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The expansion of the barrier brought with it one more unexpected surprise that Soleum didn’t find out about until a few days later. Right on the edge of the barrier, there was one spot that was close enough to a human village that you could see people come out to work the farm fields.
Every day, Soleum would hurry out to the edge of the barrier to finally get a glimpse of people just living their lives. The way they worked, the way they talked, the way they laughed, all of it was right there to finally scratch the itch of his curiosity.
Based on some walking trails and odd piles of stones or cut off trees, Soleum could tell that the space he now occupied to watch the village used to be frequented by the villagers. At first, people were wary of the barrier that had suddenly appeared. But eventually, people adapt. The fields had to be planted in spring, tended in summer and harvested in fall. The villagers even held some sort of ceremony for Soleum’s next birthday.
Gradually, kids started coming over on dares, tossing a rock through the barrier, and then running away squealing. Soleum tried to pick up one of the rocks once, after getting used to the children’s antics, but he found it difficult to toss it more than a few inches. It must have been easier for the humans since their arms were much longer.
Through this process, he realized something else. The people on the other side of the barrier couldn’t see him, no matter what he did. He didn’t know if the whole barrier had this feature or if it was added to this part, predicting that Soleum would be glued to it. Knowing that he couldn’t be seen, Soleum freely darted around to wherever he could best see.
The area right near the barrier ended up becoming a popular play spot for kids. Soleum learned how to play catch, in theory only since his hands weren’t suitable, how to have a snowball fight, in theory only since his hands weren’t suitable, how to playfight with swords, in theory only since his hands weren’t suitable, and how to play hopscotch, which he hadn’t given up on yet.
Hands sure seem convenient, he thought, redrawing his hopscotch squares for the day in the dusty ground. No wonder his family all spent so much time in human form.
Soleum started with a cheating game of hopscotch while he waited for the other kids to come out to play for the day. He always did a warmup where he was allowed to use all four of his paws and pick up his marker rock with his mouth. To this day, he hadn’t yet won a game standing up on two feet like a human, but maybe this would be the day.
He deliberately set the rock on the 2 square and bounced through the lines in the right pattern, grabbing the rock in his mouth on the way back for one successful round. Warmup complete, he then started trying to toss the rock from his mouth. He had given up on throwing it with his arms after a couple hundred attempts, but every once in a while he could get a good throw doing it this way. On his sixth attempt, the rock finally landed in bounds so he could play.
Soleum looked longingly at the other side of the barrier where none of his friends had shown up yet. He then planted his back feet firmly in the ground and started drawing his body up into a position that mimicked standing. He leaned most of his weight into his tail as his upper body drew a slow arch through the air and put his dangling front legs out to the side in a T position for balance as he reached his full height.
The other children always put their arms out for balance so he copied them, but he wasn’t sure that it helped much. Then he started slowly trying to lean off of where he was balancing on his tail. Soleum had once thought he had mastered standing, but then when a near winner of limbo was disqualified for letting her tail touch the ground, he was devastated to find out that having your tail on the ground didn’t count as standing and he had to relearn it.
It was a serious blow to his progress on the goal of being able to swing a sword like the knights in his stories.
He took a shuffling step toward his game board, balancing with his tail and upper body pulled off the ground, his whole weight balanced on his back legs. On the second step, he wobbled hard and his tail brushed the ground for balance. He hadn’t even started the game and he had already lost.
Predictably, he lost balance entirely at the fourth hop and ended up sprawled across the smudged hopscotch squares. He sat there for a bit, considering what he could have done to make it further.
Soleum hated to admit that he wasn’t getting any better at this. He had watched the youngest human kid complete his first game in only a few days after he was finally walking instead of being carried by a sibling. But Soleum’s own practice had resulted in little more than an awkward balancing act that fell apart as soon as he started trying to move. He was tired of giving up on learning the games humans played, but with no meaningful progress in forever it seemed like his time would be better spent on something else.
As if sensing the timing to cheer him up, some of the human children came running out to play for the day, laughing and chasing each other. Soleum turned his head from where he was still pressed flat on the ground to watch them.
They made it look so easy to run around and toss a ball back and forth. Soleum studied the way their feet flexed and their arms swung to try and decipher the secret to it all. Maybe he’d be better off sitting alongside the other kids to watch and read his books than try and join the games. Not everyone played the same game at the same time after all.
Watching the humans had made Soleum acutely aware of how even reading would be easier for them. Books were made by and for humans after all. It was the hands. If only Soleum had hands, he would be able to do so much more. He stared intently at the hands of a boy that reached out to grab the ball from the air as it soared over his head.
The throw was too high for him to catch, and just one fingertip brushed the ball, sending it off course. Soleum watched the way the hand bent with the impact and missed the way the ball bounced to the side. There was an uproar as the boy’s hand was moved down, in front of his body held out in a placating gesture of apology. Tension was expressed through his fingers, and Soleum could see the emotion written out as clearly as if spoken.
Soleum realized what had happened when the ball rolled into his tail. They had never lost a ball to his side of the barrier before. Usually the kids were more aware, but it seemed time had made them complacent.
“What are you doing! That was the best ball we have!” Soleum flicked his tail, testing the shape of the ball while an argument broke out on the other side of the barrier.
“I’m sorry-”
“If you’re sorry then go get it!” One of the other kids shoved the owner of the trembling hands Soleum was watching in his direction.
“But we can’t go through the-”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you lost the ball!” At the urging of the other children, the boy who had last touched the ball walked shakily toward the barrier. He was closer than the humans ever usually got.
Soleum twisted his body and carefully set his head on top of the ball. This ball was much too large for him to throw. It was bigger around than he was, and he already struggled with throwing small objects. It had come to his side of the barrier, so really it was his now. The humans wouldn’t be able to reach it, and he had no obligation to give it back.
As the human boy got within a few steps of the barrier, he clapped one of his hands over his mouth and stopped. He was close enough that Soleum could see that the boy’s eyes were wide with fear and the knuckles of the hand that wasn’t covering his mouth were white from how tightly he had his fist clenched. Soleum curled one of his paws as tightly as he could, but it didn’t show even an ounce of the emotion a human hand could express.
The further away kids jeered at the boy who had stopped approaching the barrier. Soleum could see him going pale as he tried to force himself another step closer and his knees collapsed. Tears started streaming down his face.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I’m sorry.” Getting even as close as the boy was to the barrier caused humans severe discomfort. If he tried to push through it, he likely would end up injured. It might not even be possible for living beings to get through the barrier here. Soleum had been assured that the barrier near the town was even more fortified than the rest of it.
The other kids continued to curse at the boy from a safe distance away, insulting him and saying he wouldn’t be able to play with them any more. For Soleum, used to sitting a critical few steps in the wrong direction to play with the other kids, the idea that someone who was on the right side of the barrier to play catch and had a body to do so wouldn’t be able to because of a lost ball was unimaginably sad.
He pushed himself back up off of the ball and took a good look at it. It was a nice ball, not that he had ever had one before. It had all the stories of summer days of the village children woven into its fabric. More than anything, it was a symbol of this memory for him now, this cloudless summer day when the people of the village had forgotten to fear the mysterious and the magical for a moment.
Soleum could imagine where he would put the ball among the rest of his hoard. But…
He turned to line his tail up with the ball and batted it back over to the other side of the barrier. His “kick” sent the ball rolling perfectly into the leg of the boy wiping his tears on the other side of the barrier.
That ball had more of a life to live out there than in here with Soleum.
The boy froze as the ball returned to him unbidden. The calls of the other children also abruptly stopped.
“There’s something out there!” one of the kids yelled, and then one after the other, they all ran away screaming. The boy closest to Soleum was the slowest to go, shakily grabbing the returned ball and running off with it, glancing back as he went.
Soleum was disappointed but not surprised to see them go. Would they pick another spot to play now? Would it take another season for them to forget to stay away from the magic that walled off this part of the forest? Would it take years?
Even if he had years, Soleum wouldn’t be able to play catch. Soleum wouldn’t be able to have a snowball fight in the winter. Soleum wouldn’t be able to swing a stick as a sword. Soleum flipped onto his back to stare discontentedly at his not-human hands.
He imagined all of the things he could do if he had five squishy fingers instead of four sharp claws. In all his excitement to see humans, maybe he had missed the first step he should have taken to get closer, mistaking physical proximity for understanding.
His family all could turn into a human form and take advantage of flexible fingers and thumbs with no sharp claws at the end. Would it have been faster for Soleum to learn how to do that than twist the body he had now into shapes it wasn’t meant for?
He thought about what he knew of magic. His family hadn’t been very helpful in teaching it, so Soleum still rarely used it, and only when he was inspired to do so. They insisted that he had to learn the feeling himself or it would limit his growth. Soleum read books that were supposedly from a prestigious magic school, but they weren’t helpful either. Everything in the books just talked about designing magic circles and incantations. You didn’t even need those to do magic.
Soleum always saw the world a certain way when he used magic in the past. It was something like a page from one of his books, with the world in front of him laid out in clear terms that he could understand and change. People contained many more words than the things around them, and Soleum’s family was made up of so much that it was a little hard to look at with a magical eye.
He tried taking a good look at himself for once, at those short legs he was so tired of. He read the way the dark scales interlocked to protect the muscles underneath. He read the way his bones connected and where they would move. He read the way his claws were designed to rip into flesh but had practiced to avoid doing so. He read everything he already knew about himself and nothing about how to change it.
Soleum had asked each of his family members what it was like to turn into a human, but everyone had given him a different answer.
I think about the way my limbs branch out and grow from my center, Hyung had said.
The space of one human body is occupied, said Chief.
I take the bits that make me up and rearrange them, Noona explained.
Soleum didn’t understand any of the explanations, nor why they were so different. Wasn’t it all the same type of magic? Noona’s explanation was the closest to making any sense, but rearranging himself randomly didn’t seem like a good idea, even if he could figure out how to do it.
The sound of human footsteps broke Soleum out of his trance. He realized that the entire day had passed with him peering into himself and the things around him.
The boy from earlier was back, still scared, but with determination he hadn’t had earlier. He stood a safe distance from the barrier and called out.
“Um…” he looked down, hands clenched tight in the fabric of his shirt. “I don’t know if you’re still out there… Or if you can understand me at all but… Thank you.”
Caught up in a day of thinking about magic, for once, Soleum saw the boy not as a human, but as the words that made him up. His story was short, lacking the long years Soleum saw compressed when he looked at his family members. It made it easier to pick him apart and see what words were his experiences, which were his mind, and which were his form.
Soleum read what it was to be human. He then realized where the words were that defined Kim Soleum’s body as that of a dragon. So he changed them.
Two pale hands with no claws and five fingers greeted Soleum’s eyes in the place his paws had been. Soleum realized that he had never turned his head to look at the boy and had only read his presence.
Glad he was able to express his gratitude, the boy turned and hurried back to town so he wouldn’t be late for dinner.
Soleum’s new hands balled into fists as he imagined it. It was somehow the same and yet completely different from doing the motion with his paws. He opened and closed his hands a few times, marveling at the feel of the different bone structure and the sensation of his skin shifting.
Habitually, he rolled onto his stomach like he would to walk in his normal form and ended up with his face buried in the dirt. Oh, this wasn’t how humans stood. Soleum shifted back to sit on his feet and tried to apply his experience trying to stand up to his new body.
He immediately hit a roadblock when he tried planting his tail in the ground, only for his new tail to not be nearly as solid as his old one. He flicked his new, fluffy tail discontentedly at the realization that it wouldn’t be of any use to support him.
Instead, he put his hands on the ground like he had seen some of the kids do when they fell and tried to push his legs straight. Halfway up, he realized he needed to flip his feet the right way around so that the part that was supposed to face down was on the ground. There, that was progress.
…How did you go from this weird triangle position to standing?
After some trial and error, Soleum finally figured out how to push his weight back over his feet, his now longer arms thrown out to the side for balance in a way that was much more effective than it had been when his arms were shorter. He focused on his balance as he took his first tiny step with his new feet, adjusting his arms and tail spread out around him to offset the wobbling.
Soleum decided that the first thing he would try with his new feet was conquering the game of hopscotch that he had been trying to beat all year. Three half-steps into this plan, it crumbled, as he stepped on something hard and angular, yelped in pain as he lifted his weight off of it, and went crashing back to the ground.
This must be why humans wore shoes. Soleum had never realized how uneven the forest ground was under his much firmer paws. He decided it would be a good time to go home and get some tips on how to use his new body.
Noona and Hyung would be so surprised to see him. They always celebrated whenever he succeeded at some type of magic. Chief probably wouldn’t be awake today. He had been sleeping a lot ever since he brought home Soleum’s mountain. Hyung had explained that after using that much magic, he would sleep most of the time for a while to recover.
Soleum activated the quick transport item set up by a nearby tree to teleport back to the main cave of the lair. When he arrived, Hyung was setting out dishes for their supper.
“Welcome back! I was just about to go get you. Did you have fun with the village kids today? Beat your game yet? Tonight I made…” Hyung trailed off as he finally looked up and noticed that Soleum was a little taller than usual.
“Oh my gosh you did it!”
Just then, Noona returned with the untouched plate of food they had left in Chief’s den the previous day for in case he woke up. “What are you so- oh shit, Roe?”
“I can stand now,” he said confidently.
“Congrats! I know you’ve been wanting to try that forever.” Hyung smiled at him proudly.
“Roe, you’re filthy, were you rolling around on the ground?” Noona stepped further into the room, and with a flick of her wrist, droplets of water gathered and swirled in the air around Soleum.
“I was figuring out how to stand,” he defended.
“With your face?” The warm water washed across Soleum’s skin and through his hair, wiping away the dirt. He felt the ears on top of his head stand up in displeasure at the wetness, even though he was dry again right away as Noona skillfully withdrew all of the water.
He was a bit confused why he needed two sets of ears. The ones on the top of his head responded to the way he would have usually moved his ears in his original form, so the less furry ones on the side of his head didn’t seem to be doing much.
“Don’t tease him too much. Roe, you’re doing great already being able to walk!” Well he hadn’t exactly figured out walking yet, but they didn’t know that.
Soleum took a slow step forward and was pleased to find that the floor of the cave was much smoother than the forest floor had been. The stone underneath his feet was cold, and he realized that the air here as a whole was much cooler than outside.
Noona saw him shiver, grabbed something off of a chair, and walked toward him. “It gets chilly in here, why don’t you put on a sweater. Arms up!”
Soleum complied, and with Noona right next to him now, he noticed that he was still a lot shorter than her, only reaching her waist. She tugged the sweater on him over his outstretched arms, carefully tugging it off of where it got caught on his horns. Was he supposed to still have those as a human?
“Better?” Noona asked.
The oversized sweater was already keeping his body heat close where it fell all the way down to his knees. “Yeah.”
With clothes on now, Soleum felt even more excitement bubbling up. He was totally like a human now! Other than maybe the horns. He wondered if his family would finally let him go out into the wider world and meet humans in town.
“Now that I look human, can I visit the town?” he asked as he followed Noona over to the dinner table.
He couldn’t see Noona’s reaction from behind her, but Hyung’s smile fell for a moment before recovering. Distracted, on Soleum’s next step, his foot twisted strangely and he fell yet again, reaching out for Noona ahead of him, but too unused to the length of his arms and the motion of his hands to grab on for help.
“Roe!” they shouted in unison as he hit the ground. As the surprise of falling faded, Soleum noticed that one of his knees stung from the fall. He rearranged his legs underneath him so that his knee barely poked out of the sweater and – blood. Ack.
This new human body was awfully fragile. Soleum had never had anything cut through his scales before to see himself bleeding, and the sight of even the unfamiliar skin that now belonged to him oozing blood was making him nauseous.
A hand at his chin turned his head so he couldn’t look any more and he found his face buried in Noona’s shirt as her voice resonated through her chest. “You don’t have to look. Minseong, can you fix it?” she demanded.
“I can try. People are a little harder.” Soleum could already feel Hyung’s magic stirring the air and weaving into an elaborate spell. The mana in the air transformed into something fresh and full of vitality that wove Soleum’s skin back together and replaced the stinging feeling with just a tingle.
“Does that feel better?” Hyung asked as the magic dissipated.
Soleum nodded and Noona let him lean back out of her embrace. “Thank you.”
“No problem.” Hyung breathed a sigh of relief.
“Geez, you have to be careful. You have a lot further to fall now.” Noona helped him back up and a swirl of water swished around his healed knee to wash off any remaining blood. Soleum took the chance to look at it now, and sure enough, it was back to how it had been before he fell.
Once he reached his feet, she lifted him up with a grunt. “Roe, you better not get any bigger or you’re going to be hard to carry.”
“I can walk,” he protested. He had only fallen a few times.
“Too bad, I feel like carrying you today.” She deposited him on his bench when they reached the table.
Despite the distraction, they brought back up the topic he was curious about without Soleum having to ask. Hyung started speaking softly.
“You need to be able to pass a bit more naturally as a human to go to town. Once you get the hang of walking more, we can talk about it again. They should have fall markets in town, so if you learn in time maybe we can go see that, okay?”
Soleum slowly nodded, disheartened. He supposed he had fallen a few more times in his short stint as a human than his family members ever did in human form. An event this fall was a good goal. After today his human friends might not be back for a while anyway, so he could take the time to practice.
“There’s one more thing you’re going to have to work on before we can go to the human town too,” Noona interjected.
“What is it?”
“You’ve got to start speaking with your mouth. It’s bad for humans to listen to our true voices.”
Soleum realized that while his family members’ mouths usually moved while they were talking, he had kept his closed the entire time. He sorted through the sensations of the unfamiliar muscles and opened his mouth wide.
“Like this?” He opened and closed his mouth a few times while he was talking like he had seen other people do. He even remembered to end it by closing his mouth again. That had to be a perfect human imitation.
Noona reached out and pinched his cheek in her hand. “That’s just moving your mouth when you talk, you have to make the sound come from there instead of your mind.”
She stretched his cheek a few times, to the point it started to sting a little, and then Soleum felt a little vibration in his throat as his now squishy body made a sound of protest.
“See how you made that sound in here?” She released his cheek and poked at his chest. “Humans talk from there.”
Soleum tried to recreate the feeling now that he knew it. “HMMMMMM.” That was not what he was trying to say.
“Aaaaaaaaa aaaaa?” This might be harder than walking. Noona was laughing openly at this point, but Hyung at least was trying to hide his laughter behind a hand and looking the other direction.
Soleum’s more flexible human face twisted into a pout more exaggerated than he could have made in his original form. He would get the hang of the whole human thing and then they would have to take him to town, it was just a matter of time.
With just a bit of practice, he would get it. Starting now, he would talk with his mouth to prove he could. He looked down at his plate of food with determination.
“Aaa aaaa ohhh ohhhhh aaa ohhh.” Not quite it. Hmm.
“What was that? Why don’t you try again?” Soleum watched the way Hyung’s mouth moved around the words and tried to match it up with the sounds.
“Aaaayi aaaa ooo ooo uh or.” This was hopeless.
“I want to use a fork. To eat.” Okay, talking was going to take a while. Not talking until he learned it the human way was unsustainable.
“Good try,” Hyung praised, grabbing the fork from Chief’s table setting to pass to Soleum since he wasn’t here anyway.
“It’s easier to learn how to talk if you’re watching someone, do you want help?” Noona stabbed a bite of food and waved it in the air as she talked.
“Mm.” At least Soleum could make a sound that was good enough to be recognized as an agreement. The full word ‘yes’ was clearly way off, but being able to communicate his idea already sparked a sense of achievement in Soleum.
“Look how my mouth moves. Ffffff. Ffff. Ff.” Once she had demonstrated enough that Soleum started trying to copy it, she shoved her bite of food in her mouth. Her empty fork hovered in the air as she watched him with a barely suppressed smirk. They must be trying to learn the word fork since he had tried it earlier.
Soleum’s first few attempts to copy the sound were nothing but a loud exhale. Eventually he figured out which way to arrange his lips to replicate it. “Fffffffffffff!”
“Good job,” Hyung praised, smiling gently.
“Now try this,” Noona urged. “Kuh. Kuh.” The sound was much shorter and sharper than the f sound. Soleum had never been so conscious of the sounds that made up the words he used.
This one took a lot more tries, but eventually he did it. “Kuh!”
“Look at that, you can already do two sounds!”
“Now say fuck!” Noona’s eyes glittered.
“Haje!” Were they not learning how to say fork?
“Fffaaakuh.”
“No, Roe, don’t copy that, why are we starting with swear words?” Hyung asked, distressed.
“Why not? It’s not like he doesn’t know them.”
“Do you really want his first spoken word to be ‘fuck’?”
“Were you going to try and get it to be ‘Hyung’? This is more fair.”
“What was my first word?” Soleum didn’t realize his first word was such a big deal. It wasn’t like it was his first time ever talking.
“We got you to call Chief ‘Dad’,” Hyung explained.
“He didn’t get very emotional about it.”
They continued bickering and Soleum looked down at his plate of food and the fork next to it. He could try something else while they were trying to decide what words he should learn first. In the meantime, Soleum would finally be able to use a fork to eat like the rest of his family.
He brought his hand up to the table to grab it, only for the too-long sleeve of the sweater he was wearing to swing up with the motion and hit him in the face. The petty argument cut off at the startled little sound Soleum made.
“Are you alright?” Hyung asked, reaching out and helping push the sleeve up to Soleum’s elbow so his hands were no longer trapped inside it. “Do we have any clothes closer to his size?”
“My clothes would be the smallest, but it’s still all adult size. Can’t we just put him in whatever?”
“We don’t know how long he’s going to be this small for, it would be a waste not to dress him up cute while we can. Roe, is there anything you want to wear?”
Soleum thought for a moment, but he couldn’t think of any clothes his family had worn that he was particularly interested in trying. But as far as function went… “I need shoes to walk outside, right?”
“Yeah, we’ll pick some out. I can go get some clothes for you tomorrow. Most of the stores will probably be closed this time tonight.”
Hyung continued asking for his opinion on different kinds of clothes as Soleum used his fork to carefully stab pieces of food and bring them to his mouth. At some point Noona complained that this was a lot of thought to put into clothes Soleum was going to grow out of immediately, at which point Hyung said she had no fashion sense, and the conversation devolved into more bickering.
Eventually, the plates of the three present members of the table were empty and only Chief’s was still full where it sat in front of his still-vacant seat. They hadn’t expected him to wake up today based on what he had said last time he was awake, but they set a plate for him every day anyway.
“Can I take Chief his food today?” Each day when they were done eating, one of them would leave Chief’s plate in his den in case he woke up and wanted something. Soleum had never gotten to before since he couldn’t carry a plate upright, but here was yet another thing he could finally try.
“Do you think you can carry it?” Noona sounded fully prepared to make good on her promise/threat to carry him everywhere.
“Mm.” He answered with his human voice to emphasize that his new human body could do it.
With a bit of fussing from Hyung, they let him take the plate down the gradually sloping tunnel toward the cave where Chief kept his hoard and was sleeping. Neat stacks of gold coins lined the room, carefully organized and precisely counted.
In the middle of the room, small piles of coins were arranged into a square, and Chief was laying atop them. Soleum slowly lowered the plate of food onto the flat, even pile of gold coins next to where Chief was sleeping peacefully and sat down next to him.
Today was possible because Chief had expanded the barrier right next to a town and set up a teleportation item so that Soleum could visit easily every day. If it weren’t for being able to see how the other humans were put together, Soleum would have never figured out how to do this kind of magic.
“I figured out how to turn into a human today,” Soleum reported quietly. “Thank you.”
He felt the mana around him stir in the way characteristic of Chief using it to observe his surroundings. A magical pressure settled on top of his head with the shape and weight of Chief’s hand in human form.
“Good job.” The small white form on a bed of gold coins didn’t move, but enough of Chief’s mind was awake to greet Soleum. Soleum sat there in the comfortable silence until the mana pressing softly into his hair dissipated as Chief fell back asleep.
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bonus comic sketch
