Friendship in the Far South

When Nacen was done cleaning herself, she rolled onto her back and left her towel spread out over her underbelly. "Ok. I've had another thought. It's weird and maybe disgusting. Want to hear?" she offered, glancing at Harkwin.

Harkwin had been staring at Nacen's underbelly—the wet cloth was thin enough that he could see the faint outline of her genital slit, which somehow made it even more noticeable than if she'd just been lying there without the towel. He hurriedly snapped his gaze back upwards, but not before Nacen noticed and gave him an amused grin. "Uh... Sure. What were you thinking about?" Harkwin said.

Nacen gestured loosely right towards where Harkwin had been staring at. "So we just mated, obviously. And when you finished it was by having this... fluid shoot out from your penis right into me."

Harkwin blinked. He really had no idea where this was going. "Uh... yes...?" he replied slowly.

Nacen's snout scrunched up as she frowned. "And that fluid is alive. Sort of. It's like this... It's full of sperm cells. So right now, lots of very tiny parts of you are swimming around inside me, trying to find one of my egg cells which they can combine with."

Harkwin opened his mouth to reply, then he changed his mind and closed his mouth again. "Uhhh..."

Lying back, Nacen rested her paws on her chest and stared up at the ceiling of the snow hut, looking thoughtful. "And literally every single one of my ancestors has done that. And your ancestors too. There was always a male dragon and a female dragon, and then they hump each other with the drake putting an actual part of his body inside the drakka until he can shoot out a tiny liquid bit of himself into the female, and it combines and grows into an egg which gets laid out and eventually hatches into a tiny baby dragon, chirping and needy for attention."

"I..." Harkwin was quiet for a few moments as he mentally repeated what Nacen was saying, trying to analyse the concept. "I think... that's life? I'm not sure if it's beautiful or disgusting—maybe both."

Lying side by side on their sleeping bags, Nacen slid her tail over and entwined it with Harkwin's. "I don't know why I brought that up? I guess I just thought about it since so much of your seed was dripping out of me. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm not in heat, and we could just freeze to death in the next few hours. I don't know about you, but I don't have any siblings, so that would just be the end of my bloodline. What a shame."

"Let's hope we don't die then, " Shifting over, Harkwin lay down beside Nacen and extended his wing to cover her. "I'll keep you warm..."

Still lying on her back, Nacen grinned and grabbed his wing, covering herself like a blanket. "Thanks! Although if you freeze to death from the storm, I think I'm honour bound to freeze to death along with you, since you flew all the way out here to rescue me."

"Since I flew all the way out here to rescue you, I think the best thing you should do is not freeze to death. So if at all possible, I suggest we both do our best to avoid dying," Harkwin casually replied.

Nacen's smile faded, and she let out a quiet sigh. "Huhh... I don't want to die, and I don't want to be alone. Joking aside, this storm is terrible."

Harkwin adjusted his wing and hugged Nacen closer. "I don't want to be alone either. We should get some rest. It's been a really, really long day."

Nacen shook her head. "I don't know if I can sleep. Not with that storm outside."

"Is the wind too noisy?"

"It's not the wind. It's just... the knowledge that if I go to sleep in this storm, I really might never wake up again. What if... these are our last moments alive? I have so many things in life that I haven't done yet. It feels like I've barely even gotten started on all the things I want to do." Nacen's voice got even quieter. "I don't want to die."

Harkwin wasn't sure how to reassure her, but he knew he had to try. "We won't die. Snow is a good insulator, and we have the hot spring to provide warmth. It might be cold, but hopefully not deathly cold. This storm is supposed to be a fast one—it arrived faster than expected, so hopefully it'll pass quickly."

"That's true..." Nacen leaned against him, pressing herself against his side.

"There's no use worrying about it. We've tried our best. Just relax and get some rest," Harkwin suggested. He reached over for the oil lamp and turned it down to a dim, flickering glow, then he snuggled up against Nacen, with his wing still mantled over her.

Nacen took a deep breath, then she let it out slowly. "It's warm here... warm when I'm next to you." She lay down her head and closed her eyes, and after a moment Harkwin did the same. The roaring of the wind formed a flat, constant backdrop of noise, and it was comforting to be right next to Nacen. Within less than a minute, tiredness had caught up to Harkwin and he was fast asleep.

---

When Harkwin next woke up, his first impression was of mixed temperatures—one side of him felt warm and comfortable, but the other side felt cold. His mind was still drifting in that nebulous realm between awake and asleep, but dimly he was aware of those two diametrically opposing temperature states.

Slowing waking out of slumber, Harkwin felt the remnants of half-remembered dreams slip away and vanish completely, replaced by real memory and proper awareness. It took some exertion of will, but he managed to blink his eyes open and the world spun into focus.

He was inside a darkened snow dome constructed by his own magic, and the oil lamp was still dimmed down to a gentle flicker that threw long shadows around the snowy walls. Harkwin could hear the hot spring bubbling softly, and a dull rumble came from outside the dome as the winds of the storm buffeted the shelter.

Harkwin's right side was warm and comfortable, which turned out to be because there was a female dragon with scales of sandy beige snuggled against that side. Nacen had her wing opened up and wrapped around his back, holding him against her chest. They'd fallen asleep with him holding her, but at some point in the night this had become reversed. Nacen's wing wasn't fully open and so it didn't cover him entirely—Harkwin's left side was exposed to the air, and there he felt a deep chill which stood in sharp contrast to the warmth he got from the sleeping bag and from Nacen.

Ever so slowly Harkwin glanced over to see if Nacen was awake, but her eyes appeared to be closed. In the dim fiery light cast by the oil lamp, Nacen's scales looked darker than her usual beige, almost a tan brown colour. Harkwin's gaze slid across her body, taking in all the neatly tessellated scales that covered her—from the miniscule scales that neatly covered her muzzle, to the huge scale plates on her wings that acted movable flight control surfaces.

Beneath the dull rumble of the storm and the steady bubbling of the hot spring, Harkwin could barely hear the slow, quiet sound of Nacen's breathing. Her scales were smooth and warm against his, moving slight in time with every breath. It was... pleasant and calming to be lying next to her. But since he was already awake, Harkwin decided that he wanted to check on the walls of the snow shelter to make sure that the steam from the hot spring wasn't melting them.

Moving with great slowness, Harkwin carefully used his forepaw to lift Nacen's wing away from his back, and then he shifted his tail where it was partially entwined with hers. As he slowly disentangled himself from Nacen, he made sure to keep things quiet and gentle so as not to wake her up. This careful process took about half a minute, and then Harkwin rolled back onto the far side of his own sleeping bag.

Lying on his own, he could already feel that the air temperature was much lower than it had been before. The sleeping bags were made of several layers, with a thick padding to sleep on and also a thinner blanket cover to serve as insulating layer. Nacen was lying closer to the hot spring, so hopefully she wasn't cold, but Harkwin carefully covered her up with her sleeping bag's blanket layer just in case.

Harkwin wasn't quite sure how long he'd been asleep, but it must have been hours and the full force of the storm had clearly arrived. With the howling of the winds from outside, he hoped that their makeshift ice hut would hold up. Unfurling a wing, he extended a wingtip towards the walls.

At first contact, Harkwin winced silently and snapped his limb back. The wall of whitish ice crystals was more than just solid—it was frozen and deeply cold. Pushing to his feet, Harkwin took a few silent steps over to the wall and he cautiously tapped a forepaw against it just to check again.

On a normal day, Harkwin's frost affinity meant that the temperature of snow or ice wasn't enough to bother him—he could still feel the cold, but walking in snow wouldn't hurt his paws as it might for a dragon without frost affinity, as his magic kept the heat from transferring out of his body. However, this was storm cold. The ice of the wall seemed to bite at him, leeching heat away from his exposed paw pads in an instant. Harkwin lifted his paw away and shook it to get some warmth back into his limb. There was no doubt about it now—the storm had arrived, and the temperatures outside were cold beyond cold.

Idly, Harkwin felt tempted to lick the ice wall with his tongue just to see what would happen. Would his tongue get stuck?

"Is the wall cold?"

Glancing back over his shoulder, Harkwin discovered that Nacen was awake as well. The female dragon was sitting up and staring at him, with that sleeping bag's blanket draped over her shoulders like a cloak. Her eyes were wide open and alert, albeit dark in the dim light.

"Oh. Sorry, did I wake you up?" Harkwin said.

Nacen casually shrugged, making her wings shift about on her back. "No problem. I'm glad to be awake and not dead. Is it... is the cold getting in?"

Harkwin nodded. "The walls here are too cold to touch." Using his paw, he tapped at the rocky ground and found that it was increasingly cold closer to the wall, even if it didn't conduct heat as well and wasn't as immediately painful to touch. "So the walls aren't going to melt from the hot spring, but I don't know how much colder it's going to get."

"Hmm. I wish I'd thought to bring some of my scientific instruments in here. I could plot the air temperature over time and see if it stabilizes, or continues to drop until we freeze." Still with the blanket draped over her shoulders, Nacen reached over and grabbed her flask of tea. She also took out a pocket watch from her flight harness, which was right beside her sleeping bag as well. "It's... early-morning. We slept through most of the night without dying, so that's a success."

"We still have a few more days to go. Let's hope it doesn't get any worse." Walking back towards Nacen, Harkwin tugged the sleeping bags so they were slightly closer to the bubbling hot spring. Then he lay down on the bag again, and Nacen shifted so that the two of them could huddle together under the blankets.

Suddenly the muffled roar of the storm seemed to change pitch, and a dull, intermittent thumping sound came from around the snow shelter. Both Nacen and Harkwin tensed up. "Whump! Thump! Thump! Blump! Thump!"

"What's that noise?" Harkwin asked. The two dragons glanced around, listening to the repeated thumps that seemed to come from all directions. "That thumping in the snow—it sounds... almost like animals...?" Harkwin said confusedly.

Nacen clutched him a bit closer. "That's impossible."

"It sounds like hooves. A herd of hooved animals stomping around on the snow," Harkwin muttered.

"That's impossible," Nacen repeated, a bit quieter than before.

"Yeah, I know. Nothing is supposed to live in the far south."

"Mmh, well that's not entirely true," Nacen murmured, her voice becoming more matter-of-fact as she recalled some of her knowledge. "There are no animals living in this polar environment (other than us); however there are a few species of lichen which grow on the rocks near the hot springs. But lichen is boring."

"And so... what... is... that... noise? That isn't lichen," Harkwin whispered, keeping his voice quiet as they both just listened to the thumping sounds.

After a moment, Nacen's crest fin perked up. "Oh, I know. It's hail! That's hail smacking against the outside of our shelter."

Harkwin nodded, and he relaxed slightly as this explanation clicked in his mind. "Right. Of course. Good thing we have a shelter."

"Sounds like big chunks of ice," Nacen agreed. "The tents back at the outpost are probably being shredded."

As the dull thumping continued, the two young dragons huddled together under the blankets, listening to the sound of hail continuing to fall. But the snow hut's walls were frozen fully solid, and they held up to the sustained assault.

Nacen yawned lazily, and she rested her chin against Harkwin's shoulder. "Being in this snow shelter reminds me of when I used to build snow castles as a hatchling."

Harkwin didn't share this life experience. "Snow? You didn't live in the city growing up?"

"I did! Storytime. Let's see now... snow castles..." Nacen shifted into an even more comfortable position, snuggled up against Harkwin. She opened up her flask and took a slow sip, before clearing her throat. "Ahem. Back in the city, my clan has residential territory in sector forty-seven, so I grew up in an apartment there with my parents and other clanmates. Standard stuff."

Harkwin nodded. He was well familiar with the City of Wings, having lived there all his life. "Yeah?"

"My old childhood home was near the sector border, and so one winter season as a young hatchling, I discovered that the storm shields do not perfectly encapsulate the entire city. Turns out that there was a small gap right above one alleyway on the sector border, where the edges of two adjacent shield zones didn't quite overlap, so that allowed rain and snow to get into the city. Just imagine that—one tiny alleyway in the whole city, where the snow managed to sneak in past those storm shields."

Nacen smiled as she recalled the memory, and she gestured with her paws. "I used to have so much fun there. It would be me and a few other young clanmates, maybe a couple of friends from my school—every time there was a storm and the city raised the shields, we would all head to that alleyway and play in the snow."

"That sounds fun," Harkwin said.

"It was! It was real fun. We'd try to throw snow at each other, or we would make shapes in the snow, or build castles and forts." Nacen's nostalgic expression faded slightly. "I did that less as I started to grow older. I was busy with flight school, with the training hunts, with the advanced topics in normal school, with sports and clubs, and all that other stuff. Then one day when I was an older fledgling, my flight school class was cancelled because of a winter storm, and I just decided to head back to that old alleyway to see the snow again. I always remembered that place as being this tiny little hidden alleyway between two old buildings, filled with winter white drifting down from above..." Now Nacen's crest fin drooped flat. "But it turned out that at some point over the years, the storm shields had been recalibrated to fully cover that spot—no more snow getting into the city. The alleyway was dry and empty, and I could see the snow building up on the force shields up above in the sky."

Harkwin chuckled, but he smiled sympathetically. Even though they'd both only just woken up, it felt very cosy to just lie down side by side and chat. "Haha. The magic of childhood gets wiped away by actual magic."

Nacen's crest fin perked up. "Exactly! I was so sad! I used to want to become a weather worker when I grew up, but that made me so angry with them for fixing the storm shields!"

"Those bothersome weather workers," Harkwin agreed.

Nacen bared her teeth in a cute, half-growl. "Grr. That ruined my day. I mean, they were doing their job and repairing some miscalibrated equipment, but it still made so unhappy. That very same day after the storm blew over, I flew out of the city and went to a field in the countryside just to fill up a bucket with snow. Then I went back to that alleyway and threw snowballs at the building walls until it was dark. Each snowball went thump against the wall, just like the hail that's smacking our shelter now."

Harkwin laughed again. "Hah. That sounds great. I wish I could have seen that alleyway as you describe it—back when it still filled with snow."

Nacen glanced away. "When this whole expedition is over and we're back in the city, I could take you to go see the place. It... it wouldn't be the same without the snow, though. That part is never coming back. I dream about that place, sometimes... I dream that I'm just a young hatchling again, playing around in the snow with my friends. No stress, no worries, no concerns at all."

Harkwin nodded understandingly. "It was a simpler time, to just be a child."

Nacen snorted and shook her head. "Pfft. It's a lie of a dream. I don't think I was ever carefree, even which I was a hatchling. I was always worrying about getting my schoolwork done, or about when I was going to learn how to fly, or about whether my friends really liked me or were just pretending. I feel like I can be way more relaxed now that I actually... sort of understand how the world works and know my place in it."

"Your place in the world? And... what exactly is your place in the world?" Harkwin prompted.

"My place is right here, snuggled up under a blanket and being warm." Leaning over, Nacen planted a small but affectionate lick on the side Harkwin's snout. "And your place is right next to me, as we both try to survive this storm."

"Mmh. That's nice." Harkwin enjoyed the simple companionship for a moment, then he prompted Nacen again. "Did you say you wanted to be a weather worker, back when you were a hatchling?"

Nacen nodded, and she seemed happy to keep sharing about herself. "Oh, yes. Weather working is serious business! The weather workers on this expedition are just... what they do doesn't even count as true weather working. It's just... forecasting. Back in the city, weather workers actually control the weather and manipulate the clouds—now that's fascinating work."

"And you wanted to do that sort of thing?"

"Sure. Messing with the weather is cool." Nacen let out a soft sigh. "Huuh. I always wanted to have electric magic so I could fly about in storms and redirect lightning bolts to recharge the city's energy core. But then I eventually learned that that isn't actually how it works at all."

Harkwin frowned slightly. "Wait, but I thought that the city does use lightning to recharge its power?"

"Oh yes, but there isn't any flying about in thunderstorms to redirect lightning bolts. They are these big... crystal... beam... things that link up with the storm shields," Nacen replied, gesturing with a paw. "And then I got water magic instead of electric magic, so I couldn't fly about in a thunderstorm anyway. What a shame." She let out a soft sigh. "Oh well. But what about you? What did you always dream about becoming when you were younger?"

Harkwin shrugged. "I wanted to have air magic and fly fast, so I always dreamed about being a scout. Then I got air magic, and I learned how to fly fast, and I became a scout. That worked out nicely."

Nacen laughed. "Haha, lucky you!"

"Yep. Although... let's just hope that luck continues and we don't freeze to death in this storm." Harkwin leaned his head against Nacen's shoulder. "That would be a shame, wouldn't it?"