Hatchling's Questions

“Sak-ruei, you’re my layer-placer, but have you always been a layer-placer, even for Crooked-Toes and Stretches-Slowly-Westwards?” Patuza, a small hatchling with sprouting feather-leaves and stubby horns, said to his layer-placer Sak-ruei. The sun was shining through patches of clouds and the Cyrod climate made Patuza’s skin feel smooth and his bones fill of jumping and life-eagerness.

“Oh, little one, always full of questions. I was the taker-giver for Crooked-Toes but all the rest of you were laid by me, little-sweet. Long-Legs-Swimming told you about all that already, yes, how you were made, eggs and all that?”

“Oh, yeah. That wasn’t all I wanted to know, though. The dryskins made me think about…” he paused, uncertain of what words to use. He was not afraid of his parents, but some questions were still as jagged and white-harsh in his mouth as they were in the ears of whoever heard them, and so he had to speak carefully. “The days with the elves. If you want to talk about that.” Patuza whistled a soft blue tone after he’d finished speaking to make up for any crudeness in his words.

“Hatchling, you speak of sad things, but I will tell you. My parents were slain by the elves, who came by boat and brought chains and whips. They were too proud to serve. The elves made us bury them underneath the village Hist, made us dig with bare hands in the earth. They couldn’t hear the chiming of the Hist, not even with those big ears of theirs, and they did not know why we wept. Then, there were chains and collars all the way to the elf-lands.” Sak-ruei held her spines in sadness but her fins showed anger, as did the undertones of spotted orange in her speech.

“It was salt-rice, right? They made you toil in the salt-rice fields.”

“Yes, that they did. They made us learn their language and forbade us to speak our own. If they heard any sap-speech, they cut out the tongue of whoever said it with red-hot long knives. So we only spoke in Dunmeris back then. I hear the elves have started to say that we were allowed to fill our bellies with the rice on the fields. Lies. Pure lies, grey-speckled rocks on muddy floodbanks, mere lies. They fed us on the scraps from the kitchen, where they kept the Khajj to cook for them. It was not good for a marsh-child’s tongue, that food.”

“They really kept Khajj in the kitchens? Quintus told me that Khajj just steal and put their sugar in everything, is that true?”

“I don’t know about that, Patuza.” Her spines relaxed some and he heard her cloudy green laughter, thankful that there was no sadness to be seen behind it. “They never put sugar in our meals, at least. The air was so dry there, it would have choked you right up. There were ashes even that far down south, you see. But we worked on, from before dawn until right before the light of the morning star, day in and day out. The elves wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Did they really cut out the tongues?” Patuza tried to imagine what it would feel like, to have hot blood pooling in your throat and to feel pain but be unable to scream.

“Oh, yes, little-sweet, they did indeed. There was one good thing about the fields, though, and it was the insects. The elves have a lot of those in their lands, you see, from ones large as carts that they ride to one-finger-joint-sized spiked ones the rich slavers wear in their hair for fashion. Almost like home in that way. The scraps they fed us were never enough, and so we ate what we found in the fields to stave off the hunger. You must have tried it, right, with something here in Cyrod?”

Just a little thing that popped into my head the other day. It's fun to write Argonians. This started out as an excuse to write about funny things Argonians do, but morphed into something else entirely.