Her favorite days were when Krinnk, Snowball and Altracia were all there. The fact that the thumper wasn’t afraid of the drake seemed to amaze some of the villagers who saw them together, but not Sara. All of her friends knew not to hurt one another. Sara didn’t know anything about classes or abilities, but later in life she would learn that this was just an instinctive reaction to her bonding process.

  Today was a beautiful morning. She could see her breath in the air, and she was wearing a warm fur-lined cloak that some of the ladies of the town had made for her. The air was racing through her hair as she rode along on Snowball’s back. Her small hands held tufts of fur in just the right way not to hurt her friend as he raced across the open field covered with a light dusting of snow. She was screaming in joy at the frantic pace.

  Right behind them was a horse-sized drake with a goblin hanging onto its back for dear life. They raced along, trying to keep up with the bounding leaps of the thumper. Krinnk yelled, “Krinnk catch Sara. She no win again.”

  Sara laughed and called back joyously, “You’ll never catch us.” All the while she was urging Snowball onto greater leaps while holding on impossibly.

  Snowball didn’t make much in the way of noise, but Sara could understand him. She could feel his emotions and knew that he was as delighted by the race as she was. Altracia, on the other hand, roared and hissed like a steam engine threatening to go off its tracks. Any outside observer might have thought that the drake was furious, but just as with the thumper, Sara could feel Altracia’s emotions and knew that she found these simple games to be both fun and freeing.

  As they won the race, Snowball slid to a stop, coming short of the tree line. The drake rose and used her wings to bring her forward momentum to a sudden stop, and it was all Krinnk could manage not to be thrown off.

  “Enough thumper games. Play goblin game now,” Krinnk said.

  “You said goblins only have one game, hide-and-seek. Right? We already played that last time. We need a new game,” Sara said.

  Krinnk’s face grew grim for a moment, and Sara could feel waves of shame and remorse wash over the former goblin scout. “That is only good goblin game. Sara no want play other goblin games.”

  Sara offered him a hug and pulled her friend into an embrace against the furry side of the huge thumper. Even after months of being Sara’s friend, Krinnk still was not completely used to the real shows of affection that he received from her. He always accepted them, but she could tell it was different for him, and that made her want to hug him all the more.

  Then a sibilant voice said, “We could play a drake game.”

  “Oh, oh, what kind of games do drakes play?” Sara asked excitedly.

  “Races, but those are in the air, and your sire and clutch mother have said that you are not allowed to do that. Young drakes also play hunting games and have contests to see how far they can spit acid.”

  “That no fair, only Sara and Altracia can spit acid,” Krinnk protested.

  Sara felt a conflict within her. It was not her normal nature to want to hurt any living thing. She didn’t even like to squish a spider, and Mira said that spiders were the most evil creatures in the world. Yet since bonding with her friends, she had felt changes in her personality. A girl of eight is not the most introspective, but even she noticed differences. They were much stronger since her bond with Altracia. With Krinnk and even Snowball, she got only a tiny fraction of their wild natures imprinted onto her.

  With the dungeon drake, it was different. Whether it be because her true form was that of a dungeon core or because she was so much more powerful than Sara, it didn’t matter the reason. The result though was that now Sara felt a certain feral desire to hunt. Still, she wasn’t too far gone. “Do we have to hurt the things that we hunt?” she asked.

  A snort escaped the drake’s nostrils. “No, I suppose not. The youngest draklings play a game called pounce and release.”

  “That sounds fun. How do we play?” Sara felt the excitement within her growing as she asked.

  “The trick is to first see how close you can get to whatever you are trying to sneak up on. The one who gets the closest before pouncing wins, but if your pounce misses or if you fail to pin the creature, then you lose,” Altracia explained.

  “Okay, I can do that. Hmm… what kind of creature are we going to hunt?” Sara asked.

  Altracia gave a huge toothy grin at her. Anyone else might have been scared by the rows of bared fangs even though the drake was in its smaller form now. Sara, though, was simply encouraged by it.

  “We will make a proper drake out of you yet,” Altracia responded.

  “No, Sara be gobl…” Krinnk started but then stopped mid-sentence. “No, that not be good. Can Krinnk be drake too?”

  “You can be a drake snack,” came back the response, complete with a snap of the jaws in the air near the goblin.

  “Krinnk no snack,” he huffed with an indignant look and his arms crossed.

  “No, I suppose not, but you can’t be a drake; only Sara can do that. You can help by letting her practice her pouncing on you.”

  The little goblin didn’t look very happy about the idea, but he eventually agreed. It was probably a testament to the continued changes in Sara that she was willing to let him agree. She knew that she wasn’t going to hurt him, but it was still a far more aggressive course than Sara would normally follow.

  She and the drake went off a few hundred yards from where Krinnk was standing against the tree line. As they walked away, Altracia asked her, “Have you been practicing expanding your wings?”

  “Yes, and it seems like they get stronger the more I am around you.”

  “Then I will try to come more often. There are just many duties in the dungeon, and I don’t always have time to play. Now, can you show me your wings?”

  Sara frowned. “Um, not with my coat and shirt on. It’s pretty cold to be out here without anything to cover me.”

  “Bah, if you are going to be a drake, you will have to overcome more than just a little cold. Take off the fur you are wearing, and I will cut slits in the back of your shirt so you can expand your wings without exposing your soft skin. It is only a shame that you don’t have lovely scales like me.”

  “Oh, I know. I wish I did. They are so lovely,” Sara said as she ran her hands along the dusky green scales, causing the drake to preen at the attention.

  “Don’t feel bad. Humans and elves can’t help it that they are ugly, but you have the chance to become so much more. When you are older, the dungeon will be able to help you.”

  Sara undid the coat and pulled it off. It was chilly outside, but she was determined to prove herself fit. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t like being a half-elf. It was actually very fun, and no matter what Altracia said, she didn’t feel ugly. She just liked new things and wanted to see how much like a drake she could become.

  Altracia said, “Hold still,” as she cut slits into the back of her shirt. “I will have the dungeon make you some clothing that you can train in.”

  Sara stretched her arms and shoulders. She rotated her arms in circles like she had seen Mommy doing when she did her exercises at home. Then with a strain, she pushed hard, squeezing down on the nubs that were not extensions of her shoulder blades, and she felt the wings push out.

  They weren’t big and glorious like Altracia’s. Each one was probably only about as long as she was tall, but they had the same structure as the drake’s did. They felt good when she could flex them. She didn’t begin to understand how they could completely retract into her, leaving only the little nubs, but she felt a tingle of magic as she used them and knew that she spent mana to push them out.

  “Oh, that is far better than I had hoped. I think we will give friend Krinnk a surprise he won’t see coming. Are you ready to learn to glide the way all draklings do?”

  “Yes,” Sara answered excitedly.

  “Okay, then you will need to climb up into the trees there. Work your way over to where Krinnk is and then jump from the trees to pounce upon him. Make sure you climb high enough that you will have time to expand your wings and catch the air. Otherwise you will hit him too hard, and both of you could be hurt.”

  Now Sara was nervous. She had seen cats climb into trees only to be stuck there. She had even fallen out of a tree when she was little. Her dad had caught her, but it had been scary all the same. “Um, is that safe?”

  Altracia burst out laughing then. “Life isn’t safe. Eloria is conflict. Did your brood mother not teach you this thing?”

  “No, but we aren’t from Eloria.”

  The drake’s head crooked to an odd angle at that, as though she was contemplating her words. Then she said, “Well, if you want to be a drake, you can’t settle for a safe life. Life is glorious and vibrant. Being safe dulls that. Only with risk can you fully live.”

  Sara was caught up in the words she heard. Young and impressionable, she was shaping who she would become. All the more so because of the class she had been given.

  Without another word, the little girl glanced about for her guards. Content that they were occupied with their own training, she bolted for the tree line. As soon as she reached the first tree, she pulled her wings back tight against her back without retracting them and began to climb.

  Her fingers were far stronger than any girl her age’s had a right to be. Thanks to the patron choice that Eris’ Rise had made, and the bonuses she had gained from her monster friends, she had a Strength of eighteen. That would put her at near the peak of human male strength back on Earth.

  Combining that with the minimal weight of her tiny frame and she was able to scurry up the tree far faster than she had expected. This was nothing like what she had expected it to be like. She wanted to giggle with glee, but some instinct told her that making noise would be a bad thing while stalking prey.

  Before she knew it, she was more than a hundred feet up into the air. Then she took the first big leap and jumped across a ten-foot span between trees. She felt the rush of the air going past her as she landed on her target. Instantly she knew this was for her. She so badly wanted to fly.

  From there, it took her less than a minute to get into place over Krinnk. She hunkered down on a branch far above her unsuspecting prey and began to watch him intently. The more she knew about his movements, the better she would be able to time her leap.

  She waited. It was hardly something that little girls were good at doing. Yet she kept waiting. She didn’t notice the difference. She was simply too focused. The change was subtle but significant, and just another sign of how her monster friends were changing her.

  Finally, she had timed Krinnk’s nervous pacing. She knew the exact second that he would be closest to her, yet have his head turned away from her. So without hesitation, she pounced. Her wings spread wide and her descent slowed. As quiet as a whisper, she moved through the air and pounced upon her friend’s back.

  A loud exhalation sounded as the air was driven from Krinnk’s body, but her wings prevented her from harming him seriously. She whooped out loudly in pride at how well it had gone.

  Moments later, Daichi was standing beside her. The elven guards he had been supervising were spread out, securing a perimeter. “Sara, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  She flashed him a smile. Daichi was very nice most of the time, but she could tell that he wanted to ask about her wings, so she strutted and showed them off to him. “How do you like my wings? I just figured out how to use them.”

  Sara saw that confused look on his face that adults sometimes got when they didn’t quite know how to answer a question. “They are very lovely, but I didn’t know that you had wings. Do your parents know about this?”

  “Yes, they know. Well, at least they know that I am growing wings. It started when Altracia became my friend. You remember back in the dungeon, right?”

  “Of course I remember that. We were all very worried about you, but it appears that there is more going on here than Lady Emiri filled me in on. Now what is this about figuring out how to use your wings?” Daichi’s voice took on the tone of a teacher. Sara didn’t mind that. Her teachers had always liked her.

  “I’ll show you,” she responded, and then quick as lightning she took off running for the tree, which she immediately began to climb.

  When she reached twenty feet up, Daichi called out to her, “I think that is high enough.”

  A sibilant voice spoke up next to the monk. “The youngling will be okay. Your people do not coddle children nearly so much as the humans. Sara is more than either a human or an elf, so she can be coddled even less. She will have a hard road in life if she is unable to defend herself, and for that she will need to know herself.”

  Sara kept climbing and ignored the conversation between monk and drake. This time she didn’t stop at the thick branch she had been on before. No, she was determined to climb to the very top of the tree. So climb she did.

  When she leapt from the highest branch that would support her weight, she flung her body out farther from the tree. Her leap was powered by muscles far stronger than her frame suggested. Then she extended her wings and caught the air while beginning a lazy circling glide down.

  The unexpected happened though as a sudden gust of wind flipped her all around and her wings folded awkwardly. Instantly she was falling, not gliding, and terror threatened to overcome her even as she struggled to get the kinks out of her left wing so that it could catch the air again. Instead, with only one wing extended, she fell in a tight twisting pattern that made it even harder to get the other wing out.

  Now less than two hundred feet below, the ground was rushing up. One hundred and fifty and still she couldn’t get the wing extended. She cried out, not knowing what was wrong. Her struggles only seemed to make things worse.

  One hundred feet and she could see the look of fear on Krinnk’s face. The pounding beat of Snowball’s heart was apparent through her bond. Fifty feet and Sara wondered if she would survive this. Death was still a bit of an alien concept to her, but Eloria was making it all too real to her.

  Then she was caught by Altracia. This wasn’t the horse-sized version but the full-grown thirty-foot drake. Her friend surged up under her, and Sara caught onto her back. Just as when she had been riding Snowball, she instinctively knew how to hold on so as not to interfere with the mighty flapping of the drake’s wings.

  Sara managed to fully retract her wings and got a good seat between the spikes along Altracia’s back. Her legs hooked in and latched onto spots where the scales overlapped. She pressed her chest down so that there was as little wind resistance as possible, and then she cried out in sheer joy.

  Terror might have been upon her moments before, but now she was flying. She could scarcely remember her fear. This was what she wanted. This excited her. She knew she had to learn to fly, not just glide but truly make her way through the sky.

  Chapter Eight

  “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”—C. S. Lewis

  Eris’ Rise in the Murkwood—Sara Nelson

  Altracia circled overhead in the sky above Eris’ Rise, and Sara’s keen eyesight saw her mother and father come running out of the mess hall. It was unusual that they would be in the same place at the same time during the day. She couldn’t help but wonder what they were up to.

  What she didn’t wonder about was the lecture she was sure to get when Altracia landed. She understood a bit about the deal that her father had worked out with her friend. It allowed the people of Eris’ Rise to go into the dungeon, and there had not been a single death in the past three weeks since she had been in the dungeon.

  Her father spent most every day there from sunup to sundown, escorting groups of the villagers, and every time he came back, they had an assortment of items. The crafters all over town seemed to be getting very good at making things. The new clothes she was wearing were much higher quality than the original products and more like clothes from back at their old home.

  It was perhaps due to her young age, but Sara had already started to think of Eris’ Rise as home and Earth as a place she used to live. Now though, as the town got larger while Altracia descended and she could make out the expressions on her parents’ faces, she knew she was in trouble. Fortunately, Daichi came running into town and arrived at her mother’s side before the dust cleared from the drake’s beating wings.

  When she was finally able to climb down, her father was waiting to help her down. She liked that. He had always been bigger than life. The frown on her face told her that she had disappointed him though, and that hurt more than any lecture she would receive.

  Her mother started to speak, and Sara wanted to object but was surprised by what she heard. “I am told that I owe you my thanks for saving Sara, Altracia. Know that I am indebted to you.”

  “There is no debt, Lady Emiri. Sara is my friend, and I would sooner cut off my wings than allow harm to come to her.”

  “Nonetheless, I understand that there have been changes, and perhaps we should discuss the best way to train Sara.”

  Sara heard the words come out of her mother’s mouth but couldn’t believe them. Her mother continued, “If it would be agreeable with you, then perhaps I could meet with you in three days’ time, and we could come up with a plan for her education and training?”

  “I would like that very much. I see much of your mate in the dungeon, but have had little opportunity to speak to you mother to mother. Then I will take my leave and see you in three days’ time right outside the dungeon?”

  “Yes, I look forward to it,” Emily replied.

  Once Altracia took off, Sara looked at her parents. They had exchanged that look. The one that said something was going on. She looked around town and noticed that there were no people moving around. Maybe people had gone inside because of the drake, but they should have returned to their business by now. It was the middle of the afternoon, a normally busy time.