Fluoride

It'd been months since Boreas roped Fluoride into his latest, wild adventure. Truthfully, he was glad to have the moment of peace, and the ancient lair swaying atop the Behemoth was as restful a place as any. The high altitude was reminiscent of his birthplace in the Windswept Plateau, and Fluoride dozed on an outstretched branch, his full belly and the warm sun on his scales making him feel sleepy.

Below him, a familiar voice let out a loud shriek of laughter, and he cracked open an annoyed eye to peer down at his brother, Boreas, and the jewel-bright skydancer who he'd been attached at the tail to ever since they met, Miles.
Fluoride heaved a breath and turned his face, draping his tail over his snout.
He loved Boreas, genuinely, and Miles too for that matter, but it was Boreas' plan that put them all in danger in the first place. Logically, Fluoride knew there were more variables than his own brother's shenanigans and irresponsibility, but it was hard to smother the kernel of tension and anger that hardened in his belly whenever he heard his voice or saw the flash of pale green feathers amid the trees.
Fluoride puffed a sigh, knowing he was not going to sleep now.

"What's got you all hot and bothered?" asked another familiar voice as footsteps approached him delicately over the wood. The gem on Fluoride's forehead picked up the energy of the dragon who he knew so well he was smiling before he even looked around at the soft-eyed coatl.
"Nothing important," he answered Cadbury lightly. She hummed, and he got the impression that she didn't believe him, but he didn't want to talk about his brother. He didn't know how to articulate the tangled strings of anger and exasperation that got clogged inside him like old hair in a drain whenever he thought about Boreas for too long.
Cadbury trotted up beside him and poked him until he got the idea and shifted over, making room for her to settle down beside him and tuck herself into his side. She fanned a bright wing over him, leaving Fluoride to twitch his headfeathers and hope she didn't notice how warm his face felt. Her wingspan was larger than his and she was covered in feathers, as opposed to his furry skydancer body in addition to feathered wings, and the sleepy feeling returned to Fluoride as he settled down beside her.
"What've you been up to?" he murmured to her, resting his face close to hers-- but not too close.
"I've been thinking about visiting my family," she replied, equally quiet, her dark eyes falling shut.
"Yeah?"
"Mhm."
Fluoride didn't have to ask what had brought that desire on. Cadbury had been forced to serve a giant, malevolent spider with a god complex for months. He was pretty sure he was her best friend and she still didn't speak much about it to even him, her eyes shuttering whenever the topic was brought up. In that time, she had no contact with any other dragons save for the spider's test subjects. Fluoride's heart felt tight as he remembered the skittish, suspicious dragon she'd been when they first met, jumping at every sudden movement and speaking little.
"Where do they live?" he asked.
"My parents live in the Hellwell Undercroft, last time I checked," she said, curling her tail around her neat little paws and leaning into him. His cheeks brightened and, feeling foolish, he tried to pay attention to what she was saying. "At the Milky Tea Patisserie, specifically."
"That's pretty far," he said, after a moment of considering what such a journey would mean. He thought about offering to go along with her. It would be dangerous, and the extra pair of claws, wings, and head could be extremely comforting when alone on the road. Fluoride would know, having traveled all over Sornieth with Boreas before settling in Glennehaven.
Cadbury was quiet. He opened his eyes and looked at her, the movement shifting her wing off his head and falling to his narrow shoulders. Her eyes were already open, looking off towards the coiled-together shapes of Boreas and Miles who lingered beneath their tree, unaware of their surroundings. Miles, at least, could be forgiven for that, what with her sightless eyes.
"I know. But we've been here for months. I miss them. I've missed them for...well, a while. I know that's a little unusual for most adult dragons, but I also didn't have as much time with them as most dragons do, so-"
"Cadbury," Fluoride interrupted gently. "You don't have to justify it. I was just working up to asking when you think you'll leave."
She shot him a grateful look.
"I don't know," she said. "Soon."
Fluoride lay his head back down beside hers, and they spoke no more until Cadbury's breathing eased and leveled, and he knew she was asleep. Fluoride, however, stayed awake a while longer. Most dragons he knew left their parents within a few months and while many returned for visits, rarely did they ever choose to stay within their parents' lair. Personally, Fluoride had never felt any particular inclination to return to the Windswept Plateau. He had his brother, and...well, at least until recently, that had been enough.
Fluoride felt a selfish stab of fear as he thought about this, gazing at his contentedly sleeping friend. The spider had stolen her childhood from her and scarred her so badly that she was a stranger in any place she alighted on. Was it so hard to imagine that when she saw all that she'd missed, she would choose to stay in the Scarred Wasteland with the dragons who were supposed to love her unconditionally?
Fluoride felt like a horrible friend for resisting the idea so absolutely. It was a long time before he fell into uneasy slumber beside her, coiled underneath her shimmery wings and tucked into her warm-as-chocolate, soft-as-hatchling-down side. Before he slid into unconsciousness, he wondered again about asking to go with her.
This time, the thought did not feel selfless. "Fluoride, Fluoride," someone was saying urgently in his ear, shaking him. Fluoride's eyes snapped open and he bolted upright, blinking into the primal, smoky eyes of his brother.
"What?"
Boreas sniffed and annoyance heated in Fluoride's belly like stove coils. "Don't be like that. It's Cadbury."
Fluoride tensed and he looked automatically to his side, but the brown and green coatl was not there.
"What's wrong with her?"
"She got a letter from her family. One of the hatchlings of like, a distant cousin or something has been kidnapped."
"What? Where is she?"
"In her den. Miles is trying to calm her down and has taken over your job of stopping her from doing anything crazy, since you were snoozing- Hey!"
Fluoride, in his haste to descend the tree, jostled Boreas on his way down. Throwing a slightly insincere apology over his shoulder, he flapped his wings hard and flew as fast as he ever had down to the cliffside where Cadbury had made her den. He alighted on the edge and spared a glance for Boreas as he landed beside him, looking ruffled and important, before moving inside without preamble.
He passed by toys made for hatchlings and long, shimmery silks before he got to the main area, where Miles was speaking soothingly to a hassled Cadbury. She had an open satchel placed on the table and was chucking her belongings headlong into it. Fluoride blinked, eyes adjusting to the mayhem of the room, before speaking, "Cadbury, Boreas just told me-"
"I've got to go," she said frantically, talking over him like she hadn't heard him.
"Of course," said Miles, flicking her tail pleadingly at the two brothers standing in the doorway. "But you need to be smart about it, Cadbury, come on. No, listen-" Miles, surprisingly quick, seized Cadbury's paw as she tried to shove more seafood into her bag and held on firmly as she wriggled. "Listen. It probably isn't the spider who took Cordial because you were taken by pearlcatchers, weren't you? The letter said there were guardian and spiral footprints around Cordial's nest."
"Then maybe they're hiring other dragons!" Cadbury hissed, wrestling herself free. "Besides, does it matter? They're calling for everyone across Sornieth. They've tracked them as far as the Sunbeam Ruins, but that's still huge-"
"It does matter," Boreas cut in, sounding surprisingly reasonable as he moved beside Miles. "Because you need to know where to look. Besides, the pearlcatchers were elitist, they would never work with a dragon who wasn't part of their group."
Cadbury looked at him like he was stupid, a shockingly intense look for the ordinarily soft-spoken dragon. "Didn't you hear me? The Sunbeam Ruins is where I need to look! Maybe the spider relocated, I don't know-"
"Or maybe it's something completely unrelated, but she still has to go," said Fluoride. Cadbury looked at him, seemingly noticing him for the first time.
"Thank you," she said gustily.
"I'm not saying she shouldn't go," said Miles sharply, waving her wings. As the smallest dragon among them, she sometimes had to work to be heard. "I'm saying she shouldn't rush off with no preparation, and off by herself, too."
"I'll go with her," Fluoride volunteered immediately, without having to think about it. The three other dragons looked at him, but Cadbury was not still for long, slinging the bad over her neck and settling it around her shoulders.
"What?" he asked the other two, sounding more confrontational than he meant to as he directed his words at his brother. "You and I were traveling through the Sunbeam Ruins before we met Miles and Cadbury, and I was the one mapping it out and finding the safest routes." Because you were too busy talking up travelers, Fluoride added silently. "I know the place best out of any of us."
"Fluoride..." said Boreas, a frown creasing his brow as he looked at him. Fluoride looked back at him and his mutinous irritation melted as the slightly lost look on Boreas' face. Boreas and Fluoride had always been a pair. They had never, ever been apart, except for the time when Boreas got captured by the group of rabid pearlcatchers and met Miles. That distance was just stress-inducing. But to travel without him would feel...unnatural.
The unexpected stab of shared feeling and sympathy manifested in an offer as impulsive as the one to Cadbury had been:
"You could come too," he said.
Boreas' smoky eyes slid to Miles, who was following Cadbury around and picking out necessities that the harried coatl didn't notice on the first round. Fluoride understood immediately, even if it sent a pang through him. Cadbury had not been the only one scarred by their encounter with the spider. Miles, once upon a time, had unusual eyes rather than primal, and they had worked as well as any other. Her blindness, caused by the spider's experimentation, had required some getting used to. Luckily, her telepathic abilities were strong enough to sense mindless objects as well as sentient beings and Miles could make her way around very well for that reason, but the group of friends all knew that she was not ready to be independent yet.
"I need to pack," Fluoride said, turning away, unable to fault for Boreas for staying but unable to look at him as he left. He gathered together a few essentials and met an impatiently buzzing Cadbury at the entrance to the lair.
He turned to look at Miles, who knew in that uncanny way of hers that someone had their eyes on her. She tilted her head up.
"You'll tell Shadow where we've gone?"
"Yeah." It was Boreas who answered. "We'll tell her."
Miles nodded.
"We need to go," said Cadbury, moving to his side. "Tell Reiko and Zippy we said goodbye."
"For sure," said Miles, craning her neck up to touch her nose first to Cadbury's in farewell, and then to Fluoride's.
"Give Zippy something new to complain about," Boreas quipped.
Cadbury gave him a strained smile for that, but Fluoride didn't, looking steadily at him until he met his eyes.
"Bring me back a souvenir, yeah?" he teased. Fluoride flicked his ears, not fooled by his irreverent tone. They stepped towards each other in sync and Boreas coiled his neck around Fluoride's, brother clasping brother. The two stayed like for a moment before Fluoride and Cadbury turned away and took to the air.
Fluoride didn't look behind him as he winged after Cadbury, whose huge, feathery wingspan filled the forest in front of him. From the ground, it took them about ten minutes to weave through the branches and burst out over the top of the canopy, where it would be easier to fly without obstruction or risk of ambush.
He soared a ways over her head and then came to a drifting glide over the top of Cadbury's back, small enough that he didn't bother her flapping wings as long as he didn't get too close.
"So," he called over the rush of wind. "Where to?"
"They tracked him to the Emperor's Wake," she shouted back. Fluoride looked down at her sharply, but Cadbury's eyes were fixed ahead.
"What?"
She looked up at him then, eyes blistering as she flicked her long, plumed tail. "It's not too late to turn back if that's what you want."
"Cadbury," he protested the unfair sentiment with a frown and she huffed. Fluoride flew with her in silence. He didn't need the bony orb in the center of his forehead to tell him there were all kinds of negative emotions running through her.
Instead of testing her shortened fuse any more, he turned over their exchange. Whenever he and Boreas had to pick up and travel in the Sunbeam Ruins, Fluoride had always been careful to plan routes that gave the Emperor's Wake a large berth. He'd never seen the creature, but he'd heard it. In the short, ever-bright nights, when he curled up on a large cushion in an inn or out in the open beneath the stars, he could sometimes pick up the tramp of huge feet and the bellows of a mammoth creature in a fit of rage or pain. Fluoride had been miles away at the time, he'd made sure of it, and the shudder that passed through him then did so again now. It took legions of dragons to take down one Emperor, or at least that's how the few in Sornieth's history had been dispatched. Fluoride would feel about as useful as a toothpick against one.
Worry gnawed into his gut like termites. Cadbury, like most coatls, was passionate, though he usually saw that channeled into science or her artwork or when she got in a mood to make presents for her friends. He'd never seen her like this, so full of single-minded determination and desire to protect to the point that she was snapping at him and rushing from her home with little preparation and preparing to pass beneath the nose of an Emperor dragon. She was naïve from spending most of her life imprisoned by that spider, and he knew that was part of what made her so ready to face down everything in her path-- because she simply didn't know what she was up against.
Fluoride swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. The mantle of reining in a much more emotional and impulsive dragon than himself was not exactly new to Fluoride, but this was different. This was not holding Boreas back from following a trail of fairy lights into an eerie swamp or something equally trivial. There was a hatchling's life on the line.
For the rest of their flight, Fluoride planned the most efficient alternative routes and marshaled talking points to convince Cadbury when they inevitably landed (they weren't going to reach the Sunbeam Ruins in a day, after all). She spoke a little here and there, but the conversation flow between them was as choppy and meager as their first meeting, when she was so unsure.
As the sun dipped towards the horizon, orange light spilled through the clouds like syrup and pooled over the miles of canopy below the two dragons. Fluoride swooped low and brushed his tail against the burnished leaves, flipping over and flying upside down for a moment to coax a smile out of Cadbury. As he righted himself, he saw her expression morph from creased concentration to a reluctant smile, and triumph winged through him. As he swung up back beside her, his wings ached.
"We should find a place to stop for the night," he called to her, and after a moment of hesitation, she agreed. They touched down at the forest edge and as Fluoride's legs took on his weight, he groaned and flexed his sore wings. He folded them against his back and looked around, taking in the clearing. They'd covered a good bit of distance, leaving behind them the Behemoth, the Gladebough Village, and the Shrieking Wilds. Well, mostly. The thick, twisted woods of the Shrieking Wilds rose at their back like a menacing, sleeping giant.
"You alright?" Cadbury asked. He glanced over and realized she'd caught him wincing. She was holding her own wings rather close to her body as well.
"Yeah," he replied. "I just haven't flown that far in a while."
"Me neither. Do you think you'll stay in Glennehaven longterm?" she asked as she began to set up camp.
Fluoride hesitated.
"I don't know," he said carefully. "I think so. I like it there. I like the dragons there. I think it's where Boreas plans to stay, too, and..."
"And you won't go anywhere he isn't," she finished. "I know."
"I wouldn't phrase it like that," he protested, half-laughing. "You're making us sound...I don't know. Clingy."
She glanced at him and raised an eyebrow. He frowned. She laughed and lined her makeshift nest beneath a thick-trunked plant with feathers and strips of cloth. He hastened to start designing his own with several soft objects and bent young green boughs in a circular frame. They set up camp quickly and efficiently, falling into a familiar pattern that felt only slightly interrupted without the addition of their friends.
"Cadbury," he said as they cleaned their plates of dinner, Fluoride with a crunchy assortment of beetles and Cadbury with a roasted salmon. She looked up expectantly.
"I wanted to talk to you about our pathing."
"Okay?" she said in the moment where he hesitated, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, first, can you give me a bit more information? We rushed out so quickly..."
"What do you want to know, Fluoride?" she asked, flicking her stripey tail around her paws. Her eyes were almost black in this light.
"I'm assuming this hatchling lived in the Hellwell Undercroft with your parents, but where exactly did your family lose his trail? And what does he look like? And what were the circumstances of his kidnapping?"
Cadbury looked at him for a moment before snorting. Fluoride didn't see what was so funny, but she was already talking, so he resisted the urge to needle her for answers.
"Cordial lived in the same lair as my parents, yeah. The trackers lost him at the Emperor's Wake, as I said, because apparently those ruffians," she peeled her lips back from her teeth in a snarl, "headed through there, probably specifically because they thought we'd hesitate about following them."
Fluoride kept his face neutral.
"As for his appearance, Cordial is a small, brown and pinkish coatl. His eyes are the same color as mine. Or he was last time I checked."
Fluoride cocked his head. "Wait a minute. You haven't been home since you were quite young-- Wouldn't Cordial be an adult by now?"
Cadbury chewed on her lip, avoiding his eyes, and Fluoride's suspicions were immediately heightened. "Cadbury?"
"He's eternally youthful," she said, and Fluoride's spirit soared.
"Isn't that a good thing?" he asked curiously. "I assumed we were on a time limit of less than a week because Cordial could be trained and sent to join whatever deity his kidnappers serve. But if he's eternally youthful, there's almost no chance he'll be exalted. It'll be easier to find him if he's still in Sornieth."
"That's true," she sighed, looking wearier than he'd ever seen her. "But dragons with eternal youth are so valuable for so many things, the least nefarious of which is just a status symbol. He's going to be sold and resold and possibly used in spells and the gods know what else, and he's...he's a baby, Fluoride. He won't understand what's happening."
"That's true..." said Fluoride slowly. When Cadbury's throat rippled with a swallow, he rose out of his nest and padded over to her, nudging his head against hers gently. To his relief, she leaned back into him.
"It'll be alright," he said, a promise it wasn't his place to make. "We'll find him.


~3/16/22