Chapter 16: Fists of Love
The dragon's roar rolled through the valley. A whole canopy’s worth of birds burst out of the treetops at once.
Uriel sat inside the tent and let the sound wash over him. His chewing paused for exactly one beat. Below, the noise of a few dozen students collectively losing their minds drifted up the slope.
He checked the time in his head, set down his food, stood, and pushed the flap aside just enough to look toward the ridge.
Mom was nearly there.
He scanned the slope. The crowd was scattering in every direction, all of them too preoccupied with their own panic to spare a glance at a tent tucked into a windbreak on a hillside.
Uriel pressed the flap down behind him and quietly followed.
No particular reason. Just — he'd been alive long enough to understand that this was a genuinely rare event, and he'd never actually watched her work. It seemed worth seeing.
He skirted around the fleeing students — he couldn't tell which ones were running uphill and which ones were running down, and frankly didn't care — and found a spot with a clear view and decent cover. He settled in.
The red dragon had its head lowered, vertical pupils locked onto the figure standing directly beneath it. A figure, generously described, stood somewhere around ankle height.
Tina stood there with her skirt moving gently in the hot downdraft from the dragon's breath. She was looking up at it. Her expression was the expression of someone at a museum who has found the exhibit mildly interesting.
The dragon felt something. A low vibration built in its throat.
Then it opened its mouth.
The roar hit Uriel like a wall from a hundred metres away. His ears rang. Two trees of respectable girth directly in the blast path snapped at the trunk and went down in a cascade of branches and churned earth.
He squinted through the debris and found her.
Tina's uniform skirt had been thrown nearly vertical by the force. Her silver hair was a mess. When the last of the shockwave dissipated, she reached up and tucked a strand back behind her ear.
Then she spoke.
"That kind of shouting," she said, "is not acceptable behaviour."
Uriel, behind his tree, went completely still.
"That's not how good boys behave." Her tone was the tone of someone addressing a toddler who has just thrown a spoon across the kitchen.
The dragon stared at her. Its expression — to the extent that a dragon has expressions — bore a distinct resemblance to Uriel's.
What is she saying to it.
She pressed on, wholly unbothered by what had just tried to deafen her. She crossed her hands in front of her chest in a large X, turning slowly as if surveying a mess she was disappointed by.
"Look at all the trouble you've caused. Come on, be a good boy and go home, alright? There you go."
On the ridge: a dragon the size of a small building. Below it: one silver-haired girl, head tilted back, holding eye contact.
Uriel stood in the middle of the snapped trees and felt his voice simply not arrive.
Mom. Are you. Are you parenting it right now.
The dragon, predictably, had no intention of complying.
It rumbled, exhaled a gust that cracked several loose rocks from the ridge face, and raised one forelimb. The claws caught the light. It brought the whole thing down toward her — slow relative to what it could have done, but absolute in its finality — aimed squarely at the spot where she was standing.
Tina watched the claw descend. She did not move. She looked up at it for a moment, then back at the dragon's eyes, and raised one finger.
Her voice didn't change at all.
"I'm going to count to three."
Uriel gripped the branch so hard it snapped. He grabbed the trunk instead and barely stayed upright.
That only works on kids under ten. That has never once worked on anything that isn't a kid under ten —
"One."
"Two."
The claw kept coming. The air pressure ahead of it was enough to feel from where he was standing. There was a smell — iron and something burnt.
Uriel held his breath behind the tree.
Move. Use a barrier. Do something — Mom —
"Three."
She launched herself upward.
For one fraction of a second, Uriel's mind assembled an expectation: magical artillery, a blade of light splitting the sky, something appropriately cinematic for the occasion.
What he got instead: Tina slipping between the closing claw-fingers like water through a gap, flipping once in the air, planting a foot against the descending limb to redirect herself upward, and arriving at head height of a creature the size of a house.
She pulled her right fist back.
The knuckles flushed with a faint wash of red.
She hit the dragon directly in the forehead.
BONK.
Not a crack. Not an explosion. A single dense, physical impact — the kind of sound that has nothing magical about it whatsoever. The shockwave peeled outward from the point of contact in a visible ring, clearing a gap in the clouds above. Then Tina dropped back to the ground and landed in the same posture she'd left from.
The dragon screamed.
Not a roar. Not a roar. A yelp — the sound of a very large animal that had just been hit somewhere it definitely hadn’t expected. Its entire body lurched backward. The rear legs gouged deep furrows into the ridge as it scrambled. Then, with all two hundred tonnes of it, the dragon sat down hard on the mountainside. It landed the way a scolded dog lands when it's given up trying to look dignified.
Uriel's grip on the tree tightened another degree. He stared at the dragon's head.
On its forehead — visible from where he was standing, through the red scales — a lump was rising. Vivid. Rounded. Absolutely unmistakable.
He stared at it for three full seconds.
His jaw was somewhere around his collarbone. Every pre-loaded sarcastic thought in his brain queue had gone completely silent.
...Did reality just break? Did the physical laws of this universe just temporarily suspend themselves to accommodate a gag comic?
The dragon had its head tucked down, making a low, broken sound in its throat. The predator's menace that had been radiating off it minutes ago had been replaced by something else entirely.
Tina stood in front of it with her hands on her hips, looking up, very serious.
"Do you understand," she said, "how much trouble you've caused for everyone here."
The dragon said nothing, because dragons don't speak. But it shifted its posture — head lower, neck drawn in — into a shape Uriel had seen before. The shape of a dog that's been told off and isn't sure if it's actually sorry or just hoping the whole thing will be over soon.
"Think about what you've done," Tina said. "All right?"
The dragon didn't move.
Uriel let his hands slide off the bark and lifted one to close his jaw.
It's not remorseful. It's afraid of being killed. It's doing the math and performing contrition. Honestly — that's a pretty rational read of the situation.
After another moment, Tina uncrossed her arms.
She raised one hand, palm up, and let something spill out of it — soft and diffuse, moving toward the dragon's head like warmth from a fire. The lump on its forehead began to shrink. The red faded. The scales smoothed over, slow and even, until there was nothing left. No mark. No trace. Like the punch had never landed.
She lowered her hand and put it back on her hip.
"There," she said, her voice settling back into something gentler. "Now go home."
A beat.
"And think about your behaviour."
The dragon looked at her for two seconds. Then its wings spread — the downbeat alone flattened the surrounding trees into a wide arc, sent stones skipping — and it lifted off the ridge with a sound like a sustained thunderclap. The red shape climbed, shrank, dimmed, and dissolved into cloud cover. Gone.
Dust settled on the ridge. The broken trees lay where they'd fallen. The claw-gouges in the rock remained. Everything else was quiet.
Tina brushed a few chips of stone off her skirt and turned around.
Her gaze found Uriel immediately, still standing in the tree line.
"Little Uri," she said. "I said not to follow."
"..."
He stepped out. Tried to locate a sentence.
"Tina. That punch."
"Mm."
"That was — just a regular punch?"
Tina considered this. "I used a little bit of force. Just enough to sting. I didn't want to actually hurt it."
"...Right."
A little bit. Just enough to sting. Filed.
He watched the distant crowd, still not fully reassembled, and brought his eyes back.
"The lump," he said. "Why did you heal it?"
"Because you told me not to leave any traces." She walked over to him, carrying the patient expression of someone explaining something very obvious. "Think about it — if it had flown away with a big lump on its head, people would have noticed. Someone would have asked questions. So I smoothed it over. Now it just looks like it left on its own." She paused, clearly pleased. "Isn't that perfect?"
Perfect.
It was, terrifyingly enough, completely bulletproof logic.
From the punch to the healing to the exit — it was a seamless, evidence-free operation. A closed loop with no loose ends.
The only issue being that no evidence, as he had originally meant it, was referring to an entirely different category of problem. But that distinction had apparently not survived the translation.
"Let's go back," he said. The sentence came out with the particular flatness of a man who has made peace with something. "The food's going cold."
"Okay." She stepped up beside him and put her hand on his head — a brief, light pat. "Were you scared?"
"No."
"Good."
She started back toward the tent, skirt moving quietly in the mountain air, the same unhurried rhythm as always. Nothing about her suggested that she had just uppercut a dragon into submission and then given it a stern talking-to.
Uriel followed, head slightly down. The image of that lump rising and then smoothing away was still sitting somewhere behind his eyes.
One punch to raise it. One palm to erase it. Hands on hips. Countdown from three. The whole affair conducted in the register of a parent handling a child who knocked over someone else's building blocks.
He breathed in. Let the remaining commentary go.
It was fine.
He'd made peace with this a long time ago.