The Canyon Speaks

I

“They’re a nice ride,” Hos says, his slitted, half-dragon eyes sparkling from the light of the badlands. He pats the mount, a sturdy quarter horse packed down with supplies for the trip, while his guide: a swarthy, grinning Spirakandrin, swings off his own horse and takes up the reins in one hand in a single, smooth motion.

“That they are, sir,” he notes, gesturing Hos to dismount, which he does with an unexpectedly light thump, about the sound one might expect from a human stepping off a horse, rather than a dragon-kin. “Imports as I’m sure you’d imagine.”

“Of course. Not like we have our own horses in our world. It’s downright luxury,” Hos observes as he eyes over the one he was riding on, chocolate in color and eying him with equal fascination.

The man nods as he gets off his own, “Ulterian Traders are a good friend to have.”

Hos gives an awkward smile. “And I suppose this isn’t a trade connection you’d be happy to share with the authorities?”

The man chuckles as he finishes securing the two horse leads into his left hand. “You Knights may live in a vacuum, but Rayda knows us cities have to do what we can to survive.”

Hos releases a snappy *tsk* from his concentrated mass of ivory-colored blades that he calls his teeth. “Actually, I’m sure Rayda would be thrilled to know you’ve been trading under The Kingdom’s nose.”

The man, still grinning, raises a brow as he assumes eye-contact with his charge. “I don’t imagine you’ll be ratting me?”

The dragon-kin, his blue and white scales shining like holy ornaments in the desert’s rays, gives a grin that he considers friendly. “The Knights, sir, consider mercantile interaction with outside entities to be chiefly the right of the appointed offices, and the appointed offices only.”

The man’s smile dies, but Hos continues on.

“That said, I can appreciate when laws do not serve the spirit that they are meant to embody. You won’t be troubled about them on my account.”

The man nods his head reverently. “Thank you, sir.”

“After all, they are too nice to take away,” Hos adds, watching his horse stamp in place with a brush of its spectacular mane.

“Thank you, sir,” the man says, his grin immediately returning.

“And I’ll admit. Sure beats the hell out of drake-riding.”

The man stifles a chuckle. “Feels too much like riding a brother?”

“Honestly it does,” he says, finally turning from the horse to look out at the vast expanse ahead of them.

A great orange-white roughland stretches on for as far as the eyes can see, with a speckling of jagged brownish-red lines laying sharp like cracked skin across the face of mother nature. Intermittent banners with highly stylized draconic script dot the landscape, pounded down evenly with proud, deep red banners. As if two factions were warring simply by crushing one set of banners before laying down their own, there’s huge piles of torn tapestries and splintered poles concentrated around the currently standing banners.

“So that’s them?”

“Yes sir. Starting past these banners is the reservation for the Hos people. They own the whole canyon, Red Banner post right to the north of it: mostly to keep an eye on them, you understand.”

The dragon-knight surveys the land, but particularly the banners.

“Are there problems with the Red Banners around here?”

The man clears his throat hearing that, as if the topic took him by surprise, despite it being him that brought it up first.

“I mean… if that’s what you consider it, sir,” he says, subconsciously rubbing his left sleeve.

Hos glances over to the man, and the man looks back with a smirk.

“We’re not bad people,” Hos says. “You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sir. You’re a Knight so I consider it different. You’re one of the good ones.”

“I mean, none of us are bad.”

“Not from what I’ve seen, sir.”

Hos bates his breath, allowing the man to continue.

“A s… kin took a cousin of mine, sir. I don’t much care for them.”

The dragon-kin still minces over his response, allowing the man to go a little further, perhaps too far.

“Honestly, sir, I don’t care for the Protection Act at all.”

This one leaves the two with an awkward silence. The hot winds rustle the man’s matted black hair as Hos, unaffected by the wind, simply squints down to the canyons.

Somewhere down there, either alive or dead, are his birth parents – of that he’s certain.

“I understand,” Hos says.

“You… do?”

“I felt that way about the Red Banner Knights. They killed a lot of my people and I couldn’t understand why.”

The Spirakandrin purses his lips as the scaled mountain of a man continues.

“I lived my life feeling like I didn’t belong. Like some woman’s little badge, and that if I didn’t have her, there would be nothing protecting me from the outside world… then one day I stopped being afraid of the outside world, and I went to take care of the people I hated so much… and then I found out they were like me when I was a hatchling. I was lucky I didn’t kill them when I had the chance.”

“Sir… I’m sorry for overstepping.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m here to connect to that old part of myself again; however. I can’t be the only kin in The Knights and be a softie. I can’t be a leader if I don’t even have a complete name. I’m going to make an example of myself, and this is part of that process. I’m done living for myself. I have been given too much of a task to worry about garbage like that.”

The man draws back, his brow lifted in surprise. The wind tosses his robes like a swelling, quickened tide.

“So that’s why you’re here.”

“That’s right. I’m here to get my trial name,” Hos says, his eyes trained on the canyons.

“So you go to your clan to get your name?”

“Yeah. Hos is just the clan designation. If I pass I’ll get my name – my real name.”

“Well then… I hope you get it, sir.”

The two stare down into the canyons for some time, and then Hos reaches his hand, made even more massive when gauntleted in its armor, and opens it for the man.

The guide glances over, staring at the hand for a moment like an object that shouldn’t exist, and yet presents itself before him: it’s not its existence that surprises him, of course, it’s that it’s extended in friendship to him.

The nervousness that was hidden throughout their meeting, the duration of the trip, and even this awkward parting conversation, it’s here that it emerges. The man stares at the outstretched hand, his eyes locked on it like an impossibility staring him back.

He reaches over and takes the hand – it’s cool to the touch despite the heat from the sun.

“Umarr,” the man introduces after a moment.

“Umarr, I’ll be down there. If I’m not back in two days, just head out,” Hos’ says, his slitted black eyes striking deep into the man’s own brown.

Umarr comes to a slow nod as he slowly comes to terms with the fact that it was the dragon-kin that stepped over the cultural barrier first, and not him. “I uh… yes, sir. Will you be alright?”

“I have someone over rocks I can have fetch me,” he says as he lets go of the man’s hand,, pulls out an azure stone on a chain, and flashes the sight of it to Umarr for a second before slipping it back into his armor padding. “Take care of yourself.”

“I will, sir. I’ll be over here,” he says, nodding over to a jutting of stone that produces a good amount of shade from the heat of the sun above.

The dragon-kin nods back with a gentle smile before taking up his pack, his spear and shield, and a small sack that he attached to his pack by a pair of strands.

“I’ll see you there. I left the rest of the payment in the right saddle,” Hos’ says, nodding over to his horse.

Umarr notches back. “But… sir, you weren’t-”

“It’s fine. I know you’ll stick around,” Hos’ says with a smile as he walks off.

The human losses a haughty puff of air but grins all the same.

“You take care down there, dragon-man,” Umarr says, “If you… if you happen to see any Red Banners-”

“Don’t worry about it!” the dragon-kin says with a wave from behind as he starts down the trail leading to the reservation border. “You give your boys too much credit, Umarr,” Hos’ hisses quietly through his jaws.

“Good luck, then!” Umarr shouts. “Look out for the bugs… and the rocs!”

“Thank you!” the Knight shouts back, his glance twisting with interest at the last part of Umarr’s words.

Hos’ disappears down the trail, his altitude lowering with every step as he begins the slow descent into the canyons.

II

It’s been three hours, and the sun’s height has arched past the canyon walls.

Sharp shadows blur into a continual shade, lending comfort to most.

Hos’, on the other hand, rotates his shoulders under his large cloak to assist blood flow. Physiologically speaking, it’s not quite as simple having “mild” blood, neither hot or cold by their informal definitions. He does maintain a bare minimum of body heat, but it’s difficult to maintain unless movement keeps the heart going.

With a sigh, he reaches into the side of his pack to get at his ox jerky. Undoing the tie, he pulls open the side pouch, the very second he hears something.

Or at least he thinks he did.

In the middle of a canyon draw, Hos’ focuses his hearing – the weakest of his senses, but unfortunately the only one that’s serving him at the moment.

It was a shuffling of rocks, a chittering of some sort, like hard chitin striking against the broad canyon walls.

But where was it coming from?

Hos’ eyes scan up from the blinding light of the canyon opening above, like a gate into heaven, before his gaze cuts down into the hell of his more likely situation.

Whatever it was, it’s probably in here with him, but the tricks of the canyons pervert the curtains and waves of sound into ribbons, spiraling and hitting from strange places.

Hos, telling it apart easily from the cricks and cracks of little stones dropping about the massive walls of the canyon, lowers his pack as easily as he can, but just as he does…

It’s brown, no, gold, no, brown as it leaps along the wall. Its carapace catching a wave of sun in the second it flies at him with its blade: gray, and then white, and then gray again, shining sharp at the ready.

Hos slings his pack at the thing, causing it to spin out onto the ground, and Hos also isn’t liable to ask questions around this time.

Gaining up in the second it hits the ground, Hos flattens his boot down into the creature, smashing brown hemolymph across his black-gold armor.

A sharp scent cuts into his nostrils and attaches to his forked tongue as a breeze pushes through the canyons.

“You’re one of those sand creatures, aren’t you?” Hos mutters, as an observation rather than a question.

The creature, its legs locking deliriously over Hos’ shin, twitches in a quick death, but the respite of victory’s cut short.

Hos assumed the darkened gaps in the canyons were just natural formations – he’ll chalk it up to fatigue later.

The dozens of holes along the left side of the canyon come alive as the other canyon dwellers, a largely overlooked tribe of cockroach people, emerge with their stone and rough iron blades at the ready.

“Diiiiiieh!” one with a jet black shell screeches through its mess of jaws in a crude mimicry of tongued language.

In most situations like this, Hos would reflexively pull out his Knight’s seal and send them all to their knees, but Lord Knight Destiny, or Nach as he likes to go by, taught him that they were simply too stupid to understand authority.

He starts into a run through the canyon, taking up his spear as the sharp, gusting buzz of a hundred wingbeats follow right behind him. It’s lucky that he’s a fitness maniac, or else he wouldn’t be fast enough to keep from getting overwhelmed – Nach taught him that, too.

Hos puts up a wild show, all but breaking the canyon with his foot strikes. The second one of the very fastest kafkades reaches his striking space, Hos only needs to buck to the side and catch him perfectly on the spear tip. With a gory fling, he spills each bug into the air, flailing on the breeze and splattering into the enormous encroaching group.

It’s a hot race, however, and while Hos’ reptilian side is begging him to slow down, the mammal side is just getting started. His scales vent hot as dense primal steam pours from his body – a freak of nature like him carries both advantages and disadvantages of the two classifications of species, but right now they’re serving him well.

The buzzing doesn’t let up, however, it only gets closer.

As he tears through the rocky depths, he invariably passes by more nests, and the smell of their kinblood is splattered on every inch of them.

In only a minute the winged crowd of pursuers goes from a few dozen neer-do-well avengers to a packed canyon wall’s worth of them, a flying tide of strong insectoid jaws and primitive blades held tight in their little three fingered hands.

Hos knows it would take them forever to open him up like a can, but that’s precisely why he’s running so fast, the idea of them taking five hours to saw into him is gut wrenching.

He cuts around an intersection in the canyon, following a fresh-looking Hos clan banner, its purple and gray smattering a poor but iconic representation of their blue and white scale patterns.

Smashing through a cactus patch, he strides high and fast as the kafkades swing up to go over them. Busting out the other end, he realizes that, in his hurry and pride, he forgot one of Nach’s words, this one in his youngest days as a Knight trainee.

“Hey, moron, watch where you’re going! Stupid fucking scale bitch. I’d gut you if you didn’t have mommy to watch your ass.”

“Watch where you’re going, you’re a big guy,” is the distilled message he got from that short altercation.

That day won him a sharp fist to the stomach, but today is a little more thrilling.

The cactus patch was growing on a canyon ridge.

Falling headfirst into the almost vertical ridgeline, Hos tumbles like a boulder through the sand and out into a deeper, wider canyon.

He looks back, realizing that he lost his grip on his speak, and turns back just in time to see one of the kafkades pick it up with a scratching jeer.

Nach told him never to run, not even from him, unless it’s to draw the enemy into a trap. Hos tells himself this in his head as he buckles down into a dead sprint across the sandy canyon floor. His tail lifts statically as he pushes with everything he has as the kafkades, now free to maneuver in the opening, quickly fills the widened gap and zip forward at breakneck speeds.

He ducks into a nearby passage, the world a blur around him as his mammalian half pushes his heart into a tremoring throttle forward, focusing everything toward the singular act of running away.

Hos passes the freshest clan banner he’s seen yet, and he thinks he sees something else too in the split second he passes it, but he’s not sure.

Just as Hos makes the determination that he needs to turn, he sees the masked glint of a slitted eye from behind the corner of a stone outcropping, one that would do particularly well as a lookout point, he thinks. He reaches the turn point for the next corner, and he sees it at last.

A massive, brutal wall of stone and salvaged wood greets him, the entire manufacture painted, as if by children, in the primal chalk-violet colors of the clan.

Estimating that he cannot make the jump into the jagged cut wall, he turns to face the maelstrom of mandibles and blades flying at him. He takes a breath and focuses his energies to do what only dragons do. If he dies here, at least he did it standing.

Not sure what Meeo would think, though – that’s the only thing he’ll really be sorry to lose out on.

But just when the stone outcropping comes back to his mind, he hears, and then sees a roar, and then the entire canyon behind him roars.

A curtain of yellow and orange, sweeps across his view as flames from outcroppings immolate the flying pursuers.

The wings, delicate and translucent, go first, sending the bug men to the ground to writhe in shock as figures, comparable to Hos’ own considerable size, emerge from all sides. Wreathed in flames, the blackened silhouettes run down into the mess of grounded trench men.

He watches in awe as these mighty figures, unphazed by the flames, massacre the bugs, who can neither see, nor feel what’s happening. Only the insects at the very back of the formation, those who split off to avoid entering the flames, have the context to understand what’s happening. They split off immediately, some even doing the unthinkable and fleeing over the canyon wall. Hos’ sees a roc bird’s wingspan swipe past the canyon opening above, along with the sudden disappearance of and subsequent cry of one of the insect warriors.

From the moment the canyon’s flames sprung up like a sprout of unchallenged authority, to the moment the final trench man sets into their customary curl of death, no more than fifteen seconds had passed.

The wreathes of fire drop, and Hos’ stares on in awe-struck bliss.

Like looking into a window of time, he sees the blackened figures of dragon men, clothed only in the honor of their soot, standing superior and merciless over the dozens of insects that met an immediate demise at their hands.

Their hands bathed in charred exoskeleton wreckage, they shortly turn their attentions his way.

“Th’ah,” the front one asks, cold slitted eyes blinking behind the soot-black scales. His stare is critical, deadly, and ready to turn his ire.

Hos’ bows his head, buying himself precious seconds as he understands instantly that this is not the dialect he had studied for.

“Hello,” he says in a refined Low Draconic, a hissing, guttural language that employs apical noises.

Immediately his audience vibrates into laughter. The sharpened, sinew-lean masses of muscle and scale somehow look even more threatening with such an abrupt reaction.

“His voice!” one says, winning a bout of laughs in acknowledgement.

“He talks like a trader!” another says, and this one really gets them going.

Amidst the burning wreckage of the bug men, the figures, all Higher Dragon Kin like Hos, approach with a lifted caution. He has trouble weighing their sudden ease, but after all, what could he do to them?

As it stands, he could probably do quite a bit, but he knows he’s not here to parade around the cause of humans nor their magic – he’s here on his own terms.

“What’s your name, outsider?” the front-most one asks, his body tall and regal despite the matte black color of his soot-lined scales.

The Knight raises his head in a proud greeting. “Hos’. I’m looking for my clan.”

Everyone laughs again, but this time it’s entirely inconsolable.

They spare no time to seize him, taking care not to hurt him, but making it clear that they won’t be letting go of him easily.

Hos sighs. In hindsight, perhaps he could have researched the locale a little more before setting out on this one.

Delivered by a firm but considerate hand under the dyed Hos Clan banners leading into camp, Hos watches as a commotion has already gathered from the center plaza: and for once it’s not just the unexpectedly delicate scent of the roasted trench men strung over a hunter’s shoulder that’s drawing the crowds.

Rows of dragon-kin, some as young as hatchlings, stare on at the newcomer with captivated gazes. Many of the adults, particularly the darker colored ones, inspect him with cutting, suspicious eyes. Mothers take their girls out of sight to a large tenement in the shadier part of the ravine. Hos muses how this is the first time that dragon-kin have looked at him like this, but he’s positively not a stranger to being the target of such publicly expressed ire.

“Guess you got me ready for this kind of thing after all,” Hos mumbles to himself.

He observes that the older they are, the darker their scales tend to be, particularly the more prominent figures. The younger kin and those that seem to be lower on the hierarchy, which he’s guessing by their demeanors, seem to be closer to his own natural blue and white coloration.

Sunbathing kin turn up from their shining rocks to look at him, his mere presence a deeply enjoyable change to the typical boredoms of the day.

The kin that stepped up to him first tugs him along through shaded ways past domiciles constructed of wood, leather, chitin, mud, rock, and anything else that could be found within the massive canyons of the reservation.

Children-kin tug at his cloak, teasing out glimpses of the heavy armor underneath, and scarce, millimeter-thin slices of his Reinish Knight’s crest. They’re not interested in that, he notices: it’s his empty canteen they’re after.

Briefly, he wonders if the clan would kill him if he wasn’t able to speak his peace in time, but more-so he wonders if these people even know what he is.

At the end of the trek, they find themselves in front of a large, smoking tent, and one of the only contiguous structures in the camp. As if by an invisible signal, everyone around him sobers up. Smiles fade away, the children break off, and only the sharp, slitted gazes of the adults remain. Led in by the soot-black head of the guards, he’s ushered under the raised fold of the tent’s opening, into the dark, smoke-filled tent.

III

The Inside of the tent is warmer than the outside, and the respite from the sun feels like being disconnected from a source of life for Hos.

He always hated indoor spaces, but there’s something about this place that worries him. Smothered in the dark smog, it’s uncomfortable both spiritually and physically, but he can’t put his finger on why.

A low bed of coals glows with a sacred crackling at what seems to be the center of the poorly lit room, and spending hours out in the bright sun isn’t doing Hos any favors when it comes to adjusting quickly to the dark.

“High Lance,” the slim, muscular hunter says, releasing Hos and dropping to his knees, with his head raised up in fearless recognition.

Hos follows along and takes to the floor as a silhouette begins to quietly, calmly stir from atop the bed of coals.

The Knight squints in irritation as the smoke-shrouded shape of a dragon kin shifts to reveal the shape of his jagged, worn horns.

“The ancestors spoke. Geheyl’s blood sings today,” the voice starts, the tone as gravelly as the cracking of the embers below him. “Was today the right day to interrupt me?”

“It is not as you understand i-”

“I understand enough, Bone Cutter: we have someone in our midst that bears our blood, but came from the outside.”

Hos clenches his teeth, and then the elder cranks out a long, smoke-stained laugh.

“He’ll find himself in good company!” The elder says as he leans over to spot out Hos. “Hey there, hatch! Get over here and let’s have a little talk.”

One of the clan warriors prods Hos forward. He goes up to the coal pit to sit directly across from the elder, who leans in.

“Now, what do they call you?” the elder, so soot caked after years and years of bathing in fire and smoke that his white and blue scales have diminished into swirled brownish hues.

“My… caretaker told by my colors that I was most likely of this clan.”

The chieftain’s gaze simmers against the light of the coals like a forging weapon in the heat. “And… who is this caretaker of yours?”

“I will not skirt it. She is a Lord Knight.”

“Disgusting,” the kin next to Hos hisses.

As if waiting for something important, the chieftain High Lance leans back in a calm, intense repose.

“If High Lance will not tell you off, then I will,” Bone Cutter, at Hos’ other side, says. “You are a murderer of our kind, and so you are not our kin. If you wish to leave, you may, as a token of our good wishes toward The Knights. We do not fight your kind any more.”

Hos maintains his composure as he looks back across the glowing coals to look at High Lance, his dark gaze focused on his face.

The Knight takes a long, deep breath, and then begins. “I am your kind,” he explains, “we share the same bloodline, I was stolen from the clan at a young age, I can only assume, and I am here now to receive my name.”

A disapproving pause chokes the room filled with dragon men. “You,” Bone Cutter starts with a sneer, “are a traitor. Your scales are pale with inexperience. What kind of pet-life have you lived, that you aren’t even browned?”

This wins a hearty chuckle around the dark tent: jagged figures so soot-caked and burnt over that it creates stygian pattern of muscle and teeth every direction he looks.

“We do not have that tradition in The Knights,” he remarks.

“And sure enough, it’s because your Knights are weak. They parade around and officiate the Red Banners as they carry out their dirty work,” Bone Cutter lifts up to address the others. “But we won’t let them! They won’t kill us!”

Shining jaws reveal to speak their agreement:

“As you say it, brother.”

“Spoken from the next chieftain himself.”

“None speaks truth like Bone Cutter,” are among the statements of approval that Hos picks up.

“And so,” Bone Cutter continues, “you should be on your way. We will not give you a name – your honor is already stained by their way of life, pale.”

A rising gasp passes through the tent.

“He is like a child.”

“Entirely unsmoked.”

“Never won a duel, I’d bet,” more comments writhe through the thick air.

Hos pauses, weighing his next words carefully. “Then how am I to prove my worth to yo-”

“You cannot,” Bone Cutter snaps to enthusiastic clamoring around the crowd, rising with every word. “You will be on your way, and High Lance is showing you the grandest mercy in letting you do so. Mark my words, if you show your rotten human-licking face here agai-”

“And who is to say he cannot?” High Lance asks.

The tent’s fervor draws to the uneasy silence as before.

“I…” Bone Cutter takes a moment himself this time. “That is you, chieftain.”

High Lance, little more than a pair of shining eyes within a bare silhouette surrounded by the swirling umbra of the tent, leans forward just enough so that a hint of definition is added to him by the orange glow of the coals. “And I say, if he believes he is willing to test himself against our path, then he may.”

The kind of silence that seizes the words from everyone’s breath takes hold over the tent. Hos’ feels a deep relief welling up in him as he realizes he’ll be able to try for his name after all, but what he notices next perturbs him.

They’re all so quiet.

A full ten seconds pass with nothing but the crackling of coals and the bated breath of the crowd inside the tent.

“He is an adult. He has no hatch master.” Bone Cutter explains, “Which test are we to give him?”

High Lance bends forward an inch more, the gray form of his face alighting with volcanic power.

“The one anyone who denies the path from their hatch master should.”

At this, the column of smoke pulls visibly into around the tent as gasps overwhelm Hos’ hearing.

The door behind them opens to let one out, pulling in a deep breath.

“The hatch-lookin’ monkey kisser’s gonna fight the chief!” the dragon-kin shouts.

Everyone in the tent can hear the uproar around them. It was like if all the rocks turned into red meat or something.

“Uh…” Hos’ coughs his way to something resembling words, but people are already vacating the tent, flushing the interior with light.

Bone Cutter turns away with a hiss before High Lance, illuminated and brought to the realm of reality by the sunlight, takes to his feet. A permanent brownish gray patina has stained his scales like an eternal wreath of fiery honor, and despite his age he still compares brilliantly to the sizable Hos’.

“No need to delay,” he growls with a spark in his eye. “To the pit of the ceremony.”

Hos’ grinds his massive teeth to think of the right question to ask before he’s stood up and walked out with the others.

“What kind of fight is it?”

“What is the pit?”

“What are the implications of this?” Are a few of the safer questions passing through his mind. But at the end of it, the only one that burns true enough is the one that none of them can answer: “What have I gotten myself into?”

IV

Walked across a vast stone-cairn graveyard, he identifies the so-called “pit of ceremony” only by the amount of kin gathering around it.

The nondescript circle of beaten dirt at the edge of their village is ringed by various desert grasses and oasis plants that, deprived of their crucial water, have withered into yellow-brown memories of the secret paradise they helped create.

This distracts him for a moment, and he turns to one of the hunters leading him along.

“That plant there,” Hos’ says.

“Carruca,” the elderly kin states with an excited puff of smoke. “Before the drought the stuff grew these big fruits you could eat all day in the shade of the trees.”

“Old Leaf Nibbler here speaking about the fruits again,” a bemused tribeswoman observes to a reserved chuckle around the group.

Immediately Hos’ understands that Leaf Nibbler is probably lower in the smoking order than he’d like to be. As they round to the opposite side of the pit from High Lance and his entourage, Hos’ takes a moment to get a better read on the situation. It’s those pushed to the sidelines of a society that are most willing to talk about its secrets, he understands – he’s been on the sidelines his entire life.

“There was water here?” Hos’ questions.

Leaf Nibbler, only slightly more browned from smoke than Hos’ pristine, childlike blue and white, bucks in a short gasp.

“W-well yes! When I was little, my hatch master would have us play around here. The pool of the oasis was right there in the pit, wouldn’t you believe it,” he explains in a creaky voice, like the bending of an old, dulled spear.

Hos’ expression sharpens in curiosity, and then abruptly cools off in realization. There’s not many other things that it could be, after all. “The Red Banners?”

“Hmm? Used their magic to cause the drought, I’m sure,” the older kin answers, the creakiness splintering at the mere thought. “They’ve been trying to parch us out for over fifty years, but we’re strong – we don’t need water when we have the bugmen.”

“High in fluids, I understand,” Hos’ notes.

“They get it from their caves. Lots of dew caught in there in the evenings.”

“Yeah, only thing we’re missing is Old Leaf’s fruits!” the same female from before butts in.

The surrounding kin share a laugh at the elder’s expense, who just shakes his head.

“They don’t understand, sir. There’s parts to us kin that’s both dragon and man, and us Hos clan hate seeing both sides.”

Hos nods, but he keeps his opinions to himself. Fruit and vegetables are gross, lacking in vitality, and for the weak-jawed – it’s not something he’d ever be caught eating. Instead of musing on it, he turns back to the opposite edge of the pit, where the hunters and High Lance are dressing themselves in ceremonial loincloths.

“So… what exactly am I doing?” Hos’ says, watching the kin around him take up more of the passed around cloths.

“You should begin by removing your weapons and armor, sir,” Leaf Nibbler says, “And any of the human magics will be frowned upon.”

“So… it’s a duel?” Hos asks, doing as he’s directed and starting by removing his gauntlets.

“Without weapons, sir. A test of strength and grappling skill.”

Hos’ looks across the pit again to see High Lance, stretching one moment, and practicing his tackles the next with some of the younger hunters.

“He’s much larger than me,” Hos’ mentions, winning snickers from around his side, and a shrug from Leaf Nibbler.

“A hatch master knows their hatches best, so they create the challenge that would give them the most difficulty to teach them the lesson they need to earn their name.”

Hos squints. “Lesson?” the word hangs in the air much in the way “where do babies come from” tends to.

“The lesson you… are to receive as you take your name,” Leaf Nibbler explains, his shoulders swaying up into a shrug.

Hos places shears off his front and back plates as he peers down the way – High Lance is now trouncing two hunters: large kin, soot black with fire and experience, flipped onto the side outside the ring.

The Dragon Knight stares on to watch a third, then a fourth kin pile in, but the chieftain makes good on his rank.

With a chin-shattering punch, High Lance cracks a fist into the last wrestler’s jaw, sending the poor fellow to the ground before slowly, savoringly pulling his gaze across the pit, and over to Hos.

“This is it,” Leaf Nibbler sighs.

“Never seen him so fired up,” a nearby hunter observes, “You’re really in for it, human-kin.”

Hos shrugs a shoulder to drop his enchanted interior mail. Finally revealed is his under armor padding, the kind of thing all proper Knights wear under their armor that can weigh as much as they do, or in some of the Millenia Knight’s cases, as much as a building before the enchanters can get their hands on the plates.

The subdued patch, sown into the shoulder of his padding, reveals itself from under the mail. The Reinish crest, the most recognizable emblem across the Verses, and the one symbol synonymous with the legendary Knights of Reinen: a symbol of incomprehensible magical prowess, an unflinching resolve across millennia, and of course an unmitigated, unstoppable cruelty towards cold-bloods. More than the Red Banner Knight’s dozens of symbols combined does this sight instill such fear into dragon-kind.

A silence follows around the ring.

Hos hoped that over the years they wouldn’t recognize it, but it’s clear that all eyes are on his shoulder. It’s Rayda’s patch, and it’s on the shoulder of one of their own now.

“Ancestors forgive,” Leaf Nibbler whispers under his breath.

“He has the symbol of the devil!”

“He’s a devil-man!”

“The humans took his mind!”

“Child murderer!”

“Murderer!”

Yes, it was “Murderer” that caught on with the surrounding crowd.

Leaf Nibbler and the other kin distance themselves from him with a collective jolt back – it’s like he suddenly has a disease.

Out of all the eyes, Hos focuses his gaze on High Lance, his arms crossed and his eyes cutting into him like sharpened nails into flesh.

“You certainly left none of it to chance,” the chieftain says with a grin as he steps into the pit. “Now we all know you hate us!” As an officiant raises her hand over a small leather drum, the chieftain leans into a wrestling stance.

Hos enters himself as High Lance growls in thought.

“I suppose what I’d like to know is why you want a name so badly.”

“I have never killed a Kin,” Hos states, raising into his guard with tight, military poise.

The ring of his kind laugh at first, but the fury is too great – it modifies into a roar. Stones start flying into him from all directions as even the children take their shots.

Hos stays motionless, even when a stone about the size of his fist smacks into the back of his head, scraping one of his horns before shearing into his cheek.

High Lance raises a hand, and at once the throwing stops. “I’ll remind you why the humans stay out of this canyon,” he says to an uproarious cheer. “I’ll remind you so hard you’ll waddle back to your little human tower and cry to your masters!”

Hos understands enough of the dialect to understand what he’s saying.

His face sours at first with an adolescent disgust, but after a deep breath, the calmness returns.

“I am a part of you,” Hos says, immediately winning a roaring rejection of the kin surrounding the ring. His slitted pupils focus intently. “You do not have to accept that – reality can be difficult to accept…” he pauses as the crowd leans in. “-for those who choose to live in holes.”

A conjoined fever pitch of screams, roars, and stones fly at him, even one of the ceremonial loincloths – he keeps his cool.

“Is it really this simple?” Hos mumbles out loud, almost like he’s alone. “Nach was right about my kind? A bunch of arrogant, emotional, self-righteous morons?” he hisses as another array of stones break against his solid frame.

He shakes his head and leans into his stance. “No matter. I will win this part of myself, regardless of your blessing, chieftain!”

This, perhaps more than everything else, wins the stones. With the rocks now piling up to his shins, Hos waits for the signal to begin the battle.

High Lance does not even look insulted: rather, he looks desperately excited.

He glances over to the officiant, who lifts her hand in a slow, savoring motion. The conjoined roar of the crowd drops silent, opting instead for the stomping of feet, clashing of stones, and smooth, rhythmic hiss of the ceremonial jam.

Every one of them produces a distinct sound that forms into the massive whole – a clan-wide drum beat that excludes only Hos and his opponent.

The Knight strains his hearing for the little drum from the officiant, certain it is the cue.

High Lance’s pupils slit to razor-thin sharpness: he can better relate to all the stories from the other Knights about facing off against “sharp eyed” dragon kin – it’s admittedly an intimidating sight.

He keeps himself from musing on it and regains his focus the very second the short *tum* of the little drum sounds, distinct from the rest of the clan and the call to begin.

High Lance charges forward. Hos buckles into the Chieftain’s weak side, and the two spin out to opposites sides with barely a jab exchanged.

The pitch of the clan chant raises high in thrilled bliss as the two came so close to exchanging blows. The two rotate around the ring with gut-wrenching anticipation as the chanting morphs with percussion.

In a blink, High Lance goes for him again, and then the real battle’s on.

He reaches for Hos’ neck right away, expecting to impress the crowd with the speed of a critical touch, but Hos proves stronger than expected. Hos flips the arms out of their interior space, replacing them with his own as he dips his shoulder in between them for an abrupt upward punch.

The solid jaw of a dragon man meets his fist, and he’s immediately met with the dense, finger-sized teeth of his opponent as they sink like gray bolts into his hand.

Hos inhales. All at once a piece of culture and history punches into his mind. It was never written about in any of the books he’s read, implied in any of the conversations he’s been party too, but of course the martial styles must have degraded among his people after all this time.

They’ve fallen so far – from high-mana siege weapons, mutamancy enchantments, and even early firearms… biting.

As his blood from his hand splatters into the chieftain’s jaws with a cheer from the crowd, Hos struggles to even feel bad about it – there’s a primal beauty to it that he, despite being on the receiving end of, finds delightful.

Yes, this was a dragon man.

He leans into the fight…

How the humans and fairy folk mocked him so.

When Meeo would dress him up in those fancy outfits.

Even as a child he was barrel chested and massive.

He focuses his energies without magic – it won’t mean anything if he uses mutamancy to flip his opponent head first into the dirt…

…Nach could hardly keep his eyes off him at the party. Meeo meant the best, but ultimately he was paraded around like a toy.

Rayda wouldn’t even look at him. He wouldn’t even look at Meeo – it was clear he was disgusted by the mere existence of him.

Of course, when you dedicate thousands of years to the extermination of his kind, and one of his most trusted knights brings in a fertilized egg from a raid: only to say she wants to surrogate for it…

Hos deftly dodges a swing. He can already feel the heat coming off High Lance.

The energy of the fight is changing. He leans in more – he’s waiting to see if this man among men, this chieftain is going to give him “the look”.

It’s so clear in his mind it’s like a chime.

“Like your little lizard, Mee!” Nach said, slick and deadly in his black Spirakandrin-made suit, just like the eyepatch.

And she looked back at him, with all the dignitaries watching the three of them.

She smiled, and said “I think we can both agree he’s my big lizard now,” as she patted him on his scaled arm, as wide as her neck.

Nach laughed. Most of them laughed, and he’s certain that Meeo meant nothing by it.

But now, he’s going to step out from the shadow. He’s going to find out who he is: passing the veil of human and dragon: passing the weight and expectation of society, of his mother, if she can even be called as such.

Hos cuts into the space of High Lance’s balance in a single, immaculate motion, like a god descending to punish his creation.

Hunting and wrestling and sitting in ashes all day is a far cry from what he’s gone through.

He can’t hear the cheering anymore – it’s that silent space before it shifts into collective gasps of shock. Through it all, though he lays his hands on the chieftain like Nach laid hands on him in the sparring chambers of Reinen’s Knightholds, the chieftain doesn’t falter. His eyes are so full of pride, so full of certainty – it’s like he already knows how it will end.

It’s not an expression of confidence, Hos realizes: it’s one of peace – even in defeat High Lance will not allow himself to be touched.

Hos slows his beat down by just a half-breath, giving the chieftain enough time to come in and meet him at an equal swipe.

The sound is so dense as their fists meet: if a person were party to this duel he’s be crippled the second contact was made.

Hos’ blood begins heating up with the chieftain’s. Yes, this is fighting: music made by spirits ready to smash their wills into one another until something gives out – it is a form of worship, and Hos sees that he has spent his whole life learning how to pray. In comparison to High Lance, he is young, smart and fast. Despite getting the bite in at first, that inherently primal motion, Hos is slyer, more treacherous, and more learned in the art of praying with his whole body for a world that reflects his will.

A savage undercut flies the second he hears High Lance’s breath flex into a bark – a mark of exasperation and a cue to lean in once again.

The chieftain’s ribcage curls around his fist like one of Meeo’s puffy blankets: she would heap them on top of him at night to ensure he didn’t get too cold – he hated that she would never allow him to challenge his constitution.

He grins at both the memory and the action as the crowd screams. In the periphery of his vision he sees a few of the hunters wobble from their spots, as if they’re preparing to step in and stop the fight.

Again like the deity looking down upon what he owns, he peers down coldly to High Lance:

The face remains unchanged.

…

He decides the time has come to hand it over – he can accept being named by this man: his character is what he’s fighting to see, and he’s seen it.

In a juvenile buckling of the posterior leg, Hos crumples back, receding to High Lance’s pressure – he doesn’t let the opportunity go to waste.

Like diving into the rushing waves of a golden Spirakandrin shores, his hearing is inflated, saturated by the cheers of the crowd and the punctuating strikes of High Lance, going right for the face.

Hos holds his grip low, ensuring High Lance understands he’s conscious, but otherwise allowing the old man to get his fix.

Seconds later, Hos feels the spilling heat of the chieftain in the air as, in a show of fury and dominance, High Lance pushes his foot into his opponent’s chest, looks up, and roars – the fire shearing into his teeth with its searing heat.

The proclamation sends the entire clan wild – a beacon of dragon-kin superiority in an age where the human scum have even corrupted their own to come and humiliate them.

Hos is too numb to know if he’s grinning, but he’s doing his best to keep it hidden.

A few seconds pass as the sunlight delights his tossed back frame, and High Lance, looking like a humbled god down to his deceptive creation, lifts his foot off and gestures sharply with his finger.

“Up, kin.”

The cheering drowns out anything else the chieftain might have said, but there’s nothing else to be said at a time like this.

Hos lifts up and fakes a stumble before retaking his proper balance.

“I’m… up,” he says before a spit of blood.

Everyone rushes up to honor the chieftain and his victory over the outsider, but not before the chieftain slips a quick, just-painful-enough punch into Hos’ shoulder.

“That’s it. We talk about this tonight.”

And like that, he’s lifted up by his clanmates into the air like the hero he is.

Hos feels a sharper punch into his back from someone else as the tide of hunters wash past him like a rock in a stream.

He turns to see the smoke-black hunter from before – this time with a grin across from his white teeth.

“Bone Cutter,” Hos greets.

The prime hunter punches him once again.

“We’re on good terms now, hatch.”

“Don’t call me hatch,” Hos says as he collects his things.

“Okay, bitch,” Bone Cutter scoffs, his crooked grin twisting more by the second as the clan clears off back to the village. “I saw that little flinch you did there…” with a raise of the neck, he watches as everyone gets a few steps ahead of them. “You let the old sack win, didn’t you?”

Hos stretches his neck about. “…There’s more to diplomacy than putting on a good face.”

Bone Cutter can only chuckle to himself for the rest of the trip back – and he wasn’t the only one to share the observation with Hos that one does not lose such a commanding lead in a fight on accident. A few even went so far as to blow short bursts of fire on him, claiming it was to help him “catch up”.

He sighs out a puff of smoke – whether or not it was a success remains to be seen.

V

“Fool!” Leaf Nibbler laughs, pointing at Hos from a safe distance around the bonfire. “No one overcomes the chief!”

Bone Cutter, hovering on Hos’ side around the place of honor, shears a layer of crevice cattle meat from the bone using only a pulling motion across his jaws.

“You’d better say that to his face next time,” he mumbles out, winning a ray of laughter from the surrounding hunters.

Naturally, gazes pull over to Hos who, despite his under armor padding being completely covered in soot now and utterly ruined (especially in the spot where his shoulder patch rests on his uniform.)

“This one,” High Lance says, grabbing Hos by the collar and shaking him. “This one is good!”

A cheer overcomes the entirety of the tent.

“You are strong – very strong.”

“But not strong enough to beat you!” Nibbler says.

He is ignored as High Lance takes a breath to continue.

“You are strong enough to defeat many of our greatest hunters. I do not like man, and I do not like the ways of man, but despite even their fattened ways, you have risen above them to return and show yourself a true brother!”

A grand cheer calls through crowds. They throw cooked portions of beef, chicken, and crevasse bug meat at Hos.

Sitting stoic and with a look of pure, unmoved peace, he fires up a split second to open his mouth and chomp a portion of the airborne morsels.

The crowd goes wild, and he just barely fights back the grin.

“You really have too much of a showman in you, Hosy,” Meeo would say.

Who wouldn’t after being banned from the school’s combatives guild – he can’t blame them though, after he took them all on and won.

Now he can be himself. Now he can submerge in the pride of what he is.

“So long have I been relegated to society’s embarrassment because of what I was,” Hos says with a furious gaze. “So long have I been treated second to peers everywhere for having the blessing of Geheyl in my veins!”

The mention of the Matron Primordial’s name with such admiration would have sent every knight save Meeo on his tail: Even Order… especially Order would get her fill of smacking him around for insubordination.

Here; however…

Here he can grin with that thirsty grin, and tear meat off the bone with his teeth, or simply eat it with the bone altogether.

He can feel the human side of his spirit flattened as a wave of blood and protein fills his belly and its scent billows into his lungs.

“I have RETURNED!” he roars, fire searing his scales, both form his own mouth, and increasingly from those near him in the fortunately heat-treated tent.

Some of them leap forward to embrace him, others grill him with all they have, others throw piles of food his way.

“Rayull!” a child cries as he shears a full flank of a bone with his resplendently strong jaws – the word in their language for teeth.

He was away for nearly a hundred years, but now he knows their faces, and he understands what a family feels like. Their flames curl together in a captivating swirl of heat: the expulsion of life and acceptance from his fellows.

Bone Cutter partakes in this for the first few moments, but with every new cheer, every new roar from Hos, and every new blast of flame further cementing his reputation within the clan… his smile flickers just a small bit more.

He takes a deep breath, the look in his eyes shifting from the calm bemusements of home, to the critical moments of the hunt.

“What shall be your act?” Bone Cutter asks with an encouraging tone.

Even High Lance is swept up in the mention of it.

“What will be your act?!”

“Your act, my lord, your act!”

“Brother, what will it be?”

And more, and more, and more. The question washes over him like a catalyst. Of course the duel isn’t enough to rise above them all, let alone get his clan name.

Hos draws air into his lungs, and fire spews as he speaks.

“I will bring us the river!”

Hours later, pulling away from the constant harassment of the younger females, and the awe-struck interrogations about the “man world” by the younger kins, Hos exits the tent for a short break.

He goes through his things and fishes out the chat stone, the one object that can immediately connect him to the outside world… and to Meeo.

He looks at the azure stone attached to the chain. With the smell of smoke and pride hot in his heart, it now looks like an old trinket: a key to close the world from before.

His slitted eyes round out a moment the more he looks at it.

“I won’t let you down,” he said on that day, doing everything he could not to jump for joy.

“I know you won’t,” Knight Justice said back as he rested the chain of the stone into Hos’ hands, “You’re going to show everyone here that a person’s birth defines them only as much as they’ll let it.”

At the time, Hos thought it was just another cheesy platitude, the sort of thing that everyone else in the Knights berated Justice over.

Now he understands that they were both outcasts – he understood what it meant to be disliked by so many people you respect, and do the right thing anyway.

With a single spark of mana sent into the chatterite stone by his hand, it alights.

He glances up to briefly measure the amazed and terrified gazes of the resting kin who looked up from their hovels to catch a glimpse at him.

Yes, the glowing color of blue: the color of the killers here. In the Hos Clan, blue meant the inexperience of the young scales, and the deceptive magic of the men.

Red was the color to trust, the color of fire and battle… even the Red Banner Knights were honest in that way: their red told the clan violence was to follow.

He steps out of sight as the stone fully lights up as the owner of the stone’s pair jolts their own.

“Oh!” a voice from the other end of the stone emits the moment it connects. “Hosy? Is that you?”

Meeo’s words weigh on him like a boulder, crushing his breath to the point that he cannot even speak.

“Hosy? It’s okay if you’re busy. I hope you’ve found those nice folks you were looking for. I heard they can be pretty hard to spot in all those canyons.”

Hos clenches his teeth. He knows he only needs to say a single thing, and it’ll all be over with. His body trembles, shaking the blurring image of the stone in his hand. He raises it up to his jaws, and takes a heavy, decisive breath.

“You know, I was just thinking about you,” Meeo goes on, “I don’t know if you can hear me, but in the case that you do, I really wanted to let you know that I love you a lot. We all do. Nach was asking how long you thought you’d be: he had a new move he wanted to try, and I know you enjoy that sort of thing.”

The dragon-kin steps over behind a rocky outcropping to simply lean against the stone, still warm from the heat of the day.

“Oh, and I made something for you.”

She goes on.

“I know you really said you didn’t want something woolly, so I did my best to slick it down as best I could. It’s getting cold soon and I don’t want you seizing up this season.”

And on.

“Ran’s gonna rely on us for snowball back-up, I’m sure. After the last time I think Rayda is really raring to get his revenge, but I’m not about to let him take his satisfaction when she’s the rightful champ, you know?”

And on.

Hos opens his jaws to speak, but again, nothing comes out.

“…I’m sorry, I’m sure you’re busy. If you need anything just call out… oka-”

Crumpled down against the rock wall, he retracts the mana from the stone, and cuts the signal short.

“I… can’t say that yet,” he says, both to himself, and to the woman who cannot hear it. “Thanks for everything. I will never forget what you did for me.”

He takes a minute to stare at the dirt, and a minute to look up to the stars, and then he returns to the chieftain’s tent.

VI

The following day, Bone Cutter and High Lance wait outside with their spears as Hos stirs within a tent very close to the Chieftain’s. “Nice day for it,” Bone Cutter says, passing a waterskin to High Lance, who just nods.

A karoku bird chirps upon a branch from a ridge vine, and then he emerges.

Hos emerges with a loincloth and his mace. He stands in the sun relishing the feel of his pure soot black scales – with the exception of several slender handprints of white ash applied on top his bare chest.

Bone Cutter flinches at the appearance of all that white, but High Lance seems delighted.

“Now I don’t think I’ve seen that many prints since my own day!” he laughs, patting Hos on the back. “If you’re lucky enough to be chief some day, the eggfolk’ll be all over you!”

Hos nods, concealing judgement as he finally notices the hunter-like look in Bone Cutter’s eyes.

“I value their thoughts of me.”

High Lance laughs again. “Well! I’m certain they’re more than happy for your sudden appearance. I am too!”

Hos smiles, “Thank you. I’m ready to earn my place within the clan.”

“The river, then” Bone Cutter asks with a nudge. “How do you figure you’ll do that?”

Hos looks down along the long ditch laden with river bed plants, and studies the path upward into the North East. Directly next to the encampment, some of the kin have taken to hand digging small springs in the morning for water.

He watches them struggle over every drop, some going as far as pushing their snouts into the holes for a single sip.

“I’m going to unblock the source,” he says, stepping off to follow the riverbed.

High Lance hums as Bone Cutter, dragging his spear along the dirt, notices the slight muddiness of the bed. “Well, yes, but the spring dried up even before I was a hatch. I don’t think it’s a blockage of anything.”

The chieftain, following along at the back shows off his broken grin: teeth that have crushed more bones than Hos’ mace.

“It was lovely,” he says as he lifts his hand to wave to a few females working on spinning a length of grass cord, “I’m sure Nibbler told you all about it.”

“Do you think it dried up?” Hos asks.

High Lance waits for them to get out of earshot from the others as they pass through the north clan gates.

“…It did end one day all of a sudden. It was my father who went to see what happened – he believed it was dammed… he was Chieftain, so it was his role to go inspect the source… he never returned.” He takes a long, memoried breath. “It will be quite a hike, far longer than we would usually wander… but I suppose this is the time to see it.”

Bone Cutter squints as High Lance glances over to him.

“You bothered that I lied?”

“You told me… everyone that it dried u-”

“We all agreed to go with that story. My mother wouldn’t allow me to go see, and by the time I was strong and skilled enough to go, it became apparent who got in his way.”

“Red Banners,” Hos answers.

A cruel grin misshapes Bone Cutter’s face. “Those animals.”

“Have you met them before?”

“Only seen them watching. They shot at me once from the ridge.”

“Cowardly.”

“Typical for them,” Bone Cutter adds with a puff of smoke as the three of them round a corner down along the river bed.

Hos keeps it to himself that that the odds are better than not that he not only knows the man that put in the order for this water-sealing “magic,” but also the ones that put it into action. The Red Banners are good friends of the Ragnivanians, after all, and the Ragnivanians are good friends of The Knights.

“Today we solve this. Let’s go along as far as we can,” Hos says.

High Lance nods. “It’s so strange that you’d think about the river on your first day.”

“It seemed obvious. We’re toiling for water down here.”

The chieftain glances back at the clan home as they pass the long curve into the particularly hot northern canyons.

“Perhaps I have been a coward all this time. I thought I would have died too if I went to check on it, but if I had brought other hunters, they would know I had lied… You are the reason I am returning to my past.”

High Lance allows the words to sizzle in the air a moment as they walk directly through a cactus patch, the dragon parts of them unimpeded by something as laughable as natural piercing weapons.

“Thank you,” Hos says. “I’m honored to partake in this with you-”

“Nonsense, killer,” High Lance says, “We are doing this because of you. The honor of the clan’s fortune will be yours… a human baked outsider… returning us to our former glory. History has such a way with it,” he glances over to Bone Cutter, who almost tripped over a low patch. “You okay there?”

“Fine, chieftain,” he says, gulping back saliva, “I’m ready for anything.”

After a long but uneventful three hour hike through canyons, far past the crevice bug nests and all other things the clan would care to make use of, they come to a thin part of the canyon that has rocks leading all the way up to the top.

The three stare at it like a thing of pure myth.

“I’ve… never been this far,” Bone Cutter notes as he subconsciously rattles his water skin. “It’s going to be a slow walk home with so little water.”

High Lance gives the hunter a firm, friendly shove. “Aww, don’t be so dry with our new killer, eh?”

“Hah, of course.” Bone Cutter smiles, but the falseness in it is clearer than anything Hos has seen in his life – is this what Meeo said when she was talking to him about the hidden intentions that show only in the voice?

Hos takes a moment to inspect the rocks. “That’s quite a dam there.”

“Some kind of magic, eh?” High Lance says, “I’m certain it’s beyond us.”

Hos begins climbing up the rocks. “Well, let’s see.”

“Wait… you want us to climb with you?” Bone Cutter asks, stretching to the left and right in an attempt to see further up.

“How else will we know?” Hos asks.

Bone Cutter hesitates, but High Lance is already on the rocks.

“Allllright then!” the chieftain exclaims as he scrambles up a stone half his size. “To new things!”

“This won’t tell us anything,” Bone Cutter sighs as he too begins the climb.

It’s little issue for dragon-kin to scale most surfaces. While they aren’t cliff lizards by any means, they possess a certain grip and sense of verticality that lends well to climbing terrain like this.

The higher they go, the more foliage they encounter. Desert-hardy thorn bushes prickling gently against their loincloths, but past that the dense obstacles only slide across their scaled musculature and honed weapons.

The sun sits high, and the rocks are especially hot in the tight, breezeless space.

“What do you think we’ll find, doing this?”

“Water,” Hos says as he hops limberly along a rock – landing so softly it sounds more like a jumping lizard than something that weighs almost as much as these rocks. “But first, the reason the water has gone,” he says with a leading tone, as they enter a large, dense patch of brush leading into softer tall grass.

Hos can hear Bone Cutter breathing heavily, but High Lance, wise to his years, has a sort of focused peace about what they’re about to see.

“Are you okay?” Hos asks back.

“I…” Bone Cutter grits his blackened fortress of teeth, “I’ve never been out of the canyon before.”

“Other than myself and nameless here, you’ll be the only Hos clan to exit the canyon… since Skull Hunter: my father.”

“The Red Banners are going to see us,” Bone Cutter hisses. “They’re going to kill us… you’re leading us right to them!”

Hos and High Lance glance back at Bone Cutter.

“Yes, and if they are there, then we can kill them,” the chieftain says with a smile. “Or aren’t you of the clan?”

Bone Cutter’s pupils thin with snake-like emotion.

“… I’ll do whatever I have to, obviously,” he growls.

The three reach the top, and see that they’ve scaled the rocks which piles up onto wooden scaffolding.

“Wait… what?” Bone Cutter mutters, looking across the vast expanse of the world. “I… can’t see the end of it. It’s huge!”

“Hah, keep a lookout,” High Lance says as he nods Hos over to look at something. “There it is.”

About fifty meters down at the edge of the canyon, a prodding silhouette of wood sticks up from the sand. Next to it is what looks to be a small tie down area for horses behind the jutting rocks that cast shade over a sight that causes all three of them to stop everything.

Bone Cutter clears his throat as he stares at it with the others. “Is that…”

“It is,” Hos says.

“Water!” Bone Cutter exclaims. “It’s really here! Dammed up like you said!” He pauses a moment before looking back to Hos. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t, but I know Reds reroute currents along kin territory for their farms sometime. Obviously you don’t want ‘innocent peasants’ to starve, so it’s not easy to sue them to put it back. Spirakander is Freeland, after all.”

Bone Cutter’s eye twitches abruptly. “Wait… what, so they can simply take all of our water and we can’t do anything? This isn’t Spirakander, it’s Hos Clan-”

“Hunter,” High Lance sighs, staring out at the water with a confused expression. “Most of the men don’t care about that.”

The seasoned Bone Cutter just stares out at the horses drinking their fill from the channel from the spring.

“Let’s make them care. They’ll miss their horses when they have to walk on their stupid hairy legs,” he growls, starting forward at a run as he reasserts his grip on his spear.

“Wait, don’t anger them!” Hos shouts, stumbling to catch up to him.

“Don’t anger the humans! How much I’d hate to anger the almighty humans!” Bone Cutter mocks as he picks up speed.

“Stop, you fool!”

Hos exerts his mana into his mutamantic enchantments: increasing his speed on the ground by double, but it’s too late.

From the shaded entry of one of the encampments, a solid bolt flies out nicks Bone Cutter in the shin – he falls as a reeling, degrading cheer erupts from the camp.

“Look at it! It just fell over!” shouts one voice in Common.

“Stupid scales. Too dumb to change their ways no matter how much time we give ‘em,” laughs another.

Hos catches up to Bone Cutter and tugs from his belt the Knight’s aid kit – he still refuses to learn healing magic or any other kind of Sanamancy, not because he can’t understand it, but it’s simply too much work when he can just patch them up.

High Lance walks up to meet them as a group of five human silhouettes untie their horses and rally up on them.

Hos stops his tourniquet halfway and leads Bone Cutter’s hand to the twist.

“Turn this as far as you can,” Hos commands.

“…Alright,” Bone Cutter says, already gasping for air as he the rumble of hooves fills their hearing.

Hos gets to his feet just in time to snap the soaring bolt, traveling right for his neck, into his hand instead.

“Tough bastard right here!” one of the men, armored in fading, scratched, crimson paint exclaims.

The other men laugh along with him. It’s all a game to them.

Keeping a respectful distance of twenty meters, the men array their horses laterally from them for a quick escape if one of the dragon-kin rushes them.

Another shoots a bolt, this time at Bone Cutter – Hos catches it again, burying another into his hand.

“Death!” one of the men shouts in Hos Draconic.

The men laugh with him and repeat the same term.

Hos takes a breath.

“Death you! Death you!” shouts the man from before as he reloads his crossbow.

“That’s quite enough,” Hos says in perfect, inflected common – indistinguishable from a standard Ragnivanian accent.

Everyone pauses in the scene.

Bone Cutter loses his grip for a second on the trounequet, and High Lance snorts a puff of smoke.

“Did it…” the front-most armored man glances over to one of the others.

“It did.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Can teach a lizard a thing or two.”

“Hey!” the right-most Red Banner starts, “The blood is what makes the banner red!”

A chorus of laughter and shouts fly Hos’ way. He’s heard some version of that phrase thousands of times – it doesn’t affect him.

“I’m a Knight of Reinen,” from his loin cloth he displays his Knight’s crest. “I’m here to conduct a parle-”

“Holy shit!” one laughs.

“It’s trying to threaten us!”

The group laughs before the front-most one leans forward on his horse. “Get that fake shit out of our face. I don’t know how they taught you to talk man so well but that’s as far as this little charade goes!”

“I don’t want to fight you,” Hos says, keeping his eyes on the men.

“What is he saying?” Bone Cutter asks, leaning over to High Lance.

The chieftain just shakes his head, staring on at the men. “I don’t know.”

The front man jostles a bit in his saddle. “You don’t want to fight, eh?”

“You know, I did hear about that uh… Love Knight,” the left-most Red Banner says. “Got herself a scale as a pet – heard it was a crevice shitter.”

The five shuffle about on their horses.

“She’s into that lizard dick, no doubt,” one of the middle ones notes offhandedly, winning another laugh from the others.

Hos begins breathing heavily, and the front one spots it.

“Oh, did we get you there?”

“Little bitch.”

“Stupid scale.”

“Your kind are good for the fertilizer pile and mothering else.”

“Rayda almighty you’re such a dumb little thing.”

Hos pulls in another breath, exhales slowly as the insults fly, and then takes in yet another. “I do not want to fight. I simply want to get my people their water back from that dam. It used to be used by the-”

“Damn right you don’t want to fight. Smartest scale I’ve ever met,” the front man interrupts. “All we need to do is give the word to the authorities and they’ll blast your little reservation to kingdom come.”

“No, they won’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“The Dragon-Half Act of-”

“Yeah but who would care enough to stop it? The investigator will be the local, who is a Red Banner, and he’ll just say it was all your fault. No one’s going to help you.”

“…I don’t need anyone’s help to stop you.”

A heated pause overtakes the scene as some of the horses tap in place skittishly.

“Then do it.”

“I’m giving you the chance to get away with your lives. We have to stop the cycle of violence or else-”

A bolt shoots right into Rayull from the right-most man, and he doesn’t react in time. It punches right into his shoulder.

“Die, fucking scale,” he scoffs out as all the men but the front-most join in on the chuckle.

Rayull, having died to his pride earlier, chooses to do it once again. There is a way around this, and only now he realizes that it may not be the Hos Clan way. He pulls out his chat stone, sparks it, and in just a few seconds it alights.

“Hosy?” the cooing, feminine voice asks out from the stone.

With a swing of the chain, Hos deftly tosses the stone to the front-most Red Banner, who catches it.

“What the fu-”

“Oh! Are you one of his friends?” the woman with the other stone asks from some place far away.

Once again, the stone begins trembling in its holder’s grip, but this time it’s not Hos, but a complete stranger.

“I know that voice,” the man whispers.

“Oh? Goodness! Is that Lord Rogiers?! That’s incredible! I had no idea you were down there visiting the canyons!”

At once, the left man pulls up his visor entirely to reveal a gaze of pure disbelief, and the center-right man drops his crossbow outright.

“Y-yes, Meeo! Knight Love! How are you doing today?”

“Mmm, I’m well. Honestly I assumed Hosy to be on the other side of the stone. It’s his after all.”

The front-most man, Lord Rogiers of the Ragnivanian Royal Court, raises his visor to get a really good look at Hos.

“Gods sod it all,” he whispers under his breath.

“What was that, sir?” Meeo says from the other side.

“Nothing, sorry the horse was a little rowdy.”

“Horse? Aren’t those ille-”

“Well we all keep our little secrets, eh, Meeo?”

As the dirt-and-blood-covered dragon-kin watch on with slant, readied gazes, Meeo giggles like a true courtesan.

“Oh Jacobson, I suppose you’re right. Don’t let Justice find out about that, though. You know how he is… so Hosy, where is he? I’d like to speak with him but I’m starting to wonder if he lost his stone.”

Lord Rogiers, his gaze locked to Hos’, just stares at him for a moment.

Hos stares back, his gaze slanted, but in the most human way that Rogiers’ has ever seen in a kin’s eyes.

After a short silence, he raises the stone back to his helmet.

“No, he’s right here actually.”

“Oh, goodie!” Meeo exclaims. “Please, pass it over.”

Rogiers spins it through on its chain and tosses it back to Hos, who still catches it, despite the three bolts in his arm. He raises it to his jaws.

“…Miss,” he addresses.

“Hoseeeeey!” Meeo cheers, winning a look of profound disgust from Bone Cutter, and nervous glances between the mountain Red Banners. “How have you been?! Reinen is such a nice place, but it would be even better with you over here! I’ve missed you so much!”

“I’m well,” he starts, looking back up to a much sweatier Lord Rogiers, who immediately feels himself to be the target of immediate, disadvantaged diplomacy. “I found the clan and am discussing how to help them out with a civil problem.”

“Oh! That’s amazing that you can just go down there and help them out. They’d never let humans do that.”

Hos takes a calming breath. “I’m having a great time. I’m learning a lot.”

“Oh, wonderful! I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen with this trip, but you wanted to take it so much I knew it simply had to be done! You know, Redemption talks quite a lot about ‘journeys of self-actualization’ and I think there’s really something to that for some people. Maybe you’re one of those folks?”

Hos pauses, his expression a mixture of doubt, surprise… and then awe. He lowers the stone, marks the expressions of complete terror from the Red Banners, and then he looks around to Bone Cutter scowl, as if he’s staring right at another Red Banner, except he’s looking right at him.

Finally he turns to look to High Lance who, despite the steadied breathing for a situation like this, looks as calm as he does. The two connect gazes, and for a single moment, he feels like he can hear his thoughts:

“You’ve already named yourself.”

Hos raises the stone back to his face. “I think I am, miss… Thank you for letting me do this.”

“I mean, you’re like way too old for me to tell you what to do, it’s just you’re by yourself out there and it’s a really big world, you know?”

He glances nonchalantly at the bolts buried in his oozing wounds. “I think I understand that better now. Hey, I’ll call you back. Keep this on the low but Lord Rogiers is helping me a lot with getting a well done for the reservation,” Hos says, glancing over to Rogiers only to be met with a rapid, confirming nod.

“Oh, that’s so great to hear! I knew he was a good egg. I usually don’t consult with people adjacent to the Red Banner committees like Nach, or Dan, or Ran, but I could just tell he was the kind of person that was willing to make things work out for everything. One of those cool idea guys, you know?”

“Yeah,” Hos says with a grin. “He’s a real saint, that fellow. I have to go now.”

“Okay, let me know how it all goes!”

Hos takes one last look at High Lance, whose gaze says it all again:

“You’ve already named yourself.”

“It won’t be long I think,” Hos answers her. “I was thinking I’d be staying here for a while, but I realize there’s more I have to do, and The Knights is the only place I can do it.”

“Oh! Well that’s wonderful! I had no idea you were thinking of leaving for good or something like that.”

Hos scoffs. “Leave you, mom? Never.”

“You… Hosy, you called me m-”

“Don’t trip over it,” he says over her. “See you.”

“Oh, mmm, okay. See you!”

He cuts the mana link from the stone, and looks back up to Lord Rogiers.

“My Lord, sir. I would like to formally discuss the… fielding of agricultural resources of the region. I understand you have some claim to the land, so I would very much appreciate your support.”

Rogiers, high on his horse but slumped over in relief, measures out a slow, shaken sigh. “Yes, Sir Knight. I would be happy to talk it over.”

VII

Minutes later, the Red Banner sanamancer, demanding a lengthy account of the events, finally agrees to heal Hos and Bone Cutter’s wounds, but the latter has to be pinned down to get it done.

“TRAITOR! THEY’RE POISONING MY BLOOD!” the proud hunter roars in the open sands as Hos pins him long enough for the sanamancer to finish applying their magic.

A simple minute of explanation and direction is exchanged between Rogier and Hos

And back down they come from the Northern canyons. Hos spares a single glance to the Red Banner Knights, who after a moment, one of them gives a short wave.

He waves back, winning a spiteful hiss from Bone Cutter.

“You almost got us killed,” he mutters, weak, but not so much that he can’t complain. He leans over to address High Lance. “Is this what we’re standing for n-”

He pauses at what he sees, his eyes thinning out in serpentine disbelief.

High Lance is staring across the way to Rogiers, and the two, after a short silence, exchange a short, understanding nod.

“I cannot believe you,” the hunter sneers as the three of them start back down the rocks, the sight of the Red Banners heading over to the dam’s shoring disappearing as they dip into the canyon opening.

“It’s past due,” High Lance says. “Those poor fools only have their hate left, but at least we have our families. We have to find a way to reach out to them.”

The mere thought of it is inconsolable to Bone Cutter. He simply scoffs, and makes his way down with the other two.

Every now and then he’ll hiss in frustration at the precedent of the evening – his mind reeling with the subsequent challenging of his worldview.

About high noon, and a moment before he opens his mouth again to say the three of them are going to run out of water and die, he feels the cool kiss of water against his heel.

The three of them freeze.

Hos can’t smile, not after how it happened, but he looks over to High Lance, who is feeling the touch of the spring for the first time since he was a little boy.

“Ah, that is something I’ve missed,” the chieftain says, closing his eyes and allowing the chilled slice of the water across his feet to overtake the rest of his senses.

The stream heads along the bed, growing and lengthening by the second. “Nibbler can even have his stupid fruits back,” High Lance chuckles to himself, eyes still shut.

Bone Cutter, a mixture of irritation and humility piling over his face, reaches down to cup some into his hand.

“I bet they poisoned i-”

High Lance pulls Bone Cutter’s cupped hand over, and tilts it to take a sip.

“Then I’ll be the first to go… I have decided that this will be my honor.”

Hos’ expression doesn’t flinch, he understands why.

Bone Cutter, however, doesn’t seem to see it the same way.

“The outsider d- I don’t… I don’t understand, you seemed to approve of him.”

High Lance shakes his head as another wave of blissful peace overtakes him. “It’s so cold…” With a sigh, he turns to Bone Cutter as they continue on to the clan home. “He is not meant to be here with us. He is adjusted to the life outside… and yet he is here in spirit.” He looks over to Hos. “Isn’t that right?”

Marching along with the other two, Hos holds his gaze to the streambed as dislodged sand swirls in the steadily increasing current. “It’s right.” He takes a breath. “You are my people… but this is not my home.”

Bone Cutter squints, “And just what is that supposed to mean?”

“I had my coming of age ritual with The Knights. I never needed to come here.”

High Lance pats him on the shoulder. “But… honestly, I’m glad you did… honor is honor, however.”

Bone Cutter smirks. “That’s right. You led us to the Red Banners and you didn’t even fight them. You’re a cowar-”

“Oh, shut up you ignoramus,” High Lance spurts, smoke and flame accompanying his words. “He has returned water to us. That is the thing a Chieftain would do. It is always easy to say we must be strong enough to slaughter our enemies, but now that I’m old it finally occurs to me that there are other ways to bring honor to your people.”

He glances back at Hos as they turn the corner to the clan home: they can already hear the cheering, the shouting, the din of comprehensive societal disbelief that a miracle has been delivered. “I am proud of you, son.”

Hos and Bone Cutter both glance back in shock.

“Son?!”

“Wh- impossible!”

High Lance laughs, his aged features both reminiscent of a dragon with a great horde of treasure in his lair, and a very old, very satisfied father.

“May as well. Can’t be quite sure, but just about everyone under ninety here is my kid.” He leans back with a relaxed, superior groan, “So I suppose it’s about time I groomed you for chieftain, eh?” he says, firing an embered glance to Bone Cutter.

Immediately the stress on Bone Cutter seems to melt off his face. “I… wh- You mean to say I’m still the-”

“Of course! I’m not going to leave the clan in the hands of some outsider we met yesterday, no matter how much the females like him.”

Bone Cutter almost hisses, almost smiles, but instead he just looks away in embarrassment.

“Yes, I think we’ll have to work on your temper a little before then,” High Lance says just as Bone Cutter gives Hos a slight push.

“I’m… sorry for how I treated you.”

Hos smiles as the doors to the clan gate open wide for them.

“I forgive you… I’ve been finding that more and more important these days. Sometimes you just have to let things go, and be the example people draw on,” he says, his voice washing more and more into the frantic cheering around them that eventually drowns it out.

The kin are drinking freely, dancing, playing in the water, and generally having a wonderful time.

“He brought us back the river!” a kid-kin shouts up on one of the wall posts.

“More of a stream, really,” an impressed-looking Leaf Nibbler notes.

“He really is the chosen male!” says one young female.

An elderly matron lifts her hands to the sky. “May his millions of progeny scorch the earth of the man-kin and burn them in the deepest pits!”

The crowd cheers, a few of the female swoon… but Hos: he just kind of grins.

“Uh, it wasn’t me!” Hos says, lifting his hand up with enthusiasm.

The cheering stops short in bemused surprise.

“It was all…” he takes a step aside to gesture to High Lance, who reflexively strikes the sexiest pose he can for being over a century old, “this guy!”

Oh yes, the new upstart wanderer saving the village is a good story, but the old Chieftain? Now that is truly legendary.

The specifics delivered are not extremely clear, but oh, he did face off against a whole kill-squad of mounted Red Banners… and would you look at that: not a scratch on him!

—

Some hours later and with all his gear, he climbs out from the canyon on the other end: where he had emerged from last morning.

He looks over his shoulder, to see High Lance, Bone Cutter, and a few dozen other clans-kin, waving back at him as he exits their lives. He waves back, and in just a couple of minutes they’re entirely out of his sight.

“Goodbye… father,” he mumbles to himself.

Reaching the shade of an outcropping, he fishes out a cerulean-colored gem set in a chain. With a jolt of mana, he beckons the stone awake. Umarr, having waited all this time with a couple books and a few bottles of something harder, gives him a slow, bemused wave.

Hos waves back as the stone fully alights.

“Hosy!” a feminine voice vibrates excitedly.

Hos winces with genuine bemusement before responding back. “We-”

“Hosyyyyyyyyyyy!”

“…Were you waiting for me?”

“Of course I was! It’s so boring up here right now. It’s just a bunch of meetings and Rayda’s acting so weird!”

Hos pauses with the stone held up to his jaws. “…You… you’re trying to calm me down.”

“…Hmm, oh… am I?”

“You figured I’m calling you up to tell you it didn’t go well,” he assumes – and rightfully so: for such a long time she’s been the only person around to catch him when he’d fall.

“No, Hosy, you’re calling me up to tell me that you did a great job, and that you made a lot of friends down there, and they threw a big party for you and gave you a really nice name… right?”

“You’re joking.”

“But you did get a name, didn’t you?”

Hos takes a seat on the outcropping next to him, facing the sunset as it bends over the dunes in a splash of red. He watches a horsebacked rider gallop across the horizon at the very edge of his vision… and he can still see the figure of a single clan-kin peering at him from the decline into the canyons – someone must have followed up a little to watch him a while longer.

He can’t quite make out who it is, but a part of him thinks he sees a the distinctively “dad-bod” outline of a certain chieftain staring back.

“They didn’t give me one,” he admits.

For a moment only the desert wind speaks.

“Hosy, I’m so sorry – I’m sure you did a wonderful job.”

“…I did.”

“You… did?”

Hos laughs. “The chief… he told me I should just pick one. They never don’t give someone their clan name – a coming of age test to them is an experience, not a trial that can be failed.”

“Wh… oh, well that’s great! So they did throw a party!”

He smiles. “You could say that. I was certainly the talk of the town while I was there.”

“That’s so lovel- wait, were there girls?!”

Hos groans. “Yes, what of i-“

“You need to introduce me before you get serious with any of them, you hear me!? I need to make sure she’s good for yo-“

“Meeo Jawry Letlind,” he hisses.

A short, quaint silence holds for a moment.

“…So, what are you going to go with?” she restarts, effortlessly shedding the prior topic like a shawl.

Hos watches the horseman disappear over the horizon, and the dragon-kin fade back into the darkness of the canyon’s shadows.

“I think… I think I’ll have to… think about it.”

“Bah, that’s no fun. I thought you already had a cool one.”

“Those were just dreams, Meeo. The truth is that I have to pick my name, the way we’re supposed to pick the kind of people we are.”

“So what kind of name do you want, then? A nice name?”

His chin points up slightly, entirely by habit.

“I’m a warrior, so it will be a warrior name.”

“Are you really just a warrior?”

Hos stops on her words for a moment, and then raises a scaled brow.

“You know, I am a warrior, but I’m also something else too, aren’t I?”

“I think you’re very resourceful. You should have a resourceful name!”

“…You’re right.”

“…Well, I don’t think anything else would fit better than a name like that, anyway. Do you have any ideas?”

He stares out at the sunset last of all: a curling, splaying radiance that seems to stretch into the golden forever of the sands. “Rayull.”

“Sounds nice, do you know what it means?”

“…Not sure in their dialect… Teeth, I think.”

“Well, okay. That definitely sounds very warriorly.”

“Thank you.”

“But do you think it sounds resourceful?”

“I was resourceful enough to come up with a cool-sounding name, wasn’t I?”

“M-Mmm!”

And as Hos knows well by this point, that is this saccharine, friendly sound is what she makes when he’s actually outwitted her – usually a once-in-a-decade occurrence.

She continues as if nothing happened. “…So will you be back soon? Nach was asking for ya’.”

He sighs. “I… I think I need to take the night, but I’ll be back in the morning. Gate’s just a few hours’ ride from here.”

“Okay, Hosy. Love you~”

“Bye.”

Hos’Rayull cuts the link of his chat stone and replaces it on his person.

“…Love you, too,” he sighs.

With only the sunset and the waiting horse as his companion, he slowly bows his head. “A borrowed name is just as good for me,” he says, his eyes closed, “ancestors, thank you for showing me the path between my two lives. I will be the link between our peoples, Meeo.”

In a prayerful sigh, he lifts up to look to the sky: the first glimmerings of the dim stars peeking through the azure fabric of the coming night.

“That’s who I am here. They don’t have to respect me for my strength… but they there’s no doubt about it, ancestors: they’ll respect me for my restraint, for my tact.”

At that, he sits for the better part of an hour to meditate on what he has seen and done, and then, reuniting with Umarr, he takes the horses back to Spirakander along the moonlit roads of the desert.

“Found what you were looking for, I hope!” Umarr shouts as they start off.

Hos’Rayull grins as he leans into the reins. “Something better!”

—

Some years later, with the long palms poking up from the canyon once more, occasionally kin-children climb to the tops of them to peer out to the dunes. Every now and again they’ll meet some travelling humans: small, strange creatures that look like they have no scales, but walk and act like they do.

They’ll wave at one another, and then be on their way. 

The End

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