#wehh she’s baby and adorable
@laurelnose, i blame you. also this is the only way i know how to send you a thing, lol.
So it was only Iorveth, and implacable Nature, and the sun in the trees, and his rising fever and growing weakness.
And this dragon. He blinked in some surprise; he hadn’t expected a dragon. Or a– slyzard or whatever this was. Forktail. It didn’t look like any of the creatures he was used to. It was a pale greenish color, dull and unprepossessing, with large golden eyes, and it was rather large. It had popped its head over the edge of the little nest Iorveth had made himself in the crotch of this tree, and was looking at him with first one of its eyes, then the other.
“Oh,” Iorveth said. “I suppose this might as well happen.”
The dragon sniffed delicately at him. He did not want to be eaten. But, dying of thirst wasn’t very interesting. He might as well nourish some creature on his way out, something larger than the slugs and snails that would eat his body if he died here. Well, probably rats would find him, or something. Less glamorous than a dragon. Or– or whatever this is.
“Are you a wyvern?” he asked blearily. “Or maybe a– what’s the other one called?”
The dragon pulled back somewhat, and then looked at him with its other eye. It hadn’t eaten him yet. Possibly it was figuring out if he were armed.
“I’m just going to tell myself you’re a dragon,” he told it. His voice wasn’t worth much, parched as he was, more a croak than anything else. “That’s much more interesting than any of the other creatures you could be. I’m dying anyway, I might as well tell myself a nice fairy story on the way out.”
The dragon’s head withdrew, and there was an odd flicker of light that didn’t make sense given the position of the sun and the absence of any large reflective surfaces. Iorveth drifted off again. Possibly he’d hallucinated the thing. He looked at the leaves, and then closed his eyes.
“Are you really dying?” a voice asked.
He blinked. “What?” A face popped over the edge of his little nest. It was a– woman, or girl, or– a child, possibly, he couldn’t tell how old. A dh’oine, though, blonde and blue-eyed and round-cheeked with youth. Fuck. He’d have been alarmed to see a dh’oine child, if he could feel much alarm.
“You just said you were dying anyway,” she said. Not a little kid, he thought. But then, he didn’t know how dh’oine worked. She hooked her elbows over the edge of the nest. “Are you really?”
“Did I say that?” he wondered. They were speaking dh’oine speech now. Surely he’d been speaking Hen Llinge before, how would a little dh’oine-let have known what he was saying? Had he said that? Who’d he been speaking to? Oh, the dragon. “Wait, was there just–” A dragon there? What a mad thing to ask. “Uh.”
“What’s killing you?” she asked. “That wound? Is it infected?” She looked solemn, biting her lip. “I bet I can help.”
“Water,” he said. “I’m dying of thirst. I ran out of water and I’m too weak to go get more.” He produced his empty drinking gourd, and she took it and investigated it as if she’d never seen such a thing before.
“If I get water will you live?” she asked.
He laughed. “No guarantees, little friend,” he said. “Fever’s pretty bad too, and I ran out of food before I ran out of water.”
She looked up from the gourd. “Out of food,” she said. “Why– what do you eat?”
“Same things you do,” he said.
“I doubt that,” she said.
you gotta be careful saying ‘same things you do,’ iorveth, you might end up getting fed rocks
