to do them--things, though he didn't know it, like manners and polite words. That unease bled, as it always did, into frustration--so that he felt a haze over his vision, a faint ringing in his ears. It wasn't, again, directed at Carja. It was directed at everything, at nothing, a frustrating general anger.

He snorted, shaking his head, and plowed forward--up and out--toward the tunnel exit.

Though he didn't really have the words--nor socialization--to express it, he was curious about... houses. Smaller caves. Rain. "You do not like rain?" he asked, at last, slowly. He'd never really considered it, before, but he supposed he did stand under trees when it got very heavy--usually, though, he didn't care.

Dragons need houses, he thought to himself, a new 'fact' he now committed to memory.