Raz,

My first name is Esme. I didn’t realize you were with Serenity.

It’s good to hear you’re doing fine. I’ve been worried about you.

We should talk. Near the Willowrock portal, there is a cafe that is still intact and open. I often stop by for a meal. Let the people there know where you’re staying in Willowrock and I’ll come see you.

Grandma Tillon

--------

Raz couldn’t decide if he should laugh or cry at the contents of the message. It was wonderful to know that Grandma Tillon was still alive, but why had she decided to not answer him? She obviously had the ability!

She was probably trying to keep him safe, just like when she sent him away from Asihanya. At the time, they thought it was an attack on Sunrise specifically; Raz was pretty confident now that he could have stayed on Asihanya. No one would have been hunting him.

However unnecessary it was to flee, Raz couldn’t be unhappy about the results. Aki was thriving in her new home and he had friends who would help him avenge the death of his Clan. He’d still prefer the attack never happened, but even if he hated to admit it, he was probably better off now because it did.

Despite the positive outcome, Raz was still a little ticked at Grandma Tillon over it. He had almost died in the dungeon where he encountered Serenity. Worse, he couldn’t escape a little feeling in the back of his mind that said he’d been sent away because Grandma Tillon didn’t want to take care of him, rather than because he was in danger. Everything looked different when he looked at it from that angle and he couldn’t say that it wasn’t true.

He should still send a letter back; he expected Serenity would as well, when he remembered. Serenity was a little distracted right now.

--------

Grandma Tillon,

It will probably be a few days. Serenity’s daughter is supposed to arrive tomorrow and I think he’s going to want some time with her. If you’d rather visit us, we’re staying at the Great Library in Takinat.

Raz

--------

Serenity and Rissa waited at the portal to Takinat; the one they’d arrived at was also the one Tirmanak Oathbinder had said he was going to use to reach the city. He’d cut months off his travel time, but hadn’t been able to find a ship captain willing to take him all the way to Takinat.

They waited for more than an hour before a portal appeared. Fortunately for Serenity’s mental health, the person who stepped through was Guildmaster Tirmanak himself. He carried a small form in a pouch attached to his front, but something didn’t look right about it.

Serenity hurried forward. It took entirely too long for him to realize the issue: he wasn’t looking at a young human-dragon hybrid; instead, the figure Tirnamak carried was clearly a very young dragon. She had the same scale coloration as Jenna, the same scale coloration as her father. The child had to be Jenna.

She seemed to be asleep.

Serenity wasn’t sure what to do. He’d never had a child before and he’d certainly never had one that shapeshifted, but that was all he could think of. Had she inherited the ability from him? Why had it happened so young? He didn’t think dragons shifted so young, but what did he know about dragons?

“This is why you didn’t send more details,” Rissa stated. Her voice was level and controlled, but Serenity could tell there was emotion behind it. He just couldn’t tell what emotion it was. “Let’s get to the library; I’ll carry her if she wakes up on the way.”

Tirmanak didn’t even bother to respond to Rissa’s statement with anything other than a nod. It must be as clear to him as it was to Serenity that she wasn’t going to allow any argument about this.

They walked together for a couple of minutes before Serenity decided to break the uncomfortable silence. “It’s just you and Jenna?”

Tirmanak nodded. “Fast and light seemed like the way to go. There wasn’t much space on the ship; it was really a cargo vessel, not for passengers, but they’d take one or two people in the crew area if you were headed where they were.”

“Yet you couldn’t tell us you’d be out of contact for months?” Serenity was still upset about that. “We thought something bad happened, you suddenly said you were heading this way then nothing. Not even why you were coming.”

“I…” Tirmanak stopped and seemed to think. Serenity gave him time and eventually he came up with an answer. “I’m not used to … It didn’t occur to me that you’d expect to be able to reach me whenever you wanted. I told you I was on my way and I assumed I’d get here long before you worried since I was taking a faster route.”

Serenity made himself think through Tirmanak’s answer. When he did, he had to admit that Tirmanak had a point. Serenity and Rissa were both used to being able to reach people regularly, often in minutes, even from across a planet. He’d even managed to achieve the same effect from another planet, though it was limited and expensive; messages tended to be better, as long as you could wait for the recipient to check for them.

Instant communication was not an assumption of Tirmanak’s society. Even something as simple as the flying message tokens Tirmanak had provided to Serenity were costly and limited; they weren’t even as good as a pager. At least, Serenity thought they weren’t; pagers went out some time in the mists of history before he was born. They showed up in movies sometimes, but that was all.

Whether or not they were as good as a pager, they definitely weren’t as good as a cell phone, even one used only for texting. They weren’t instant and they had very limited range.

The other main way to contact someone without going to them was to send something using the Messengers’ Guild. It was fairly fast, only a few days between planets, but it wasn’t usable at all if you didn’t know where the recipient was. Like the postal service Serenity was used to, the Messengers’ Guild could only take a package to a known address. It wouldn’t work to send something to someone who was traveling unless they were going to stop in one place and wait.

So maybe Tirmanak’s assumptions weren’t that unreasonable. Serenity still wasn’t happy about them; he did have the Voice’s message system available, after all. Sure, it was more expensive and less convenient than email, but it wasn’t slower.

They’d also checked in regularly during their travels, even if it was often little more than a “Hello, how’s Jenna doing?” Tirmanak had responded to each message so he didn’t have the excuse of knowing that they weren’t interested in their daughter and checking in regularly. “You didn’t think we’d contact you on the same regular basis just because you were traveling?”

Tirmanak stared down at Jenna, but Serenity wasn’t certain he was actually looking at the dragonling. “I didn’t think about it. I should have told you I’d be out of contact.”

That was the best apology Serenity thought he’d get. It was actually a pretty good apology. Tirmanak hadn’t let them worry out of spite; he simply wasn’t used to being in frequent contact with people who were far away. He’d admitted his mistake. There wasn’t much else he could do now.

Serenity reached up and patted the dejected daa’il on the shoulder. “At least you got the most important part right. You got Jenna here safely.”

It didn’t seem to cheer Tirmanak up much.

Jenna started to stir before long. Rissa reached into the baby carrier and picked her up. “She’s so small, no larger than when we left.”

Serenity knew that wasn’t true, but he wouldn’t have known without Aide’s help. She was slightly longer than the Jenna they’d left, though the difference was less than an inch. He doubted he’d be able to tell if there was a difference in weight; if she was, it was probably from the shape change. She ought to weigh more, though Rissa was handling her as if Jenna were nearly weightless.

Jenna gurgled cheerfully and headbutted her mother. Rissa winced as the nubs that would someday become horns impacted her chest.

“I think she recognizes her mother.” Tirmanak was smiling.

Serenity realized he was as well. It was good to see his daughter again. Hopefully she’d recognize him, too.

---------

In her dragon form, Jenna could walk. It really wasn’t a crawl, even though it was on all four limbs, because dragons walked on all four. It also wasn’t really a crawl, because a crawl implied that it was slow and Jenna zoomed. She wasn’t quite moving at a run but it was similar.

Serenity sat on the floor of the ground level of the Great Library and watched his daughter check everything out. It was, honestly, hilarious. She was interested in everything. A chair needed to be inspected from all sides, while a bookcase needed to be taste-tested then climbed.

Sure, she fell down sometimes, but she was fine; each time, Serenity’s spell caught her and made sure she fell fast enough that it was exciting and possibly scary but slow enough she wouldn’t actually be hurt. It didn’t have to be comfortable but he wasn’t going to allow actual injury.

She didn’t learn quickly, or maybe she learned too quickly; she didn’t stop climbing. She did manage to fall less often as the day progressed; she also managed to get herself higher, where actual injury was more likely if no one was watching. Serenity already knew he needed a playpen and this only made it more obvious.

He also needed a nanny. Fortunately, that particular need should be relatively easy to handle; nannies were fairly common -

Well, it would be fairly common if Jenna were human. With her current form being a young dragon, finding a nanny might be a little harder.

Serenity wasn’t really listening to Rissa and Tirmanak talk in the background; like Serenity, Rissa wanted to spend time with Jenna but, unlike him, she had questions for Tirmanak she wanted him to answer sooner rather than later.

Rissa’s voice caught Serenity’s attention when she asked a question he’d wondered about as well. “So when did she figure out how to shift shape? Can she shift back?”

“She was a dragonling when we saw her one morning. With what I know of Serenity, I figured it was a shapeshift, but I checked to make certain it was still her anyway. Obviously, the dragonling was Jenna, but she doesn’t seem to understand when we ask her to shift back. She’s just … been a dragon ever since.”

Tirmanak paused. He sounded a little uncomfortable, but Serenity didn’t turn to look. He was busy watching Jenna try to chase her tail, spinning beneath one leg of a table. The tail kept disappearing from her vision, blocked by the table leg, but when she moved it was visible again for a short moment.

“I reached out to the only person I knew who could help. I don’t know what I expected. No, I take that back; I expected him to just … fix things. To show Jenna how to shift into her natural form. But that’s not what he did; he took one look at her and yelled at me to get her back to her parents.”

Tirmanak paused again, then continued in a softer tone of voice. “He said she was overcompensating for not having another dragon around and that she needed her parents to teach her to shift anyway.” Even quieter, Tirmanak muttered, “I also think he found it funny.”

Lillene

Serenity grew up in an era where a long distance call and a local call just meant dialing a different area code, not paying for the minutes …