From above, if she watched the Mother’s forest long enough, Lisa could begin to see the stretches and tears in its fabric.

Patches of trees pulled apart, balled up like tiny worlds, and blinked out of existence, only to be replaced by writhing monstrosities, and then fields of wild grasses and flowers. Walls of distortion flowed like rivers, caught the light, and blinded her. Objects in the distance didn’t always grow larger if she spent all day flying toward them.

Still, it was easier to focus on the horizon. Her vantage point didn’t give her much of an advantage over what lay below her, nor could what was below her easily see up.

Cloud gazing was more fun when the clouds teleported, split, and merged like kaleidoscopes.

So when the first volley of arrows flew at her from within the forest, Lisa was caught by surprise.

She was descending, following Wiggle’s direction. Her exhausted mind identified the lines in the air but didn’t seem to feel the need to react to that information until the last second. It was her school training that saved her.

Lisa slammed her wings down like a shield, drew herself up, and reinforced the wind to send the arrows careening in a storm around her.

A few struck her scales. Time slowed to a crawl as her panicked brain worked overtime. The arrows fell slowly enough for her to spot the glass tubes on some, the enchanted tips on others. Her wind had pushed needles back. Fluids sprayed in the air and mixed in chambers.

They detonated.

A series of bright, flashing explosions, like bottled thunder, crackled around her, and Lisa dropped in a defensive spiral.

Worse than light and noise, the smell was more noxious than the swamp they’d left behind, repulsive on an instinctual level.

She spotted bits of patterns in the yellow gasses, and recognized a similar formula to the repellants Micah had worked on once. A hundred times more potent. It made her want to retch.

Her eyes burned as she dove through a tendril of falling gas, and her second eyelids slipped shut, glazing her vision.

She warned Wiggle, arched her back, and dove in the other direction.

When she turned her head, she couldn’t see any sign of the attackers. No follow-up. She would have relaxed, but the stench clung to her like a bad taste.

“What the hell was that?”

“Repellants,” Wiggle signed.

“Yeah, no, I got that. I meant—”

“You look like an overgrown drake. They probably thought it wiser to chase you off rather than hunt you … for now. Be careful.”

His words left an even worse taste in her mouth. A reminder of the fate that awaited any of her siblings who escaped their Nest, and their behavior when they ran rampant in the world.

Not just that, but it was also a reminder that, technically, her existence was supposed to be a secret. It was a poorly-kept secret. Her family liked to brag, and … she’d told Allison, and Mave, and the Heswarens knew, and the exodus myconids probably knew, and the Dwarf. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the Hadica government knew as well, or at least some of the other factions in the Five Cities.

Still, Lisa took a reluctant breath, looked up, and let out a guttural cry of frustration. It rolled over the trees, stilling the birdsong and forest. She puffed a bit of fire to sell it.

“Not a word.”

Wiggle sat very still on her back. She felt the amusement rolling off him in waves.

If they thought she was a drake, it was best to keep it that way. “I guess we have to circle around. Where are we going?”

He gave a flute of hesitation and pointed. “Back. To where the arrows came from?”

Lisa gave him a blank stare. “Great.”

“Is this wise?”

Her sign language was rusty, but ‘rusty’ didn’t even begin to describe how much her ability to mimic myconid spores with magic had deteriorated over the past few years. If she tried, she had no doubt she would insult someone—herself, at least—so Lisa fumbled out a slow response, “We won’t know until we look, will we?”

She couldn’t speak. If there were any beastkin among their numbers, she used Ryan as the standard to measure their hearing ability by.

If they were discovered, it would be bad enough. If the Northerners found out a child dragon existed? One they didn’t have to cower before, whom they could hunt?

Her family had done much to foster a reputation of strength, because they were strong, but they weren’t always in a position to leverage that strength to its fullest. Their reputation had to be a shield, and she wouldn’t want to harm it.

So she crept, body close to the ground as Viglif shifted branches and bushes out of the way.

The forest was thick enough that she couldn’t see anything past a hundred meters, but once they neared the treeline, hoping for the same would be like covering her eyes and pretending nobody could see her.

Wiggle had it easier. He could camouflage. He was also shorter than Micah.

He led her to a vantage point where she could peek through a bush at a field of tree stumps in the distance, and beyond them, the first signs of an encampment.

It was late in the afternoon, but the summer sun set half an hour before midnight this far to the north. They couldn’t hope for the cover of darkness anytime soon.

The camp was still active despite the late hour. They wore simple worker clothes, boots, and belts stained an almost uniform brown by sweat and dirt. The steady sawing and thunk, tunk, wap of axe and hatchet against the trees echoed throughout the area. Thin trails of smoke rose up from fires, and thicker clouds in vibrant pinks, yellows, and white plumed in the canopy.

Those moved unnaturally, manipulated by wind elementalists or an enchanted item, no doubt.

People in camouflage uniforms, chain mail, and gambesons—like outdated copies of climbing gear in their style—patrolled the area, and here and there a group dragged a monster carcass behind them. Guards?

Some groups wore full protective gear, like armored beekeepers, and almost always returned with carcasses. Hunters, then?

Both groups alike lifted their spoils by ropes as they stepped onto thick salt roads that led to a station a good distance away from camp. The spoils went into a cluster of carts—each body into a different one—their equipment into another cart collectively, and they stripped naked to dump their underclothes onto a third one that piled higher than the rest.

Those who had no fur revealed red or green lines on olive skin, red marks snaking like veins, green ones covering muscle groups like moss. Here and there, she spotted one that was more stylized. Those must have come from families that had cultivated their marks over generations, or otherwise hired a tattoo artist to alter them—both implied a degree of wealth.

None of their marks were much larger than Kyle’s, but one bear beastkin turned in the shade, and Lisa caught a glimpse of red in the dark fur of her shoulders.

She had two bloodline traits, which was rare. And celebrated.

Even so, most of the marks were empty after a long day of work, nothing but dim outlines, and when another armored group waved to their colleagues as they headed out, Lisa recognized the shift change.

The returnees were hosed down in crude showers and filed into a larger tent that stood at the border to the encampment. Some kind of quarantine procedure, then? Wise, she supposed, even if the area seemed tame to her.

“Adventurers?” she signed, letting her annoyance bleed into the hand gestures. They were sloppy and she wouldn’t have understood them herself, had she been on the other side of the conversation, but Wiggle was used to slang.

He shook his cap and corrected her, “Soldiers.”

Huh. That fit.

The Northern nations that bordered the Mother’s Forest built outposts—frontier cities, really—that housed adventurers, craftsmen, tradesmen and their support structures almost exclusively, usually for one or more of three common reasons:

To farm the forest, harvesting monsters and materials for alchemists and enchanters to use, or offering combat experience; to defend against the forest’s spread in key points; or to act as waypoints from which the Northern nations pushed forward, trying to conquer more land.

Oftentimes, it was the last of those, when they overreached, that got overrun. Lisa had visited more than one monster-infested ghost town on family trips.

However, the border territories were almost separate nations unto themselves, a type of quarantine on a much larger scale, both in practice and culture: people flowed toward the frontier; nobody expected them to come back.

They weren’t allowed to unless they had special permissions, which a handful among thousands jockeyed for.

Magical plagues had taught them to structure themselves so, and people had quickly found room for profit.

In many nations, as Lisa understood it, moving to the frontier was not seen as an opportunity, but as a punishment. The majority of people in those cities were minor criminals, indentured servants, or otherwise desperate. Very few left willingly, and the ones who did had the backing of powerful groups or individuals in the heartland, a purpose in mind—like an expedition—or both.

The ‘tradesmen’ who went to the frontier were nothing more than middlemen. Their employers or at the border made the real profit, like farmhands and farm owners.

That meant the soldiers here either belonged to a powerful house that was fielding its own troops instead of hiring people—which would be cheaper and have fewer logistical and legal complications—or this was a royal project.

Lisa was leaning toward the latter. They wanted the vein.

So did she.

They stood between her and Sam, between her and curing her brothers and sisters when she wasn’t sure her family would keep trying.

And they’d shot arrows at her … from within the forest when she had been outside of it? How? It should have been like trying to spearfish in a river of liquid mirrors.

Wiggle tapped her to get her attention. “Give me a day or two, I can find a new spot. We don’t need this one.”

“Wait,” she fumbled her way through a response, “maybe we can do this. What is the vein? No sense in keeping it a surprise for me anymore.”

He hesitated, looking away, and she nudged him again. “Viglif.”

“It’s … a series of hot springs,” he said. “And geysers. With fire olms.”

Fire olms …?

Her eyes widened. “Salamanders?”

His expression withered. “I wanted to save the best for last. They weren’t here a week ago.” He gestured at the soldiers.

They’d gotten this far in a week? That confirmed it for her. Who else could afford to? Or more importantly, why try?

“We’re staying.”

His head fell as though he’d known she would say that. “Wait here. I’ll scout.” With barely a warning, he sprinted soundlessly and unseen into the woods.

Lisa lost track of him after a moment as he camouflaged, turned back to the bush, hesitated, and looked over her shoulder again. Suddenly, she was alone. She resisted the urge to whistle.

Even if a patrol didn’t find her, the wildlife was unnaturally quiet around her, and they would notice that instead, or another predator might. It was only a matter of time.

So she kept an eye out, but when a humanoid patch detached itself from the forest to her left and sprinted at her ten minutes later, she still jumped.

Like a shooing motion, she flicked her hands at him. “Damn it, Wiggle! Don’t scare me like that!”

He tilted his head incredulously. “Wiggle—? Nevermind. It’s a siege. The camp goes all the way around.”

Hrn. That explained why the area seemed so tame. Lisa considered, but she felt the way her classmates had often looked during exam season: tired, grumpy, a little hungry, but driven.

Her spirit felt like a worn rag, ached like an empty stomach, and did all it could to sustain her dragon form. She had a bit of mana, but all of her spells cost more, only a few drops of elemental essence, she couldn’t use her life essence because of stupid rules; she was exhausted, her wing ached where an Alder had wailed on her, her right eyelid twitched, and she was pretty sure she’d pulled a muscle when she’d fell into the swamp …

Her thoughts ran like a cat on ice—a dozen places at once without moving from the spot. Skills?

She had Skills … spells, spells, spells, ones that needed mental magic, [Empowered Cast] actually increased mana cost— Nothing.

Could Viglif donate some of his magic …? She didn’t want to ask when he was already reluctant to be here, though.

She couldn’t overrun an encampment.

She couldn’t sneak in. She hadn’t brought her human body, nor had she fixed it.

The thought went in the right direction, though. “Here’s the plan,” he signed. “I make a summon. It sneaks past the encampment, through the lair, and steals the vein.”

Wiggle stared. “Okay?”

Lisa hesitated. Somehow, she’d expected more push-back. She was too used to watching Ryan and Mican bicker over who got to die first, she supposed.

Wiggle motioned for her to get on with it so she gently drew on some of the essences around her—enough to save costs, but not enough to be noticed—pulled her practice crystal from her satchel, and used it as a base to summon an altered Teacup.

Viglif stopped her with a hand. “Why are you making it visible?”

“Invisibility is too expensive. It would be temporar—”

“Expensive?” he signed. “Shouldn’t it be cheaper? Just don’t paint it all.”

“Paint?”

“Paint— Fill? Don’t fill it in. So it can walk through light and grass without disturbing it?”

“I can’t make it incorporeal,” she scoffed. “I might be able to make it transparent in a few places but the summon still needs structure.”

“Incor—? Gaseous,” he moved closer and Lisa tried to butt him out, but she didn’t have the room to leverage her weight, and he pushed her arm back.

Flooding the incomplete summon with a cloud of spores, he began to alter it, getting rid of the color—which she would have done herself—and then thinning it until it swayed like a leaf in the wind.

Lisa gave him a droll look. “How’s it going to move, wise guy?”

Wiggle hesitated. The summon paddled its legs. Slowly at first, then quickly, but it found no purchase on the ground. It paddled a mile to move an inch.

He scratched his cap, perplexed.

“What, did you think I didn’t earn my levels?”

He shrugged. “[Grand Summoner]? Level nineteen? Can you eat these things?”

It was a figure of speech. Lisa still smiled. “Yes. Yes, you can actually.”

She shouldered him aside, shooed the spores away, and began to fix the summon as she explained, “Twenty is an ideal graduate, and that’s after three to five years of training.

“Thirty is a master craftsman, and they’ve had to lower the bar in recent decades because fewer and fewer people achieve it as early as they used to.

“Forty is the dream. About as high as you can hope to get nowadays … about as high as you should want to get, come to think of it. Consuming too much of a single Class’s essences can’t be healthy … for you …”

She trailed off as the Salamander solidified. It nearly zipped off, and she plucked it off the ground before it could, considered, and partially undid her changes.

Then, it barely touched the grass. Still not as quick, but if she was going to have to attach a [Summoner’s Bond] anyway …?

Lisa did, wrapping an extra shell of mind essences around it as it formed, and tried. It worked. With a few adjustments, she could solidify and loosen the summon on command.

“Hey,” she waved it at Wiggle like a toy and hissed, “gimme some more of your magic.”

It turned out to be more of a wind elemental in Salamander form than anything else, but that was fine. Wiggle helped her attach a crude invisibility to its ‘stomach,’ where it kept the crystal of holding, and Lisa gave it half of her remaining elemental essences.

“Are you sure about this? If this goes wrong, you could lose your crystal. You just got it.”

She waved him off. “I can always locate it again, even if I have to stalk their roads.”

She set the summon down and it zipped off toward the distant field of tree stumps. Reaching through her [Summoner’s Bond], Lisa took control: she saw through its eyes, ran with its legs, in a sea of blurry grass.

She was—that was, her Salamander summon—still visible to the naked eye, just difficult to spot, and some humans could see magic with the right bloodlines or training.

So as she ran, she corporealized to pick up speed. When she hid, she unraveled so the tall grass could sway through her in the breeze.

Stretch by stretch, tree’s shade to cattle fence, cart to crate, grass to tent, she snuck her way to the border of the camp and disconnected to examine her position from afar.

“Can’t you make a bird?” Viglif signed. “That way, you could keep your vantage point even when it moves beyond our sight.”

“We already know they’re keeping an eye on the sky, but we managed to sneak this close on the ground. For now.” She frowned. “Can you cause a distraction?”

“Not easily. Not safely. I’m also exhausted.”

“Right. Thanks, still.”

She took control again. Into the camp proper, she navigated through a sea of tan tents and legs from a worm’s eye view. She crossed a divide into a more chaotic cluster of smaller tents—barracks, she assumed—and crept through the metaphorical back alleys past rotting fruit peels and half-buried liquor bottles.

She could have searched for another route. The barracks had more eyes to spot her with, even by accident, but their tents stood back to back in cramped twin rows. Plenty of room to hide.

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The ‘roads’ in-between those were narrow, and the tents staggered so the opening of one faced the negative space between the others.

She was about to cross a road when a man slipped into the tent to her left, and she ducked back into the shade of the tent flap.

Muffled voices. He greeted someone with an exhausted sigh. His shift must have ended, but his bunkmates were in. Night shifts? What an odd grouping.

Her ears were practically nonexistent, but that was both good and bad here. Trying to listen to Northerners speak was a trial in sanity.

Her family spoke ‘Draconic,’ which had branched off from what the Five Cities called Dwarvish, and what the Northerners called New High Eonian … mixed with a few other languages throughout the years as they’d traveled around and studied the wider world, as well as bits of the myconid invented language, snippets of the Allmother’s tongue they’d picked up from the Whisper Tree, and a few terms they’d repurposed or invented themselves …

All of that had been adjusted to their dragon bodies and culture, then marinated over decades of near-isolation.

… It was a bit of a mess, if she was being honest. Three languages in a trenchcoat. But it was her native tongue so it made sense to her.

The gibberish these people spoke? Not so much.

She could speak Modern High Eonian. Even a few different dialects. Reading and writing it was easier. Whenever she heard it, her brain lagged a second behind as it tried to draw nonexistent connections. It just sounded too similar to home. Get past the thick accent and every word was a butchered homonym.

One guy was … happy to get off work? She could guess that one for free. He wanted a drink and a massage. A bunkmate made a derisive comment. Prudes, she remembered. It only added to the proof that these weren’t normal soldiers. The middle class was weird about propriety.

“Valli!” Massage guy shouted, and her legs twitched. She heard the mocking smile in his voice, then the disappointment when he didn’t get a reaction.

Was someone asleep in there? Three people, then?

“Let him be, Doron,” the second person said.

Massage Guy was Doron— No, wait. Why was she listening to this?

Lisa shook her head and crept forward to peek left and right. A group two tents down was chatting outside.

Drat. Slowly, she crept back around to the other side, her brain still trying to decipher the background conversation.

Doron wanted some sleep himself—he complained about his mark having exhausted itself. The other guy apparently didn’t have a stamina mark at all.

Something impacted the tent wall, and she jumped. It fell with a metallic clatter. A cup?

He was rummaging around, getting changed or tidying up—either way, he distracted his bunkmates with his chatter.

She wondered if this was what it felt like to have a stroke. She’d taught herself how to watch out for the warning signs in case Allison or Garen ever had one.

They hated being here. That became obvious. They were far from home in a place they hadn’t ever expected to be deployed, territory that might kill them or horribly mar them, physically or socially, forever.

Of course, they never said that. With bitter words and light tones, they complained about the cold showers and having to dig latrines.

Lisa tried not to feel bad for them. It helped a bit when the second guy prayed to Hela that the Witch wouldn’t cause any more delays. The irony had to be lost on them. The Mother wasn’t a witch, but by many historic accounts, their late God Empress had been.

A fourth person spoke up, and Lisa learned there were four people in the tent, “At least if the witch makes us impotent like Sunset, Doron here can buy as many ‘massages’ as he likes.”

Doron groaned. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Stone. Getting a real massage feels divine.”

“You’re right. I don’t know: I assumed we’ll get to go home at all.” His bitter tone left a pause, and the second guy’s response was a murmur.

“Hope so. Both options suck. Wife and I were trying for a second kid.”

Lisa paused.

“You know what we need?” Doron forced a smile. “Alcohol. A well of it, if I’m going to have to spend a month here with you. I think I heard the others talking about tunneling in a supply.”

There were shuffles and words of agreement and suddenly, the tent flap was flung open as they left and called out to the other group.

Using their distraction, Lisa crept alongside the front of the tent to dart across—

One of her eyes peeked inside the flap, looking straight at Valli who still lay half-naked on his cot, snoring through his mouth. His bleary brown eyes blinked at her.

Not asleep then.

“Ah,” he said.

Lisa held still, letting herself unravel as much as she could. Maybe he would think the blur on the ground was the sleep in his eyes?

Instead, he rubbed one eye and squinted at her. “Uhh— AH!”

He scrambled back. The jig was up! Lisa ran.

“AHH—!” He choked, coughed, and sputtered, “Monster! Shit, uh— MONSTER IN THE CAMP! MONSTER IN THE—”

The other group jumped and looked—at his tent first; she didn’t think they saw her, and she was too busy solidifying to care.

Valli shouted directions, followed by a sting of more flowery expletives, and more and more heads poked out over the sea of tents to search for her.

The tents themselves offered her cover until she had to cross a road. A group spotted her. She dodged the first boot, a javelin— Someone threw a bucket at her, and water sloshed out over the trampled grass.

Alarm bells rang, people shouted, but in the next group to find her, someone laughed. The sentiment echoed. Apparently, they weren’t intimidated by a wind lizard running free in their camp.

Which, sure, was fair. She was only as deadly as an embolism right now. They still used her for target practice.

When hiding between the tents failed, Lisa used people for cover, hoping the friendly fire would distract them. She might have started a brawl, but they started taking her more seriously after that after someone bellowed orders and frustrations rose.

Despite that, Lisa was close to the edge of the barracks. Getting out wouldn’t be the hard part, then. Crossing the border of no man’s land?

When she spotted the open stretch, she faltered. On a dime, she looped back around into the sea of tents. She had to lose as many eyes as she could before she left. It was the only way she would survive.

Sharp right, ducking behind a box, circling around a tent, then running into another and scrambling to dig back out under the fabric of its wall again—anything to break their line of sight.

Lisa spent five minutes running circles around them before she hid for one, glanced left to right to see if the coast was clear, and darted out into the open.

Across an open field, under a fence, the base of a rickety watchtower, and a wall of horse spikes—she fled.

With any luck, the watchers above were keeping an eye on the commotion in the barracks, not their own shadow. She crossed another field of stumps, ran over salt lines, and past hunter’s traps toward a—

Moat.

They’d dug a moat, too?

Lisa dug her feet in the ground to slow herself down just as the arrow pierced her left leg. She unraveled on instinct to let it pass through her, but the damage was done.

It nearly shore her leg off, and the wooden shaft pinned her in place. She stumbled, her momentum tearing her free, and picked herself up. She couldn’t stop.

Resolidifying, she half-limped, half-ran toward the edge, drew on the elemental charge within her, and pushed.

With a burst of wind, Lisa flung herself over the moat. The force of it tipped her and she tumbled, catching a glimpse of a shallow moat below. She stifled a curse.

If she had known—they weren’t even done. But it was too late. Back first, she bounced off the thicker grass on the other side, rolled, and scrambled up to limp beneath cover.

A glance back saw a trail of arrows behind her, but no follow-up. Thank the Mother. And why would there be? A tiny lizard had snuck through their camp to go into the doomed lands of the vein. Unusual, but what were they supposed to do about it? Why did the chicken cross the road? It probably wanted to eat magic. It didn’t mean anything. Not yet, at least. Or not at all, depending on if she succeeded.

The terrain was rougher on the other side. Walls of moss and roots grew on rocky slopes, and each tree was a gnarled thing growing over tiny hills and gullies.

The humidity weighed on her as she limped. That wasn’t wholly intentional. She was losing essences by the second. Her wound only grew worse.

She had to hurry, but she wasn’t exactly in a position to defend herself. So she slowly scaled the gravel slopes and used roots like bridges.

‘A geyser,’ Viglif had described the vein as. That couldn’t be hard to find. After the first hill, she already spotted a puddle smoking with vapor. She rushed down the roots—

A mossy boulder shifted to her right. Lisa scrambled into the shade between two roots and peeked out.

A pale pink and white Salamander the size of an alligator lay underneath a rock a third of its size. It had buried itself under there, she guessed by the claw marks in the dirt, but the rock barely covered it. Did it think it was small enough to fit?

Its head poked out in her direction. Viglif had described them as ‘olms.’ Were they blind?

Couldn’t risk it. They’d have some way of detecting prey. Keeping her eyes on it, she slowly circled back around until it was out of sight and turned—

Two giant, beady black eyes stared at her. Lisa froze. The Salamander in front of her was larger than its kin, with a long swan neck bent down so it could stare at her.

Definitely not blind.

It was a little darker than the other, its white fading to pink, and its pink to red. Steam radiated off its skin and clung to a dusting of scales on its back like a ghostly mane.

It moved—

Lisa bolted, tripped over a root, and scrambled. It swooped around her, encircling her with its neck, and she tried to duck, but it crushed her with one limb.

She considered unraveling, but it would hurt her more than it helped. Would a wind gust push it off? She only had so much magic left.

When it turned its head toward her, she almost risked it anyway, but it didn’t open its mouth. Instead, it turned toward the clearing on the other side of the tree where a large pond of steaming water had pooled in a nook below a cliff.

An almost psychedelic ring of colors ringed it—thriving bacteria in vibrant pinks, azure blues, and sandy oranges.

The swan-necked Salamander looked at her and … inclined its head again.

Huh? Slowly, Lisa limped in the only direction she could go, trapped between it and the tree. She kept one eye on it.

It let her pass.

After she covered a good distance, it followed, and when she tried to climb the hill up the side of the pool, it nudged her off with its face. She tumbled back down through the grass and panicked—was it a persistence hunter?

Monsters could rapidly develop all sorts of instincts in this forest. It could want to tire her out before it attacked, despite their size difference.

Lisa faced it, made herself as big as she could, and hissed. Ignoring her, the Swan swooped its neck around and pushed her from the side.

Oh. Was it aquatic? Maybe its young were in the water, and it was it trying to feed her to them?

Lisa tried to run, drawing on her wind charge, when her foot touched the ring of colors in the shallowest parts of the lake. Immediately, traces of life essence flowed up her leg to knit it back together again—and then more, beginning to fill in her blueprint, knitting flesh.

She scrambled out of the water and shook herself dry. The Salamander still tried to nudge her into the lake, but Lisa hissed and retreated.

Finally, it gave up.

… It had been trying to help her. Healed her. Why? Did it matter? She groused and scaled the hill again. This time, the Swan left her alone.

After she crested the hill, she spotted more and more monsters in the thick terrain, some lazing in the shade, some in gaps in the canopy.

One paced in a circle, and it must have been pacing for a while: its feet had cut a groove of dirt into the green.

They saw her but didn’t react. They looked … bored. Like animals raised in captivity, though the siege was only a few days old.

Had they tried to escape and been rebuffed? Or maybe they were a few days young, and this was the survival instinct the vein had imparted on them.

The swan-necked Salamander still shadowed her as she carefully walked among the monsters. Lisa ignored it and tried to orient herself.

The ‘vein’—or its output, at least—should have been close to the center, so she followed the steaming pools and growing humidity until she stumbled upon an obvious sign:

A thick wall of trees intergrown with dense vines, curtains of moss, flowers, and fungi stood among the forest like a two-story gazebo grown from plants. Slivers of empty space led inside like stageside entrances. Gaps in the ‘walls’ looked like natural windows that let in the breeze.

Animals sat perched there—smaller olms, birds, spiderwebs, and darting squirrels. A fluttering hummingbird drank from flowers. Wasps buzzed by.

Lisa wandered up to the entrance and found a crater half-filled with a pool of boiling water.

This was it.

She hesitated.

So much life thrived here because of the vein. They sought it out like a watering hole in a desert. If she took from it, this would all vanish that much sooner.

Then again, it was all going to disappear one way or another … But, if the soldiers hadn’t been here, how would this have gone down?

Viglif and she would have flown in from above, ignored the buzzing wildlife, and shouldered her way through a narrow doorway to steal what she could. Maybe she would have relaxed in a hot spring afterward.

It had been years since she’d been home, studied under a family member, or pushed herself to her limit. Her dragon body had grown without her. Viglif looked shorter than before.

She wasn’t a child anymore, was she? Who had to beg her parents for permission to do anything, to hide her projects away, or throw a fit for a chance at independence.

She wasn’t just a student either, who had to scrape money together for ingredients or mana rings.

She was a dragon, which meant she would one day tower over the world, crush mountains underfoot, and change lives on a whim.

Lisa regurgitated a bright red jewel and poked it with her face, slowly rolling it through the grass like a tennis ball until it tumbled down the slope. When it lay inside the bubbling water, she poked it again to activate it, and the vein dipped.

A shadow fell over her. The Swan swooped in and swatted the crystal out of the vein with a splash of liquid. It bounced away and rolled to a stop.

Lisa ran but by the time she got there, the Salamander had sniffed the jewel, nudged it, and slowly rolled it back into the vein. Lisa slowed down, observing. It watched the crystal slowly consume the liquid and turned to her with empty black eyes, steam clinging to it like a cloak.

She tried to make herself as tall as she could without looking aggressive. She would fight it if she had to—or snatch the crystal and run.

Instead, it did—the Swan ran. It squeezed back through the entrance in one fluid motion and dashed into the forest with a trail of fog.

“Lisa,” Viglif nudged her true body.

It took her a moment to return her senses, staring after it in confusion. “What?”

He shushed her. It sounded like a nearly inaudible shriek, and she remembered she was supposed to be signing.

“There’s a patrol,” he signed to her left eye, and she noticed he was fussing about with something, “they’re investigating the area.”

Something poked her in the side. A tree branch? Oh, he was trying to camouflage her.

“Are you done?”

“Almost. I’m at the vein.”

“Hurry.”

Easy for him to say. Lisa nudged the crystal a little further and turned as her hearing perked up.

A monster cried out, the birds in the windows went silent, and then twittered up a storm as they took off. The squirrels fled. Shadows swept past the entrances.

She retreated to peek outside and found the monsters trapped inside the siege no longer acting like they were born in captivity, but raging like wild animals stuck in cages.

The swan-necked Salamander whipped them into a frenzy. The ones nearest to the gazebo at first, and they spread the message in a ripple of agitation throughout the forest.

It returned, running on bridges of branches through the canopy, and poked its head in through one of the windows. A smaller olm writhed in its maw, dangling over the edge like a kitten in its mother’s mouth.

Was it sick? Or too small? Too weak? Lisa expected the Swan to drop it into the vein to strengthen it, or feed it. Instead, it held its body down and tore its neck out.

Blood sprayed onto the walls and grass, and the Swan flung its limp carcass into the vein. It hit the water with a splash that drowned out the steady hiss and sounds of its bubbles, and where the splash traveled, the vein began to froth red and boil. The liquid rose up.

Her stupid air legs were too short. Just before she could snatch the crystal up again, the geyser erupted. A mountain of red steam shot up and sprayed, and where it met the plants, they wrestled one another for surface space. Where the potency was thickest, more Salamanders rained down on them.

They looked similar to her at first: skeletal outlines of translucent red that rapidly drew in material from the world around them to fill themselves in. In a wave, they hit the grass and tumbled.

Lisa’s eyes were on the crystal. It rolled in a sphere of negative space as it was pushed up by the steam and ate it.

In her distraction, she didn’t notice the Salamander next to her until its hiss was in her ear, and she dodged back—

It rushed her, half-formed, looking for more material to write itself into existence. The Swan saved her with another cry, and all of the newborn monsters froze.

With a hiss and jerk of its heaf, it led them away in a rushing horde, bodies clambering over one another in their haste to squeeze through the doorway. Lisa recognized them for what they were then: troops.

She glanced up as the geyser died down, sprinted, and jumped to catch the falling jewel. It didn’t have as much of a charge as she’d hoped for, but she was out of time.

“They’re close,” Wiggle urged her.

“I’m leaving—”

“If you have what you need, hide your summon. We can come back. We’re about to be discovered.”

“You’ll get your distraction in a moment,” she flicked back, frustration bleeding into the gesture again, “something’s about to happen. Defend me. I’ll have to reveal myself. And multitask.”

“Huh? Wait, no— Lisa.”

She ignored him and stood. A shower of bushes and branches fell off her dragon body, and a chorus of shouts erupted as the camouflage veil he’d woven faltered.

A few meters away, among the trees, a patrol levied its spears. One man shouted a command, and someone detached from the group to sprint toward the camp.

Lisa tracked him slowly, raised her neck up, and spat. A viscous glob of mana arced toward him, someone cried out a warning, and he turned to raise his shield.

It splattered across his frame like slime—because that was what it was—and as the summon formed, it dragged him toward the ground. Lisa had had to learn to summon them for her weekend job in the arena.

Good enough. It would slow him down. She ignored the rest. She was running on wisps of magic—last stretch before the finish line—and her spirit gasped for every breath.

She was going to have a migraine after they got out of here. Assuming they got out.

Her wind lizard was already sprinting after the tide. All around it, legs trampled over the grass, and monsters cried out in a cacophony. A battle cry.

She’d taken most of the vein off their hands, the Swan had used the last surge to spawn more troops, and the army would scrape together what was left—with nothing left to defend, the monsters were free to attack.

As they crossed the stretch of no man’s land, she heard the alarm bells ringing through two sets of ears, and felt the earth rumble as Viglif raised walls of thorns. Arrows rained down on both of her bodies.

She moved her dragon body to search for an open stretch, her lizard to dive between bodies, legs, whipping tails, and trails of steam.

Pits collapsed, bear traps snapped shut, and a wave cried out as the arrows fell. Lisa knew what to expect. She walked in the footsteps of larger monsters and used them as meat shields.

The serpentine monsters crossed the moat like a bump in the road, and she hid in it for a moment to navigate her dragon body, and then the camp was out of time.

She prayed the ruckus she’d caused earlier had at least put them on alert. The wave of monsters crashed into their horse spikes and fences, ran over one another, and fell onto the defenders.

I’m sorry.

A Salamander bit into a man’s leg and tore him off his feet. He looked like Ryan to her.

His comrades nearly hacked the beast’s head off and dragged him back, closing their ranks as someone put pressure on the wound. His blood still flowed freely onto the dirt.

Lisa ran by them. The open spaces and tents naturally funneled the monsters, and though many of them formed kill zones, the layout of their camp wasn’t perfect on all sides.

She followed a group down a narrow road back the way she had come, surrounded by collapsed tents and monsters snooping for food. In the distance, soldiers retreated. This was no place to fight, but one of them lagged behind. She recognized him. Valli.

Go, Lisa thought as he slowed down. He looked at his allies’ backs and back to the monsters.

Run. Idiot.

He stopped and turned to face the horde armed only with a spear. It was stupid. All he had to do was regroup and fortify one of the places where they would want to fight. So why …?

I am not going to let you die here. Maybe if she got there first, she could do something about it? Blast him out of the way or get the horde to back off—something.

Lisa hurried, but when shards of his irises glowed like broken glass, her own eyes widened and she changed course.

Right, right, right, right—her feet scrambled to turn, overshot, and she ducked into the nearest alley between two tents, glancing back.

His mouth moved as he mumbled words to himself. A familiar shade of blue filled the shards in his eyes, and they flared when he raised a hand.

A wall of force appeared, bisecting a tent to her side and stretching ten meters from side to side, curved like a piece of a much larger dome, but littered with cracks and holes like a dilapidated window.

It flicked in and out of vision, then flared when the first six-legged monkey hit it—and it held.

The serpentine Salamanders tried to climb through the holes, but they slipped as the dome flickered in and out of sight, and were impaled on the jagged edges of the barrier.

Remnants, Lisa thought. He must have been a true descendant of the Empire, someone whose ancestors had survived its fall, now left to inherit crumbling power.

She pointedly looked away, facing the sky, and spat. With the last burst of her magic, she shot the red jewel into the air. It glimmered and blurred as her form began to unravel.

The last thing her summon saw was a red dragon swooping down to snatch the gem up—Lisa returned to her senses, and wished she hadn’t.

From above, she could see the true extent of the monster’s attack as she sailed over the tents. The soldiers had been right to choose a siege. There were hundreds of monsters she hadn’t even seen attacking the camp in multiple places, but they hadn’t been prepared to defend against a surprise all-out attack like this, and now had to scramble to regroup and fight back.

She cried out, breathing fire down an open road, and dipped down to snatch up two more Salamanders in her hands.

Just a scavenger, snatching food away when the hunters were distracted. She hoped they would believe that.

They weren’t really in a position to worry about her anyway but miraculously, some of the soldiers chose to attack her when she was flying away from the camp. Something hit her and Lisa glanced back. Two arrows stuck inside her waist, one dangling between two scales like it was about to fall out. The pain slowly grew, and Lisa frantically kept an eye out for any other attacks.

She spotted the Swan as she searched, standing on a fallen command tent amidst flames.

It was staring at her.

It kept her gaze without a hint of fear or hostility. Did it know? Did it care? Would this matter?

She wanted to know, to swoop down there and take it with her, find a way to undo this, but someone threw a weighted net over the Swam, and it tore its eyes away from her to fight.

And Lisa flew on. She brushed past the canopy on the other side of the camp, and Viglif hopped off of a tree’s branch onto her shoulder and frantically signed, “Go. Fly. Run!”

That had been the plan. She angled herself for a descent and crashed through the trees, scraping past branches, and bumping into tree trunks.

Touching down, she flung the two Salamanders she’d kidnapped forward and they sprinted into the forest away from her. Viglif demanded to know what she was doing.

She looked at him. “Help them.”

“Huh?”

“I’m out of options, I’m out of magic. But I can’t just leave. Please, make the fighting stop.”

The inhabitants of the vein would have died one way or another, but Lisa didn’t want to be any more responsible for this than she had to be. If she hadn’t come here, if she hadn’t been so stubborn—

His eyes were wide with disbelief as Viglif stared at her, but he puffed out a ring of spores in frustration, and wrenched himself around to hop off her back.

Walking backward, he signed, “You owe me one.”

She nodded and followed as he began to create another cloud. Instead of a killing cloud, this one was of sleep.

It wouldn’t affect the entire camp. It would take time to work—it was too little, too late—but she had to do something, if only rely on him for this.

Someday, Lisa would be able to crush mountains. She just hoped she’d be able to raise them up again, too.

Her side throbbed with pain where the arrows stuck. With one hand, Lisa reached back and wrenched them out. Her wounds spat out splinters and closed in seconds.