true

True never expected to end up in a lair of Coatls. Well, maybe he did; he'd studied their language for weeks when he was a hatchling, trying to mimic the soft, humming tones that they spoke in. But he never thought he'd actually find himself being a translator for the clan he joined almost by accident.

It started with the most unusual fishing trip of True's life; it was not fish that he pulled from the water, but a soaking, fading Coatl hatchling. Alarmed by the other dragon's shallow breathing, True carried him to his home and cared for him for days until the hatchling was able to stand on his own feet and trill questions at him.

His name was Abaddon, he told True, and he was very lost. True did his best to answer his questions, but with no clues as to where the hatchling had come from, finding a way to get him home was nearly impossible. He scouted around, but none of the nearby clans reported a hatchling missing, and True wasn't willing to leave the clearly accident-prone hatchling alone for long enough to fly to the clans in the higher mountains.

It was about a week before the hatchling - was he really a hatchling any more? Dragon children grew remarkably fast - was strong enough to spread his wings and fly out of the cave. On the first day he did so, he returned to True's cave humming about a beautiful dragon with a voice like thundering water whose words he could not understand. It took True a few attempts to get Abaddon to actually calm down enough to tell him some more details about this wondrous being he had met.

She was called Ruckus, it transpired, though it was True and not Abaddon who found that out. Abaddon could only speak in the Coatls' humming-language, and Ruckus only knew Draconian. It took days for the two of them to learn enough of each other's language to communicate, and even then they needed True to make sure that they weren't completely mistranslating something.

As he continued to work with them, he became more and more attached to Ruckus and Abaddon. Eventually, he came to the realisation that even when the two of them could communicate perfectly, he didn't want to leave their small group. He wanted to stay with them, to be their friend and to travel with them wherever fate might take him.

Perhaps because of how much help he provided to the clan when it was just starting up, True quickly found himself becoming the dragon the others went to for help and guidance. He did his best to be wise and knowledgeable, though sometimes he suspected that the dragons who sought his assistance didn't actually follow his advice in quite the way he meant them to. The hatchlings knew he was a safe haven, both from the scary outside world and from nest-mates who were being a little too boisterous, though they preferred to clamber all over Abaddon. True sometimes wondered if the little hatchling he had saved from the water all those months ago, now his clan leader, had ever stopped being a hatchling, especially when the game of let's-see-how-many-hatchlings-can-climb-on-Abaddon-before-True-rescues-him became a nightly ritual.

Not that he really minded. After all, he had found his home here.

Written by Naurath