Minutes passed in silence. The girls’s eyes darted about the shack and her whole frame shook, but her eyes kept returning to the only exit and the jet-black creature which stood there. When he did not move, the girl finally spoke. “You’re a Scale,” she said simply.
He nodded.
“Can you speak?”
“Yes,” the creature responded smoothly.
“What do you want?” she asked quickly. “I don’t have anything you can take any more, I’m not powerful or anything, I’m nobody! I mean it, please! Don’t take me away!” Tears began to stream down her face.
The tall Scale sat down where he was. He folded long, plated arms over his crossed legs. “I will not hurt you,” he whispered. “I do not bring harm.”
The girl drew in a few ragged breaths. Her choked sniffling was the only sound in the room for some time before she recovered enough to ask “Then what are you doing here?”
“I heard that man say that you were to give help. I need help, and so I found you.”
The girl shook her head in confusion. “But I’m not… I mean, I’m a…” she stared at him, bewildered, from what he could tell. “You didn’t want a whore, then?” Whatever that word meant, she spat it out disdainfully.
“I do not know. Are you a ‘whore’?”
“I-” the girl began to say. She frowned, bowing her head. “No, I’m not.”
“Ah. I am sorry to confuse you. Where can I find one, if they are the ones who sell help?”
The girl raised her eyebrows at him. “You really don’t know what a whore is, do you?” The Scale shook his long head. “Well, there aren’t any around here. You’ll have to go further west to find those kinds of people.”
“Please help me, then. I need a person to help me. Do you offer your help to sell?”
“But what do you need help with?”
“I am on a journey,” the Scale explained. “I go west to find a dragon.”
The girl frowned at him. “There aren’t any dragons any more,” she said flatly. “You know that. There haven’t been any for hundreds of years. Not here, anyways. Why do you think you’re going to find one in the west?”
The Scale considered her. “We had heard that one had come, had made itself known. Have you not heard?”
“No,” the girl answered, shaking her head. “And if you go west, you will be killed. You don’t fit in. You’re-” the girl thought for a moment, then gestured widely to him. “You’re a Scale!”
He nodded. “I know. That is why I need a whore: to guide me.”
“N-no,” the girl stuttered. “You don’t need a whore; you need a guide, a person to speak for you. If you open your mouth, people will know.”
“I see. Will you be my guide, then? I can pay. I have very much gold.” To prove his point, the Scale patted the pouch at his side, which jingled enticingly.
She peered at him, swapping between the pouch at his side and his slitted yellow eyes.“I don’t know.”
“Ah. You have people to care for. You have a life to live here. I understand.”
The girl stretched out her legs in front of her, placing her head upon her knees. When she failed to speak, the Scale plodded over carefully and sat beside her. He noticed her back heaving slowly. “You are crying again,” he observed. “I am sorry.”
“It’s not you,” she coughed. “I’m sorry, I j-just can’t stop.”
They sat together in silence. The girl cried, and the Scale watched implacably. Eventually, she looked at the Scale. He felt her eyes peering into his own. “I guess I’ll just go to sleep, then.” She said. “You can stay here, for tonight.”
“You will not be my guide, then?”
“I can’t. You should just go back east; there’s nothing for you in the west.” She laid down upon the straw mat, her naked back facing him. “There’s nothing for anyone out there,” he heard her mumble.
The Scale hung his head, and looked out the window at the moon above. It gave off no warmth, but the sight entranced him. He pulled out a small knuckle-bone and turned it in his fingers, feeling the engravings upon it and muttering to himself. He repeated one word several times, barely audible: “Whore.” He turned to face the girl again after pondering for some time, and found that she had rolled over at some point. Her eyes locked with his own, and he watched as stars flickered within them, their reflections dancing within the deep brown pools. The Scale stared, fixated.
“What is it?” the girl asked, breaking him out of his reverie.
“What is a whore?”
The girl opened her mouth for a moment. Her lips pursed, and her eyebrows wrinkled. “You really don’t know?” she asked. He shook his head. She sighed, and stared at him for a few seconds before responding. “A whore is… a whore is a woman who sells herself. To men, that is.”
“Ah. Are you sure you are not a whore, then? You were trying to sell yourself to the men at the tavern, were you not?”
The girl’s face flushed, her cheeks turning a darker shade of brown, and she turned her eyes away from the Scale. “I- I was trying to. But it didn’t work; everybody here is still old-fashioned. All I got was ridicule. When you came up and offered six pieces of gold, I grew a bit worried. I’d heard stories of rich men paying girls like that, and it was always for horrible things. You scared me, but I needed that money.”
“I am sorry,” the Scale said quietly. “I did not want to scare anyone. It is why I wear this. I only want a guide to help me go west, and then I would leave.”
The girl looked at him again, and they locked eyes for a moment. “Is going west so important to you?” she asked. Her gaze did not waver.
Though he didn’t know why, the Scale reveled in her eyes once again. He could see them now, not a simple brown, but filled with ridges of darker shades and nearly orange streaks running along their edges. “It is very important. To me and to my tribe.”
“Why?”
Her eyes seemed so warm, like baked earth. “Are you able to be trusted?”
“Of course.”
He hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “We are dying. Slowly, our people are all dying. The magic of the earth is going away, and without it we cannot be reborn. A dragon in the west would mean that magic is returning, and we would be strong again. We would have purpose, and we would not sit and guard old ruins any longer. Even if the rumor we have heard is not true, we must see for ourselves; for if it is true, our tribe will not die.”
“But you’re a horde!” the girl exclaimed, surprised. “There’re thousands of you! You’re all over the East! Dont you just… make more? You’ve got to have women, don’t you? And what does magic have to do with it?”
The Scale cocked his head at her. “There are many of us, but our numbers are not so great any more. Without strong magic in the soil, we need more than our own remains to be reborn. But why do you speak of our females? They are reborn just as we are.”
“Reborn? What do you mean?”
The Scale paused. “It is… difficult to tell.” he said slowly. Her eyes questioned him. He tore himself away from their depths, looking at the rest of her. She lay on her side, still uncovered. Her delicate, earthy skin had the tone of soft leather, and her two breasts clung tightly to her like morning dew. She seemed so relaxed, so trusting of him.
His jaws moved, and more secrets poured from his mouth. “A Scale is not born,” he explained. “The first of us was a claw from a great dragon, planted in the ground. The claw broke into many pieces, and the pieces grew into us. We crawled from the earth and served our masters for many years, far away in Terethia.”