An Empath's Entrance to Existence

In the land of Kumandra, a land inhabited by mortals and magical beings alike, two dragons sat hunched in a cave. Their names were Kanjo and Firingu, a mated pair, and their focus was locked on their egg just a few feet away from them. Kanjo was a stout, purple dragon, his long sleek body designed for quick and nimble movement. He could easily move his body with the slightest twitch of his muscles, and for fighting against the Druun. That agility was useful for avoiding the Druun, for even the slightest touch could turn their victims to stone. His unique magic allowed his body to adopt the density of water, which meant that it could not compress, making it very hard to injure or harm him.

As for Firingu, the dragoness was smaller than her mate, but she was actually physically stronger than him. Her strength in combat outclassed many of her peers, including Kanjo. Her azure coat drooped with water after the swim she had taken to get here after a crucial battle down at the tail end of Kumandra, the part that would eventually become the Tail Region of Kumandra. Her magic involved directing the wind, a mild irritant on most days, invisible to the naked eye, but at its peak, one of the most powerful forces of nature.

To the minds of Kanjo and Firingu, the moment before their egg hatched felt like an eternity for every 2 seconds that the egg did not twitch or make any sort of movement. The air in the room felt stale, which was certainly a possibility considering the fact that their bodies blocked most of the door. To the other's knowledge, they both were basically hyperventilating, and not just because this marked a moment in their lives that should have been monumental, but because recent events weighed on their minds. Recently, battles with the Druun had doubled in lethality, and it wasn't unheard of to have an egg turned to stone in its cave, which was…well…terrifying. Every moment not spent in the safety of the river felt like a knife scraping along the dragon's many vertebrae.

"Dear, just so you know, we could consider the fact that it isn't today that the egg hatches, and that we are putting both ourselves and the egg in danger for absolutely no reason." Kanjo told his blue mate. He was very concerned, and if he were to be honest, Firingu could get a little hot headed at times, and stubborn on the worst days.

Firingu looked at him as if he had grown two more heads to become one of those ridiculous monsters from the human stories that they called "hydras''. At that, he almost scoffed as he recalled when one of his human friends told him about this mythical creature and then had the audacity to ask if such a creature were real. He had already been bothered by the idea that such a creature could even be conceived of in the first place. And these humans could not agree on one thing no matter how many times he refuted them by asking if it were real by posing the same question, 'how would it function biologically?'. No human, to this day, has given him a consistent answer. It either had a connected nervous system that connected three brains, which all worked in unison, or it was three separate personalities that had to agree upon one action, which he regarded as straight up idiotic. When he had brought up these flaws to them, they always responded with "Well what about magic?". That was SO annoying. Magic wasn't this godly energy that can do the impossible. Even his own magic had to abide by actual scientific properties. Unfortunately, no matter how many times he explained this, to both kids and adults, they always proclaim it to be magic and leave to tell their friends their 'findings'. But he was getting off topic here. Back to the present he returned since his mate was yelling at him.

"I told you Kanjo! A mother always gets a distinctive feeling about when her egg is about to hatch, and today I got up with my mane all twirled up and my heart racing! I know this is the day." Firingu spoke with a ferocity that not many would expect from the smaller dragoness, but she shattered expectations many times over. It was one of the things that endeared Firingu to Kanjo. He was about to make a rebuttal when they heard a tap, a sound so distinct that all arguing seemed pointless and useless in the magnitude of this development

Their long necks swiveled around to look at the small egg that lay before them, and after no activity for a moment, a whole 90 seconds, they started to second guess themselves. They led themselves into believing that the stress of the moment and their desperation to see their offspring had faulted their senses until they heard another tap, and another after precisely ten seconds. They both forgot each other for an instant and turned to their egg. The egg gave a twitch, no less than a millimeter, but to them, it felt like a massive leap.

The little light in the cave revealed an undulating shape beneath the nearly translucent shell, and the shell then gave a slight twitch again. The nest rustled as the twitching grew more and more frequent. A small fist seemed to be beating the shell from the inside, struggling to get out. A purple paw then burst out of the shell, and from what they could see, it was a forearm.

"It's purple! He will be the spitting image of me! Or her, I guess." Kanjo exclaimed. He was nearly jumping with excitement when another paw bashed out of the other side. Unlike the forepaw, this one was a light cyan, which confused them both. The egg wasn't nearly big enough to have two dragons.

"Do you think there could be multiple colors on our offspring?" Firingu asked. Double toned dragons did exist, but they were rare and often had more abnormal magic. It wasn't a generalization. Two toned dragons often had more powerful magic, but there was always a downside that often made the magic impractical to use, a literal double edged weapon. He feared the same might be true for their offspring. As the shell cracked more and more, a spider web of cracks splintered out from the two open points, and there in front of them was the result of their union.

It was a normal shaped dragonet, though he, or she since they had no idea, had two horns that jutted out from the same central point on their skull. Those were decidedly more common, however. Physically, they were the same, but the colors were what made it abnormal. A quick check by Firingu confirmed that it was a he. Rather than the strange process humans used, they checked around the base of their heads, where the neck met the lower jaw where there were two sets of ring-like indentations around the base of the throat. These differences would eventually fade with age, but males usually had only one of these lines while females had two. It was strange, but evolution itself was often strange. The mane, head, as well as the shoulders and forepaws of the young drake's body were a light purple not too different from Kanjo's mane, though this was his entire color scheme. The infant's purple color went to about halfway around the belly, where it slowly faded into a light cyan that dominated his rear end and tail, which swished out behind him as he slowly got to his feet.

The newly born dragon looked at both of them, and they saw a vein twitch on his head. It was very small, but it almost made him seem stressed out. This confused both of them. It had just entered the world, so he could not even distinguish what was right or wrong. Yet it was looking at them as if it was as stressed as the both of them. They couldn't distract themselves, though. This was an incredible thing! They let their hearts fill with love for their son, and they hugged him tightly, their feud and the entire world outside this moment irrelevant. Like a switch, their son then purred happily and nuzzled their chests as they embraced each other.

"He's perfect. I couldn't care less about how he looks. He is still my son, and I love him, regardless," Firingu thought to herself. She tried to get a better look at him, but then was disturbed by the look on his face. He looked scared, but that was made irrelevant by the sudden screaming from the guards.

"Kanjo! Firingu! Get out of there! The Druun have breached the defenses! Get to the river! Lutuk has been turned into stone!" One of the guards, Hanja, she remembered, called into the den. With a sweeping motion, Firingu grabbed her son and held him close as she ran towards the river. The Druun frothed and steamed, a hideous, purple-smoking mass. There was no mistaking the dragons' mortal enemies for anything else. She dodged a Druun as she made for the river. Her feet trampled the grass along the bank until she finally dove into the safety of the river. Now that she and her child were safe from the Druun, she turned around to see Kanjo pulling an injured dragon, Gapat, into the river behind him. They were also safe.

She watched in fear as the Druun overran the camp. One or two dragons got turned into stone, and she watched helplessly as the Druun frothed and writhed on the riverbank. Their sanctuary was the water that surrounded them, and she was grateful that these manifestations of human cruelty and misery were unable to pass that threshold.

"Love, it is time to go…". Kanjo tugged on her shoulder, as if to tear her eyes away from her friends that had been turned into statues. They looked so peaceful, so serene, that she felt like she was going to be sick. They were frozen there, either dead or suffering in limbo, yet their stone faces were the image of contentment. She grit her teeth as he continued. "We have to go. We have to get our son to a safer place, behind the canal that the western humans are building. It will be a permanent fixture to the peoples that live there, and we won't have to rely on enchantments or hastily built crevasses."

Firingu looked back at her frozen companions one last time, and she stood silently for twenty seconds, giving each one their moment of respect. "Jatka, Ioral, I will not forget your bravery."

Kanjo joined her in this moment of grieving and waited patiently for her to start moving with him. She did, holding their son to her chest. The child was crying, which was to be expected, but there was the question of why? It should have been scared, and no doubt about it. But what was it sad for? Those were tears of sadness, not tears of fear. This dragonet cried as if mourning the death of a friend, which it couldn't possibly be. Then in an instant, it stopped crying entirely, letting out a growl of pure, unrestrained anger. He had no idea what was going on with his son, and it worried him. Was this his magic's curse? Was he forced to feel emotions that had no personal, meaningful origin? Would he spend his life unable to have emotions of his own, or was it something….deeper?

Things started to add up in Kanjo's mind. He and Firingu had been stressed out for their son, and they both were not that cagey about that fact. The child had come out of its egg, stressed as they were. When they turned things around and expressed affection towards the young drake, he in turn expressed affection. He had become sad and teary as Firingu had mourned her friends, but now he was angry? If he was reading this situation right, his son had the ability to read emotions, and he was reading Firingu's indignation and anger towards the Druun for turning her friends to stone.

"Dear, I think our son has the power to read our emotions," Kanjo said, looking at his mate. She turned to him with confusion, which was to be expected. No one they knew had ever heard of an ability like this. To Firingu, it was almost an insult that her son was to have such an outlandish ability.

"Don't be ridiculous, Kanjo! Look at him, he's just fi-" Firingu stopped as she looked down towards her son, and he looked back at her with a look nearly copying her own. She was confused, which caused her son to tilt his head, in a similarly confused manner. She turned back to Kanjo, "I think you might be right. Oh…what do we do now? Our son has a power almost unthought of!"

"Dear, we will work this out, but I think that a good first step would be to give him a name. I know it must be hard for you to think about anything other than this tragedy, but we must push on for the sake of our son."

Firingu sighed. It hurt so much to ignore such a catastrophe, but she cared for her son and wanted the best for him. "Yes. I had an idea. I was thinking 'Tarloc' for a boy. If you have another name, I would be open to suggestions."

Kanjo gave a small smile. Any sense of joy was very welcome in this instance, "Yes, Firingu. I like Tarloc.". They smiled at each other as they stepped out of the river, well away from the Druun, especially since it now started to rain. They pressed their pads onto nothingness and felt a platform of hardened magic water form beneath their paws. They ran along the sky, the rain clouds had given way to a sun shower, which, after the battle, was a much needed relief. She laughed as she watched the newly named Tarloc whoop in joy as his mother held him close, traveling across the bright noon sky. The lands of Kumandra spread out before them, and it was beautiful.

It was just…beautiful.

Hello guys! I'm not dead! I just started college so this won't be my main focus. I thought I would throw something into the mix as my internet life has gotten a bit dull, and I wanted to try my hand at a fandom that I love. Tarloc was a character that I lent to AdmiralCole22 for his story No Greater Disaster (Discontinued, but hopefully not forever). I won't have an upload schedule, so just be aware that I am no professional and will update at my urgency or leisure.

Peace out!