Friday, January 11, 2013

The Naming



The dragon was growing quickly and Riona was becoming worried that her mother might start noticing the larger and larger amounts of food going missing.  So she had to smuggle the dragon outside during her chores to give him more of an opportunity to hunt. He started in the barn. Riona had never thought that they had a mouse problem until the first day when he had caught five of them before she was done feeding the animals. He was smug for the next several hours until he realized there were no more in the barn and that they had all run away into the fields.
                The horses and chickens were afraid of him at first, but once they got used to him being there, they didn’t make as much noise. Riona was glad, because she wasn’t sure how she would have explained to her mother why the animals were constantly upset.
                After one long day, when they were both safely tucked up in her room for the night, it hit her that she still hadn’t named him. It wasn’t that hard to not use a name, after all, he could sense her thoughts and vice versa, there hadn’t been a time she had needed to use a name.
                He was sitting on the end of her bed, looking very much like an overgrown housecat. When he was stretched out from nose to tail tip he was now longer than her bed. But there he was, curled up by her feet, his body moving gently in time with his breathing, every now and then his tail would twitch.
                She tried to recall the stories of the Ryders that her mother had told her as a child, but none of the names really seemed to fit. There were Eos and Eris, the twin dragons. Then there came Matius, Letimer, Etretia, Lucia and she kept running down the list, but not one of them made any sense with the sleeping lump at her feet.
                Crossing her arms and furrowing her brow she just sat and watched him sleeping.
                Steam emitted from his nostrils with every breath and his scales shone a deep red in the little light that came in through her window. He twitched in his sleep and half rolled onto his back exposing his golden underside. All of his colors were of jewel tones, or precious metals that she had seen coming from mountains.
                “Hah!” The dragon woke with a start, his eyes wide looking around them.
                ‘Is something wrong?’ His mind voice sounded sleepy, but she noticed that his claws were held at the ready, his brown and gold flecked eyes rolled to rest on her. ‘Did you have the nightmare again?’ She noted that his tone took on a certain depth when he hit the word nightmare, and she smiled at his protectiveness.
                ‘No, nothing is wrong.’ His whole body relaxed again as his eyes stayed fixed on her. ‘I think I have a name for you.’ His mouth yawed open in the gesture she had come to recognize as his smile.
                ‘Well? Is it a good one?’ he asked impatiently.
                ‘I think it is.’ She waited a minute, wanting him to be surprised. She had learned quickly how to shield a few of her thoughts from him from time to time.
                ‘Tell me!’
                ‘I am going to call you, Feoras.’ She could mentally feel him rolling the word around in his mind and his feelings toward it.
                Suddenly he perked up, ‘I like it better than the other names you were running though. Feoras.’ He looked up at her with a quizzical expression, ‘Does it mean anything?’
                ‘Of course it does.’ He looked up at her expectantly. ‘I was sitting here thinking that all of the colors of your scales are like the gems that come out of the mountains, and Feoras means ‘of the mountain’ so I thought that it would fit you.’ His eyes lit up at the explanation.
                ‘You mean I’m going to be compared to the mountains all my life?’ His tone didn’t sound upset, but rather awed. She shrugged.
                ‘Well, I guess, if you put it that way.’ She could still faintly hear his mind mulling over and repeating the name again and again.
                ‘Well, I like it.’ He did his dragon smile again and re-curled himself at her feet as she laid down to sleep herself.

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