Cynobria jotted down the solution to the final problem and sighed. She breathed on the ink to let it dry, then closed the book and set it down.


    ‘Done already?’ asked Yselle.


    ‘Done already,’ Cynobria said, flexing her paw. She removed the ferrule she’d been writing with from her claw and wiped it against a cloth. ‘They’re making them too easy.’


    She set the ferrule neatly on the small table she shared with Yselle. They’d rented this nook in the library for a little after-class study session. It was a small thing, walls lined with books Cynobria didn’t care much about, a small table just enough for the two of them and a lit chandelier overhead—two concentric wooden circles lined with candles—which made the room feel somewhere between cosy and cramped.


    ‘Maybe you’re just too good.’ Yselle shot her a grin. In the well-lit library there was a red-purple glint to her dark scales, her eyes a light violet, set against the frame of her slim dark snout and curved graphite horns.


    ‘Flatterer,’ Cynobria teased, though she was happy—if a little disappointed—to hear the praise. This book was only one of many of the sort she’d got—filled with riddles, problems and convoluted conundrums. She’d used to spend hours solving them, relishing each for the challenge it had brought. As of late, though, it had started to fade. They grew too easy, too quick to solve—and even a few days’ challenge hardly brought the desired thrill. The thing about artificial problems was that there were patterns to them, many locks yielding under the same key, and once she cracked those, any challenge they gave went up in flames like straw.


    ‘Well, if you’re done, could you have a look at this? For the life of me, I can’t come to terms with your weird Ablyneese grammar.’


    Cynobria smiled and leaned to look over Yselle’s shoulder, at her notes from the class.


    It wasn’t Svarish, but it was close enough—they were studying Krahan, which belonged to the same family as Cynobria’s native tongue and, despite some differences, she found little issue with it, even if for most of her Tarangean classmates it proved a challenge.


    Cynobria glanced through the page, looking for what Yselle seemed to be struggling with.


    ‘You have to use the locative case here,’ she said, pointing. ‘And it will add an “-e” suffix. “NE HVASE”. Here. See?’


    Instead of looking, Yselle’s head fell against the table with a soft thunk. ‘Why would anyone need seven grammar cases?’ she groaned. ‘It’s like they asked themselves “Hey, how can we complicate this to be as inconvenient for everyone as possible?” and someone was feeling particularly inspired.’


    ‘Hayar has seventeen.’


    ‘No.’ Yselle lifted a claw to silence her, head still flat against the table. ‘No no no no no. Don’t make it any worse.’


    ‘It’s not that hard, really,’ said Cynobria, sliding the notes over to Yselle. ‘You use locative when talking about where something is located, like—’


    ‘Why do I add the “-e”?’


    Cynobria’s wings twitched in a shrug. ‘It would sound weird otherwise.’


    Yselle groaned.


    ‘It might seem,’ Cynobria went on, leaning in, ‘that there are more exceptions than rules here, but really, it all comes together quite nicely, if I may say so.’


    ‘Right,’ said Yselle, sounding entirely not convinced. ‘You know, if you complain about all your riddles being too easy, maybe you should try learning Hayar’s seventeen cases instead. See how easy that is.’


    Cynobria smiled, a reply ready on her tongue when she stopped, considering. She had never tried learning from scratch something as expansive as a language—Svarish and Tarangean she had learned in her first years after hatching, and the Krahan classes provided hardly any challenge, so similar to Svarish at times she thought she had a better grasp on it than learnéd Noteuf. Hayar in the other paw…


    ‘You’re considering it.’ Yselle lifted her head, looking at Cynobria a little hollowly. Her frills quivered. ‘You are really considering it.’


    Cynobria grinned. ‘You always have such wonderful ideas.’


    ‘I was joking.’


    ‘Well,’ said Cynobria, tilting her head, flicking an ear, ‘I’m not.’ Her tail-tip twitched excitedly. ‘Oh, this could be interesting.’


    ‘It is official,’ said Yselle, addressing the empty space of the nook around them, the shelves crammed with dusty books silent witnesses to her claim. ‘My girlfriend is crazy.’


    ‘Oh, please.’ Cynobria bumped her snout against Yselle’s cheek, ‘What’s new?’


    Hayar was hard.


    Some part of Cynobria knew it to be a good thing, and it relished the challenge the language had posed. It was unlike anything she had studied before—it shared hardly any common ground with either Tarangean or any of the Ablyneese tongues. She could deal with vocabulary—it was simple memorisation, which, though not much enjoyable, she prided herself on being good at (and the word formation, the turning of a noun to a verb to a participle clause, had patterns to it, ones she could look for, crack, understand), but the grammar…


    Was this how everyone else felt in the Krahan classes?


    Cynobria gritted her teeth, pondering an exercise, and jotted down an answer. She sighed, took up her book and flipped to see the correct declination of “see”.This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Her answer was wrong.


    Slow breath in. Slow breath out. No fire, not even smoke. She wouldn’t want to damage the lovely Hayar book, would she?


    A few calming breaths later she was back at the exercise, trying to crack the next answer. It seemed… oddly similar to her native’s instrumental case. She frowned and then, not entirely sure, wrote her answer down. She read it aloud. It… didn’t sound too bad, hopefully? She leafed to the end of the book for the answer.


    Wrong.


    Again.


    She squeezed her eyes and slammed her paw into the table, and a metallic crack accompanied the impact. She winced and, with deliberate slowness, lifted her paw to an expected sight—she hadn’t removed the ferrule she’d been writing with. The thing lodged onto her claw and, on impact, broke, spilling dark blue ink across her black pad and the desk.


    She breathed in, barely managing to stop herself from clawing at the table once more. She moved to take the ferrule off, if only to continue her venting without making everything worse.


    It wouldn’t come off.


    The impact must have dislocated parts of it, and now it was stuck on her claw, dirty and broken, taunting her like only an inanimate object could. She tugged harder, but to little avail. And then more. And more, and more and more andmore andmoreandmoreandmoreand—


    The ferrule at last gave way under Cynobria’s furious assault, but it didn’t go out without a fight—it relented by breaking further apart, an explosion of ink all across Cynobria’s paws and desk and practice book.


    ‘Flame-blasted—URGHHH!’ Cynobria roared, smashing her paw into the table again, strong enough to flare a fresh wave of pain. Cynobria hissed. She dimly realised she could damage her books even more, and a distant part of her knew she would be regretting this later, but at this moment she couldn’t care. Because this blasted ferrule—


    ‘What is going on here?’


    And of course Mum was here now because why not.


    ‘Nothing,’ Cynobria said flatly.


    ‘Bree,’ said Mum, with the barest hint of a growl, and Cynobria focused everything she had on biting back the anger that was forcing itself to spill.


    ‘The ferrule broke,’ she managed.


    ‘Is that it?’ Mum still stood in the doorway; she wasn’t entering Cynobria’s room, and though it was a little thing, it felt absurd just how grateful for it she was.


    Cynobria breathed for a time, Mum’s presence at the door forcing the anger to withdraw. She wasn’t turning to her, not yet—she needed to calm a little more.


    At length she said, ‘I can’t get Hayar grammar right.’


    ‘Bree, dear.’ The impossible calm in her voice only fanned the slowly dying embers of Cynobria’s ire. ‘You can’t expect to be able to do everything immediately.’


    ‘But it’s been three months!’ Cynobria whirled where she stood, finally looking at her mother. Melodia stood there, framed by the grey stone doorway, her mosaic of blue scales almost uniform in the shadow. A picture-perfect Ablyn—a strong build, though without the bulkiness of Cavrians, and a nimble step, without the Taragneans’ dancelike quality. Her crest stood proudly along the back of her neck, light blue wings folded neatly against her sides. Two pairs of curved white horns adorned the back of her head. ‘Why can’t I get it still?’


    Mum looked at her for a few moments, considering. Right as Cynobria readied herself to speak further, Mum asked, ‘How long, do you think, it took me to learn to speak as well as this?’


    Cynobria frowned, only then realising the last sentence was spoken in Tarangean. ‘Six months?’ she ventured.


    ‘A year,’ said Mum, and before Cynobria could react, added, ‘And even then it wasn’t like this. I could talk without tripping on my own words. For the fluency I currently have it took another year of living here, and even after that I was—still am—learning.’


    ‘A year?’ Cynobria groaned. ‘That’s too much!’


    ‘Why?’


    Cynobria stared at her, stumped. Why? It was obvious, wasn’t it? Clear as day. And yet, as Cynobria thought how to reply, she could find no words to say, no proper reason as to why.


    ‘I… uh, that’s too slow,’ she said lamely. Was that really the best she could muster?


    ‘Who are you racing, Bree?’ Cynobria said nothing. ‘You took up Hayar yourself, didn’t you? It should be fun. If it’s not—why force yourself?’


    ‘No,’ Cynobria said with sudden defiance. ‘I can’t stop. I can’t give up like this. That—’ she pointed to the miserable mess on her desk— ‘is my only “fun” right now.’ She realised how utterly ludicrous that sounded as soon as it left her maw, and Mum’s expression was a silent mirror of that thought. There was a stinging in her eyes, and Cynobria grit her teeth, bracing for the inevitable comment that would crush her flimsy illusion of calm.


    ‘Alright.’


    Her head snapped up with a sharp and shaky breath.


    ‘I can’t stop you from learning Hayar,’ said Mum. Calmly. Matter-of-factly. Sincerely. ‘Nor should I. But mind, Bree—no one gets it right the first time. And it might take a fair bit to hone your skill to a point you’re pleased with it. You’re a smart dragon, smarter than me, I’d say, so you might take less than a full year. Or more—Hayar is much harder than Tarangean after all. But even smart dragons need rest. Take a break, for now, and come back to it later. Don’t beat yourself up for failures. Failing is how you learn. Can you promise me that?’


    ‘Yes, Mum,’ Cynobria said unconvincingly.


    A bit of hesitation. ‘It’s the war too, isn’t it?’


    Cynobria averted her gaze, jaws tense, and swallowed. ‘It’s far away from us.’


    ‘It is.’


    Her paws flexed against the floor. Damn her. She was making her talk.


    Cynobria didn’t know her homeland—fourteen years, and all of them spent living not among her kin. They rarely visited, with her parents’ busy schedule and the fractured relationship Dad had with his own, but most of all because it wasn''t safe. Vyl had fallen years ago. Recently, some Albyneese lands too, though with those the Cavrians’ progress was much slower, especially after the Conqueror’s death—thank the spirits. Slower, but progress it was. If they sat by, would Cynobria ever see her homeland? Or should she not be learning Hayar, but Cavrian instead? Her parents kept telling her to be proud of being a Svar, and yet all Cynobria saw of their own love for the country was running away.


    Cynobria stilled her tongue. They’d had this talk too many times before.


    When it was clear she wouldn''t speak, Mum exhaled slowly, lingered a little more in the doorway, then said, ‘If you want to talk, I’ll be in the kitchen with dad.’


    ‘Alright,’ said Cynobria.


    She turned to the ruin of her desk—the blue ink splotches marring both the book and the desk itself, the broken ferrule sitting in the centre like a proud king.


    Anger stirred inside her again, but Cynobria only closed her eyes and breathed. Mum was right. She needed a break.


    When the tears eventually came they brought relief and cleansing, and she welcomed them with open paws.