Wyrmcoil Engine: Glad to hear that!

2: Semi-Animal

Jambu saw something.

It was the first something he saw in a while, dragging him out of oblivion. It wasn't a very interesting thing to see, just dull blackness, but it was something. He was not very happy to be seeing this something, as it disrupted his reasonably blissful sleep. His mind, barely conscious, tried to recede into nothingness as best it could, but it was too late. Already, he had noticed the horribly uncomfy hardwood beneath him; the awful contortion he found himself in to accomodate the tiny space he had been cramped into.

Jambu twisted around in this tiny space, feeling around for something he could move or a crevice to stretch into so he could get more comfortable and fall back asleep like that. His claws glided over the roughness a few times over, an anxiety building up in him slowly as he failed to find any crack in the strange walls around him. Eventually, when he was certain that there was no escape, a grand fear struck him, one common to all vertebrates: fear of being trapped.

Reacting to this, he thrashed and kicked against his surroundings, tearing at the wooden walls to some avail, but not enough. His voice was dry and unready to scream, but he would have if he could. Even in this terrified, frenzied state, though, he was still wise enough not to use his venom. That was the benefit of those years of training: not the skill in using his venom, but the restraint not to.

After a minute or so, he was awake enough and exhausted enough to stop, and while he wasn't any less scared he had the sense to figure out what was happening before continuing to squirm about. He was somewhere dark, that was for sure, and very, very cramped. There was wood all around him—was he in a cage? It was so small, not dragon-sized at all. Made sense. Cages were made for animals, not dragons—so why was he in one? Around him, he could feel that the cage was moving, but nothing was carrying it—it was like he was floating down a river, bobbing up and down. Dragons definitely weren't buoyant enough for that, except for really little dragonets. Was he still a dragon?

No, of course he was. He was just... somewhere weird. Andha-tāmisra, the hell of utter darkness? No, no RainWing had sinned awfully enough to warrant any hell for fifty years, if old Handsome were to be believed. Very faintly, Jambu could hear things from beyond his cage. There was some kind of squeaking below him, and every now and again he could pick up little snippets of speech. He couldn't understand them, but they were in a strange voice—one he recognised...

Yes, that was it! That was what happened before, that was how he got here, those dragonets shot him—and sent him to hell, apparently. They were moving him... where? Why? He'd wonder how they were carrying his weight, but he wasn't being carried—he was being moved along like magic.

Something jostled Jambu's cage, and he with it, injuring his neck as he went from side to side in the narrow box. It wasn't as smooth as magic, apparently, if it stumbled like this with such exaggeration.

What's it jostling around in? it occured to him to think, once his headache, worsened by the sudden movement, had receded enough; his confinement had to be itself confined if it wasn't just flying away. More magic, he wanted to explain it easily, but he realised that he'd heard a thunk earlier, barely audible under the sound of his own scales colliding with the walls; the sound of wood hitting wood. It was in some greater container, and that was what was being moved. It wouldn't make it any easier for these dragonets to carry or pull Jambu along, but it was... a fact. An idea, at least.

"Hey."

Was that a voice? A whisper... was someone else in here with him? No, it couldn't be. There was no room—only a tiny dragonet could fit in here with him, and he would have kicked it to death accidentally by now if there were.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

Well, that tiny dragonet was alive and to his left, apparently. Once that idea was set firmly in Jambu's head, a realisation quickly came to him: they weren't in the box with him, obviously, they were next to it in whatever the box was sitting in.

"Yeah, I hear you," he replied. The voice to his left was a dragonet indeed, but she was older than "tiny." Three or four, maybe. She also had the very same funny voice—a friend of the mischief makers, Jambu presumed.

"I'm in the crate next to you," the dragonet said, which cleared some things up for Jambu and made more confusing a number of other things. He was being transported along with a dragonet, which might have explained why his own crate was so small; was it made for dragonets? Why he was together with this dragonet he had no clue in the slightest—could he have been mistaken for one somehow? But he'd always been large...

"Uh-huh," Jambu prompted her for more answers.

"I woke up a little while ago, talked to another dragonet," she continued—there were more dragonets, which supported Jambu's theory of him being mistaken for one. It shone no light on the motives of the ones who had put him and those dragonets in these crates, who he remembered might not have been dragonets after all. If they weren't, it made a little more sense as to how he was being moved, but it would take a lot of strength to move even just him, never mind these dragonets who numbered at least two. "I heard you thrashing around. Your voice sounds weird."

Hm. Was she unaware of the silly voice? Did it just come naturally to her—had she been raised in its tradition? "Your voice sounds weird, too," Jambu replied, remembering to whisper like she was.

"Are you from a different tribe?" the dragonet asked.

"I don't know," Jambu said. "Where are you from?"

"I'm a SkyWing."

Jambu didn't really know how to picture that, but that SkyWing who had been in one the healers' huts those months ago had red scales, so he was imagining him but a bit younger. That was something he hadn't considered until now: could the dragons who got him in the neck have been SkyWings? They had the same weird voice...

"I'm a RainWing," Jambu gave his own tribe in response.

"Oh..." The dragonet sounded sorely disappointed. "Well, you couldn't really help, then..."

"Help? With what?" Jambu was quite intrigued by anything he could—or couldn't, on account of his RainWinghood—help with in this circumstance, where his actions were limited essentially to thrashing around.

"Well, you can't breathe fire. I was gonna ask you to help, so we could burn our way out, but..."

Jambu was about to bring up the wood-eating ability of his venom, but he didn't want the SkyWing to think that would solve things—he would need a lot of time and care to make a hole through the wood with it without killing himself in the process—if he wasn't just killed anyway by another sudden jostle—and dragonets as young as this one didn't always have the patience for that. "Breathe fire?" he asked instead. He knew NightWings could do it, so the concept didn't surprise him, but its application here did. "Wouldn't the flames just spread and burn you?" He always did worry about some careless NightWing burning down the jungle with that strange trait.

"No, I'm good at only breathing it into a little area. My teacher called it concentrating it."

"That's..." Jambu didn't really know how to react to that, or what to do if the dragonet ended up going through with it. "That's cool."

"Well..." A long pause came, unmuffled by the two sets of walls inbetween Jambu and the dragonet. "You might not be able to breathe fire, but you sound older than me... maybe you could tear up your crate and escape like that? Okay, when I say go, I'll start breathing fire, and you do that, okay?"

Jambu didn't really want to commit to escaping before he even knew where he was, but he knew that disagreeing wouldn't get the dragonet to not try. "Sure," he half-agreed.

The dragonet went silent after that, leaving Jambu with his own thoughts. He could tell by the sound of the wildlife around him, or lack thereof, that he definitely wasn't in the Rainforest Kingdom anymore, but where he was and why were completely unknown to him. He'd been put into a tiny crate by some dragons who were probably SkyWings and been taken out of the jungle—but why? That was a question and two halves.

He'd heard stories that the world outside the Rainforest Kingdom was unpleasant and evil, its denizens the same, and that would be an easy explanation: these SkyWings shoved him in a box because they were evil and wanted to hurt him for no reason. Those were just stories, though, weren't they? He'd only seen a bit of the world outside the rainforest, but it struck him as interesting and beautiful, and a majority of the dragons he'd met who came from there were kind and friendly. There were exceptions, of course, but he understood why they weren't the most pleasant: he knew how it felt to get tranquilised, so he couldn't really blame the MudWing visitors for being mean and grouchy when they woke up, and he could tell very easily, even without reading their scales, that almost every NightWing he saw on the island was terrified. That was a scary island they lived on!

(Now, what couldn't be excused was some NightWings' post-island conduct, but to extend their greed and rudeness to the world was, in a word, stupid.)

Now, if Jambu wasn't as adventurous, if he hadn't seen how scared those NightWings were or how nice Glory's friends were, if he hadn't gone with them to the desert and that bizarre place where the water became hard, he might have believed those stories; he might have thought that these SkyWings were just senselessly evil dragonet-killers (and Jambu-killers). Jambu knew better; he'd never met one until a minute ago, but he had the utmost confidence that SkyWings were not demons. There was a reason why they'd put him in this box, even if it wasn't the most kind.

Jambu had no clue what it was.

He tried for a moment to think about the possible motivations for his probably-SkyWing captors to, y'know, capture him, but he quickly realised that he had no explanation at all. This didn't stop him from trying, and he came up with a few possibilites—their mistaking him for an actual jambu, for instance—but what it did stop him from was concentrating on his thoughts when the sounds of speech outside became louder. All in the funny voice, of course. It took a moment, but soon he could identify different voices, belonging to different dragons...

"It's distribution of weight, or work, or something," said one of them—she was young, but slightly older than Jambu. "The wheel-and-axle, it's a simple machine. They teach you this!"

"Maybe they taught you that when you went to learn the quadrivium or whatever, but I'm the son of a blacksmith and I know that this isn't efficient!" The other was her elder; his age was high enough that Jambu couldn't count to it, but it sounded to be at least thrice his younger's.

"I keep telling you, I didn't go to university!" The younger one's voice became too quiet for Jambu to make out any words. All he heard was the conclusion to their speech, "...in the palace."

"I—" The elder one cut himself off. "Whatever. We wouldn't be having this argument if he hadn't insisted on taking the RainWing."

Another voice edged into the conversation, quieter than the others and closer to the younger's age, his vowels broken up by a barely-audible stuttering noise. Jambu couldn't say if he was speaking lower or if he was just far away. "He's worth his weight in gold—"

"We have a day to get there before she hauls us over the coals!" his elder shouted back at him. "We would have been there a day ago if we weren't wasting so much breath lugging him around. I don't know what riches you're expecting out of him, but you'd best find a way to take them with you to your next life if we end up late."

The strange threat of a hauling over the coals seemed to shut the quieter one up; really, Jambu didn't understand very many words in this conversation. He'd been cowed into silence, so Jambu had to rely on his memory, but the quiet one sounded familiar... the realisation clicked in his brain once the space stopped being taken up by yelling: he was one of the maybe-dragonets that had shot him!

"Hey!" he shouted, hoping that he could be heard through however many layers there were between him and the SkyWing. "You shot me! Why did you shoot me?!" Before, he had regarded his captors impersonally, almost as a force of nature, in the face of his general helplessness; sure, he could use his venom, but whatever he was in would need to stop moving for it to be safe. Now, though, he recognised one of them, and that made things different.

"Is that him?" asked the eldest of them. "That's an adult's voice. You've given us an adult!"

"I hear you! You can hear me!" Jambu continued, laying out the facts despite the lack of a mediator to judge them. "Why did you do this to me!?"

"I told you that!" The one who had shot him shouted back. Jambu hoped this was a reply to him, that he had somehow forgotten speaking with this SkyWing, but it was not. "I told you he was an adult, that he was a prince, when we brought him back!"

"Hello!?" Jambu wondered if they really could hear him—what was saying, in any case. From their perspective, he had a silly voice, and they weren't RainWings; they might not have been surrounded by silly voices for their entire dragonethood.

The yelling outside became even louder and started to overlap, and Jambu could no longer piece together even a single word in the chaos. Abruptly, the thing he was in lurched to stop, sliding Jambu along the bottom of his crate and making his stomach feel even worse about being tranquilised. He saw the opportunity to escape, but he wanted a moment's respite before he did; by the way it sounded, the argument outside wasn't ending anytime soon. He turned around, settled his head on the floor, and tried to get as comfortable as he could, when a syllable reached his ear from the right.

"Go!"

A worse sound came then from the other crate, like retching but furious. Jambu still felt sick, but this was a good opportunity; there was no way they were going to keep moving the container if a hole was actively being burnt in it. He backed up as best he could and spat venom in front of him, hearing it fizzle as it annihilated the wood. Depending on how thick the wood was, it would take about three minutes to form a hole big enough to escape and dissipate to the point of safety; he could speed it up by spitting more, but that was very dangerous in an enclosed space such as this. As the analysis flooded his mind, Jambu felt proud of how much he remembered from his venom training, despite the fact that he hardly ever used it. From his right, the flames were either spreading or just becoming more intense. He could feel the heat radiate outwards, and the argument suddenly stopped.

"Oh, for crying out loud," cursed the eldest of the SkyWings. "One of them's trying to escape again!"

There was the sound of fast movement around him, and Jambu heard then the dragonet roaring; a roaring that was getting farther away, like they were lifting her up—there was a sudden thud that drowned out the roar, but only for a moment. At first, it was just a roar of rage, but something happened up there that turned it into something desperate. Now she was crying out, wailing in fear as they did something to her. It was agonising to listen to, and for Jambu it was incredibly muffled... carelessly, dangerously, stupidly, he spat more venom onto the wood. He could see the daylight filter in upwards through the hole, now. If he was quick enough, he could save this dragonet from whatever was happening to her.

"What do you mean you can't find it?" shouted the female SkyWing, her first distinct utterance in a while. "I'm not holding this little monster for much longer! You better get a hold of it now or I'm siccing her on you!"

If Jambu was supremely lucky, he could leap through the hole now and not have his scales destroyed by venom, but the chances were just too low...

"It's not in the bag!" replied the one with the vocalic clicking noise, the one who had shot Jambu. "I don't know, it might have fallen out!"

"Like that makes it any better! You were holding the bag the whole time!"

Just a little longer, and Jambu could do it. The venom was receding, the wood was turning black...

"Hey!" the female one barked. "You stop that! I—"

A scream of pure pain and horror erupted from above, drowning out all of the bickering SkyWings in its totality. It was still too dangerous, but Jambu had no choice; he had to risk it. He leapt downwards through the hole, scraping his horns on the jagged wood, and landed almost in a heap on the other side. The impact hurt, and his heart was pounding, but a few seconds' lack of total agony let him know that he had survived, that none of the venom had stuck to his scales. He camouflaged himself and scrambled forward onto what registered to him now only as a long gray shape. He looked over at the dragonet squirming in her captor's talons, screaming her head off for fear of death, and Jambu realised that he didn't actually know how to help her.

His only applicable skill was with a blowgun, which he didn't have; trying to wrestle her out of their talons would end awfully. He couldn't use his venom; if the stories he'd heard weren't bad enough, he'd seen the true agony Kinkajou had been put through those months ago when Grandeur accidentally hit her. She'd survived that, and it hadn't lasted for very long, and Jambu could very well tell how much it hurt; to kill a dragon with it... Jambu couldn't stomach the thought.

So, he just sort of... watched. Petrified with fear and anger, he watched as one of them pulled a blowgun out of a bag—they must have taken it from the village—and aimed it at the dragonet's terrified face. He dipped the dart into a clay cup full of what Jambu could only assume was tranquilising brew, and loaded it into the front of the gun. Jambu traced its path from cup to gun, and predicted its path then to her face, and realised only then something that chilled him into action: they had used way too much tranquilising brew, submerging almost the whole dart in it. That dragonet was about three, maybe just past four, and that amount of tranquiliser would kill a six year old.

No! Jambu wanted to scream, and he wanted to heroically get in the way and knock the dragonet out of that SkyWing's talons, hiding with her in the... okay, there was nowhere to hide, really. Around Jambu was a flat immensity the likes of which he had seen only once, and not for very long, while he was in the Ice Kingdom. They would just shoot Jambu, and he'd not have done anything; surely, his chances were better at doing something if he remained awake?

No matter how much sense this made, Jambu couldn't listen to it, his legs ready to spring forward at any moment; but his legs had also taken this as cardinal truth, and were in the process of backing down from their readiness to spring forward. Rogue tendons, still loyal to the old plan, wiggled about, trying to incense a springing forward to happen regardless. His heart was pounding, he was gripping the tiny rocks beneath his talons to ground himself but was still not grounded in the slightest, his nerves were reacting with utmost terror to the sound of a fly buzzing past his ear, and the blowgun was still aimed at her face...

Thunk!

The dart went in, and she went limp immediately. Breath escaped Jambu's lungs, and nothing bothered to replace it. He looked at her as she was placed back in the crate, which was placed back into the container, the same thud reaching his ears again as the lid was closed. He had no eye for the container, though, despite his fixation on what it was up until now. No, his eyes stayed on the SkyWings. They had gone back to arguing, so the thing was still stagnant on its four supports, which meant that there was a chance...

He darted forward until he was just beneath the big wooden box that the crates were in, reaching through the hole his venom had made and hoping it was safe to do so. It was at the very edge of the box, so he spat venom onto the side and waited anxiously for a hole to form so he could take the crate out. After a tense minute, Jambu risked putting a single talon through the hole, tugging the box out with great force. He climbed up into the container in its stead.

In the cramped darkness, he felt around for the crate next to where his was, pulling it out quickly as he felt the container move ever so slightly backwards. He carried it as quickly and quietly as he could away from the SkyWings; dragonets this old were pretty heavy, but he found a deep resevoir of strength to keep his arms from going limp. He found a ditch not far away, just beside the long stretch of tiny rocks that cut the plains around him in half, his discovery of which he could attribute only to divine favour. He slid into it with the cage, opened it up (very easy from the outside, as it turned out), and carefully placed the sleeping dragonet down.

He clambored up the side of the ditch, looking out at the SkyWings to make sure they hadn't noticed. They were starting to leave, now, taking their container with them. He appraised it as it went away, something he'd been itching to do even in the panic of rescuing the dragonet. It looked like an animal, having four legs, a large body, and a long neck, but no head. Its body was the aforementioned big wooden box where all the crates were kept, and the legs were four wheels attached to the bottom, moving 'round and 'round instead of up and down like legs usually do. It couldn't move on its own like an animal, though; one of the SkyWings had to pull it by its neck. Jambu had no idea what to call this thing, but he felt a need to slot it into the assortment of names in his mind anyway: a semi-animal was the best word he could find for it. It was like an animal, but only halfway there.

His safety assured, he hauled the dragonet up the ditch and onto the rocks themselves. He realised, as he looked at her, that he didn't quite know what to do in this situation. What he'd been taught to do if he shot someone with too much tranquilising fluid was to get a healer, who would get an assistant, and the two of them would cut open wherever the dart had landed and let their patient bleed for a time before bandaging the wound and letting them rest. Jambu's memory said that this almost never worked, but that was because the times it didn't work had been repeated to him again and again by his teacher when he was learning dart shooting, an incentive to always be safe when applying tranquilisers to the dart. In truth, there was about a half-and-half chance for it to work out, but the statistics didn't really matter, because these kinds of accidents were extremely rare in the Rainforest Kingdom. Jambu didn't remember, or perhaps had never been told, exactly how often it happened, but he only remembered it happening once in the entire nine years he had been alive.

That was why Jambu had never been taught this procedure, despite the fact that it would be useful to know, there being plenty of spots of deep jungle where it might take too long to find a healer, or where you might become lost. The overwhelming rarity of these sorts of injuries deincentivised Jambu from ever wanting to learn how to treat it and his teachers from ever telling to him unasked for; he had thought about it once or twice when he was young, but he'd just promised to himself to always be conscientious, to never inflict this injury on anyone. He hadn't in the six years since then, but three-year-old Jambu could not have predicted this situation.

Even disregarding that the treatment needed an assistant, the level of precision needed was beyond Jambu's untrained claws—the healers always used knives, anyway, and he certainly didn't have anything like that on hand. Barring some sort of miracle, it really seemed like this dragonet was doomed.

Jambu thought about this for a moment, and felt tears start to wet his face. He rested his chin on the dragonet's chest as he wept, a great futility overcoming him. He had seen worse tragedies, the sight of the starved NightWings on the island coming to mind, but... they didn't feel as real as this did, right now. He could have stopped it. He could have not frozen, not just stood there, gone in and saved this poor thing instead of... doing whatever farce of heroism he had. The tears kept flowing, and his body tried to turn them into rage and into fear, but it didn't work; they each came as the other failed. No, it was just sadness, a guilt that would haunt Jambu for the rest—

Jambu was abruptly knocked out of his crying as he was kicked in the face. Bewildered, he retracted his neck to look at the young dragonet. She rolled over onto her stomach, which didn't make any sense—neither did the kick, either. That much tranquilising fluid would have completely knocked her out, but here she was moving in her sleep like she was comfy in a hammock. Jambu looked her over again—had she not actually been shot? There wasn't anything on her back, obviously, since they'd shot her from the front. He put his claws on her sides to try and roll her over, and a faint growl came from the mass of scales as he did so.

"Hey, stop that..."

Jambu almost dropped her in shock, but he finished turning her over to her front. There she was, her eyes half-open, mouth having just protested... she was awake.

"What... you're..." He could not find the words in his astonishment. This should have been impossible; even if the SkyWings had missed and gotten the dart lodged in a muscle, that still should have knocked her out for at least a short time. Here she was, though, awake after only a minute, talking, albeit tiredly, like it was nothing. Jambu looked for where the dart had landed; not in her neck, because she was keeping that upright well enough. It would be bad if it was in her chest, because there were a lot of muscles down there that you needed to breathe, but that was fine. Moving up her face...

Ah. It was in her ear.

Those SkyWings had missed so spectacularly that they managed to hit her ear. Jambu saw where they were aiming: at her cheek, which wasn't where you were supposed to aim, but it still would have worked anyway with the sheer amount of brew they'd dipped the dart in. Jambu realised that he was lucky that they'd not doused the dart he was shot with; if they tranquilised all the dragonets on the semi-animal, he really hoped that this was a one-time error.

How they had managed to hit her ear while aiming at her cheek was a mystery he would never solve, but it was luck beyond luck. She'd just fainted from the shock, surely; she was already terrified to no end, and he had to imagine that it hurt worse being shot for someone who'd never experienced it; or experienced it once, if they'd tranquilised her. It would hurt when Jambu pulled it out, too; he should get on that before she woke up enough even more.

Carefully but quickly, he plucked the still-wet dart out of her ear, a yip coming from her mouth in response. He rested a claw on her shoulder as her eyes fluttered all the way open, taking it back as she rolled back onto her stomach. She was orange, which Jambu supposed was another colour SkyWings could be—he felt bad for all the other tribes who only got to be, like, three colours at maximum for their entire lives—but not in the way an orange was orange. She was dull, like she was overripe, but not brown. Her tail was long and thin, like the red tail he saw poking out of the bush; it was indisputable that it was SkyWings who shot him. She still had those eyes that dragonets have, the ones that are weirdly big compared to the rest of their faces, that go away when they turn four or so—she must have just been big for a three-year-old.

He had saved this poor thing, but he couldn't stop his gaze from returning to the now very distant semi-animal. He didn't know what they were doing with those dragonets, and he knew it couldn't be nice, but to go in there and save them all... He was only one dragon, and a tired, stressed dragon at that. He would mess up eventually, and then all his work would be undone. No, he couldn't do this by himself; he needed his sister's help at least. Rainfall drowned his mind, collected in buckets, and when the shower was over he arranged those buckets into a plan: he would take this dragonet home to wherever she lived, get home himself, and then talk to Glory about what had happened. He didn't really have a lot to say to her about these SkyWings, but she was smart; she could figure out what they were doing and where they were going way quicker than Jambu could.

Well, the first part of of any plan is knowing where you are, and Jambu did not. He saw a flat expanse around him, blanketed in green that was bright but dull, sort of like a lime. None of the navigatory techniques that Jambu had learned worked at all outside of the jungle, as he'd learned when he got lost with Mangrove while taking that message to the Ice Kingdom, but it was impossible for him not to see the massive mountain in the distance, towards which the semi-animal had disappeared. Like a tooth, it jutted upwards abruptly and sharply, ready to pierce the sky and let the juice dribble out into its mouth. There were other mountains around, but none as towering or brilliant, save for the faint hint of an equal behind it. The sun hit its slopes in a way that made it almost seem alive, a twinkling path winding around its enormity. This was a landmark if ever there were one.

Jambu felt the air on his scales, not humid but neither dry. It was colder than Jambu was used to, but it was warm compared to the temperature up north, in the tundra. The buzzing of insects and tweeting of birds all around him were similar to the rainforest, but different in a way that made him more uncomfortable than if they were silent or unrecognisable. The smell was familiar; wet grass was a rainforest staple. The lack of anything else to accompany this smell... that was weird. The Sky Kingdom—he presumed he was in the Sky Kingdom—was just as bizarre as the rest of the world, as it turned out. Even the Rainforest Kingdom, he figured, would be feel strange to a non-RainWing; he had heard Deathbringer complain about the sun more than once, which was a mode of thought Jambu was incapable of understanding—even in hindsight, as a Tunnel Philosopher. Turns out that the Tunnel Philosophy doesn't help you understand a whole lot of non-tunnel related concepts in a way that most other schools of thought would.

"Hello?"

Jambu looked down and to his left, seeing the dragonet he had rescued up on her paws. Standing tall, she was about half his height, despite being a third of his age. "Hello," he replied. "How're you doing?"

"I'm fine," the dragonet answered with haste. "What happened?"

Jambu wasn't good at telling dragons' emotions without reading their scales, but he felt that the dragonet was a little less than fine. He was about to offer to get something for a headache, or whatever was ailing her, but he remembered: no medicine around. "I rescued you," he said. "It didn't really go great. You're lucky, you know."

The dragonet asked for details, and Jambu recounted his escape and her rescue, summarising the crying to I thought you were dead.

"So, I guess we gotta get you home, now." He crouched down to level with the dragonet, who backed away from him in response. "What's your name?"

"Garnet," the dragonet said.

"Well, Garnet," Jambu greeted her, "I'm Jambu." He extended a paw, which she met after a moment's hesitation. She gripped harder than Jambu expected her to, but that grip wasn't very strong. His next instinct was to ask what's your favourite thing in the world? part of his routine when meeting new students who were around Garnet's age, but he stopped himself. He looked to the great mountain in the distance. "So, is your home north of... that? South?" He waved his tail in its direction.

"North of what?" Garnet asked. She wasn't looking at his tail, just at him—at his arm, specifically. Was she expecting him to do something with it?

"The mountain," Jambu clarified, trying to point more directly at it. He could have used his arm, he supposed—he guessed that was what SkyWings did when they needed to point at things.

Garnet looked at the mountain—no name was necessary to identify it. "Oh," she said, "Jade Mountain? I live near there, actually."

"Well!" Jambu raised himself back up, putting a claw on the dragonet's wing and brushing away some of the tiny rocks that had gotten caught there. With undue seriousness, he continued: "Let's get you there."