Chronicles of a Sleepy Rabite

“Excuse me”¦” The young woman ““ she couldn’t have been any older than 25, and she had long black hair and a motherly expression on her face ““ smiled gently at me as I put my ticket in the box at the front of the bus. While the bus driver didn’t give me a second glance, this woman seemed very, very concerned about me for some reason.

“Um”¦ Yes?” I tried to smile in a pleasant manner”¦ I really did. But all that came out was an exhausted and an annoyed grimace that probably made me look like a brat.

“Are you alone?” The woman spoke slowly, as if I were a kid that couldn’t understand grown-up speak. “Do you need help finding your mommy?”

“I’m good. Honest.” I tried to smile brighter ““ I wasn’t very good at the cute kid routine, and I certainly wasn’t fooling the young woman who leaned forward, bringing her face at eye-level to me.

“Young kids like you shouldn’t be on a bus alone”¦ are you lost? I can help you get to a family member”¦”

“I said I’m okay. Really. I know where I’m going.” I was trying very hard not to snap at this point, and my patience was really wearing thin.

“But you’re just a”¦”

“A kid. I know. I’m working on that. Excuse me”¦” I slipped between two standing passengers, making my way through the crowd to the back of the bus. Finding a place where I could hang onto the rail without having to having to be six feet tall, I closed my eyes, wondering how I managed to get into this situation.

My name is Krysit, and I’m a dragon.

It might come as a shock to you”¦ but dragons are real. We’re around you and you don’t even know it. The perky girl who made that latte for you earlier in the day? She was a dragon. That newscaster on Channel 7 who keeps squinting at the teleprompter and occasionally tripping on his words? He’s a dragon, too.

We don’t usually like dealing with humans. No offence, but you people are extremely difficult to be around. Human nature is barely tolerable as it is, so we tend to keep to ourselves. However, we sometimes need to go out in the human world and interact with you ““ that’s when we take on human forms.

A dragon doesn’t really have control over their human form. It depends on a lot of things: your nature, your age, even your subspecies. Celestial dragons tend to manifest as Asians, while manifested green dragons tend to look European. Most of the time, however, unless you’re really old (in which case you appear as an old man or woman), we tend to look like a young adult, or, at worst, a middle-aged human.

Unfortunately for me, though, I currently look like a ten-year old boy.

This wasn’t my choice. Believe me, there are better forms to appear under, and this isn’t one of them.

See, I was cursed. It sounds bad to just fling that word around, but a curse is just about the only way I can describe what happened to me.

I was pissed off at the world and pissed off at the Elders for not giving me the recognition I deserved. And why didn’t they? After all, I was the strongest pyromancer in Agratana (that’s one of our capitals, so if you haven’t heard of it, don’t worry ““ you’re not the only one). I had spent hundreds of years honing my skills to a fine, precise art, and the least they could do is make me one of the Esparion Knights; those people are the best of their class, and the ones who maintain order within our ranks. People look up to them with pride, respect, and fear.

But no. They refused. Mocked me, even. They said I was doing this for all the wrong reasons. That I was consumed with pride and selfishness. That I should go back and quietly meditate for a couple of decades on the true meaning of power.

So I went a little nuts. Can you blame me? The entire Council of Elders mocked me! I wasn’t a happy dragon. So I took out my frustrations on a nearby human village and torched the entire place. It was glorious.

There are rules in place to prevent humans from discovering the existence of dragons. That goes back to the whole human nature aspect. While I can respect that you guys are curious, I really don’t want to be laid out on an examination table being poked with various sharp and pointy objects to see what makes me tick. So when someone torches a town of 300 souls because they were having a bad day, a lot of clean up work ““ both physical and mental ““ needs to be done.

Dragon law is a little strange. We don’t have those lengthy trials that you humans do (though they’re incredibly entertaining), since the Elders can just look in your mind and see all the evidence there. Punishment is based purely on the whim of the Elders, too. So when I was brought in chains to the Council, well”¦ it’s not like I could hide anything.

They stripped me of my power”¦ reached into my soul, yanked the Fire Within and cast it away like it was garbage. It took me hundreds of years to cultivate it; it took them thirty seconds to take it all away.

When a dragon is stripped of their power like that, things change. It kinda does something to them”¦ in my case, it made me pissed off, and I found out that my human form was”¦ diminished.

Oh, the puns.

I hate my human form. I hated it before, and I hate it even more now that I’m whelp-sized. I still have reddish-brown hair, but it looks like it was hacked off with a carving knife. My red eyes are still there, though (small comfort), and if I look at myself in the mirror long enough, my irises still have that starry vortex in them. I have dark skin, which freaks the humans out even more ““ what kind of kid gets a tan? And”¦ I’m short. I’m told it’s normal.

But because I’m now banished from Agratana for 500 years, and I can’t go into a dragon settlement without alarms sounding and children screaming, well”¦ I don’t have much of a choice but to hang out with you guys.

But I won’t like it.