“Of course I’ll be there,” I said. “If it turns out that I’m supposed to have a magma estragon as a familiar, then I’ll take one. If I’m not fated to, I won’t.”

Dusk and I had carried the eggs for a long time, and had risked a prison sentence for them. I couldn’t just skive off from being at the hatching.Thea met my eyes and nodded, then she slipped her hand into Kater’s and leaned against the spirit-woman’s shoulder.

“I think it would be a good idea for Thea to get some rest,” she said. “She’s strained herself recently.”

“Had to,” Thea mumbled. “Things keep changing…”

Kater glanced at her and then sighed, slipping an arm around her legs and hoisting Thea up bridal style. She tilted her head towards us.

“It was lovely to meet you two. Our wife should be finished with her analysis soon.”

Then Kater and Thea’s bodies dissolved into motes of purple and black, flowing up into the sky. I stared at it, wondering what, exactly, that was.

“We should probably finish our tour,” Octavian said after a moment of silence.

Dusk agreed cheerfully, and our little group continued deeper into the oceanic depths, passing a drop that had dozens of lines of wards and enchantments. Even under the ward tunnel, it began to grow dark, and I could feel the pressure closing in.

I was suddenly very glad I wasn’t claustrophobic, because it felt uncomfortably like being in a tomb.

I glanced around, and through the murk and gloom, I could see the shapes of squid-like creatures, gray-black estragon with underbellies of blue, and the thin, serpentine forms of what I could only assume were powerful sea drakes of navy blue and gold. We watched as one of the drakes released an arc of a breath weapon at a squid, which released a cloud of ink in retaliation.

To my surprise, the breath attack of the sea drake was a brilliant white-gold, that flared through the water like a beacon. The light sent the estragon – and several fish that I hadn’t noticed before – fleeing.

The cloud of inky darkness tried to consume the bright light of the breath weapon, but it failed, the light dispelling away the ink. But even as the cloud dissipated, the sea drake swam away hungry, as the squid-like being had escaped.

We watched for a while longer before we started the trek back upwards. On the other side of the artificial depths, light began to peek through, and the pressure receded to reveal a bed of oysters and clams and mussels, with long stalks of kelp and algae blooms, through which brightly colored fish swam.

A terragon with long, hair-like strands of kelp forming a mane and beard swam past, and my eyes widened some as I studied it.

“We keep him and the coral terragon separate,” Octavian said with a sigh. “It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of mutualism between coral, kelp, and algae, but for whatever reason, whenever the two terragon get too close, they wind up in a territory dispute, and it got… bad… a few times. Now we keep them on separate sides.”

I didn’t know what mutualism was, but based on the context, I thought it probably meant the same thing as symbiotic? I took a moment to curse researchers for needing a dozen words for one thing.

I was sure a wildlife researcher would claim that they were incredibly different things, but…

I realized I was getting caught in my own head and went back to looking at the sanctuary.

We passed through some plains, which looked rather boring to me on a personal level, just lots of grass with shallow bowls of water interspersed throughout, but Octavian went on a lecture about the incredible biodiversity of the area, and how much it, alongside solar capture, worked to mitigate the more extreme fluctuations of solar energy.

It was kind of amusing to watch the estragon. They had thin, spiky scales of green and brown, and slid through the grass on their bellies, moving with a shocking amount of speed. Several small raptors ran around in the grass, hunting for field mice and other small game, and occasionally the raptors and estragon would interact, which usually ended with the raptor turning tail and fleeing.

There was apparently a couple of grassland terragon in the area, but they weren’t anywhere near the ward tunnel.

Octavian did point out some massive shapes in the distance, that I had thought were hills. After a moment of study, however, I realized they were enormous, furry beasts, with long tusks, almost like a shaggy elephant.

“They’re sleeping right now, but world-mammoths are native to this environment. They’re not dragons, or even dragonblood, but they’re rare and extremely powerful. Their legacies compress their mana even more than most dragons. They have almost no offensive spells at all, though, all of their magic being about enhancing the power of the world around them.”

The trail moved in their direction, and as we got closer to them, it got increasingly chilly. A while after we had passed them, it began to get thick and snowy. Dusk chimed out a complaint that we’d just gotten away from this kind of weather, and Kene laughed at her, thinking she was joking, only to receive a raindrop-sized slap.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“We don’t have too many creatures in our taiga habitat,” Octavian said. “But the two we do are the entire reason for it.”

We passed by many familiar looking creatures – hex ermines, aurora toads, arctic foxes, and winter deer – along with some new ones, like winter estragon, who’s horns resembled moose horns made out of ice, and who’s scales resembled ice crystals.

But it quickly became apparent what Octavian was talking about when we saw a four-headed hydra with frosty blue-gray scales, a thick body, and powerful wings, munching on what looked like half of an entire pine tree. Standing next to it was the biggest wyvern I’d ever even heard of, easily tall enough to tower over a three story building.

“They’ve sparked several eggs. Mostly terragon or wyvern, but two hydra as well, and once a full dragon egg,” Octavian said happily as we passed by their cave.

I noticed the bones littering the ground beneath the pair, and wondered why exactly the hydra was eating a tree?

“You keep saying ‘sparked’,” Kene commented. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, dragons and most pure blood draconids like drakes, estragon, hydra, and terragon don’t have kids in the normal sense,” Octavian explained. “They produce eggs on irregular cycles – usually, the higher the baseline strength and sapience, the less common it is for their cycle to begin, or for the sparking – and then they invest a fertilized egg with power, and cause it to begin absorbing power from the environment and making a core of its own. That grows into a dragon. You can have multiple people investing into one egg, but the odds of sparking it to life doesn’t usually change that much. There’s a small increase, but nothing crazy.”

“If stronger ones have a harder time sparking their eggs to life and laying eggs at all, why would you allow people to bond to the estragon?” I asked, careful to not say what type of estragon I was talking about.

“I said baseline strength and sapience, not final strength and sapience,” Octavian said. “Terragon, for example, don’t hatch until third gate. Drakes usually around second, though some deep sea drakes are third. Dragons hatch with nothing, but they possess sapience right away. All of those have a harder time producing an egg… If they stay at that level.”

He held up a finger, and Roh took a bite out of it. A smile flickered over Octavian’s face as he scooped the will-o-wisp up and plopped him into his hair.

“But if they grow stronger, it increases the odds significantly. That’s why we allow bonds to happen – getting an estragon to third gate makes it more likely to lay eggs of any sort, and makes those eggs have a better chance of sparking to life. In addition, the odds of them producing a terragon or hydra or lindworm or whatever also skyrocket.”

“Interesting,” I said, thinking through the implications of that.

“The life cycle of dragons is a very unusual one,” Octavian agreed, bobbing his head.

We moved back out of the taiga and high winter peaks and through a wardline that cut off the nature of the taiga entirely. It was strange – no gradual contrast, just a sharp wardline that led into gently sloping foothills that were absolutely covered in vibrant flowers.

There were flowers in reds and blues, yellows and greens, purples and oranges. Some were roses that looked as small as the nail on my pinkie finger, while others were sunflowers that towered the size of a small tree. Bees, hornets, beetles, and other insects swarmed through the air, alongside butterflies and moths and fruit flies and more, but I didn’t see any mammals.

“Welcome to the most dangerous habitat in the entire preserve,” Octavian said, sweeping his hand over the fields of flowers.

“I would think you were joking, but I saw those wardlines,” Kene said. “I’m no expert, but they looked… serious.”

“Oh, I’m not joking,” Octavian said. “We call this the bone fields. There are multiple highly potent flowers that Granny Kater uses in her alchemy.”

I stared at Octavian, waiting for him to explain the dangerous part.

“Bonesprout?” Kene asked in a horrified, questioning whisper, and Octavian nodded.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a disease that can take root in plants that have crossed into fifth gate,” Kene said. “It gets inside of a person and begins to cause their bones to grow. Small spurs at first – if it’s caught early enough, it’s treatable. But it keeps progressing, and if it’s not caught, it can cause the skeleton to begin to bloom out of a person, sprouting spikes, and then eventually…”

I shuddered at the rather visceral image that popped into my head.

“The thick amounts of telluric, life, and death energy also make for the perfect environment for two of our also dangerous specimens,” Octavian said. “We have a pair of basilisks, and a clutch of cocatrice.”

He reached out and tapped on the ward.

“Don’t worry, the ward is strong enough that even if we spot one of them, you’ll be fine. The poison, murderous gaze, and the cockatrice’s breath can’t pass through. Or the bonesprout, for that matter – the field has been infected for over a decade, and there hasn’t been a single instance of the wards being breached.”

“I’m surprised Kater, Thea, and Olive didn’t just burn and raze the field to get rid of it,” I commented.

“That’s the usual strategy to deal with bonesprout in most places, but for all that it’s horrible for humans, it’s great for plants,” Kene said. “It can assist their growth significantly, and the slow killing of animals around it creates nutrients, at least until animals learn to avoid it. There are also several potions that use bonesprout infected plants.”

“And like I said, it gives us a cheap way to support the environment for basilisks and cocatrice,” Octavian said. “Not to mention, the sale of the components and potions is one of the things that helps keep the sanctuary afloat. Running this much infrastructure while also only allowing a limited staff is… Difficult.”

I hummed my agreement, and we started walking through the field of horrifying, yet beautiful, death flowers, when I spotted one rustling and pointed.

Slinking through the flowers was the large, black, serpentine body of a basilisk. It didn’t look directly at us, but even through the ward and my damaged spirit, I could feel a pulse of life and death mana wash through the air around us.

This was definitely my least favorite habitat, even if it looked beautiful from the outside, I just couldn’t get over the mild horror and worry that I was going to somehow catch bonesprout.

When we passed through, we had completed the loop and Octavian sighed.

“Sorry if I went a bit too tourguide.”

“No, it was fun!” I said, grinning at him.

“You did sound a bit like you worked here,” Kene said. “But it was interesting.”

“I used to,” Octavian said, rubbing his freckled nose. “I still do, in some ways. But… yeah. You can probably find me somewhere around here if I’m in town. You’re staying for a bit – we should hang out some? Maybe Malachi could even pick up part time work at the sanctuary, once he gets clearance.”

“Sounds good!” I agreed, while Kene nodded.