Chance and I located the dragon nesting area described by the Adventurer’s Guild. Chance handed me a sword and explained to me that most dragons are actually mindless animals, known as wyverns or drakes. He taught me that no one understands how or why, but some whelps will instead grow into proper dragons.

  The was not far from the path but it was over rough terrain and we had to climb several high cliffs. This was probably the only area where I outshined my mentor. Quite exhausted, we reached the top. As we approached, we were attacked by five or six whelps of varying colour. They began diving at us, biting and clawing on occasion. Chance quickly dispatched all but one. Again, his skills with bladed weapons must have been legendary. Blood sprayed and bones cleaved as I drew my blade.

  The last remaining whelp swooped at me and I struck it directly, expecting the blade to cut clean through the creature like it had for Chance. But the blade practically bounced off the whelp’s head. The back of the blade struck me in the face across my eye, splitting open the skin and partially blinding me. Chance immediately executed the whelp which had continued its assault against me, taking advantage of my disorientation.

  After the scuffle, Chance apologised and explained that he had given me a single bladed weapon for just this lesson. I began using some of my minor restoration magic to prevent too much blood loss, but Chance said it was merely a flesh wound, and would probably give me a manly scar.

  Not far off we found the nest, just a simple bedding of straw and branches. I saw fragments of egg shells inside before Chance pushed me into the nest. That instant I felt a violent gust of wind and heard a deafening screech. I turned to see Chance engaged in full combat with an adult drake.

  Chance was a moderately muscular man, he wore minimal armour because he carried a small arsenal of bladed weaponry around everywhere he went. By the time I looked, Chance was already dropping a bloodied scimitar to the ground and drawing a curved blade with a long handle from his back. He and the drake must have just clashed and the drake was climbing in altitude for another swoop. As the drake turned in the air, I could see a spear or javelin sticking from its flesh and as it approached I could see fresh blood glistening off its white scales. When the drake finally got close enough to see clearly, I also noticed a blood soaked hatchet sticking from one of its eyes. As the two fierce combatants were about to clash once again, Chance rolled to the dragon’s blind side, lifting his blade as a single action. The amount of blood and dust made it hard to see what happened next. Chance slashed the drake’s underside from stem to stern, causing the drake to crash hard into the ground. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen!

  After the battle I gathered the whelps and Chance began carving the drake for valuable materials. As Chance was explaining the typical lifecycle of dragonkin to me, we noticed a man standing nearby. The man rudely asked what we were doing and as Chance explained the situation, the man became visibly upset. This did not go unnoticed by Chance, who swiftly presented the Adventurer’s Guild contract. The man immediately began to wail, snatching the parchment from Chance’s hand, and ripping it in half. Chance was clearly caught off guard and began shouting at the man, but the man just dropped the torn page and continued to cry. He looked to me, the dead whelps, and to the slain drake with a look of incredible sorrow on his face. Just then, the man started to glow… It’s hard to explain, but somehow it was a glow that emitted an aura of darkness. At the same time the man’s figure also began to grow in size, and change shape. I looked to Chance for reassurance but the look I saw in his eyes shattered any hopes I had. I saw the seriousness and gravity in his expression. He was looking directly into my eyes as if to say one thing; “Goodbye.”.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Chance already knew what I was about to find out. The man who approached us after the battle was in fact a dragon, and suffice it to say; Chance was no match for it. The dragon killed him, and ate him. Taking the corpse of what must have been his mate, the female drake with him. I never tried to help, I never tried to stop him, I never even moved from that drake’s roost, and I didn’t for several days… I cried, and I slept. I wanted the dragon to come back and kill me too; or somehow for Chance to be okay, but it never did; and he was never going to be.

  I always wondered why that dragon spared my life, was it to send a message? Or was it because I was only a small half-elf teenager? Perhaps the drake thought I was Chance’s slave…. I would never know and I could never forgive myself.

  As I laid in the deceased drake’s nest, I grew hungry and thirsty. The smell of rotting whelps began to attract insects and scavengers. I thought about Chance, and how his corpse would never decay in this manor. I thought about what it would be like to be digested by a dragon… As my thoughts began to turn to the darkest escape, I heard a massive rumbling sound coming from deep within the earth. There was a sharp cracking sound, but it seemed too loud to be very close. When I lifted my head the sound stopped completely, so I put my ear to the ground and there was nothing. So I looked at the bundle of sticks and dried grass I had been resting my head on to inspect it more closely. As I pulled the branches and sticks from the tangled mess, I discovered a pristine dragon’s egg. It was very strange and much smaller than the eggshell fragments I had been sleeping in for the past few days. It also wasn’t made of the same coloured shell, but covered in scale like plating.

  I remembered the books that I had been given in the capital and checked for any information about dragons. Unfortunately, they contained nothing but royal lineages, history, and complicated elven magics. I figured it was rather obvious that this was a dragon’s egg, but it must have been some kind of runt. It was also rather obvious to me that the poor little guy was having trouble cracking the thick armoured eggshell, so I decided to give him a little help. I carefully pried one of the scales from the egg and underneath was what looked like a regular eggshell, so I placed the egg in my bag with the shell exposed to the sunlight. I figured it could help the little guy find the thin part of the shell. I finally climbed out of the drake’s nest that Chance had pushed me into a few days earlier, and I prepared to head back home, alone.