When the young dragon awoke, he lay puzzled at the strange dream he’d had the night before. He’d dreamt of being a human, standing at a… counter. He wasn’t sure how he knew what it was called, but all of a sudden, he could place a name for the strange object, along with the things that sat atop it; a flask, a bunsen burner, a jar of water, carrot stems, and a hawk’s eye. He remembers pouring the water into the beaker and letting it “boil,” another concept new to him. He then used his… fingers to drop the eye into the beaker, submerging it in water. He waited as it boiled until the water dropped to half the height of the eye. What was left was a yellowish liquid. He then took the carrot stems, pressed them into the ooze, and capped it off the flask with a cork. It needed to rest for at least a day, so he was dismissed from class.

That was when things got weird.

When he opened the door to leave the classroom, he found himself in a dark, stone brick room. The air was cool and damp, with an earthy smell. In the center of the room stood three people, huddled over an ornate pedestal.

When he tried to push through the group and see what was so important, he phased right through them. It being a dream and all, he didn’t find this strange at all. What he did find strange was the items atop the pedestal. A human infant lay on one side and an ornate wrought-iron cage on the other. The infant was pale and cold. It did not stir or cry. The only sign of life it showed was the weak rising and falling of its chest.

One of the people in the circle walked straight through him, holding a red cloth bundle. The man opened it up, revealing three glowing-white crystals, two of the same size with the third much larger. He placed one crystal on the infant’s forehead and one inside a slot on the top of the cage.

He then placed the larger crystal between the two, and a bright white line traced itself into a pattern across the pedestal, painting itself onto the infant’s head and converging at the crystal. It then climbed up the bars of the cage, illuminating its interior. The young dragon peered inside and was shocked by what he saw.

Himself.

The lines continued creeping their way up the cage until they all converged into the crystal. Once all three crystals connected through the lines, the room was suddenly illuminated by their blinding light.

Once the glow subsided, the crystals were gone, and the cage was empty. In the center of the pedestal where the largest crystal once sat, the infant lay, crying its eyes out.

The rest of the dream was hazy, but he remembered snippets of the room flooding with people and the infant being taken away.

When he finally pushed the dream from his mind, he found himself back in the same room as he woke up in the day before. His body ached, and he felt the tenderness of injury on his side. That human must’ve caught him again!

He looked around, and to his dismay, locked eyes with his captor. It spoke to him in a language he’d never heard before, yet he understood it.

“Finally awake again? Good. needed to make sure I didn’t drain too much magic from you just then.”

The young dragon tried to get up, but could barely move his limbs. It was as if all the life in him had been sucked out, leaving barely enough for his body to stay functioning. He cried out, leaking a short whimper.