[Abandoned] The Dragon That Is Most Certainly Not a Prince

In Which He Recalls His Past- Briefly

She doesn't seem to know what to do with me. "There's a city over in the East a bit, but that would mean you have to leave the forest, and I'm not sure what they'd do if they saw a dragon walking along the road, or flying overhead. Did you fly low enough the border guards saw you?"

"No, Bellwyn. I have told you this a dozen times already," I say again, walking alongside her through the trees, enduring the muttering and mumbling of Bellwyn with a patience I know Mother would be proud of. If I'd been human, that is.

Groaning, Bellwyn punches a tree we pass, then swears at her now-bleeding knuckles. I lick the blood off, and it stops bleeding. Her glare isn't as effective as Mother's, or Gwendolyn's. "Why do you have to be so damned big?"

"Well, for the record, I wasn't nearly this big when I left," I tell her, using a claw to gesture at my former height. "Maybe this big. I could still fit through the castle corridors if I kept my wings close and didn't parade around like a swan."

That makes her roll her eyes. "Whatever. Have you tried using magic to shrink yourself?"

"Bellwyn, I haven't even tried using magic in general. How do you think I ended up like this in the first place?" I ask, tilting my head at her. She understands only a few of my gestures, and I'm still not sure which ones they are, so I keep using all of my probably strange gestures anyway. It's difficult to express myself like I used to when I don't have a flat face and my eyes are on nearly complete opposite sides of my head.

She stops walking to look up and down my length, or what she guesses are my scales. Honestly, even I'm not sure where my scales end and the foliage begins. "Well, why don't you try now? I've met a few mages, and they love to talk about magic, so why don't we start small? Try and shrink yourself a bit."

I stare at her blankly.

"Close your eyes and look for, I don't know what it'd be for dragons, but, um, the mages said they had a spark of magic inside. Look for something sparkly, I guess."

Closing my eyes, I turn my gaze... inward, I suppose. Feeling through my body. Feeling the brush of leaves on my scales and going deeper. Feeling the tingle of smells in my nostrils and following that strand. It doesn't lead anywhere except my stomach, which feels rather empty. So I hover around that feeling for a bit and decide I don't need to eat anything today, and follow the itch of my throat up to where the fire is stoked, the fire that I'd used once to crisp a rather loud knight. That seems like a spark, but probably the wrong one. But what makes the fire go? I linger for a moment, then open my eyes and let out a little puff of flame. It disappears before setting something on fire, like I'd wanted it to. Chasing the feeling into my throat, it goes down my neck to my chest, where it festers, growing warm. An inner fire?

Looking at Bellwyn doesn't answer anything. She probably doesn't know how to do magic, either.

Going back to the fire in my chest, I close my eyes and lay down, poking around the feeling mentally. It's warm (of course) and it seems... wild. Far more wild than I've ever been. It seems locked, as well. The strand from my flames is a tiny opening in the ball of fire. My heart? Is a dragon's magic centered around the heart? "Bellwyn, where did they say their sparks were?"

"Um, in their belly. A warm, tingly feeling that they could poke at with their mind and ask it to do something, and it would do it, if they asked right."

The belly. That explains that feeling I had while the curse was taking effect. The burning sensation in my stomach that had forced me into a miserable ball of painful magic for a day, even after the curse had finished, but then... I had been curled up around a different pain. A pain in my chest. The dragon magic spawning, maybe? I poke at the fire, but it doesn't shift, even when I try asking it nicely, or when I try to force my way in. So I settle outside of it, examining it, and I ask it to shrink me to the size of a cat.

I open my eyes to see the world growing around me, nearly spinning with the speed of my change. Much closer to the ground, now, I struggle out of a bush I had previously been laying on, where it had sprung back up after I shrank and now holds me captive. Two gloved hands reach in and pry branches out of the way, and I scamper up her arms and perch on her shoulder, licking at the bleeding scratches I'd gotten from the offending bush.

"Well, I guess you did it."

My mouth opens, and a chirp comes out instead of words.

"Oh, that's even better for me!" Looking at Bellwyn's suddenly much larger face, I growl quietly at the look of satisfaction it bears. "You just stay there, then, and I can carry you into town and show you off as Verdant, my little companion dragon!"

Show off? I don't like the sound of that, but I hunker down around her shoulders anyways, draping my tail over one end and letting my head droop over the other. The magic fire inside doesn't respond when I ask it to let me talk, so I leave it alone and grumble in little high-pitched chirps and chitters to myself.

It takes all day to get to a village, where Bellwyn trades in some antlers for coin, and uses the coin to buy herself a place to sleep and a horse that doesn't seem bothered by me, even when I hop onto his back while Bellwyn haggles and the stable-master sweats heavily at my actions. The horse doesn't care, and I sit proudly on his back while Bellwyn takes us to an inn on the edge of town, to the east, where we'll be heading come morning.

She doesn't notice when I slip into the inn after her, and doesn't seem too bothered when I hop up onto the counter where she sits down and pays for some food and drink, and a room. When I nudge her hand with a chirp, she rolls her eyes and picks a few pieces of meat from the stew and playfully teases me with it. She's making an unassuming show of us, probably to put the other patrons at ease with the dragon sitting on the counter. After only a couple of cubes of cow, I'm full, and I take a couple licks at the broth in her bowl while she's talking to the innkeeper. It's really good. Too bad I can't have more.

I hop onto her shoulder when she stands up, taking a key from the innkeeper. The room is on the third floor, with a rather rickety window and an even more rickety bed that sags alarmingly under my weight. Bellwyn doesn't mind, even when I pin down a few cockroaches that skitter around the room after she falls into the bed. I'm more than a little disgusted by the state of the room, but I've been living in the woods, and so has Bellwyn, so I suppose any sort of room is a welcome change.

"Go look out the window or something," she orders, holding a pail of water and sitting on a wooden stool in the corner. "I'm washing up before we leave and I don't need a nosy little dragon staring me down while I do it."

That makes sense, so I hop up to the windowsill and nudge the frame until I can get my talons under the edge, pulling the window open enough to slip out. Sitting on the outside, I curl up on the narrow ledge and look up at the stars. They're so different, even if we're only a few days out of... can I even call it my kingdom anymore? Am I still actually Prince Arthur, or am I really just Verdant the Dragon, nothing more and nothing less?

Bellwyn wakes me up when she pulls me back into the room, and she sets me on the pillow next to her head as she lays down. Even though she was concerned with me watching her bathe, she isn't at all worried about me laying on top of the blankets next to her, nosing up to her warm stomach when the cold night air worms its way into the room. Her arms reach down and wrap around me at the movement, and I look up at her face. She has a soft smile on her tired face, and pulls me up to hold me even closer, even though that means placing me nearly on top of her breasts. Apparently she doesn't mind, but I put my head on her shoulder, just in case she wakes up and thinks I was going to try anything, even though I'm a cat-sized dragon, now.