Dream Lost
THE DRAGON AND THE MAGICIAN
Long ago, when magic flourished throughout the lands of Albion, a magician named Darragh was befriended by a great red dragon. After a mighty battle, the dragon lay dying, and in a final act, it passed on its magic to his dearest friend.
Darragh took the nameGreatdrakesto honor his dragon friend and ensure no one in his bloodline forgot where their power came from.
All magic, and especially wild dragon magic, came with a price, and the power in the Greatdrakes bloodline was no different.
With the dragon’s blessing, there came curses.
The first was that at least one child in every generation of Greatdrakes tended to go mad.
The second curse was that when their dragon side decided to choose a mate, they had absolutely no say in the matter.
This was the legacy of the Greatdrakes. Unfortunately, the stories were mostly wrong because, like many ancient family histories, they were passed down by men. The truth was far more complicated.
For a start, the great red dragon had been a female. She had been one of the ancient dragon shifters who had lived in Albion before men decided to drive them into Faerie. She had died because an army of men had hunted her down, and Darragh had arrived too late to help fight them off.
Her magic had been passed down through their five children, whom Darragh hid away until they were old enough to venture into the world, wise enough to hide who they were, and powerful enough to smite anyone who tried to hurt their family.
The madness of the Greatdrakes was a result of their brilliance and heritage of magicians breeding magicians. Magicians were generally too clever for their own good and as haughty and mad as cats when provoked.
The only true part of the original tale was that they did tend to have a dragon side that chose mates. The unions were always happy ones, despite any rocky beginnings, so they never really bothered to try and find a way around that.
All of this went on for generations quite easily, and every generation knew what to expect. Sadly, that knowledge and comfort went to hell when the fae returned and subsequently restored magic.
Now, the Greatdrakes family was facing a new wave of problems within their lineage. For example, the patriarch of the family, Cosimo, had learned that dragons could have more than one mate if their first one died. He had been a widower for a long time, and the thought that he could have another mate out there that he didn’t know about unsettled him greatly.
Another new and dangerous possibility was that every one of them had dragons inside them, waking up and getting more and more eager to get out. No one knew if any of the other Greatdrakes in their long lineage had inherited the ability to shift into dragons because the fear of ignorant humans made them too cautious to write it down.
They were at the dawn of a new magical age, and none of the Greatdrakes knew what changes would come from their bloodline.
Luckily, through marriage, they had inherited a large extended family of ancient and powerful fae, who knew how to deal with magical problems, the aforementioned ignorant humans, and dragons coming into their power for the first time.
1
For as long as Bas Greatdrakes could remember, he had been dreaming of flying. All the dream books and websites would say that flying in dreams represented freedom and new beginnings. And in other people’s dreams, it probably did.
Bas knew that his flying dreams were because his ancestor had fucked a dragon. Now, he had a dragon part of him who longed for the wind rushing over its scales and the sun on its wings.
Unfortunately, he had wanted to dream about libraries growing in woods and strange, beautiful women who threw books at him (like he had on Midsummer’s Eve) and not bloody flying.
It was now the beginning of fall, and while Bas still hadn’t managed to find his way back to the library in the woods, that didn’t mean he had stopped thinking about the stranger he had met there.
You didn’t even ask her what her name was.He had been so surprised by her appearance that he didn’t have the sense to introduce himself.
Bas had the most sense of all the Greatdrakes boys, but he had failed to have any when it mattered. It annoyed him, and when a magician got annoyed, he got obsessed. He was definitely obsessed with the beautiful woman in the woods.
Bas’s magic had manifested when he was a kid, and he had read his father’s mind before asking him telepathically to take him to the library. The day his mother died was the first time he went to the astral plane.
Like all Greatdrakes, his abilities had been prodigious, and now anything to do with minds and magic were his purview. Dreams, telepathy, telekinesis, and astral projection were as easy as breathing for Bas. Every night, he swam in the waters of the collective unconscious and manipulated the astral planes to dance to his will.
That was why Basknewhe hadn’t created the woman or the library in the woods. They were her creations, and yet he had wandered right in. A magician who was experienced enough to build such a sanctuary in the astral plane should have been smart enough to build protection wards too.
That was what his mind couldn’t stop chewing over. She was brilliant...and unprotected. His overprotective side, which his Uncle Taranis had assured him was all dragon, was worried about the woman he had met. So what if she had thrown a book at him? It could have been a lightning bolt.
In the astral plane, you had to be careful how you reacted to fear, lest you manifest something greater and more terrifying than the thing you were trying to defeat or create.
