Lisa had her own ‘room’ in the commune, a small dell nestled against the outside of an escarpment of the Nest, a tableland her family had artificially raised and carved out in the forest.
She and her parents had split off from the rest of her welcome party so she could put her things down, but they would meet up for dinner later this afternoon.
She, for one, couldn’t wait. She’d been starved of good food for years, but seeing her room again took precedence in her mind.
It was cleaner than she had left it. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Of course, she didn’t exactly have a roof and someone had to have kept the weeds out.
Still, someone had been in her room. She stumbled over the thought as she stepped into the clearing and hurried on.
The space seemed smaller to her now, ringed by mammoth trees standing close enough so the adults could only enter from the front and one side of the mountain.
Most of the trees were large enough to rise above the tableland, and two of them had a spiraling ramp of fortified bark and load-bearing branches affixed to them that led to it. Her dad had made that after she’d fallen off the cliffside one too many times.
Her cave itself had three rooms: the entrance area, large enough for her parents to fit in, a room she kept her stuff in, and one packed with a moss her family had bioengineered that was ridiculously comfortable. In case she wanted to sleep in her dragon body.
A latch led to a secret, fourth room far below the earth that was much smaller but magically fortified, filled with more moss, a blanket, and a pillow. She had asked for those after Garen had described human beds to her. The gift had meant the world to her at the time. Now, she couldn’t help but think that her beds in Hadica had been so much larger. In Garen’s house and even the school.
Her parents had promised her more space and her own laboratory once she was old enough to find her own project, but not here.
“You’re too close to the children,” her father had explained.
Most of her family lived further away, in a system of reshaped trees, caves, mines, odd buildings, and lakes and rivers that could loosely be called a town.
Only those who actively looked after the Nest had their homes nearby, but Lisa had asked to have hers here before she’d known if she would choose that as her project.
After all, she had wanted to live close to her siblings.
She hurried inside, took a left, and put her luggage down. Ornately-carved wooden shelves and cabinets, stone shelves and drawers built into the walls, chests, and piles of tin and can boxes filled the space.
Her radio stood on a shelf, a toolbox below it. Her parents must have put it out for her.
At a glance, she couldn’t tell if anything was off. It was all far tidier than she’d left it. Had Muri been in her room? Was anything broken?
Then again, did she want to know? She could guess. It would only sour her mood.
She dug into her bags and brought a pile of books back out to her parents. “Here. For you.”
“Are these your research notes?” her mom asked.
“Some of them are, yes.” She indicated a pile of journals. Nine out of ten of those, she had made over a year ago when she had still been motivated to complete her project. The last two, she’d hurriedly slapped together over the last two months after deciding to go home.
“Exciting,” her dad said, and her mom smiled.
“You will have to present your findings—”
“I brought you gifts, too!” Lisa interrupted. She pointed at a dark boxset of tomes in the hopes that it would distract them. A corner of the box was dented from Muri’s handling of it.
“Books?”
“The Registry’s Decade Publication. That is—the Registry is an academic organization within the Five Cities, mom, that studies magic and their society. They do analytical and statistical work for their government, too.
“Every ten years, they publish an updated compendium of all the most pertinent knowledge on their magic for the public, with observations. It is quite expensive, banned for export, and its distribution is even regulated within their four trading points. This is their most recent edition for the new century, by their count, published not a month ago. First edition.”
Her mom looked more and more impressed as she explained, but all it took was the last two words for her dad’s eyes to light up.
“I will take that.” He swept the entire box set up with two fingers.
Lisa smiled. Her dad wasn’t a collector—at least, not comparatively speaking—but he did like to lord the occasional treasure he found over her aunts and uncles who were.
Not that this was a treasure, but he would treat it as one. It had come from her after all.
That made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Usually. Once or twice, he’d gone too far bragging about her and started bitter fights within the family.
“And this?” her mom asked, opening a folder that lay separate from the rest. “More research notes?”
“No. Those are … report cards and school work.”
It took a second, but then her mom smiled. “Ah. Test results.” She looked far more interested in this than her research notes. “These numbers. What do they mean?”
Lisa briefly explained Hadica’s grading system, and her parents caught on quickly. She watched her mom use the wind to flip through her report cards for the first three semesters and hum. Her grades had been perfect then. Including the numerous electives she had chosen. Her fourth semester had a small blip in her self-defense class. Then, her fifth and sixth ones, at a new school, fell off both in the number of courses she’d taken and her grades.
They were still good. Better than Micah’s and she had barely tried. Some, she could do in her sleep. Like the magic and science-related courses.
Others, like grammar or history … well, her handwriting had improved, but she wasn’t about to force herself to vomit a perfect essay onto the page for every exam. Not anymore.
In the beginning, Lisa had thought, as one of the first dragons to attend school, as a representative of her family, and with this being part of her first big project, of course she would have to have perfect grades. Anything less would be an embarrassment.
Part of her still believed that. But she’d made a decision to stop investing so much of her time into the minutiae of school life, and she couldn’t, and wouldn’t, undo that.
She’d found much better things to do with her time, so she didn’t care … as long as her parents didn’t?
“What happened here?” her dad asked, leaning halfway over his mom’s wing to look in with her.
Her mom had stopped humming. Having found the exams, she leafed forward to find the answer herself. By the look on her face, she did not like what she saw.
Nervously, Lisa began to explain. Her mom snapped the folder shut before she could finish and sneered.
“Ah. We had our doubts. We should have known those schools would have little to offer you. However, now that you are home, you can resume your lessons with us. Zest sends her love. She regrets that she could not be here for your homecoming but expressed interest in teaching you elemental folding when she returns in the fall?”
“I remember how eager you were to learn how to fold living lightning when you were, what, ten?” her dad said. “Have you taught yourself yet?”
“I, uh— I tried? A little,” Lisa said. “But I won’t be here this fall?”
“Where would you be?”
“I have to go back to Hadica.”
“Why?” her mom said. “You completed your project. We’re excited to hear all about it, of course. You will have to present it to us yourself.”
“At dinner, maybe you could share an appetizer to see who else is interested?” her dad said. “We could make a lecture of it?”
“I have school,” Lisa said, her voice faltering as her mind drifted. “I have to graduate.”
Ah, she thought. They knew all along, didn’t they?
Three years ago, Garen had come to visit and when he’d left, Lisa had hidden inside his backpack and tried to run away from home.
Her mom had been the one to find her, descending from the sky like the end of days. She had been furious. They had gotten into an argument.
Lisa had accused her parents of treating her more like a prisoner or experiment than a daughter. Everyone else in the family had their own projects, duties, contributions, but they never let her do anything. This, studying the Five Cities, could have been her first project.
Only the first part had been true, it had been an excuse, and even still, she had been trying to guilt her mom into letting her leave.
Her mom had known and let her go anyway.
Because Lisa had wanted to get away from the family for a time, to see the world, to see Garen’s home, and to … think. She’d wracked her brain trying to come up with ideas but never been able to figure out what her first project could be. Studying the Five Cities wasn’t it. Her family had done that ages ago and learned all they needed to. They were faking their excitement for her ‘research,’ and doing a pretty poor job of it at that. If they had thought she was genuinely interested in this, they would have been genuinely excited for her. That was the giveaway.
But she wasn’t sure it mattered if she did find a project. They were so much older, wiser, and stronger than she. They would forever be the teachers and she the student. How could she ever hope to make a difference?
And, oddly enough, those feelings didn’t hurt much as they once had. She had other reasons why she wanted to leave home this time.
“Graduate,” her mom said as if trying the word. “Have you not done so yet? How long do you need?”
“Two years, at least, but I repeated a year so I could attend a new school with my— I made friends? I told them I would come back, mom. I didn’t say goodbye to them or Garen, or— Garen has a girlfriend now!”
“So he wrote to us,” her dad said, “it’s a relief.”
“He always said he had troubles reconnecting with his kind,” her mom mused.
“I didn’t truly say goodbye to them. Not if I’m leaving for good. And I didn’t treat my research seriously. My notes are sloppy and riddled with holes. That may have been on purpose … but even so, I don’t want to leave my first project undone!”
Even if she had another project now. She had to tell her parents about Sam, and she wasn’t sure how. If they saw right through her again, would they spare her feelings?
That was a distant problem compared to the look on her mom’s face right now.
“Lisa,” she said and sounded hurt. “You have been gone for so long, three years, and now you want to leave again already? Why—”
“I want to stay, I missed you so much, but—”
“Then stay. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t. This ‘school’—” A bit of her agitation slipped into her voice.
“She only just came home to us,” her dad interrupted, “let us enjoy today at least. We can discuss this another time?”
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
Reluctantly, her mom conceded.
“Besides, you didn’t only come here to put your things aside, did you?” he asked her.
Lisa shook her head. “No.” She had places to be.
He pressed his forehead to hers. “Then don’t be long. We missed you, too.”
Her parents left. Lisa turned to the escarpment with a wistful smile. She glanced at the ramp, but she didn’t need it anymore.
With a beat of her wings, she ran forward and pushed off. Her claws found old marks in the wall and dug in, and she picked up speed as she scaled it. She kept her body low and her chin brushed over bumps and weeds.
In a few seconds, she shot past the edge of the cliff and unfurled her wings to hover in the air. A wild teeming jungle of life expanded in the bowl of the tableland below her. Their Nest.
Cries echoed. The canopy shook in trails as bodies moved within. Flames of different hues flared up between the green.
Lisa tilted her body and sailed over it. She found a clearing to touch down and followed a caretaker's trail further in.
After a few minutes, she found their lair not where it had been three years ago, but close enough. And they found her.
The first body tackled her from the brush. Tufts of brown fur stood out between his red scales, and he made snapping motions at her neck and scrambled up her side, smaller than Muri was now.
Lisa laughed and leaned her head back, trying to pry him off, but the second body dropped down from above and brought her head down.
Her green and brown scales blended seamlessly into the trees, and they had even turned to bark in places. Her tiny wings flapped around her head, disorienting her.
Two more crawled up her left wing, claws digging into her skin. A wet, pointed nose poked her in the side. That one had a slender, furred tail with a flame burning on its tip.
More and more joined the pile, sniffing, licking, and biting her, and they cried out to others in distance. Family, their tone said. Lisa was home!
“Yeah, and where were you?” she demanded. She finally managed to pry the little guy off and held him up. “What did you do?”
He bit her hand. She yelped and let go, and he flapped to the ground only to scamper around and join the horde again.
A whole flight of them circled and hovered overhead, flapping their wings, looking for a way in, and some gave up and dropped the same as their sister had done before them.
“None— Oof,” Lisa grunted as one of them fell on her shoulder. “None of you— Well, you were there.” She pointed one out. “And you. But the rest of you? Why didn’t you come to greet me? Huh?! Are you under house arrest again?”
They surged up her side and the weight became too much. Lisa tipped over. “Okay! Okay! I’m back. You can calm down now.”
Her siblings didn’t listen. One of the dragons yapped a battle cry and the rest of them dove down from the sky. An older brother teasing his little sister.
After all, Lisa wasn’t an only child. She was just the only one of her parents’ children who enjoyed all the same blessings as they did.
She surrendered, scooping as many of them as she could up into a hug, and closed her eyes. “I missed you, too. I’m home.”
----------------------------------------
There are six Gods in this world, Lisa. Six that matter. For us, there is a seventh.
Over two hundred years ago, the Allmother, Per, tore Her own heart out, tore it to pieces, and threw those pieces onto the world.
I want to live among them, She said.
Yet, one of Her Drops of Blood did not fall among civilization. It fell in an ordinary forest miles from the nearest mining town. She connected with the life She found there instead. She gave them gifts, one after another:
Capacity, magic, attunement to a greater web, primal forms, and finally—a Spark of Life. She made them Her children in truth.
And then, She left. In a hurry. She abandoned Her family, left them unfinished, left them to discover how to clean up Her messes on their own.
It had taken them two hundred years to have a child that was like them, and Lisa had been an accident. A happy accident, and her very existence had inspired hope that their kind was not doomed to extinction.
Fourteen years later, her cousin Muri had been the second.
The rest? Her older siblings surrounded her, as well some of her cousins, and nieces, and nephews, and grand-nieces and grand-nephews.
Drakes, some called them. Or Wyverns. Other people had been the first to make the distinction, but there were those among her family who had picked it up. Lisa disliked it but found herself making it, too.
They had some of their gifts, never all of them, and never … altogether there. Most of them had life essence, but they used it frivolously, strengthening themselves to win a tussle against siblings, to win a hunt, even to grow tree spikes they could use to scratch an itch.
They adapted on a whim, changed coats with the seasons, and didn’t stockpile their power to make the most of it.
They could be taught, but it was difficult. The lessons didn’t stick. Some of them were decades older than her and smaller than Muri.
And there were so many of them. Dozens around her, thousands in their care. There were only ever a dozen or so adults around to take care of them.
This Nest had been created when their family had been much smaller, before Lisa’s time, to keep them in one place. It was enchanted with centuries-old wards that at least one person retraced every morning and every night as they walked a circuit around the land, and they kept an eye on the dragons within, kept them in where they were safe.
It wasn’t enough. Even with more caretakers and greater security, it had never been.
They did have some of their gifts, and most of them had a crude sense for magic. Some found weak spots in the wards to slip through, others used their life essence to adapt and gain magic resistance, and again some, they just ate the wards. Most of them were omnivores the same as she after all.
It happened often enough that they were used to it. Usually, an adult would catch them before they made it too far and punish them with house arrest, no flight lessons with the others, or no hunts with the adults for a time.
But if they weren’t caught? They spread throughout their Mother’s Forest, hunted monsters, made nests, attacked other factions, and gave their family a bad name.
Or they spread beyond the forest itself and terrorized the nearby human settlements.
And they … procreated. They had children among themselves.
Half a dozen would slip away one night, a few adults would chase after them, and, a few months later, herd fifty new additions to their family back home …
… missing a few old faces. Those settlements defended themselves after all, and Northern adventurers hunted drake— dragons like they were walking fortunes.
She’d lived two years in this Nest before her parents noticed she was different. They had taken her away and suddenly, she’d had the entire family’s attention for one decade.
When she had been old enough to demand a place of her own, she’d chosen to live nearby because she had missed her cousins and siblings.
She loved them, but as horrible as the thought was, she didn’t think she’d ever wanted to take care of them like that, to make that her project, if only for a time.
She had wanted to help them. So, when she was twelve, her parents had given her the opportunity to shadow those who were pursuing that as their project.
She had seen what it took to learn how to help them. She hadn’t the stomach for it.
In a way, being an eternal student had been a relief then, because at least she could tell herself she wouldn’t have been able to contribute anyway.
Even that had been a lie. She had found a way around the problem later on, hadn’t she?
I’m sorry, Sam.
Her smile slipped as she spared a thought for what the little Teacup Salamander would become.
The dragons around her noticed and they redoubled their efforts to crush her.
Lisa groaned and with a forced smile, flooded magic to her wing.
“Okay, that’s enough!”
She shoved and a wave of bodies went flying into the forest, into nearby trees and bushes.
They scrambled back around immediately, breathing fire and roaring at her. Laughing. Again! Some of them prodded her instead, undeterred. Others didn’t have the capacity for empathy.
“It’s nothing,” Lisa assured them and sighed, “it’s just, I am going to have to have a tough conversation with mom and dad later …”
She trailed off, having an idea, “You know, you could be my backup if you wanted to? How about I break you out of here for a night?” They could take some attention off her.
They loved that idea apparently. They immediately settled down in the trees and on the ground around her, listening. Not patient. Scheming. They waited for Lisa to explain her plan.
“No. No plan— Not yet!” she raised her voice in efforts to calm them down, but the horde erupted into chaos, flying in circles to point out weak spots in the wards, complaining about how unfair the house arrest was, and that other children got to attend the feast tonight. Because they had ‘played nice.’
Some of the ones who had ‘played nice’ were here right now and balked at their tone. They weren’t goodie two shoes, they just weren’t idiots! Half a dozen fights erupted in an eye blink.
“Watch it!” Lisa tried to mediate as some of the smaller dragons—though not always younger ones—got crushed.
She flung them to safety, herded them under her wing, swept an arm through fights like parting the sea—
—and froze. “Who are you?”
A tiny dragon sat among the rest, smaller than Micah, with vibrant red scales and fresh eyes—excited and frightened at the same time at the chaos around him.
“Who do you belong to?” Lisa scooped him up with one hand and sniffed him.
He tried to protest, but he might as well have raged against a storm. He smelled like a mixture of the brats around her, like the smells of the forest, smoke and blood, but beneath that … he carried a bit of the scents of a few of her aunts and uncles on him.
She could guess which two were the most likely parents based on the couples in the family and his features—large teeth, bright eyes, the shape of his wings, and pattern of his scales.
More than that, Lisa held the young dragon to her ear and listened. Beneath the beat of his dragon heart, she heard a much fainter, much quicker thumping. He still had his true body.
No adaptation or hybridization that she could see, he looked healthy, which could mean he had a spark of life, or that someone was making sure to feed him well, and his inner flame was bright with magic, which spoke to the strength of his elemental spirit.
If Lisa had to guess, he was a little over a year old.
Two years, that was how long it took to be sure, to know if they would grow into their full blessings, or if they would forever be stuck as a child. It’d been that way for Lisa and Muri both.
“Will you join us in a year?”
He burped a flame at her eye. She drew back with a pained smile, guilt worming inside her heart.
Another reason to stay.
“I’m Lisa, your older cousin,” she introduced herself, “we’ll figure your name out along with who your parents are later, okay?"
She placed him down on her wing where he clung to the edge and peaked down at the others.
Lisa raised her voice, “Listen up! If I’m going to break you out, we’re going to have to contribute. The adults prepared enough food for themselves but not all of us, and we can’t steal— No, I know we can,” she said when one of her brothers protested.
He roared and spread his wings over the others. We have them outnumbered!, his posture said.
“It wouldn’t be nice,” Lisa clarified, “and I want today to be nice for all of us. So how about a hunt?”
There was a vein of power within the tableland—a place where wild magic and remnants of the Mother’s power pooled. It spewed out monsters for the children to hunt and eat.
Their caretakers regularly changed its connections to the surface through a series of vents and cave systems, and fed the vein different ingredients, to keep them active.
Not to mention the rest of the ecosystem they artificially maintained. Dragons were, all of them, gluttons.
They agreed, of course, and Lisa asked them to lead. They were, after all, her older siblings.
With a cacophony of roars, Lisa led a flight of a few hundred dragons off the top of the tablelands and over the forest.
Some of them carried one another, some glided, her newest cousin rode on her back and added his own tiny squeak to their battle cry.
Her family was still in the process of preparing a banquet in a series of glades. Lines of low stone slabs and rivers of reformed trees were the closest thing to tables they had. They were stacked with dishes like the child of a harvest festival feast and the Registry Ball’s buffet.
Roasts, salads, whole potions, rare treasures like leaves of the lightning trees, drops of the veins of power, alcohol they brewed themselves, and small bowls filled with gemstones. Lisa eyed those.
What they ate didn’t matter much; it was just easier to digest things the closer they were to ‘life’ for them, but how things tasted was based on their magical properties as much as their physical ones, so they were connoisseurs of all sorts of things.
She had only tried gemstones once or twice. They tasted savory, sweet, and filling. They were good, but not something she would eat too often lest her scales began to glitter like some of her aunts’ and uncles’ did.
Instead, she wondered if she could sneak a few out to sell them in the city for funds. She would have every chance in the chaos that was about to erupt.
Dragons, myconids, deer, and even … a human woman Lisa didn’t recognize looked up as the kids sailed overhead, crying triumphantly, and dropped the spoils of war they carried in groups.
Carcasses hit the grounds and tables: magical goats, bats, bears, and one cow. They threw up splashes of food and drink that glittered in the sinking sun.
The children who were already at the banquet, sitting patiently, helping to carry things around, or to clear the area, looked up and fidgeted nervously, but when the adults cursed and began to move, they couldn’t resist the call. They ran off with roars of their own and took the sky, sweeping dust over the tables and jostling adults on the move, or they began to eat before everything was ready.
The adults tried to capture them with the strength of their arms or spells. Trees reached out to entangle them, the earth turned liquid beneath one group and swept over a third like a blanket, cages of wind snapped shut around others.
Lisa spotted her parents and swooped down. On the way, she saw one of her cousins clinging to a tree trunk and scooting right when a dragon tall enough to be face to face with him standing on the ground went left, and scooting left when the dragon went right.
She touched down and gently guided her newest cousin off of her shoulder, but the little guy jumped off her hand halfway there and fluttered away in fits and hops, meter by meter.
He cried out his excitement, elated by the flight, and wanted to join the others, only to trip over a roast in the grass and fall down.
Her parents glared, but there was no real heat behind it. They looked daunted, but she knew they understood why she'd had to do that.
She opened her mouth … and hesitated, blushing. “I might not have thought this plan through.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” her dad said and his tone wasn't admonishing, but Lisa still felt a spike of embarassment.
“No, not— Let them have their fun? I meant, I have something to talk to you about. I need your help.”
Asking for a favor right after misbehaving wasn’t the wisest course of action, but Lisa hoped they would see past it this one time, and the chaos around her made speaking up easier.
In her hand, she held up a tiny red summoning stone.
Because, even having worked on it for over a year, she had no doubt her parents could do a better job with Sam than she, but she didn’t care if she wasn’t as smart as them anymore. She would study around the problem as long as it took until she was wise enough to help.
And she would keep her promise. She was getting Sam a soul.
“I need advice. And a bag of holding.”