Alverd took up the lead of the conversation, intending to steer it in possibly a better direction.

“So what is it that you want us to do? Telling us all of this… what will it accomplish?” He was fighting to keep his tone fair and even. She’d just admitted to her father’s motivation and the both of us were likely trying hard not to take it out on her. She slipped off the railing and turned to face us both.

“I just wanted to be honest with you. If I’m going to have you around, I need you to understand me just as much as I understand you. I need to know how the two of you feel about me, as well. Don’t take this the wrong way, but a lot of people who get close to me don’t do it for my own good. And you two didn’t have a say in the matter. Think of it this way. I don’t trust you two just yet… but I want to. And I want you to know you can trust me.”

I was surprised she was being so up front, for sure. Giving credit where it was due, she was trying to bridge a gap and build trust between us. It was a tall order to set aside my resentment, but for the moment I appreciated her gesture, even if it had been clumsy and roundabout.

Alicia motioned to the guards surrounding the plaza, and they let people back in, going about their daily routines while grumbling that those routines had been disrupted in the first place. As we walked back towards the Castle, passing by irate peasants and deferential guardsmen, Alicia spoke again.

“I can’t change the way our country is. Not yet. And hopefully, Evros willing, I will find a way. Maybe you two can help me with that.”

My best friend nodded his head.

“If that’s what you want, then that’s what we’ll do. It’s a worthy cause, and I would prefer to see your country take a turn for the better rather than continue on the path it is now.” I couldn’t help but notice that his expression was still grim. “But it seems you have an uphill battle on your hands. And if you want us to help you with it, I confess I’m not sure what it is you think we can do.”

She climbed in silence for a moment, then responded.

“I want you to come with me somewhere. A place that is beyond sacred for us. It’s called the Nest. A den of wild dragons situated in a valley within the treacherous mountain range known as the Mother’s Spines. I’ll get you some books and records when we get back. I’m sure Kuro will love them.” She gave me a snide, yet playful smirk over her shoulder.

I’ll admit, I was intrigued to learn more. But I was also worried about going to a den of untamed dragons. For now, though, I had to trust that Alicia had everything in hand. I followed the two back up to the Castle.

After we arrived, she had us taken back to our guest quarters and within an hour, a servant dropped off several large tomes about the Nest. I picked up the heaviest one and flipped it open, scanning through the pages to get a feel for the level of detail. I wasn’t disappointed; there were long pages of text, diagrams of the dragons found within, and even a number of passable artistic depictions of the Nest’s geography and flora. But one page caught my eye, and I stopped flipping to get a better look.

It was a man, minuscule in the scope of the picture, standing before the reclining form of some monstrously huge creature. It was unmistakably a dragon; its prehensile neck ended in a head replete with long, sloping horns, finlike ears, and a scaly snout full of sharp teeth. Its large eyes stared down at the man in an expression that was equal parts amusement and curiosity. The notation beneath said, “Deyovar braves the Nest to meet with Evros, the Mother Dragon”.

So this is the creature the Ishmarians worship. Not hard to believe that a country of barbarians would choose to worship something as powerful as a dragon, but it still left a few holes in the story. Dragons capable of sentient expression had been killed off a long time ago, mostly after some ancient war that happened centuries ago involving the end of the world and religious nonsense like that. The odds of a “true” dragon surviving were practically nonexistent if the Church of the Balance, Selarune’s established religious authority, was to be believed.

As I closed the book, however, something fell out of the spine and onto my lap. It was a perfectly cut red crystal. It wasn’t a proper gem, like a ruby; it had a kind of translucent nature to it that wasn’t a property of gemstones. I turned it over in my hand to check to see if it contained any kind of outstanding properties, and that’s when I felt it.

It was magical.

There was a faint kind of pulse deep within the crystal. It was too weak to be caught by anything except a more thorough examination. What an artifact like this was doing in a book about Ishmarian history, I wasn’t sure. But there was no way it could’ve been a coincidence. I checked the spine of the book where it had fallen out .

The spine of the ancient tome was unremarkable, except I’d seen its kind before. Trick tomes had hollow spines that allowed mages to hide small objects in them, like wands or gems. They were designed to be opened only by mages, and they reacted only to the presence of magic. For this book to have spit this crystal in my lap meant that when the book was written, someone had to have placed the crystal inside, then sealed it magically.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I didn’t know what to think at first. The idea of a mage having hidden this book in an Ishmarian library was strange enough, but that the mage had intended for this crystal to be discovered by another was troubling to another degree. I placed the crystal in my pocket and put the tome back on my nightstand. The candle I’d been using for light was burning down, and I blew it out as I climbed into my bed.

It was a mystery I’d have to solve later, but one I’d have to be careful about looking into. It was bad enough that I’d been outed as a mage, so if other Ishmarians decided I was up to no good then, Princess’ decree or not, they’d execute me in a heartbeat. I pulled the covers up and tried to ponder why such a crystal even existed, but exhaustion quickly pulled me into a feverish sleep.

I had the nightmare again. I woke with a start in my bed, cold sweat dripping off of me. The dream was happening with greater frequency as of late, no doubt because I was so close to the people who had given me the nightmare in the first place. Of all the things to dream about, it had to be that. I wished it didn’t have to be that way, but like so many other things in my life I had no control or say in the matter.

After lighting the candle next to my bed, I pulled one of the other books off the nightstand and opened it. It was a dry history about the taming of dragons and the way they had factored into Ishmarian history since the country’s founding, and eventually I stopped trying to read it and started flipping the pages. I was about to close it in disgust when a series of diagrams caught my eye.

There was an image of a person standing before a dragon. Based on the captions it was about taming a feral dragon. There was an entire process for doing so, but was stated by the book to be an act of desperation, as dragons rarely heeded the actions of men. As I began to read the section about the steps, I heard a commotion by the window.

I slid out of my bed and crossed to the window, the book tucked under my arm. Looking down from the window I could see a number of soldiers circling a very small dragon, only half the size of the one we had killed. I also spied Alicia, dressed fully in her leather armor, standing in front of the dragon. A thick metal collar was clamped around the dragon’s neck, and the soldiers were struggling to keep it lashed to the ground with thick chains.

Alicia stepped forward, then nodded to the soldiers. Together, they let the chains loose. The collar fell away and the chains went slack. The dragon, no longer bound by its restraints, surged forward with jaws open to bite Alicia’s head off.

With more speed than I expected from her, Alicia sidestepped the dragon’s lunge and wrapped both of her arms around the neck of the dragon, twisting her body to snap her onto the dragon with one impossibly smooth motion. Yanking the dragon’s head back, she launched a brutal backward kick with her right leg into the base of the dragon’s wing, causing it to tumble onto the ground.

I opened the book and began to compare Alicia’s technique with the methods described in the book. The book’s notations made it clear that a dragon only respected the idea of a superior aggressor, so only through nonlethal pacification would a feral dragon stoop to serve a human master. There was no actual “method” to the entire process; the ritual shared more in common with a drunken tavern brawl than some sacred covenant between man and beast.

The dragon started to thrash against the ground, bucking wildly in an attempt to throw Alicia off. She held fast to the dragon, her arms now encircling the dragon’s mouth to keep it clamped shut. The dragon’s tail whipped around and nearly slapped Alicia in the face. Hunkering her head down, she began digging the heel of her boot into the shoulder joint of the dragon, and I could hear its stifled cry of pain even from my vantage point several stories above.

For several minutes that felt like hours, I watched Alicia wrestle the dragon into submission. With every passing second the dragon’s resistance became more frenzied; its tail cracked across a soldier’s chest and floored him instantly. His companions dragged him to a safe distance while the rest continued to watch the spectacle unfolding in front of them. Just when it seemed like Alicia was gaining the upper hand, the dragon did a jerking roll that slammed her head against the ground.

Alicia was knocked off the dragon’s neck by the force of the blow, and she turned over on the ground with a pained expression on her face. The dragon righted itself and advanced toward her prone form but the soldiers moved as one to intercept it. Chains and the collar came with them; in the space of a second they were working together to weigh the dragon down, lashing it with the chains and snapping the collar around its neck again.

One soldier stood over Alicia with his spear held at the ready. Regaining her feet, she limped away as the soldier covered her retreat. The other soldiers finished fixing a muzzle over the dragon’s jaws, and with the chains now secured to the platform by thick hooks, it was in no position to attack anyone. It still thrashed against its captors’ bonds, but it was only a matter of time before it calmed down and realized that struggling was pointless.

As the soldiers attended to Alicia, who looked crestfallen at her failure, I read the final passage in the book. Taming a wild dragon was significantly harder as the dragon’s size increased, and fully matured dragons were far less likely to take to the taming. It stressed that imprinting on newborns was far more successful in creating lasting bonds between tamer and dragon and that feral dragons were not suitable as life companions anyway.

Knowing all this, I could tell we were going to have an uphill battle. Alicia had just failed to tame a dragon half the size of her old one. Taming a fully grown mature dragon was going to be next to impossible. But there was no alternative. She was counting on us to help her. And it wasn’t like I had a choice. Sighing heavily, I went back to my bed, threw the book back onto the nightstand and blew out the candle.

Sleep came soon enough. And luckily for me, this time I didn’t dream.