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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