Dragon Scale

“I have to go, Mom,” I said softly to my mother who was standing at the door. “Don’t forget my goodbye kiss.” All she could think was how weird her mother acted, she was seventeen years old. What seventeen-year-old girl kisses her mother? Before Victoria stepped outside, she rolled her eyes in exasperation. Why can’t she be a normal mom, Victoria thought on her way to school.

In her head, the things she had to do kept on swirling around. She had to practice with the school band, do homework, and her boyfriend Cade. He was annoyed with all her activities for school and outside of school, with all the work she had to do outside of school. She has to pass by the woods before going to school, which is on the other side of town. She steps into the woods where she hears the stream’s water flowing. The birds are also singing beautiful songs in the summer sun. She was almost over the bridge, so she could continue down the street. But her attention is distracted by a man’s voice. She walks to where she hears the voice coming from. A little down by the creek in the dirt is a man lying under the mud as if he had just crawled out of the water and rolled in the dirt.

She looks at the figure crouching and trying to get up. When he finally gets up. Victoria looks at the man covered in dirt and mud, towering over her. He curses, and then she sees that he is naked. Ok, his body was almost completely covered by the brown substance, but she could also see some pink skin coming out from underneath. Victoria doesn’t know what to say to this big man. She could see that he was solidly built, but she couldn’t quite tell what color hair he had or what kind of body he had. All the while, she turned her face away from this naked man in front of her. Something inside made her feel that he had no ill intentions toward her. “Are you a human being?” Asked the dirt-covered man Victoria. Like he was her leader. “Yes and you are naked,” Victoria pointed out to him that he had no clothes on. “You have to help me!” he orders her. She didn’t like the tone in which he spoke at all. “Can I clean myself? Do you have a tub and some soap?” He asks her, annoyed when she looks away from him. He acts like everything is perfectly normal. Victoria has to restrain herself from bursting into laughter. “Of course, follow me,” she said as she walked back home, not thinking about school and all the things she also had to do. This man had made her forget everything. He was too special and mysterious to walk away from, especially for Victoria, who loved helping people.

The walk back to her house through the woods was silent, all she could hear was him talking to himself in another language. Later on, she looked behind her to see if he was still following her after she had not heard him for ten minutes. He was still following her out of the woods to the blue door of her house. She had painted the door blue with her mother this summer. They step inside in the hallway, “Mom is at work and will be home late,” Said Victoria before she stepped up the stairs. After a few minutes, she no longer heard the mysterious man following her. She watched him as he took baby steps up the stairs, it was like he had never been on stairs or had seen one before. She couldn’t stop looking at him, she was so fascinated by this mysterious man who looked still firm, all was he was naked and covered in dirt. Victoria had let him follow her down the hallway where pictures hung of all her childhood years, with her mother and father in the pictures. He looked at the pictures, too, as if it were some kind of witchcraft. Victoria gets a flashback of herself at the age of seven where she played with her father in the garden and later that day he was gone. The pictures on the wall stopped at that moment. It made an empty hole in their hearts, a whole they stitched by doing volunteer work. Like he was one of her new projects. Finally, they came to the bathroom, where his jaw sank at the sight of the white shimmering tub and the glass wall in front of it. All Victoria could think was that this man was very peculiar and that she wanted to get to know him better. He looked lost at first but he did get up, like an instant. He didn’t let his guard off, like a real soldier who had to focus every minute of the day.

She could tell he wasn’t from this place, yet he didn’t feel aggrieved. As if he was immediately adjusting to this new environment. He made home adjust as he lived there for years. First, she finds it odd but after a couple of minutes, it’s like she never knows otherwise. “Is this the bath?” He said to himself more as to Victoria who looked strangely at this man who was standing in front of her like he was just joking around. But when he kept looking at her for an explanation she knew he really didn’t know what to do. She goes to the shower and turns on the faucet, causing water to come out of the sprinkler. He looks at her in amazement and then decides to stand under the sprinkler anyway as Victoria walks out of the bathroom. She walked through the hallway to her door at the end of the hall. As she is in the room Victoria grabs some clothes from Cade who had left them at her house. He was the typical hot boy with his blond hair and blue eyes which made every teenage girl fall in love with him. They were one year together and he had been sleeping in this house with her, but she was still a virgin that she did not want to change before she knew he meant it seriously with her. She knocked on the door and said to him that she dropped some clothes at the gray bathroom door. She turned around back in the hallway to her room to call the school with an excuse that she wasn’t there she heard a noise in the hallway. She walks to her door, looking for who or what made that sound. Stepping out of her lavender-colored bedroom right stared at the man she found in the woods, who was now clean and looking better than she ever had imagined. After all, that dirt is washed off his body.

Shocked, she continues to stare at him. This almost causes her to drop her mother’s vase in the hallway, which she had already told her mother was not in a good place there. She moves closer to him and takes a closer look, where she sees the sweatpants of her boyfriend who was a soccer player and also very muscular. Where too tight around his legs and the T-shirt is also tight around the muscles of his arms. He looked like some fighter god, who also had a strong face with a strong chin line and short thick hair. His neck was so wide from the threads of muscles. He looked like he could kill a man with his neck alone. Victoria was confused by his appearance, she could hardly believe that this man just had been stranded by the stream in the park, there must have been more to him. He looked at her, and he saw how she had looked at him. “Do you like what you see?” He smiled at her as if this was all of some kind of joke. If he hadn’t really been naked in front of her before. After a few minutes, she broke the ice by asking him further, cause she didn’t know where he was from and what he did by that stream. “What are you going to do now?” She asked him as she ignored his question to her. Whether she was only interested in his body. It’s not that she doesn’t like his body or his looks but his ego and conceit don’t exactly appeal to her. “I don’t know. Berklia doesn’t want me anymore, and I have nowhere to go in this strange world full of humans,” he said talking like he was an alien or something. Maybe taking in someone you don’t know wasn’t such a good idea. “Is this a joke? Is this a move you’re making to get a girl?” She said, a little afraid of what she had brought home. He laughed as if he had never been so offended. It wasn’t a smile that touched his face more like the smile of someone with a toothache.

“Getting women is no problem. I wasn’t paying attention to having that ugly princess creature as a wife and that’s what got me banned from Berklia.” Now it was not he who laughed but Victoria who laughed at this man’s foolish words. She really thought he had lost his mind and was thinking about how she could help him. “This is not a joke. Are humans really that stupid or are you just crazy?” He said about her annoyance. She notices immediately that he is not joking and now she is sure that he is crazy and need help. While she wants to talk to him he ignores her like she is an annoying fly buzzing around his head. “Have I not said who I am? Where are my manners? I am Xilliorn otherwise known as the Dragon Prince.” The man said proudly. Victoria thinks about all the things she could say to these words and what these words meant that he says. Is he playing a game with me? Did Cade send him to play pranks on her? It can’t be, Victoria thinks. He was covered in mud by the creek. Victoria is sure no one would do this for Cade or anyone else. Victoria made a joke, knowing he must have seen Star Wars. Who didn’t? “And I’m Princess Leia,” Victoria said. Playing the game she thought he was playing too. But hearing him call her Leia she was really annoyed that he kept playing with her. Or was he really playing a game? Victoria had a lot going on and this was not something she asked for. But she had to help him that’s just who she is. She had been dedicated to helping other people. Her mother did work at the hospital as a nurse and Victoria did help on the weekend as a volunteer. “Why are people so weird and where can I stay?” Asked the man she now knows is called Xilliorn in a commanding tone.

She looked into his seaweed blue/green eyes as she said her real name to him. He himself looked back into her brown hazel eyes that she had inherited from her father. He is standing still as if he is waiting for some kind of answer like a colonel or someone who clearly has an army background. Though Victoria first wants to know who she’s really dealing with and ignores his commanding tone, “You said you’re from Berklia? What is this place?” If he is lying he must fall through his own lies. Because he has to tell about this particular world he made up anyway. He still stands and looks at her as he begins to tell about his world about all the dragons that fly around freely and terrorize and destroy the world. Xilliorn told her also that he was the leader of the Vandeliar guards. She can hardly believe all this is true, but what should she do with this stranger? He had no other place to go? Her mother will go crazy. If she sees this man living in their house and with the crazy things he says. Is it a stupid idea to take him into her house, where her mother can see him and talk to him?