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There was a dragon at one of the tables in the pub.
Ginny'd had to repeat that to herself a couple of times, in a couple different cadences, to really get it through her head. There was a dragon at one of the tables in the pub. There was a dragon, at one of the tables in the pub!
She'd had a million questions in her mind ever since. First of all, were dragons just a normal thing here? Her old hometown of Rimmington had a weird history with black dragons, especially since half the village had disappeared into a mysterious cave with a really bloody big one. Varrock had no such history (she presumed) -- maybe that was why a dragon could just march into the pub, take a secluded seat, and start scribbling away at paper after paper.
Second of all, once the initial shock of 'dragon' had worn off: what was it even doing? It sure was up to a whole ferocious load of something with that quill pen. She rarely got to see enough to peek, though, before one of three things happened: the paper tore, the quill pen broke, or the dragon simply seemed dissatisfied with what it was doing. All three outcomes led to the offending implement being burnt in a tiny ball of flame, then discarded on the floor nearby.
It certainly made Ginny work for her wages, but everyone in this pub was like that in one way or another. Every few minutes, she'd do her latest round of the dining room: broken glass shards near the local barbarian woman, morsels of steak or splinters of stakes from near the vampyre hunters, and a pile of ashes from the dragon. Sometimes there was a distinctive burnt feather smell, sometimes she could see glowing embers on tiny shreds of paper, but always it was her job to sweep it all neatly away.
This time, though, she sighted a sizeable scrap of paper in the mess, relatively unincinerated. That was new. It made her feel a little like an adventurer: for some, finding scraps of paper from strange beasts was kind of their whole deal, apparently. They didn't always read them so much as skim read and dispose of them, but Ginny was sure she'd be the kind of adventure to read them for real.
She swept it into her pile of detruitus, shuffled it into a relatively shaded spot near the bar, and -- had to yank her hand back from the pile the first time she'd tried reaching in for it. Still hot! Bad idea! She'd waited another few minutes before making another sneaky grab for it, and this time she'd managed to seize it, by this point feeling nothing but gentle warmth.
Only a few sentences, in spiky, almost wobbly handwriting, had survived the flames:
Astrath sat in the Varrock publick house. Such establichments were rare in Taverley, where alcohol was more comonly consumed in the home or with frends. Here, they found themself alone, isolated from their usual amicable companie
It ended abruptly there, and faded into singe marks not much further down.
Ginny leaned back against the wall, hidden from the patrons, and contemplated what she'd read. Presuming the dragon had been writing about themself, the dragon had a name. A pronoun preference, even. That in particular was a surprise -- not a bad one (she'd mentally crossed out every 'it' she had used so far, a little ashamed in hindsight): no, almost the opposite of bad.
In fact, strange as it was to acknowledge, it was almost a point of kinship. After all, it still hadn't been that long since she'd deliberately vanished from her old life and restarted from the beginning, in Varrock, as a 'she'. She may have been a cleaner at the Blue Moon Inn, but at least she was a little closer to being a happy one.
A little ashamed at having pried, she returned the scrap to the pile and swept it out into the alley. Back to work, posthaste.
"Excuse me," said the dragon. Astrath. Presumably. They had a voice. For some reason, she'd imagined no particular voice when reading their writing, assuming nothing but a voiceless roar.
"Sorry, yes?" She hurried to their table, clutching a little more tightly to her broom.
"I saw you reading what I had written." Of course -- they were a dragon, probably had magically good sight in the dark. Or they'd smelt it or whatever. She was a little startled, but there was no offence in their tone, especially when they continued: "Was it good?"
"Oh, uh," she began. "Yes! Astrath, they come from Taverley, right? They're a little way from home, here in Varrock, and they don't really know what pubs are like."
The dragon nodded. Oddly enough, they seemed a little startled. "Writing is... not my best skill," they clarified. "I have observed others doing so, and I make every effort to do likewise. It seems a worthy deed to describe one's own life, though I'm not sure that becoming a writer is my true calling."
Then they really were Astrath, and that sense of kinship wasn't unfounded. Hopefully not, anyway. She still knew next to nothing about them, but...
"You seem alright to me," Ginny assured them. "The words were mostly right. You talk all fancy, too."
"I had an upper class upbringing, in some respects," they said drily. "Speaking in their manner was deemed necessary. Writing was not."
"Oh," Ginny said, reluctant to pry.
They'd been writing again. Ginny hadn't intended to peek, but she couldn't help seeing the exact same as what she'd just read on the scrap. This 'description of one's own life', they'd rewritten it the same way at least twice.
Astrath didn't seem to mind the look. They even moved their hand aside to allow her a better view. "Which words were incorrect? I know that one," they said, tapping the word 'alcohol' with a claw. "Alcohol in several forms is a common reagent used in potions. No avoiding it in the druids' notes."
"Taverley business, yeah," said Ginny.
They looked up. "You know Taverley?"
"Heard of it," she said. "Druidic town, right? Sounds like a pretty nice place."
"It is." They sat back in their chair, stretching their wings out behind them. She'd barely noticed the wings up until that point. "I never realised anywhere could be so lovely. People such as myself, creatures both larger and smaller than I am, can simply live among humanity like equals. The plants are not cut into shape, but allowed to roam free across the settlement. It is beautiful."
"Huh." She'd been picturing it as they spoke. Didn't sound all that bad. She'd already picked a place to start a new life, though, and she wasn't about to start again... all over again.
"We lost track, I apologise," Astrath said. "Would you do me the courtesy of pointing out anything I've spelt incorrectly?"
She was far from a flawless writer herself, but she pointed out what she could. "I think that one's with an S-H, not a C-H."
"Truly?" They stared blankly at the word. "C and H, such a confusing pair of letters. I suspect I've seen them a thousand different times in a thousand different ways."
"Yeah, they're like that," she said with a little laugh.
"Well, I'll need to burn this one as well," they said, starting to crumple it into a ball.
"You don't have to--"
They tossed it in the air. There was a burst of flame, and Ginny jumped back. The ball of paper disintegrated into ash, and with their arm they swept it onto the floor. "I can clean that on my own when I leave," they insisted. "If there are complaints about your behaviour as a result, you can tell the Servants' Guild or your employer that I specifically requested this service as unnecessary. I can write you a note to confirm as much, if you'd like?"
She looked at the sad pile of ash on the floor. "You wouldn't just burn it, would you?"
"Why would I do that?" they snapped. "I would write it perfectly. You would help me, such that I would make no mistakes, and I would have no reason to burn it." They smashed their quill pen into the table, destroying the tip in the process. "Now look what's happened! I'll have to burn this as well."
Having angered a dragon made Ginny significantly uncomfortable here. Yet there had to be more to it...
As the pen feather burnt up in a disgusting smell, Ginny looked down at Astrath's stack of paper they had: sure enough, it was significantly smaller than when she'd first seen them sitting in the pub. They'd run out of paper soon at this rate.
"You know, when I was learning to write, we used charcoal," Ginny eventually said. "You can erase that with stale bread, so that you don't have to redo the whole thing. I don't have any charcoal, but there's plenty of stale bread out the back."
"Really?" Astrath looked at her with interest. "Can you fetch me some of that bread, and potentially a long wooden implement around the width of a pen?"
"Wooden spoon maybe? Kitchen's got a ton of them."
"Excellent! My offer is a hundred gold coins," Astrath said with quite some confidence.
Ginny's eyes widened. That was easily her next month's rent. The wooden spoons may not technically belong to her, but surely one wouldn't go amiss. Besides, it was only 2GP to buy another.
"Right you are!" she said, and dashed out to the back. She returned not long later with the items in question.
"Marvellous," said Astrath, putting the bread aside and holding the woodem spoon in front of their mouth... to slowly engulf it in a column of fire, which they blew upon with normal breath to reduce the flames to embers. It was a rather pretty sight -- a cylinder glowing orange, now almost unrecognisable as wood -- and soon it had burnt out entirely, the colour falling to black.
"Yes, I see the utility of this," said Astrath, eyeing their creation. They used their claws to sharpen it to a tip, then made careful contact from charcoal to paper.
"I must be gentle," they reassured themself, "else the entire structure will crumble."
"Shouldn't write too hard with charcoal, yeah. It gets all over your hands, too."
Astrath looked at the black, scaled palms of their own hands. "I would hardly notice."
"You would once you started to touch other things."
"Ah." Astrath looked again, then self-consciously lifted a hand from where it was leaning on the table. "Well, in my note which I shall write shortly, I will be sure to additionally exempt you from any expectations to clean any handprints which may occur."
Ginny laughed, and Astrath cocked their head.
"Is that funny?"
"Kind of," she said. "Not often you get people coming in and telling you not to do your job."
"Someone such as yourself has enough of a job to do already," they insisted. "The greater respite you have from your employer, the better."
Ginny half-gasped, and was quick to clarify: "I don't hate my employer or anything. I get money! He pays me on time." Lowering her voice: "Most of the time."
"Most?" Astrath looked askance at that.
"It's nothing," said Ginny cheerily, and then made a very careful effort to keep her hands from fidgeting.
Astrath looked at her for a second or two, their dragon face scrutinising Astrath's human face.
"I can usually tell when someone is lying," they assured her. "It has saved me from many an undesirable situation in the past. Please, allow yourself to be relieved from at least a little of your own undesirable situation."
"Who says it's undesirable?" She'd said that a little more forcefully than she intended. This was all she had.
Fortunately, Astrath took her point. "Never mind," they said. "I know so little about employment. Or about you. Forgive me, but what is your name?"
"Ginny," she said. "Short for Genevieve! I chose it myself."
"Really?" Astrath seemed delighted at that concept. "Is that common? I know that some druids will choose names that amuse them."
"Huh." She hadn't known that. "It's, uh, kind of uncommon? Bit of a personal reason with me, though." Kinship or no, there were some things that she'd prefer not to explain on a first meeting.
"I see. As for me, I have been Astrath since I hatched. It was not a name I chose..."
For a second, they looked distant, staring out of focus to a far corner of the pub. Then they returned to the present:
"... and yet it is mine. I have freed it from those who would enslave me."
Enslave? That went a long way to explain Astrath's unfamiliarity with the world. Surely Taverley hadn't been the place they were enslaved. There was something more to their story... but, like her, they probably weren't about to explain everything on first meeting.
Instead: "And now you're free to have come to visit Varrock, then?"
"Indeed. In Taverley, I live with a druid who thinks I would benefit from seeing the world," they told her. "He has a cousin who lives and works in Varrock, and so here I am."
"Oh, wow!" It felt almost like a privilege to get to see them on their very first visit to the city. This was a formative experience for this incredible creature, and she got to be a part of it. "What do you think?"
"It is... different," they said, after some consideration. "Animals follow you in the streets, but they are nowhere near as well-looked after as those that live in Taverley. Neither are some of the people. But I do have the chance to see people from all walks of life here, and see the true span of what the world can contain. I am told I should visit the museum, for instance. A building dedicated to the wonders of the past and present, without having killed or enslaved any being for display. I do like the sound of that."
"Oh, the museum is lovely!" She'd barely been in Varrock, but she'd already been there. It had been free entry, and she'd needed something to do, so she'd visited on her very first day off work. "Do you like the past?"
Astrath thought for a while. "I do not like those who would pose themselves as conquerors of the past, as though the entire story had the purpose of setting them up for greatness. I have yet to have the chance to see it depicted another way."
"Oh, yeah, the museum's not really like that," she said. "They just... have a whole lot of stuff, and they like to show what happened. They recently discovered there had been a whole other city at this location before what we thought was the oldest, did you realise?"
"Really?" That had engaged them. "So this is a city upon a city upon a city."
"At least."
"Goodness. There is more to Varrock than I thought."
That had certainly been Ginny's experience the past few weeks in Varrock. Suddenly emboldened, she asked: "Would you like to go with me tomorrow? I don't work until the evening. I can be your guide!"
Astrath put down the now-cooled stick of charcoal in their hand, and looked directly at Ginny.
"I would appreciate that. Thank you."
Astrath slept well that night, curled up on a human bed.
Beside them on the nightstand was a piece of paper full of their handwriting, half of it having been erased and written over at some point in the past few hours. But for now, it was complete, and the beginning of it read:
Astrath sat in the Varrock public house. Such establishments were rare in Taverley, where alcohol was more commonly consumed in the home or with existing friends. It seemed, however, that a place like this could give one the opportunity to make new friends. Astrath had just met their first: her name was Ginny.