Confusion

I sat down cross legged at the very edge of the clearing. Staring at the exhausted creature before me. He had clearly seen me when I stepped into the clearing, but had hardly reacted at all. His mana was very weak for a dragon's. He was probably simply to exhausted to move.

How was something like this possible in the first place? She had very clearly seen the swordsman she wanted to hire transform into a full fledged dragon. From what she could tell his dragon state wasn't much more mature than his human one. Young. Not a child, but still very young.

A young man in his twenties perhaps. Dragons reached adult size very quickly, but grew very slowly after that. I had never seen a dragon be so still. They were antisocial creatures. It took them decades to learn to use human speech with they didn't take well to strangers.

It had been years since the grand master had last introduced me to a dragon. He only had good enough standing to speak to three without getting killed the instant he stepped into their territory. Dragon's didn't care for mages much. He had been a truthfully massive beast. Big enough that I was sure he could take on the whole of the kings army.

Although the one before me now was much smaller than him. I stopped my train of thought. This wasn't a real dragon. Not to long ago this had been a man. Which brought me back to how was this possible?

His mana flow showed that he had hardly any mana in him to start with, and right now it was the same as what I'd seen before. Almost no mana in his body. If anything he looked as if he was starved. How long had it been since he changed into a dragon? Would he change back?

Could he do it at will? I wanted to ask him all of these questions, but since it was very clear he wasn't going to wake up right now I wanted to do something so I decided to look at his mana flow. His mana flow was very unusual. I don't think I would have ever noticed the darkness at the core of his mana if his mana wasn't almost completely gone. It was a curse deep at the core of his mana.