A human child, frightened and small, ran into the kobold burrows. Problem was, despite only being there a week or so, now they were refusing to leave, clinging to the kobolds that had been watching over them. -- Anon Guest
All the smaller species agree, only a true fool would run directly into a Dragon's den. Even the den of a pack of Dragonkindred... like Kobolds. They dig confounding warrens that only a being with stonesense can navigate. They eat anything, they say, and don't always wait for it to die.
Some people will say anything. Relationship to the truth be damned.
Dree knew for a fact that Kobolds wouldn't eat a little kid who fell asleep in their kitchen. She couldn't fall asleep in their pantry, since their pantry was a cluster of kegs in a peat bog[1].
What she did do was provide warmth for some of the new hatchlings after their cooking fires died. Half asleep when the first ones started cooing for attention, she gently petted them and held them close. Dree, age four, kept calling them "kitties". Even after she was told otherwise.
People say Kobolds aren't very smart. They say that because many of them don't know the first thing about anyone who isn't a Kobold or other Dragonkindred. They haven't needed to know it. People don't say that Kobolds are incapable of logic or reason.
These ones, having rarely seen Humans at all, could correctly posit that Dree was a Human hatchling. They could also guess that she shouldn't be bleeding, nor have her bones so visible through her skin. So they did what any society should do when discovering an abandoned, beaten, and starving youngling.
They fed her and did what they could to ease her hurts. They treated her gently and taught her to speak and, because they were Kobolds, gave her work to do that she was well capable of. She was always warm, so one of her duties was helping nurse the newest hatchlings.
She picked up Yprak, the Kobold dialect of Draconic, in a matter of weeks. And that was when the burrow learned exactly why Dree would not return to her own people.
According to Kobolds, Humans get everything wrong. Starting with having the males more valued than the females. A male can get a female gravid and pass into the next life without any harm to the burrow. The loss of a gravid female was the loss of an egg as well as its bearer. Males were expendable, and easily reborn without much in the way of cost.
Humans viewed their females - even their hatchling females - as burdens. Debts in waiting. So much so that the family of a human female hatchling had to pay a different family to take her on.
It boggled their little draconic minds.
Females made more eggs. Eggs meant hatchlings and, in very fast time, more workers in the mines, more trap-makers to protect the mines, and more hoard for the warren. Learning the dangers and intricacies of the laying process[2] just astonished them further. Humans could lay more than one egg at a time? Astounding! Astonishing!
As many as three! Good GODS! Protect and nourish this fecund miracle with everything the warren has to offer!
And the Humans beat them for not being male.
Fuck that for a load of horseshit!
This idiot Human didn't want his potential Queen? Well! They were going to keep her. She could warm the new Hatchlings when they were still blind, she could sort things by colour even in low light[3], and could push far more than any Kobold could. Sure, she didn't have claws, and needed a lot more space to move, but when it came to making detailed things... oh boy! She was a genius. Show her a dozen times and she could to it automatically. And she was happy to keep doing a thing with praise alone.
So she ate as much as five Kobolds three times a day. She worked like fifty. Entire teams cheered her whenever she said, "I can help!"
So she was three times their size. It was no trouble for the warren to make its tunnels bigger. They even found more resources for the community hoard. And, when Adventurers found them all, it was Dree that translated Yprak to the Trader's Tongue, and explained that this warren was not the danger that nearby villages insisted they were.
"But... they stole you," argued the Adventurers.
"I stole myself," said Dree. "I like this home far better."
[1] Every species has its own method of food preservation, and everyone else reckons the rest are ruining food. For the record, Kobolds use a mixture of lard preservation and bog butter.
[2] Some understanding barriers simply cannot be overcome.
[3] Darkvision can tell you where things are in low light, but everything is grey.
[Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash]
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