They weren’t dragon-fleas. Shudder. The canine mind boggles at the idea of being bitten by a dragon-flea. I was bitten by a dragon-fly once (admittedly, I had caught it in my mouth, just because it was so big, fluttery and coming past, and might possibly be edible. I was a puppy then, months ago, and always hungry. Actually, I am usually hungry, and it was worse here in Sylvan, seeing as Fionn was eking out the food, and there wasn’t much to start with. One of the things about being a dog is, as you have no hands and you need your mouth, the place to carry food is in your stomach. The burying bones thing I never really got the hang of, as I’ve always been a dog of no fixed abode, moving with my pack. My pack is human and dragon, and they sometimes carry packs, with food in them. See what I mean about their confusing barks. Pack only means one thing to a dog: us.)
Anyway, the flea was bothering me, so I got up to see if I could scratch the bloodsucker loose and then bite it with my front teeth. As I was doing so, something occurred to me: If there were no animals on Sylvan... just what did these fleas and the mosquitoes eat, besides me?
We’d arrived in Sylvan through a gate into the place of rest. Rest is a wonderful, healing thing, provided you wake up, eventually. The dark trees there had decided it would be better, for them anyway, if waking up didn’t happen. Fionn had fiddled with the magic of the place, and made it the place of peaceful drowsiness... disturbed by insects which drank blood.
Fionn’s magic made the place attractive to mosquitos and fleas. Unfortunately, we’d been there when he did this. Fortunately, it kept us awake.
There had to be some source of blood, besides occasional travellers who fell into this world by accident. I was thinking about this, and wondering just how I could get the idea across to Fionn while I sniffed about for a suitable spot. . .
And then I gave a bark, but a very, very small one. The kind of bark a young sheepdog might make if a cat the size of a bear silently landed next to him. I can’t land on leaf-litter soundlessly, but it could.
This was not the kind of cat I barked at to see if it ran away. This was the kind of cat where I put my tail between my legs and ran as fast as I could back to my dragon. Maybe barking over my shoulder if I had the breath. Only... there were two of them. The second one was just about as much in my run-path as possible.
And they had real teeth. Not kitty teeth. Blades coming out their faces like yellow ivory daggers in the moonlight. Teeth nearly as long as my nose. And there was another of the big, stripy, nasty-looking cats dropping, as silent as mist, to the forest floor.
I had always understood that, besides everything else, we dogs are superior to cats because they don’t have packs. Or so I had thought. I wondered how they felt about dogs who rolled over into a suitably submissive pose. On the other hand they weren’t dogs. I was not too sure they’d understand, and one of those teeth would make a terrible mess of my undercarriage. So I tried the nervous growl that means “you’re bigger and uglier than me, but I am going to bite you if you try anything.”
Whatever they usually ate, did not growl at them like that.
Actually, it probably didn’t growl at all, but ran away if they hadn’t landed on it. And it probably was bigger than a mouse. . .or even a sheepdog. The cat made a low "Mwrrrrrllll" growl back at me. The sound throbbed. It was terrifying as noises go, but what was more scary. . .was that I understood it. Meb, my goddess, wanted me to understand, and she was working strong magics with her dvergar necklace of many powers. It helped with something as complicated as human. It worked just fine on something relatively simple like big-cat-that-run-in-packs language. I’ll put it to you as it came to me, without something of a speech impediment because of the teeth. I so do not intend to mock that unless I’m on top of a very wide-awake dragon.
It said something like: “What kind of food is this?” and it wasn’t addressed at me at all, but at the other big pussy-wussys. I’d guess this was a young one, just by the tone.
There is nothing like big teeth and a paw about the size of my head, and razor-sharp claws sliding out of that velvet paw that is reaching towards you to aid in learning a new language, really, really fast. “Not food!” I growl-mwrred back. It was hell on the throat, but not as bad as a claw through the neck. The language wasn’t that different. More about intonation than separate growls for everything.
“It talks.” The claw pulled back.
“Not some strange kind of water-deer then. It smells wrong. I do not like it,” said one of the big cats.
The feeling, trust me on this, was mutual. I was about to take my chances on running and barking, to see if these big pussies would like to be the mat in front of the fire (because the dragon was still bigger than them, and it set things on fire), when one of the three casually swiped something out of the air.