On the last day of the month, the full moon shone high above the bleak black. Scurrying through the town’s smallest streets, Pi hastened his step, little legs now moving in a frenzy. Bloodfar unnerved him in the small hours. The pirate port possessed an eery habit of jumping out at you when you least expected it. 

Vollis’s manor was not far, up the dirt track and past the kip. The horses turned away as he passed, still spooked by their owner’s most recent acquisition despite his having lived there three years. Pi was equally as perturbed by the stallion and his three mares, though he noted they all shared a similar elongated snout to him. 

Bathed in ochre candlelight, he closed the heavy door with a clunk and sighed. The entryway turned black as ash clouds plumed from his nostrils. With a frantic wave of his declawed hand, the glistening motes dissipated. Vollis never minded the mess, but the serving girl certainly did. Just as Pi was sure he’d smeared every last ash particle from the shelves, a familiar clattering reverberated through the manor’s ceiling. 

Vollis was clambering about the laboratory as usual, arms laden with jars and tinctures and terrariums. In his erudite fervour, he paid no mind to Pi’s entrance. The laboratory was housed in one of the manor’s many towers. It contained a single potion pot, bubbling over a fire at the centre of the mosaic floor. The walls were coated in curved display cases, filled with a thousand books and boxes, themselves each filled with the remnants of ancient beasts and man’s triumph over them. 

“Pi!” Vollis cheered upon noticing his assistant. “There you are, my boy.” 

Vollis was a kindly man, somewhere in his second century and a practising wizard for at least three-quarters of that. Though Pi did not often meet his brethren, he knew he was lucky to have been bought by such a forgiving owner. Dragons such as he, though domesticated, were still considered a conniving bunch. Take your eyes off them for a single second and out the window they’d fly. But Pi, who greatly enjoyed the sugar grapes and kaas that Vollis plied him with, bore no intention to leave. 

“Come come, that’s it. You have a busy night ahead of you,” Vollis divulged, pushing a pair of half-moon glasses up the sheer bridge of his nose. 

Abandoning the tome he was scouring, the wizard produced a pair of tweezers from deep within the drooping sleeve of his cloak. Pi, well-trained, extended his tail. Not even so much as a whimper could be heard as Vollis removed one of his assistant’s tail spines, or when he selected and plucked from Pi’s head a particularly vibrant scale.

“Perfect.” 

Pi beamed at the praise. With a flick of Vollis’s wrist, the premium ingredients disappeared into the thick, beige gloop boiling in the pot. The sickness potion got angry as it dissolved his givings, yet the new, crystalline blue seemed as calm as an aestival sky. 

Vollis’s beady eyes turned once again to Pi’s small form. 

“Now, you have a very important task tonight, my boy,” Vollis explained. 

“Anything.”

“I have procured a fascinating beast. Rare. This beast has been shipped to me from hundreds of thousands of miles west of here. No small job,” the wizard tapped the side of his nose. “You must go to the port-”

“I don’t want to go to the port,” Pi protested. He was deathly terrified of water, as most dragons were, but Vollis was already shaking his head. 

“You must go to the port,” he said, softly. “But if you collect this beast for me and bring it back here, you may have the remaining small hours all to yourself.”

An interesting proposition. Almost too good to resist. The wizard bent two creaking legs in front of Pi, reaching into his sleeve for a second time. 

“Ah, let’s see. There you are!” 

Vollis pulled from the cloak a colossal, colourless diamond, almost as big as Pi’s widening eyes. He remained mesmerised even as Vollis continued. 

“I’ll pack it for you. And you should take this,” he grunted, plunging back into his storage sleeve. “I must clean up in here. Got it.”

Pi was handed a small chunk of a particularly aged kaas. 

“You know I trust you, but I must stress again, this is a very important task,” he uttered. “Off you go, then!”

Freed from the sewers, Pi emerged onto Bloodfar’s port, where docked there floated a great-ship of redwood some thousands of years old. Though, it was not the wood that caught Pi’s attention and the stunned looks of the vagabonds milling around the jetties. It was that every inch, every centimetre, every possible space on the surface of the vessel was covered with jewels. Scarlett and sapphire and sunset and cerulean and cerise and canary and copper and charcoal and chartreuse. Every colour was accounted for, though those who looked too long trying to discern them were rubbing watering eyes. The shine was simply too much. Gawping as he was at the towering vision of stained glass and shimmers, Pi did not notice he was about to be accosted by six rabid strays. He squawked when their growls grew closer, cowering in on himself. 

The nearby captain’s attention came to rest on the sorry sight. 

“You?” He boomed, extending a plump finger to the stout dragon, the hounds scampering. 

“Me?” Pi squeaked. 

“Good Lord!” The silence left in the wake of the captain’s words snapped when he, and his three minions, burst into hearty laughter. It went on for some time. Pi shifted on his feet until, at last, the giggles waned. 

“There’s no way. Simply no way you’ll get that back up the hill.” 

Wiping a tear from his eye, the captain looked again at Pi.

“Do you have payment?” 

Pi lugged the diamond from behind him, the jewel quite unassuming now. 

“I’ll be taking that, if you don’t mind,” the big man said, snatching the heavy gem from Pi’s paw before he could react. 

“Up you go.” 

Ascending the side of the great ship on nothing but a few planks of old driftwood, Pi’s nostrils flared. Blood. The stench of it was ripe in the air, so ripe as he had not smelt since Vollis skinned that dying selkie. As he climbed the ladder, captain underneath him, he followed the crusted crimson trails in flowing stains down the side of the ship. 

When finally he reached the deck, he saw immediately that the blood was emptying from a beast just like he. Only this dragon was far, far bigger. While Pi’s scales could fit in the palm of his hand when they fell out, each of the behemoth’s burgundy shards was the size of a serving platter. A soft underbelly blanketed the deck, and at every fatty fold a serrated metal claw dug into its insides, anchoring it to the wood. Its tail was so long it ran along the taffrail and off the end of the ship. 

He wandered tentatively to the bow, deckhands ignoring the presence of their newest and littlest guest. Pi paid equally as much attention to them, eyes locked in terror and delight on the hulking head, muzzled by metres upon metres of golden chain. His scales flared with the heat from its maw, two black holes leading into the mass. And yet, he shuddered. A singular, browned tooth curled over his brethren’s bottom lip, sharpened point glinting in the moonlight. The diamond he’d relinquished to the Captain seemed too small a payment. For this! This…thing. The captain was right, though: Pi couldn’t take it back to Vollis.

“Where did it come from?” The smaller dragon asked of the presence he sensed behind him. 

“Caught it on its way back from the nest.” 

The boy, illuminated in red lamplight, flicked his head west. Both of the long braids hanging over his shoulders imitated the movement. His slender figure sat cross-legged on the step from which he had watched Pi board, coring the apple in his fist expertly. He offered half to Pi, not once looking up from the silver blade. Pi produced the slice of kaas from behind his ear, crumbling it down the middle and placing it on the apple. With a short blast of his heart flame, the kaas melted, dripping over the apple’s flesh and browning with the heat. He gave it back to the boy. 

“I’m Patch,” the boy grinned. 

“Pi,” said Pi, for a second forgetting all about the vicious scene behind him. 

“Haven’t smelled cooking like that in a long time, Pi.” 

“No kaas at sea?”

“Well, you can’t hardly milk dragons.” 

Pi felt his back blaze with a particularly heavy sigh from the wild thing. The wildest thing. 

“How did you catch it?” He whispered. 

“Wasn’t easy. Almost destroyed the ship. Took 23 men, the loudmouth did.”

Loudmouths. Pi rarely heard the term in Bloodfar. After all, he was the only dragon for miles in every direction. Still, domestic dragons were undeniably common. You only need seek out a market town to spot the rows of eggs, lined up and ready for purchase. Loudmouths were those most ancient of dragons, still baring their pre-domestication physiology. Tail spines that could spear sharks. A heart flame to burn cities. 

“How many have you caught?”

“Diamonds like this are only traded for the biggest and best. My father is the richest dragon hunter ever to have lived. Our family has dragon hunted for thousands of years.” 

Pi stared somewhere past the boy. The boy whose father was responsible for his walking on two legs, his speaking their tongue. For his being hatched in a human home. For his life in captivity. 

“-millions left, they think.”

“Pardon?”

Patch only laughed, a short, sharp blast through his nose. 

“I like dragons, me. You fly, Pi?”

Pi extended his flimsy wings, where the customary snips had been made through his dorsal tendon. 

“You ever tried?”

He shook his head. He knew some smallmouths were now bred with deliberately stunted wings, limiting the need for a post-hatch clipping entirely. Those poor dragons didn’t even have the chance to try. Could he…

“Shame. It would’ve made our trip much easier.” 

“Your trip?”

“Our trip. To the crow’s nest. Come on.” 

Patch sprang to his feet, dancing over to another ladder running up the side of a sky-scraping pole. Just visible under the stars was a small basket, swaying in the breeze.  

Though it was particularly chilling up in the nest, the further away from the ocean’s gurgling surface he was, the better Pi felt. Patch extended his spyglass, leaning over the nest’s edging and forcing the entire thing to swing. Pi gulped. 

“Here. You get a good view of it up here,” Patch suggested, handing Pi his spyglass. 

Through wisps of steam and cloud, Pi saw the sprawled body splayed out in its entirety. The sheer size of the thing was undeniable. Not only the biggest dragon Pi ever saw, but the biggest of anything. If that thing stretched out its wings it could lodge the entire ship under them and fly off wherever it pleased. 

“The wizard will treat it well?”

“Very well, I think. Very well. He treats me so,” Pi reassured him. The small dragon knew that he certainly would never be able to make his own potions. 

“Look that way,” Patch’s soft touch guided the spyglass eastwards. “That’s the direction of the Gugenbelte, where I’m from.” 

“Are there dragons there?”

“Like you. To be sure.” 

“How much is a smallmouth?” Pi enquired, immediately. 

“How much were you?”

“Four farpennies.” 

“Hah!” Patch’s piercing laugh made the dragon’s ears twitch. “Lot more than that now.”

A shrieking bell clanged once, twice, three times below. 

“That’s final call. You’d best wake him up,” Patch shouted over the mounting hollering. 

“I can’t carry that thing!” Pi began to panic. Vollis gave him the night’s freedom, though now it seemed he would have to spend the next precious hours lugging a loudmouth up the side of Bloodfar’s cliffs. 

“Well, you’d best hope you can hold onto the leash.” 

Patch smiled for a final time, placing his blade between bared teeth. With a flash of his bushy eyebrows in Pi’s direction, the human hopped up to the rail and without a second thought, fell backwards into thin air. Pi gasped, rushing to the edge just in time to see Patch swing to safety on a great twine of rope wrapped around his ankle. His paws came to rest on the diamond-encrusted rail, while he watched the expert display. Like the carts on market day from the manor’s highest tower, the minuscule deckhands rushed to and fro in perfect synchronicity. 

Though the matter at hand was urgent, Pi’s mind wandered with his gaze. Out to sea, out to the Gugenbelte where he could just make out the raised lip of land on the horizon. Back to Bloodfar, to the manor’s towers, a mirage behind the swirling tendrils of fresh storm clouds. Pi fingered one of the decorative gems between his talons. Deep purple and coated, it looked like a sugar grape. 

He never meant to break it. The stone simply fell out of its mould and behind his ear. He never meant to climb the rail either, but he was certainly up there now. Scrunching his eyes closed, Pi remembered the images from Vollis’s encyclopaedias of loudmouths. They could glide through the air like a child’s kite. His heart flame blazed bright in his chest, erratic thumping echoing in his ears. Do it, Pi thought. Try Pi. 

Leagues below, the loudmouth began to stir. 

Featured image credit: AcidifyArt on DeviantArt