A Pet for the Dragons

189.

IVRET

I couldn't help but eye Zorge with suspicion as he quietly braided Arika's hair while she flipped through one of my many journals. She wouldn't be able to read them, but still, she was taking her time admitting my sketches.

It was a good enough distraction for her, and I was more than happy for it, especially for having her in my laboratory. I had set the dome ceiling to display a calm, starry night sky, even though a severe storm was raging outside.

I loved the storms, but on occasions like these, it irked me because Zorge was in my laboratory. I generally preferred to keep him out of here because something always went missing whenever he visited.

Zorge narrowed his eyes at me over his shoulder. He could tell that I was annoyed by his presence, and he was doing his best to get me more and more annoyed by every passing second. He smirked and looked away, focusing on braiding Arika's hair in a very elaborate manner.

"What's this?" Arika asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

"That's a very ugly-looking elfling," Zorge replied before I could go over and see what Arika was looking at. "That's how Ivret looked when he was a fledgling," Zorge added, earning a low grunt from me.

"A what?" Arika asked again, holding the journal closer to her eyes to see it properly.

"That's a cross between an elf and a fairy," I replied, looking over both of their shoulders. I pricked Zorge quietly in revenge before Arika could notice. Zorge sent me a silent glare over his shoulder. I knew he'd have his revenge soon.

"A fairy? That doesn't look anything like a fairy. That thing looks... ugly," Arika wondered out loud. "I thought fairies were beautiful little creatures,"

"Who told you that?" Zorge gasped, and my reaction was somewhat the same. Fairies were anything but beautiful little creatures.

"That's what they tell us over there," Arika shrugged and moved on to a different place.

"No wonder they hunt humans," Zorge snorted, and Arika pushed back at him.

"What do you mean they hunt humans? I'd never heard of anything like that in my whole career of piracy," Arika exclaimed, going back to that page and looking at the sketch. I remembered making that sketch in my earlier days as an apprentice, when we were allowed to enter the forbidden dungeons to observe all the strange creatures that had been hunted or caught.

"Well, you didn't know about us either, did you?" I said, and Arika fell silent for a while, flipping through other pages. I could tell that Zorge had fallen into his contemplative state too, probably reading through Arika's head.

In times like these, I envied him greatly. I wish I had the skills to read Arika's emotions and some part of her thoughts, too.

"A kraken," Arika gasped, opening a section of my notebook that had been stitched with several pages to make it big enough to accommodate the whole stretch. "Wow. I have never seen them like this..."

"The warriors had managed to capture a kraken at the war of Dacva. I had the chance to study it up close... of course, after it had been killed," I told her, reminiscing but those days. Those were very strange days for me. I hardly remembered much of them. That part of my life was mostly blurry because nothing worth remembering had happened in it.

"Did you say Dacva?" Arika asked. "I think I heard that name before. Is that a place?"

"Yes," Zorge replied. "It's a place between our realm and the ones in which the elves live. It often serves as our frontline. Nothing much is in that realm except for a bottomless sea with monsters and merpeople in it."

"I see. Didn't you say you fought in a war with your brother, Zorge? Was it this one?" She asked after a while.

"Yes, it's that one," Zorge replied. For a moment, he sounded lost as if he was remembering those dark days. I didn't envy him when it came to this. I didn't have to fight in that war. "I didn't fight directly on the frontline like my brother, but I was there. It was... terrifying,"

"Radrox was swallowed by a kraken, wasn't he?" Arika asked.

"Yes," Zorge replied, sounding lost. I noticed that he had stopped braiding.

"Then how did he make it out alive?" Arika asked in wonder. It was something that I had wondered about for the longest time, but hadn't had the best opportunity to ask him. I specifically avoided this topic with Radrox because I knew it was very tragic for him.

"He doesn't recall many details, but he claims that it was his second-in-command, Rhondothir, who was swallowed with him and saved him. My brother never saw him after that," Zorge replied.

Rhondothir... for some reason, that name sounded extremely familiar. I was sure that I had heard that name somewhere, but I couldn't figure out where. It was as if my brain were determined to conceal the information from me.

"And we haven't seen Radrox for weeks," Arika reminded us. She had been worrying about this a lot lately, even though Zorge and I were doing our best to distract her. However, it was starting to bother me, too. Zorge seemed to be nonchalant about his brother's disappearance, saying that he always disappeared for long periods when he had some work, but I could see that he was starting to worry, too.

"He'll be back soon, Arika. You don't have to worry about him," Zorge repeated the same thing he'd been telling her for countless times over the past week.

"Yeah, he should be back soon. Radrox is the solitary kind," I chimed in just to not make her worry too much, but she didn't seem to be buying our excuses lately, and this was worrying me.

"I don't believe—" Arika's words were cut by a loud crash somewhere outside. Zorge and I exchanged a look, both of us shocked.

"Wait, what was that?" Arika asked before a look of realisation dawned upon her face.

~

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