Feye's hatchery quest [part 2]

Ah, the war. The thing that had taken her mother’s life first, when her family couldn’t afford to heal her due to the rising cost of medicine, and her father’s second, when he was caught in the crossfire during one of his business trips. She didn’t want to fight in the war, and her parents didn’t either, but what else could a seventeen-year-old girl do when her parents are both dead within a year, her brother not yet old enough for proper management of the business that was their only source of income, and herself unemployed and without any formal education?

The day that she heard the news, she mourned for her father with her brother. No one would accept a family of orphans with no inheritance to their name and nothing to offer, even if they had the money to spare. So Feye made one of the most reckless decisions she had in her life, and flagged down the same courier that had delivered the news of her father’s passing.

“Please,” she had begged the courier and his dragon, “take us to where you are. I’d rather work with dragons and live, than let my brother starve on the streets.” The courier, a boy not much older than she was and someone who she was acquainted with, ended up allowing them to ride with him. (The poor dragon was a bit overburdened, and didn’t want to grow any larger, so her brother ended up having to ride in the dragon’s claws.) Upon arriving, she firstly realised that there were a lot more women here than she was told. And secondly that their dragons looked to be all massive and clearly used in the same war that had taken her parents’ lives. She didn’t want to fight in that war, she didn’t want to take a side. But her choices were do it or starve.

So she went to the authority who managed this flock of dragons, a gathering of unsurprisingly all men, and again pleaded with them if she could stay. They agreed, but only if she proved she could learn everything in time. Feye was assigned to the same dragon she had first met, that day when she was five and playing outside, and learnt that it had been a female Wind element dragon named Raka. Evidently this dragon, with its iridescent black feathers and gentle nature, was a good beginner’s guide, for she saw several other boys learning from its rider just as she was.

This is when all the secret study she did as a kid came in handy. She was careful to hide it from her parents, but she had a feeling that they knew. And maybe, on some level, they wanted her to have all these skills in case something like the war happened. Feye learnt quickly, and by the end of the month she could list off exactly how to harness and de-harness a small-sized dragon like the courier she came in on, as well as the steps to cleaning its black and purple feathers. But more than that, she had learnt what the dragon looked like when it was appreciative (purple glowing eyes half closed and feathers fluffed), curious (antennae extending out and gently touching her hands), startled (body tucked and the barbs on its crest standing tall)…

They had accepted her in the end, of course, because she consistently outperformed her peers in pretty much every aspect of dragon care. That was to be expected, considering the hours she put in each night in her room (now shared with her brother) reading over the lengthy pages of manuals on dragon care, or dragon elements, or how they even came to be. And maybe some part of her was still filled with the anger that she had locked into a box so far away from the front, anger at the world that had forced her hand to join the same war that took her parents from her and her brother, anger that women were not treated with nearly the same respect as men, and she took it all out on studying for this. Over time, as much as she still hated contributing to this war by caring for their dragons, she had to admit these little (or big, or massive in the case of quite a few she’d seen in combat) creatures were growing on her.