The morning was bright to her eyes, but not intolerable. Ka’Plo said the sun was behind the clouds, and so she was spared the blinding, direct sunlight. Still, she asked him for a bit of thin cloth that she happily took and fashioned a sort of blindfold that she wore the rest of the day, - that still allowed her to see without hurting her eyes.

“You’re very good with those hands of yours, Kreet!”

“Do you think so? I’m not as good as my mother was, but she did show me how to do things. I could fix your covering if you want me to,” she said as they packed up and began to resume their journey.

“When we get home,” he said, “that would be wonderful! I am a poor man, Kreet. You should know that. But I have a modest cabin in some woods not too far away. We should get there by noon.”

They started walking down the road, but Kreet began to find it hard to keep up with Ka'Plo’s stride. When he asked her if she would like to ride on his shoulders, she practically beamed with joy.

“Kreet, you should tell me when something’s bothering you! I’ve tired you out trying to keep up with me, haven’t I?”

“No!” she shouted, trying to climb up his legs, belying her protests. “I’m not tired! I can keep up with you fine!” she said, her muscles protesting. “But if you want me to ride on your shoulders, I will not mind.”

“Here,” he said, squatting down so she could climb up. “Hop aboard, Kreet.”

They passed a few travelers on the way, and Kreet was deathly afraid they would see her and kill her - but in fact they just gave her an odd look and continued on.

“Kreet, you should learn some of our words, don’t you think? Can you say this?” “See if you can say ‘hello’”

It took some repetition, but before long she was greeting the other travelers with a hearty “Hello, Sir, or Hellow, Ma’am!”. However, Ka'Plo had to explain the difference between “Sir” and “Ma'am” a few times.

“Don’t be silly, Ka'Plo. Of course I know the difference between male and female. But it’s easier to tell in a clan. You know everybody. You Big People are so wrapped up in clothes there’s no way to tell!”

“Well, usually our women have longer hair, though that’s not always true either. Only the men have beards too, so that’s another way to tell.”

“The elves don’t have beards,” Kreet stated, rather proud of her knowledge she’d learned at her father’s knee.

“That is true. Also, when they talk, women’s voices are higher pitched. Breasts are another difference.”

“What are breasts?”

Ka'Plo laughed. He’d finally explained laughter to her some time earlier. Then he held his hands under his chest. “These things. Women have them. Men don’t.”

Kreet scratched her head, but accepted it. When the next travelers passed, she spotted them.

“The one on the left is a woman, isn’t she? She has breasts!”

“Yes, that’s a woman alright.”

Kreet looked down at herself. “I don’t have breasts.”

Ka'Plo sighed. “No Kreet. Kobolds don’t have breasts. They’re for ‘nursing’, and your kind doesn’t 'nurse’.”

“Nursing?” Kreet said the unfamiliar word, and Ka'Plo explained as best he could in a language that had few words for the subject.

Finally, they turned off the road, onto a small path and into some woods where Ka'Plo’s cabin stood decrepit but serviceable.

“I wish I had breasts,” Kreet said, climbing down from Ka'Plo’s shoulders.

“Kreet, even if your kind had them, you would be too young anyway. And there’s no good in wishing for something you can’t have. Now, let me show you around.”

Kreet understood the wisdom of his words. She would never be Big. She would always have a tail. She would always have a snout. Her scales would never be skin. She would never have a beard. She would never have breasts. She would never have a clan. She would never fit in.

———————–

Ka'Plo didn’t fully understand why Kreet looked so sad when he showed her the little cabin, but he knew she’d been through a lot. After she’d been introduced to the cat and the little outhouse behind the one-room shack, he left her alone in a corner to cry a little while he busied himself getting some food together for them.

He looked at her occasionally while he cooked. Most people would see a little monster at best - all fangs, claws, scales and tail. But he had spent years studying her kind. He’d even adopted another many years ago, though that hadn’t ended up well; for him or the ‘bold. And now he’d killed the last of the kobolds in the caverns too. True, he hadn’t literally killed them, but he might as well have. In his studies he had become a local expert and had mapped most of the major passages of the caverns here, primarily looking for kobolds. They were elusive enough creatures, but every time some group of Adventurers would go into the caverns and run across a clan he would learn more about them by careful examination of the carcasses left behind.

Yet he was poor. No matter his expertise in the little dragonlings, there simply was no wealth to be had in being a kobold scholar. This last band had needed a guide, he had needed their coin, so he had agreed - and now regretted that decision with every fiber of his being. There had been only one kobold clan left in the caverns. He could not have imagined that this group would actually find them! But find them they had, and they had done what everyone before them had done. Mass slaughter. They had cut the angry little lizards down without hesitation. They had to have some reason for all that armor and weaponry of course, and slaying kobolds had become that reason far too quickly.

Despite this slaughter, a miracle had happened. This one little kobold had survived. She would be his life, he swore. He would do anything he could to keep her alive. When he had slightly 'revised’ the Adventurer’s map after the slaughter, he slid it back into their pack with a glad heart. They would never emerge from the caverns again. It was inadequate retribution for what they’d done to Kreet’s family, but it would have to do.