Chapter 13
Because of the many wild and unbelievable things that Tarrin had seen and done since taking up the quest to find the Firestaff years ago, Tarrin was an extremely hard man to impress. Amazing magic was dry and dusty to him. Exotic locales were boring, as everywhere he went and where he lived could be considered an exotic locale. Most magical beasts were a copper a tenpair. Even gods were little more than episodes of increased interest.
But Fireflash impressed him from the moment they met.
At first, the little juvenile drake was almost effete in its attitude, rather vain and fully expecting to be the center of all attention, which it seemed to disdain with an uninterested turn of its head. But that didn't last long, and Tarrin suspected that it was an act that the animal put up in order to get Tarrin's attention. After he used Druidic magic to talk to Fireflash, to set down the house rules, he found the drake to be surprisingly intelligent, smart enough to understand spoken language, playful, loving, and very loyal. Sapphire had talked to him before dropping him off at his house, and told him that he was being placed in a home where he was wanted and needed, a place where he would have no shortage of children to play with, as well as accommodating laps and shoulders and ample opportunities to learn. Fireflash was at that awkward age in any sentient being's development where he was caught between the needs of a child and the motivations of an adult, and in Tarrin's house he would find plenty of activities to satisfy both his childish needs of play and love and inclusion and his adult impulses to learn and have an established place and contribute to the well-being of the home. Tarrin was impressed by the drake's adolescent mind, a mind that was very hungry to learn. The drake understood Wikuni already, but had not learned how to speak quite yet--but not for lack of trying. Speaking humanoid languages was extremely difficult for drakes, for the shape of their mouths made it difficult, if not impossible, to make some of the sounds the humanoids did. Fireflash had been practicing for nearly a year, and could manage to hiss out some Wikuni words. All in all, Wikuni was a good language for an animal like a drake to learn first, since some of the Wikuni themselves were possessed of similarly shaped mouths. There were many words in Wikuni that included hisses, sigh-like sounds, and even yips and near-barks, to accommodate those mammalian and reptillian Wikuni who had very long muzzles.
Not everyone in the house would be comfortable speaking in Wikuni to the drake, so Tarrin cheated and implanted the other three languages that Fireflash would be apt to hear within his house; Sulasian, Selani, and Sha'Kar. It took Fireflash about an hour to get his balance back after that, because implanting languages with Druidic magic always left one dizzy and a little disoriented afterwards, but Tarrin did that down in his study, to keep the drake out of the paws of the cubs.
But what impressed him most about Fireflash was how well he integrated with the rest of his family, almost immediately. The three cubs were absolutely smitten with him immediately after he introduced him to them, and Fireflash seemed just as smitten with them. Everyone liked him, because he was polite and affectionate, and he liked the others, because he thought they were nice. After Tarrin gave the three cubs a stern lecture about how to treat the drake so no one would get hurt, they all ran out and started playing, and they were very careful to be gentle with him.
Tarrin watched from the porch for a while, as the four of them played a game of tag out in the yard--which was really just Fireflash chasing the girls around as they giggled and carried on--and he was satisfied that the cubs wouldn't hurt Fireflash accidentally, and Fireflash would be careful not to hurt them. He'd given the drake permission to lay into one of the cubs if she hurt him in any way, which would be a very effective reminder for the cub about how to be gentle. Then again, all it would take would be one blast of that paralyzing gas in the face, and the offending cub would be chastised most effectively without doing any harm. Tarrin had had Fireflash try it on him, and he could personally attest that it worked. He'd been unable to move for nearly five minutes after getting a face full of the strangely sweet-smelling greenish gas. The paralysis could last for over an hour if it was used one a human, but against a Were-cat, who had a powerful metabolism that could quickly burn out any kind of invading foreign agent, it only lasted about five minutes.
