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.

@Carja

Carja continued to walk, curling her sweeping tail forward so she didn't accidentally knock Abaddon's legs out from under him. She quickly realized that he wasn't the brightest crayon in the drawer, so she had to be a bit more... blunt.

"Okay, so dragons can look different, though they're always lizard-like and always breathe some sort of fire or ice from their mouths," she said, "Otherwise they can be different. I know a dragon who breathes fire and has two legs, and another who breathes ice and is as black as night. I breathe fire and ice and I have fins like a fish and can breathe underwater like one too."

More ice formed under her paws as she continued to apply more energy into doing so, her eyes on the ground to ensure she was still making suitable strides for the bull to walk on.

"I don't live here," she chirped, "I live in Cepheus now! It's a cave with a castle and it's super pretty with flowery trees all around! I'm making a house for me and my family there!"

She became more cheerful the more they talked, enthusiastic about the topics she spoke of.

"Do you live anywhere, Abaddon? Or do you wander?"

@Abaddon

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.

@Carja

Carja hummed for a moment, "Um... I think it's past... Polaris? A cave with all these glowing gemstones and mosses with a magical Spire in the middle. I'm what you would call adopted. In a way."

"But! I do have my daughter and my son, they're dragons-", she said, squawking as she suddenly tripped and fell forward... right into a mud puddle.

As she tried to get up she found her paws were stuck fast in the mud, frozen by her own spell. It had crawled up her legs just like the damn burns in the Black City and she hissed as it started to burn just like it had then. Hadn't her hands taken enough abuse??

"Um, could you help me?", she asked, trying and failing to just pull herself out using her wing claws, "I-I can't get out.."

@Abaddon

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.

@Carja

Carja watched the bull approach and did as told, leaning away from his hooves and lifting a wing up to get it out of the way too. She would be grateful for his thought process if she knew, but she was still such because slowly but surely, the ice was melting.

One foot was freed and she wiggled her fingers to shake bits of frost off, holding it out of the way while Abaddon continued to melt.

"Uh... just realized I didn't say where else to go. But once you go to Polaris, the glowing cave, you should go into a cave called Ursa that's covered in snow. Once you pass through it you'll reach Cepheus, my home. If you ever want to visit, feel welcome. There's a cluster of buildings that looks different than the palace, that's where I live," she explained, trying to wiggle one of her other feet free.

She waved her paw towards her back feet and spread the ice out along the ground, dispelling it from her legs. She stood up, though she hissed as she yanked on her remaining front foot, tugging on it gently. Her scales were frozen right to the ice she was stuck in, and she risked pulling them off.

"One foot to go," she said, and looking up, fins flaring, "Oh hey! We're nearly at the tunnel! I can see it through the trees up ahead."

Carja looked over at the bull suddenly, "Oh! Do you want to go to Cepheus with me? I can show you the house I'm building!"

@Abaddon

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?"

@Carja

Carja broke free finally and shook her claws out, hissing gently. There was definitely some damage... more damage, but it didn't seem permanent and would heal fully unlike the warped scarring on her front claws and wrists.

"Um... a house is sort of like... it's a bunch of trees cut down and used to create an enclosed space, like a tiny cave to keep the rain away," she explained, "I'll show it to you when we get there."

She hopped forward onto some grassy soil and shook the mud off her claws, grumbling at the mud cakes to her front and belly. It'd take forever to clean off...

"Here has better footing," she said, walking along carefully and making sure she didn't trip again, her scales lighting up once more to illuminate the area around her, hopefully making it easier for Abaddon to see.

She approached the tunnel and looked back, her tail swishing gently behind her, "Here it is. Once we're through we'll head to Cepheus!"

@Abaddon

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.

@Carja

"For smaller or dead ones I just knock them down," she said, "Or my papa- um- Attikias cuts them down with this sharp thing called an axe, and then I knock them down. So it's really only cutting when Attikias helps, otherwise I guess it's just knocking down."

Carja stood in front of the tunnel for a moment longer, "Actually I love rain. But it gets annoying sleeping in it when it's constantly dripping on you, and if you get too cold you can get really sick. So I go out into the rain but I go to a dry, warm place after so I don't get sick. Hence the house to protect me from it."

She stepped forward into the tunnel and prepared for a long walk, her head held high as she hummed happily, content to have someone to walk with. It had been so long since she'd had someone to just... walk with.

@Abaddon exit?