Lindír had no guide, no path to follow. He knew nothing about this other dragon, nor where they were going, nor any way to signal for them other than with his voice. All he knew was that a yellow dragon had been seen traveling west from that village, and that they had only a few hours headstart. But a few hours for a dragon on the wing is still more distance than a horseman could travel in two days, a vast area for any search. Really, Lindír was hoping for a minor miracle.

But he hoped regardless. It was an almost indescribable feeling which burned in Lindír’s chest as he took aloft, and which sustained him as he serpentined across the frigid skies of the further North. It was not like the keen, sharp thing which had been his now-shattered love for Razan, though its effect was similar. If anything, it was more akin to the deathly hunger which had taken hold of him in his youth, the way it sank into his bones. But it was a joyous hunger; a hunger for his own kind. A hunger to, after two long decades, finally see and meet and speak to one who looked like him, moved like him. The only situation which could have produced a similar emotion within Lindír would be if he had crossed paths with Ámnistr again, though doubtlessly not so strong.

It was good then that, driven by powerful wings to a great speed and with the fullness of his mental efforts turned to visual perception, Lindír did eventually catch sight of the other dragon. They were but a speck in the far distance, many meadows away, and Lindír might have mistaken them for a bird were it not for the telltale glint of clean scales against the sun. With a goal before him, Lindír sped his progress even more. He made use of every trick of aerodynamics which he knew, every technique for increasing speed, and redoubled his efforts until he felt as though his sinews would snap from the exertion. When he could catch his breath, which was not often, Lindír would cry out with a shrill trumpeting call. It was the loudest sound he knew to make which did not signal anger.

The speck continued to grow more defined. The other dragon was flying at a leisurely pace, not exerting themself to the utmost, and so Lindír was closing. They were indeed a pale yellow color, not quite golden, more like flax, and Lindír could see from their posture that they indeed flew in much the same way as him.

And then, finally, the other dragon turned downward and swiftly dived to the ground. Lindír watched them carefully, memorizing every visible detail of the hilltop onto which they had descended, and set his course that way. A joy took him, especially as he allowed his exhausted wing-muscles to rest, a joy so furious and so primal as to be nearly overwhelming. The other dragon, it seemed, was willing to meet him.

Lindír descended slowly onto the grass-speckled hilltop, carefully watching the sole living creature there. A dragon. They were a dragon, like him. They had the same fine scales, the same rows of scutes along the back, the same long and serpentine tail, the same catlike body which paced back and forth, impatient for his landing. But they were not exactly the same.

Besides the matter of their scale color, the other dragon of course did not have the patch of scaleless skin in the center of their chest. Nor did they have any other scars or marks at all, aside from a single long scar across the side of their belly. They were shaped differently from Lindír as well. Their scales did not sit quite so directly on their muscles, and even discounting that they were still slightly taller and larger than Lindír overall. And their horns were different, having only four straight horns instead of the crown of curving horns which decorated Lindír’s head.

Lindír continued to note every detail of the other dragon’s face as he set down, memorizing its contours and quirks with a wide-eyed awe. They were quite a beautiful dragon, he decided. Much more beautiful than he.

And then the other dragon said something in a language which Lindír did not understand. When he replied in Kojurlander, the other dragon tilted their head at him, confused, and tried again with a different language. Fortunately, Ásmnistr had made a habit of teaching Lindír multiple tongues, so they were able to go back and forth about this for a short while. It was, of all languages, that of the Flaxenvale and the western coast, which got a response.

“Oh, thank the stars, I was worried that we would be stuck having to communicate by gesture. As I was trying to say, my name is Yrsel, of the Eastern Solseyja colony. You are most surely not from any colony with which I am familiar; so what was it you wished to speak about?”

Lindír suddenly felt about a decade younger than he was. He could not tear his eyes away from Yrsel, and for several moments he could not force himself to speak. “I do not know.”

That only elicited a longer and more painful silence. Yrsel at first huffed with annoyance, but as the moments passed, and as they took in Lindír’s appearance for the first time, their visage softened. “Who are you? From where do you hail?”

“My name is Lindír. I… suppose that I was born in Hvalheim, on Kojur, to the south. But I haven’t been there in years, now.”

“No colony…” Yrsel sighed, their voice ethereal with horror. “You’re a stray, then.” Yrsel had a magnificent command over her voice, Lindír noted. They were still speaking human tongues, with all of the oddness of accent that that implied from a dragon’s mouth, but even still Yrsel was able to do it much more naturally, more smoothly.

“I…” Lindír hesitated, his pride wounded. But even he could not help but admit the truth. “Yes, you could call me a stray. What is a colony?”

“It is…” Yrsel hesitated for a moment. “A group of dragons who live in proximity, make decisions about things together, support one another when the need arises. The way the little people live in villages and towns, some dragons live in colonies.”

Lindír could not help but spread his wings a little bit. A group of dragons, the way humans had groups, was something almost beyond his comprehension. “There are more? How many?”

“A bit less than threescore, I think.”

“I want to go there!” Lindír said. He felt as though he were about to burst entirely from his own scales.

Yrsel laughed, a chittering birdlike noise. “You can do more than go there, if you like the idea so much. You can join the colony. There’s always a spare lair ready for a stray dragoness like you.”

Lindír’s excitement was suddenly cut through with confusion. He wondered if he should have been offended; certainly if a human man were to be mistaken for a woman, the human would be offended. But would a dragon?

“Dragoness?” Lindír said.

Yrsel startled slightly, then bowed their head in a way Lindír recognized as apologetic. “Drakkar. There’s always a spare lair ready for a stray drakkar like you. I should not have assumed.”

Lindír paused. That did not answer his question. It took him several seconds to work out what his question was in the first place. “But why did you assume that?”

Yrsel’s expression said that they had not expected the question either, which was odd. “Is this some kind of trick question? I assure you I meant no offense; and I will not allow my first impression to mislead me in the future.”

Lindír shook his head. “Why did you assume that I was a dragoness? I don’t understand.”

“Because you… look like a dragoness?” Yrsel said, rearing their neck back as though prepared to take flight at a moment’s notice. “And you smell like a dragoness. And although I am well aware that names differ from country to country, yours is distinctly female, at least where I come from.”

Lindír awkwardly curled his neck down to look at his own chest and front limbs. They looked the same as they always had, down to the spiraling contours of the outline of the patch of bare skin. “I look like a dragoness?” he said. “What does a dragoness look like?”

“You are looking at one,” said Yrsel, as though unsure of what she was saying. “Have you never seen another dragoness before?”

A shiver passed down Lindír’s spine as he realized that Yrsel expected him to answer yes. Humans knew other humans, giants knew other giants, even hellira and trolls knew other hellira and trolls. But not him. “I was raised by humans,” he admitted. “You’re the first other dragon I’ve ever met.”

Yrsel made a high sound in the back of her throat, a sort of soft trill of disbelief. “I see. Well then, in that case, I suppose a brief lesson is in order. Drakkars are generally smaller than dragonesses… though now that I say it, you’re about the right size to be a drakkar. But drakkars are also shaped a little differently. Should you accompany me to the colony, you will see what I mean by that. And drakkars generally have much longer horns than do dragonesses.” She paused a while in thought. “They have multiple colors on their scales, as well, usually in bands or spots, not just different shades of one color. And as I said before, they have a different odor to them.”

That, at least, Lindír understood. Male humans smelled differently to female humans, he’d picked up on that when he was a child. Lindír realized, as he cast his memory back, that he had initially had quite a deal of trouble telling the difference between male and female humans. Could it have been the case, then, that humans could not tell between male and female dragons?

It seemed impossible, but more and more it seemed to be true that Lindír was indeed a dragoness. As soon as he tried to ascertain what he felt about that, though, he hit a solid barrier. Either he felt nothing at all about it, or else he felt so many things that they all blurred together, in the way that mixing countless colors of paint will produce only muddy brown.

“I suppose I am a dragoness, then,” said Lindír at last. “You said that I could join your… colony, was it? You said that I could join your colony if I so wished?”

“Indeed I did say so. I’ll go back with you, to help carry your hoard?”

Lindír scratched guiltily at the ground. “There will be no need to turn back. I have no hoard.”

Yrsel’s tail sank low to the ground, and her voice became very soft. “Have you lost it somehow?”

“No, I never had a hoard. My parents never gave me one and I’ve never had the chance to accumulate one since then. Not that I’ve ever stayed in one place for long enough to keep a hoard, regardless.”

Yrsel became still for some time. At first Lindír did not recognize the expression other than that it was sad, but in a moment of empathy he understood the emotion, for it was one he had felt himself. It was the feeling he had felt when he realized that he had been starving to death in the dungeons, not cursed by some draconic affliction of hunger.

“In that case,” Yrsel said, “there’s no decision about it. You will be following me to Solseyja. The journey from here is around four days, assuming we’re flying; will you be able to do that?”

“I’ve flown the length and breadth of the North in my day,” said Lindír. “It will be effortless. And besides, I hear that it is much easier to travel when one has a proper destination.”

For three days they journeyed together, moving ever westward. For most of that journey they stayed high up amidst the clouds, where the wind was fierce and cold and speech was impossible. But every evening they would stop, and Lindír would hunt deer or bison for them, Yrsel having admitted that she was a terribly inexperienced hunter, and while they ate they would talk.

Lindír had not travelled with a companion since Ámnistr, but Yrsel could not have been more a contrast to him. While Ámnistr loved silence far more than one might expect from a troubadour, Yrsel babbled. Lindír normally disliked talk, but it was worth any discomfort just for the opportunity to hear another dragon’s voice, and to sit in the knowledge that it was another dragon he was speaking to.

And besides, none of what Yrsel spoke of was truly unpleasant. She jumped rapidly from topic to topic, occasionally entering into long tangents about the inner politics of the Eastern Solseyja colony, of dragons who had displeased her or whom she thought possessed various attractive qualities, but more often remembering that Lindír knew nothing of the colony and speaking to him as such. She taught him a few words and phrases in their language, the first words Lindír had ever spoken which felt natural in his mouth, words for greetings and blessings and other such important things, and told him a few tidbits about how to avoid “acting quite so much like a stray,” as she put it.

She also, on a couple of occasions, tried to recount the origins of the Solseyja dragon colonies. There were three, that much she was certain of, and they’d been there for about two and a half centuries, but beyond that the details became fuzzy, and she admitted to remembering multiple stories. It definitely had something to do with the island’s nisken population, and with how they refused to hunt dragons in the way that the humans of the mainland did. But where the nisken had come from, and how the Solseyja dragons came to be arranged into three colonies, she didn’t know.

“I’m no chronicler,” Yrsel said, baring her teeth in a sort of primal cringe.

“Is there a chronicler?” Lindír said. The idea of a dragon chronicler was at once humorously absurd and deeply beautiful, and he leaned forward over his half of the boar in anticipation of the answer. “Do you have… occupations? Roles?”

Yrsel crossed her claws, pondering the question for a moment. “In a way, perhaps? It’s all very unofficial. Different dragons specialize in different ways, but we don’t give each other titles in the way that humans do. You will encounter no Duke of Such-and-Such whither we are bound.”

That disappointed Lindír greatly. What was the point of being a dragon if one did not accumulate titles for all of one’s great deeds? “What do you do, then, if you aren’t a chronicler?”

Again Yrsel pondered the question, though not for quite as long. “One might call me a diplomat. Or a courtier. I’m good at talking, and I’m good at being nice, and I do my best to prevent the other members of the colony from arguing too intensely, lest things have to get official.”

After another pause, Yrsel said, more to herself than to Lindír, “I suppose it’s quite a good thing that I found you, as opposed to someone else. If my brother Ulkred had found you, he would never have bothered to teach you the language, because he’d be too busy asking you how many humans you’ve slain and where you got every single one of those scars.”

“I’ve killed many humans,” Lindír said darkly. But Yrsel did not respond on account of having a mouthful of delicious, fresh boar meat.

That exchange took place on the evening of the second full day of travel, the third evening they had together. On the fourth evening, they did not talk as much. They stopped early, and Yrsel made sure to impress upon Lindír the importance of resting as much as he could. Both of these were for the same reason: they had reached the cliffs of the coast, and the next day they would cross the sea.

The longest Lindír had ever been to sea was when he had left Kojur, and a few other times he had been forced to cross narrow straits and broad lakes upon his journeys. That night, he fell asleep seized with terror. The ocean extended hundreds of meadows without end, and Solseyja was only one small part of that unending expanse. Though Yrsel had explained it several times, the way one could align oneself by the rising sun and the uninterrupted ocean breezes and fly to Solseyja along a direct path, the thought still plagued him that they might fail. How easy would it be to set off in the wrong direction and fly, fly into the waters of the world, fly until they were exhausted and then drown and die in the deep.

But fly they did. Yrsel set off first, catapulting herself off of the cliff’s edge with impossible grace, Lindír following close behind. He did not dare wander from her path, as he might have done over land. For hours they flew, Lindír hugging so close to Yrsel’s tail that at times a gust of wind nearly caused them to collide. By mid-morning, even the slightest sliver of the mainland was out of sight, and Lindír was further afield than he had ever been.

The boundless sea mixed in strange ways with his nervousness, and that alchemy of the mind had an almost hypnotic effect upon Lindír. He imagined his cousins, terrible sea serpents and great leviathans, following him just below the sea’s surface, even when he could only see schools of dolphins and flying fish skimming the waves. Occasionally, flocks of albatross and other gliding birds would accompany Lindír and Yrsel, riding the same winds, and Lindír would find himself imagining their squawks to be voices, hurling exhortation and praise in the same breath as they cursed and despised him.

And then, at last, land once more. Solseyja appeared at first only as a few spots on the horizon, and then slowly grew into a ragged strip. Even from a great distance, Lindír could tell that it was a rough and mountainous terrain, with high cliffs and many rocky hills. Perfect terrain for dragons. He also understood, instinctually, the source of its name. By that point, it was late in the afternoon, and the setting sun appeared to be settling in to land directly upon the plate of Solseyja, as though the island had been placed by the gods to cushion its landing each and every evening.

As they came closer still, Yrsel steered slightly off the straight-line path for the first time that day, drifting steadily to the right. Lindír followed. There was no clear reason, at first, for the change in course; a direct path would lead them to the island regardless. But as he could not ask the reason, he did not dare to do anything but follow close behind, out of fear that Yrsel followed some kind of hidden path.

The truth was far more mundane and yet, to Lindír, infinitely more terrifying than either of those. After some time of slow approach, the terrain of Solseyja resolved itself into ever-finer detail, until Lindír could see the individual convolutions of sharp mountains and grass-stubbled valleys spreading out before him. It became clear that Yrsel had aimed herself towards a particular point, a rocky headland jutting out into the waves. This was, evidently, a known point; for upon it stood seven other dragons.

Lindír’s courage shattered like so much glass. He was not prepared for this. One other dragon, he could manage, perhaps even two, but seven? No, seven would be too much, he would hardly even know what to say or do. An unaccountable fear arose in his breast, and he veered to the side. Let Yrsel greet them, he decided.

As Yrsel landed directly in front of the awaiting crowd, Lindír swept past them, settling into a large crevasse where the soil had settled due to erosion. There he crouched, caught between curiosity and fear, wishing to flee into the wilderness and never return, become a hermit among his own people, and yet finding himself listening intently to the speech going on between Yrsel and the other dragons. He recognized only one or two scattered words; but later he would ask Yrsel what they had said, and she relayed the exchange in full.

One dragon, a small drakkar of silver scales run through with bands of forest green, approached Yrsel first, though all were crowding around her. They exchanged pleasantries in the form of a sort of half-kiss, each touching the side of the other’s throat with their cheek. Then he said, “It is good to see you again, Yrsel. But you have much to answer for. You left to deliver a gift to the Mount Stofrik colony, and yet you return with another dragon in tow! Were you going out to find a husband without informing us?”

Lindír found, now that he was seeing dragons in number, that it was indeed easy to distinguish between dragonesses and drakkars. There were, counting Yrsel, four drakkars and four dragonesses on that headland; and Lindír fit very clearly into the latter group.

Yrsel chittered again, that strange laugh of the Solseyja dragons, and performed the greeting gesture with another dragoness, this one slightly smaller than her and possessing scales the color of sea-foam. When she was done, she spoke to the silver drakkar, saying, “No, I am not so courtship-mad yet, though I suppose if any more of my siblings find spouses while I yet remain single, I might. She’s a stray, and supposedly she was raised by humans. Almost as soon as I met her I knew that she had to come here, to Solseyja.”

One of the drakkars, of average size and mottled black and violet scales, one of his horns broken off near the tip, looked over to where Lindír was hiding. “That would explain the behavior, I think. I was worried that she’d crashed.”

All of the dragons laughed at that, aside from one. He was an enormous drakkar, larger even than Yrsel, and his scales were midnight blue with bursts of gold and grey upon them. He merely watched Lindír with narrowed eyes while Yrsel relayed the story of their meeting.

To Lindír, who had understood none of the conversation, this was the first moment of proper contact, this steady gaze. He wondered at first if it was a look of anger, resenting his intrusion upon this foreign land. But the drakkar’s posture was totally relaxed, at least as Lindír could see it, with his head raised high and his wings splayed lazily upon the ground. As he and Lindír made eye contact, Lindír found himself slowly relaxing, his wings settling against his sides, his tail no longer flicking back and forth as though prepared for a fight.

Then the drakkar turned away, and Lindír retreated, stung by perceived rejection, or merely by the absence of soothing attention. More words were spoken.

“A stray?” asked the huge drakkar. “Those scars, such small size; she looks in quite a bad way.”

“Indeed,” Yrsel replied, a hint of bitterness slipping into her tone. “You see why I had to extend the offer, and why she took it so eagerly?”

“I do, and you were right to act as you did. Does she speak the language?”

“No. The only common tongue I could find is the trade language used by the humans of the western coast.”

The huge drakkar made a grunt of acknowledgement, then set off at a quick pace to the crevasse where Lindír had stuffed himself. Lindír knew that he was coming by the sound of his footfalls, and shrank back from the edge; yet again Lindír’s body betrayed him, for he could not help but be curious about what it was the stranger meant to do.

He stood at the edge of the crevasse but did not enter it, looking down at Lindír with a massive advantage of height. For a moment, they resumed their prior staring contest. But then, with a soft and resonant voice, he said, “Do you have a name? You may call me Camreth.”

Lindír was taken aback for a moment that this foreign dragon spoke a familiar tongue, and stuttered over his words for far too long. “Lindír,” he said. “Lindír Heimirsson, though it seems that you do not use such names here.”

Camreth made a rattle in the back of his throat. “There are not enough dragons in the world for us to need such distinguishing names. Though I suppose if I were to meet another Camreth from some far away place, I might distinguish myself by saying that I am Camreth of the Sea-cliff family, and he the Camreth of some other family. I shall just call you Lindír for the time being, if you do not mind?”

Camreth was oddly polite for a dragon, Lindír decided. For some reason he had expected other dragons, ones raised far from human influence, to be as bestial and as aggressive as Sivnis was said to have been.

“I do not mind.”

“Is it true, what Yrsel tells me about you? That you were raised by humans?”

Lindír nodded, though he was unsure if that gesture was familiar to dragons. “It is. I had never met another dragon until I met Yrsel, four days ago now. Are you… a relation of Yrsel’s?”

“Not by blood, no,” said Camreth. “Though my family knows her well enough to await her arrival. Would you like to meet my family? You are somewhat of the topic of the hour.”

Instantly, a hundred horrible futures appeared in Lindír’s mind. What if he spoke to them, and in so doing, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was no proper dragon at all? Or they might overwhelm him, drive him to flee and make a fool of himself. What if this chance, to finally speak to others of his own kind, turned back on him in the same way as had every other glimmer of light in his life so far?

“I want to,” Lindír said. “But I’m not certain that I can. For one thing, will any of them be able to speak a language I understand?”

“True enough,” Camreth said slowly. “Perhaps we will let them talk. But I insist that you at least get to know a little bit about them, if you plan to live here. Come here, and I might tell you a bit about the Sea-cliff family.”

Though his muscles were stiff and his heart beat frantically, Lindír forced himself out of the crevasse, step by step. Once he was out, he sat down on his haunches next to Camreth. Camreth, in turn, made a trill of pleasure before doing something unexpected. He lowered his wings to the ground in what, for Lindír, would have been an aggressive gesture. But instead of moving to action, he simply rested his body upon his wing claws; then, he raised up his forelimbs, now freed from the burden of his weight, and began to use them to gesture, as humans do.

“Now then. That silver drakkar, you see him? That is my husband, Ziorrin. He can be a bit of a gull, if you know my meaning, but I assure you that he will do you no harm. Now, the dragoness with the pale green-blue scales—no, with only two horns—that is our eldest, her name is Irvo…”

And so on and so forth through the group. Though Camreth had called them his family, many of them were only related by marriage. He matched names to colors, fondly remarking on their personalities, and Lindír was sure that he would remember none of it. Then, at last, came the final member of the group.

“Now, do you see the blue dragoness, the one speaking to Yrsel? She and Yrsel have been good friends nearly since they were hatched. Her name is Biorra, and she is my youngest.”

For a moment, Lindír could not find the one he was indicating, amongst the throng of dragons. But as soon as he did, there was no mistaking it.

Biorra was a huge dragoness, larger even than either of her fathers, with scales the same perfect blue as the sky on a cloudless summer day, scales so pure and clean that they shone. And yet, despite her great size and musculature, she moved with an impossible grace, as though even when she was firmly planted upon the ground she still flew. Only a single pair of horns adorned her head, sweeping back along her skull in a beautiful curve that made Lindír faintly envious. She was decorated, too, with golden rings along her horns and a jeweled bangle decorating her wrist that rattled as she moved.

Looking back on it, Lindír realized that her life could be divided into two portions. These portions were not equal, neither in length nor in quality, but still the division was as stark and as clear as any such division in her life could be. The dividing line, Lindír decided, was the exact moment when he first looked upon Biorra, that fine spring afternoon.

SaffronDragon

It speaks well to my skill as an author that so many people were hoping and praying that the meeting between Lindír and the other dragon would go well, and for the most part it did! Also, shout-out to the one person on the discord who completely called what was going on with Lindír's gender, that was incredible. And to settle some confusion right now: Lindír is some kind of undefined nonbinary, and uses both he/him and she/her pronouns. I, as the author, will be changing Lindír's pronouns based on how she feels at any given moment, but for readers you can use them interchangeably. You'll come to see what I mean in the future chapters, of which there are currently three uploaded to my Patreon! So if you want to see more of Lindír coming to know Solseyja, click the link below and subscribe for only $3 a month. If you can't, that's fine, I'll see you in two weeks for Chapter Twenty-one: A Lair And A Hoard.