Rebirth15 min read
The Sweet Potato, the System, and the Dragon Who Became My Doctor
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The first thing he offered me was a sweet potato the size of a loaf.
"It’s hot," he said, but his voice was a rumble like wind in a tunnel. "Eat."
I poked it with a trembling paw. Steam kissed my fingers. Hot—so hot I jerked back.
He cocked his head, red eyes narrowing. He reminded me of a player in a puppet show—huge, sharp, and oddly clumsy with care.
"Right hand," he said, blunt as a stone.
I lifted my right paw. He smiled—if a dragon could smile—and blew. The breeze was a storm. I landed on my rear, whiskers flying like confetti.
He pinched my collar, lifted me up, presented a tiny spoon.
"Eat."
I ate. It was sweet and plain and perfect. He hummed.
"Did you hear that?" a voice banged into my head like a dropped pot.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +1."
I blinked at the ceiling, then at the enormous dragon who had just saved me from two hungry rats and taken me in like a ragged pet.
"Favorability? System?" I muttered to no one.
He tilted his head. He touched my head with a careful claw and made low sounds. I leaned my forehead against his rough finger. Warmth spread like honey.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +2."
"Good," the voice said. "When target favorability reaches full, you may unlock a hidden task. Complete the hidden task and you may return to your original world and obtain one wish."
My heart did a little leap that felt like a trapped bird.
I had a way home. And the giant who had my entire life in one swaying palm was the key.
"Call him—" the system offered suggestions of noises I could make.
"Aoa?" I tried. "Meow?" I tried. "Huff?" I picked one that sounded like the clumsy long note he used when amused.
He dug a piece from the sweet potato and presented it with a smile like a crescent moon.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +1."
I decided then and there to be the very best pet I could be.
That night I practiced sulking, chirping, begging, rolling. I stuck my head where he could pat it. I refused to make a fuss when mice squeaked too close. I preened and purred in the style of a creature that knew how to charm.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +20."
I went to sleep on his knitted nest, slumped into deep, safe, hungry sleep. Morning woke me to warmth and a new voice—clear, youthful, with a cut in the eyebrow like a slice of light.
He poked my head. "You awake?" he asked.
"Mm," I answered with a muffled chirp.
He blinked. I blinked.
Then I saw him properly—a boy with dark hair threaded with gold, two small dragon horns like black seeds on his brow, one horn chipped. He moved like a shadow that had learned gentleness. He smelled faintly of smoke and something like old paper.
"Are you hungry?" he asked.
"Birds lean up and chirp for food," he said, giving the kind of small lecture that made my heart hop.
His name, the dragon said, was Evan Ray. The system confirmed the name every time it pinged like a bell.
"Eat," he coaxed, opening a neat tin box that clinked with little bear-shaped biscuits.
I took one. He smiled.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +1."
"I can do this," I told myself.
"Don't make a mess," Evan said, soft and mock-scolding. He tucked me into his chest pocket, where his heart hammered like a trapped drum.
"Hold on," I told him with my paws around his thumb. "Don't go."
He sighed, gentle and helpless. "I can't take you everywhere."
He placed me inside his shirt, inside the pocket by his heart. The rhythm there was fast, steady, dangerously comforting.
"Keep warm," he murmured.
"Yes," I answered in the new language the system taught me: little chirps and sounds that matched his thoughts, and a strange, sudden fluency filled me when his favorability rose.
At school he slid me into his pocket and introduced me as "my little creature." The other kids stared. A blond boy with honey eyes and too-wide grin came over, his gaze hungry and unpleasant.
"You found some odd toy," he sneered.
I tightened my grip on Evan's shirt. He barred the boy with a look that was not mild.
"Back off," Evan said.
The blond's mouth curled. "Let me see it."
"No."
"You're hiding something," the boy said, leaning. The smell of his breath had candy and something sharp. He pushed forward.
Evan's hand came up like a shield. "She's shy."
"Show it," the boy demanded.
"Don't," Evan said, and his hand closed around the edge of the pocket like a promise.
My heart thudded. The blond's eyes glittered and he stared at me like an object on a shelf. He was ugly with the kind of possessiveness that makes small creatures feverish. I shrank closer.
"Stop looking like that," Evan murmured to the boy.
Almost tenderly, he put a hard orange candy into the pocket—another small offering. I felt its weight, its sugary heat.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +1."
Evan stroked my head.
"You're mine," he whispered.
I liked the way that sounded.
Days passed in tiny victories. He taught me to respond. He fed me bread and pastries and everything tasted like the world might keep me. He would take me to a tailor who made me the daintiest outfits. The tailor—Benjamin Bryant—measured me with a soft tape and smiled.
"She is adorable," Benjamin Bryant said, his fingers careful as if touching a sleeping egg. "Make several. Keep clean. Keep warm."
"They're fragile," Evan said, thumb for a long moment on the fabric.
"Take care," Benjamin Bryant said.
Evan joked and showed me tricks. He let me sit on his head, and I grabbed his horn and laughed.
"Hold tight," he warned. "If you fall, I won't be there."
"I'll hold," I chirped, and he smiled.
But under the easy afternoons, a shadow nagged. The jagged memory of hands, the memory of being taken, the ache in his words when he mentioned a name: Arabella George.
"Who is Arabella?" I asked once.
He flinched like a dark chord. "She is... someone who owns things."
"You don't like her?" I asked.
He laughed without humor. "She is cruel. She owns pains like trophies."
He told a fragment once about a bird he had once loved, how a girl had taken it and ruined its song. He had buried it in the mud to stop it fluttering for her pleasure. He had never forgiven himself.
"I won't let that happen to you," he whispered. He pressed his forehead to mine and closed his hands like cages.
One day the blond—Raul Dixon—took a darker interest. He muttered, and not long after he brought me somewhere that smelled of iron and old rope.
"You brought it to me," a soft voice said. It tasted like honey, but it smelled like rot.
Arabella George arrived like a storm in silk. Her face was a ruin veiled in beauty—a scarred bloom. She moved like the top of a mountain, entire and untouchable. She smiled at Evan like someone who owned the sun.
"You found it for me?" she asked.
"No," Evan said. "It's mine."
Her smile sharpened. "Everything is mine, boy."
She reached. "Let me hold it."
"No," Evan said.
She slapped him. The sound skittered.
"Give it to me!"
He stumbled. I could see his skin split with pain where her fingers had carved at him. A red sigil burned across his throat like a brand.
"Please," I begged in whatever new language my system gave me.
He covered me. "Go," he said, and his voice was as broken as dried glass.
Someone shoved me back into darkness, into a cramped bag, into cold. I couldn't breathe.
I felt his hands carrying me like a hallucination. I heard the clack of someone's heel. I felt a slam.
When the bag opened, I peeked through a slit. Arabella stood there like an accusation. She sniffed.
"Smells like it belongs to no one," she said. "I like it."
She laughed, a blade on the tongue. She laughed and then turned away. The world collapsed into night.
Later I learned through whispers from Raul Dixon—who had a softness that wasn’t real, only practiced—that Arabella's father ran arenas. That some people bet on pain. That Evan and others had been in the clutches of such a place long ago. There were rooms with chains and games that made big dragons howl until the walls bled sound.
Raul's voice broke when he said, "She likes things that scream. She liked him. She'll like this."
I hated Raul then in a way that made my fur stand on end.
I will not recount everything that led me to the deep stone place where walls had lanterns like the eyes of the night. It smelled of iron and the teeth of other beasts. I will not say how fear tasted like grit under the tongue.
What matters is the prison.
Evan was there. He lay like a broken mountain, scales torn as if someone had carved his map with cruelty. Chains were cold around his neck. His breath rasped like dry grass. Blood dotted the lips at his jaw.
"Why are you here?" he asked, and there was no anger left—only a tired ache.
Raul pushed me forward with a hand that tried to pretend it didn't tremble. "I brought it to see him."
Evan looked down at me. His eyes searched the small creature he had sheltered and loved and failed.
"Why would you put her here?" Evan whispered.
"She will make a good... vessel," Raul said. He was trying to appear fierce. "Arabella wants it."
Then Arabella arrived. The doors opened and she stepped in like sunrise. She was even worse up close—smile sharp, robe dripping with jewels, face broken but cruel.
"Bring it here," she said.
Evan stood slowly. His wings scraped the floor. He pushed his body between me and her like a gate.
"Back away," he breathed.
She touched his face, left a smear of blood on her fingers as if she had collected something and kept it like a prize. "You do not get to keep this," she said. "You are property now."
He laughed like a man with nothing left to lose. "Never," he breathed.
Then it happened.
A man with pale hair and eyes like winter—Cyril Salazar—entered, and the air stiffened. He looked young, and the cold in him was sharper than any blade. He moved like someone who bent the world to numbers and spells.
"You will be useful," Cyril said. He lifted his palm, and a thin thread of blood-red light skated along Evan's scales, twisting into a sigil.
Evan collapsed like a mountain under siege. He tried to stand and failed. But his last courage was to shield me.
"Go," he said. "Run."
He looked at me with all the tenderness he had stored. I can still feel the heat of his last hand on my head.
"I love you," he whispered, and his words broke like a star.
Then the blade. A bright white blade appeared from Cyril's hand, and Evan fell.
I saw the red splash, the hot bloom like a firework, the way his breath left him like someone who let out a secret.
My body felt like glass—and then the system sang.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +5."
"Ding. Favorability full. Hidden task completed. Host may return to original world and make one wish."
I thought only of him. I thought about small paws and a big pocketed heart. "I wish," I whispered with everything inside. "Take me with him."
The world turned violet and then blank.
When I woke, I was in a hospital bed, my mother's hand like a cliff on my shoulder. She was Ethel Hanson. She cried and called for help, and a man in a white coat bent over me with eyes I knew like a light in the dawn.
"Evan?" I croaked.
He smiled, the small half-smile of a man who recognized the story in his own hands. He was there, standing as if his arrival was the one logical event in the world.
"You're safe," he said.
But safety had teeth. I wanted to go back, to drag him out of rooms with gray lights and say: You said you'd wait. Wait.
I didn't know then that the world I returned to had changed.
I did not expect what happened next: justice.
I stood at Evan's side when the truth came spilling out. The city has ears, you see. People who knew the arena, people who had been wronged, people who kept little truths like seeds, all came forward.
It began with a whisper. Someone in a tavern remembered Raul Dixon carrying a small creature. Someone else remembered Raul's hands trembling. A bookkeeper, Benjamin Bryant, provided receipts—raids, bribes, the ledger that should have stayed hidden. A tailor sang a tune about the cost of cruelty. Friends fed each other names, each one a match to a dry pile of wood.
Within days, the square filled.
They gathered at the central plaza, under a statue of the city’s founding dragon. Lanterns swung. "Show them," someone said. "Let the world look."
"Let them answer," I said.
Evan's eyes were pained but steel. "You deserve..." he began, voice thin as thread.
Arabella was brought in like a wounded queen. She had expected adoration and found curiosity instead. The crowd roared like a storm had broken and left stale things flung on the shore.
I stepped forward.
"People of the city," I called, and the sound of my voice felt strange after the system had taught me to sing in Evan's tongue. "This is Arabella George. She bought monsters and made them bleed for sport."
A hush fell. A few people murmured. Arabella's expression slid, surprised, and then beautifully furious.
"What proof?" she snapped. "You are nothing."
A woman stepped forward. "I married for safety. I was there." Her hands shook. She showed bruises old as winter. Another man produced a ledger. "These are receipts. Payments," he said. "Cyril Salazar was paid to bind dragons, to make them docile and useful. He is here."
A dark who had lost kin in the pits spat, "She sold them to die so she could watch."
Arabella's face hardened. "They were entertainment," she said. "It was the world."
"Was it?" The crowd’s tone sharpened. "Where is honor in crowns made from hearts?"
Cyril tried to move among the witnesses like a man with a spell that would hush the tide. He spoke with cold, learned detachment.
"You speak of old laws of ownership," he said. "Property binds stronger than blood. We were merely following tradition."
The square hummed. A woman in the back—the wife of a man whose dragon had not returned—began to sing a lament. A child threw a stone at Arabella and hit her shoe. Laughter and anger braided into music.
Then the prosecution began.
"Do you admit to performing binding sigils on sentient beings for profit?" asked a magistrate with eyebrows like thunder.
Cyril smiled. "If I molded them, I made them useful."
"Did you teach others to do the same?"
"I instructed those who asked."
"Did you profit from fights where dragons died to please wealthy spectators?"
"Profit is how cities run."
"Answer plainly. Did you order injuries, sell creatures, tear out hearts in front of wagers?"
His smile froze then smoldered. "I practiced arts." He stared at the ground, and I could see denial like a brittle mask cracking.
"Do you feel remorse?"
The crowd leaned in. Arabella's face went slack, a mask shaped like rage.
"Remorse is useless," she said. "The strong take. The weak break."
"Why?" the magistrate said. "Why would you do such things?"
She laughed and then stumbled because the crowd's faces were no longer adoring. Their expression was cold. "Power," she hissed. "Pleasure."
"Do you realize what you have done to Evan Ray?" I demanded.
"That dragon deserved its place," she said. "They are small things. It was entertainment."
A murmur like breaking glass rose. People who had lost dragons, their homes turned hollow, stepped forward.
"From the arena that you ran," said Benjamin Bryant—whose handwriting I had seen in a ledger—"we have names of customers, of bets. We have witnesses who stand here now."
He spread copies of the records. Fingers pointed. Raul Dixon's signature—a child's desperation masked as cruelty—was on several pages.
Raul stood pale. "I did what I was told," he stammered. "I thought it'd be fine."
"Fine?" a man scoffed. "You handed living things into pits."
"You brought her to make a profit," someone shouted. "You handed her to a woman who breaks songs."
Raul's face was a portrait in oils of remorse and fear. He had the courage to look down only when Abu Sha—someone whose kin had been lost—threw forward a tiny box that had once been a keepsake. Raul flinched like he had been struck.
"Why?" someone from the crowd demanded. "How does one justify selling a heart?"
Cyril tried a different tactic. He raised his hands and spoke words of cold logic. "Dragons are beasts under the old compacts," he argued. "You cannot punish the past."
"But the past that was cruel will not be your sanctuary," the magistrate said. "You will answer for the living pains you wrought."
It was not law alone that rose—it was the city's moral force. They wanted spectacle—not the kind Arabella loved, but the kind that tore away the comfortable masks.
They stripped Arabella of her place in the guild. They tore down the posters that proclaimed her shows. They called for restitution.
Arabella's reaction was a study in fury moving through stages: pride, disbelief, denial, rage, collapse.
"You're monsters!" she screamed. "You cannot take me!"
The crowd booed and jeered. Someone held up a ledger of her payments, inked with her signature. Children who had witnessed the arenas came forward to point small fingers.
"This is the woman who bought my brother," said one boy, voice raw. "This is the woman who watched us fight for coin."
Her scream turned to silence as the weight of witnesses pressed.
Cyril's fall was different. He tried to reason; his arrogance was his undoing. People brought forward the bindings: the ropes of red light he had learned to knot and the journals that described his experiments: how to bind will, how to use a small sentient body as a container for a spell.
"You made a creature into a vessel," I spat. "You called it progress."
"Progress can be asked to clean its hands," the magistrate said. "And progress will answer."
The public punishment was not a theatrical lynching; it was something the city could live with as justice. They forced Arabella to stand in the very square where she had been lauded, and they read the names of the creatures who had disappeared under her reign. They had each person come and tell what they had seen. They called witnesses—parents, former employees, mechanics who had cleaned up blood, a tailor who had mended the torn wings of a dragon and kept the threads as proof.
When it was Raul's turn, he trembled. "I thought it would be small," he muttered. "I thought…"
"It was never small," said a voice like the echo of a bell. "You made a living being someone else's toy."
Raul looked up as tears cut tracks down his face. The crowd did not roar as when they shouted at Arabella. This was not bloodlust. This was truth.
They made Raul publicly return what he had kept—the small ledger, the records. They had him stand by the families he had harmed and apologize. He did. He choked on the words.
Cyril tried to bargain. "I am a scholar," he said. "You cannot judge a scholar by his methods."
"We judge you by your choices," the magistrate answered.
They unmasked his charts, the sigils he commanded. They forced him into rituals of his own undoing—binding scripts that severed his ability to perform the specific curse forms he had used, read aloud in a chorus until the magic bled out into the air like smoke.
Cyril's face shifted through stages: arrogance, then alarm, denial, bargaining, and finally a collapse into raw fear when the things he'd once controlled slipped out of his fingers and turned like frost.
"Please," he begged the crowd. "This was knowledge. This was for the city—"
"It was for you," someone shouted. "You humiliated lives for curiosity and coin."
The crowd demanded his name be struck from the rolls. They ripped public honors from him. They forced him—publicly, painfully—to watch as the bindings he had once performed were named and the victims were carried through the square in a slow, reverent parade. Children laid white flowers; the old mended, scarred dragons lifted their heads high.
Arabella's pride crumbled. She writhed as people's voices unthreaded her authority. They wrested her jewels, remade her halls into shelters, and placed the ledgers in the hall of remorse.
Raul bent down in front of those he had hurt and said, "I am sorry," and it sounded at first hollow but then honest, like a bell struck to stop ringing. He was ordered to work to rebuild what he'd helped break—gardens, enclosures, to feed and clean and learn the names of those he had bought and traded in callous nights.
Cyril—who had once thought himself above town judgement—was disgraced in a way that burned. His apprentices left him. He was made to surrender his books and teach others the harm of such manipulations.
All of this happened in the light, with witnesses and with the city's formal seal. There was no grand guillotine; there was a public, communal unmaking, a subtraction from prestige that left them small and common.
They were punished in the way that mattered: their power taken, their names turned into warnings, their ability to hide stripped away.
When the dust of the square settled, when the people fed and comforted the creatures taken from the arenas, when the small wounds were cleaned and bandaged, when Evan and I walked out in the light together, I felt the city breathe like a relieved thing.
He limped, and his eyes were old but softer. He held my tiny paw. "Did it help?" he asked quietly.
"It helped they could not hurt others anymore," I said. "But did it help you?"
He touched his chipped horn, and his voice trembled. "I ... needed them to see."
"You deserved to be seen."
He smiled a tired smile. "That was your doing."
I thought about wishing stupid little wishes: more treats, soft nests, his smile like dawn. I had asked to take him with me, and the system had done something strange—brought him to my world, wrapped him in a white coat, and placed him beside me as the very doctor who checked my breathing.
He knelt on the floor and brushed my hair back like the dragon of memory and the man of now. "You came back," he said.
"I did," I replied.
He laughed, and the sound held a memory of cliffs and wings and the square and the terrible blade. "You make the best decisions."
A long time later, when the wounds had begun to stitch and the city learned to keep an eye on the darker trades, Evan and I walked through streets that smelled like bread. People no longer stared with hunger. Children reached out to touch my tail—soft now in a way that didn’t startle. Evan carried me on his shoulder, thumb pressed into the fur like a promise.
"I will be here," he said, always like that—small vows wrapped in deep things.
I had a wish. I had thought I wanted to take him with me. The wish had found a way: he was my doctor now, and I would keep him like that, under hospital lights and under morning sun. He would help broken things and put his hands where they were needed.
Once, on a rainy evening, I sat on the sill and watched a man whose name once meant catastrophe to him—Raul Dixon—plant flowers in a courtyard. He wiped his hands and looked at me with something like shame and something like hope.
"Do you forgive me?" he asked.
"I don't know," I said.
"Will you ever?"
"Maybe," I said. "When you can show you're not alone in the ways you were."
He nodded like he understood a long sentence I'd yet to finish.
At the very end, when the city had washed away some of its darker stains, I curled into Evan's pocket as he walked the hospital corridors. He tapped my head, and the familiar system pinged once inside my skull—like an old bell.
"Ding. Evan Ray favorability +1."
I tapped his finger back. He looked at me with the soft ache of someone who had buried a bird and never stopped hearing the echoes.
"傻人," he said, because he still used that one word for me in a strange, affectionate way he had always used in the dark.
He had become both my punishment survivor and my rescuer; he had been put down by cruelty and lifted by a city that believed in loud truths.
I put my head against his thumb, looked up at the fluorescent lights, and thought of the sweet potato, of the first spoon, of the pocket that smelled like a beating drum.
When people later spoke of what had happened, they used a dozen different words for justice. For me, justice had a name and a breath and a thrum in a white coat.
He tapped my head one last time.
"Stay," he said.
"I will," I promised.
The End
— Thank you for reading —