”Four-legged furry creatures, similar to me but without wings,” Caliante explains. ”Some of them are the same size as us, some of them are smaller, and some of them are… bigger.”
She had flown away from the larger ones as quickly as she could after finding out about them. Even though Mercury had been clamoring in the back of her head for her to stay and fight, she would rather save herself from being covered in bite marks once more. It was bad enough the first time.
Not to mention she was certain those things hunted in packs.
Blight cracks his jaws open, and Caliante draws herself up slightly in attention; is he going to perform more magic? Perhaps more shadow will flow forth from his jaw, perhaps—
—perhaps nothing at all?
Oh, well. There’s no guarantee that magic works; she’s experienced that first-hand.
Blight seems to think otherwise, however, and she pauses, trying to discern whether he did do something or whether he just thinks he did—
—the urge to sneeze wells up in her abruptly, suddenly, and she turns away to do so, not wanting to be rude to the young dragon.
And then it wells up again, and again; Caliante quickly finds herself in a sneezing fit, tiny, high-pitched noises worthy of a kitten rather than a bat, eyes slipping shut as she tries to get the urge out of her system.
What was—that?
An excited giggle in her head answers her question, a sense of anticipation from the one being who shouldn’t be excited or anticipated at all making her heart skip a beat.
Oh, great, this again, Mercury says. Crack, stay.
No answer except another harsh giggle, and Caliante supposes that it was misplaced after all to hope that a dragon named Blight carrying unexpectedly familiar neon eyes—although where she’s seen them before, she can’t tell—would be free of—well.
Plague.
She shivers and elects to use the dragon’s question to ignore the topic of magic, hoping that he won’t bring it up again. Hoping that if they don’t talk about it, he won’t use it again; stupid, really, but she just wants to avoid the thought of plague altogether.
”Well...” she begins, hesitating. What is there to do in a tunnel like this? It seems so eerily barren of life, so unnaturally devoid that it sets her on edge, (not like there isn’t a plague dragon in front of her to do that already) that she can’t really think of anything.
She eyes the dragon’s wings, hesitantly. They seem oddly tattered at the edges, but other than that, they look—pretty much fully developed.
Maybe she can teach them how to use those wings of his? She’s probably the best gembound for the job, all things considered.
”Would you like to learn how to fly?” Caliante asks at length, spreading a wing to accentuate her question.
When I speak.
When I think.