Razor sharp talons below and a crown of horns above.
A scaled body so large, I immediately understood why all the rooms I’d seen so far had such high ceilings and little furniture.
Suddenly, I knew the answer to my third question. The one Aengus had made me wait for.
Also, what are you?
A dragon. My maybe-fated-mate was a dragon.
He stood before a digital wall that showed a crystal-clear picture of the cavern I’d been sleeping in next to vertical rows of scrolling god tech language—green hierglyphs cascading like something out of that old 2D filmThe Matrix.
He was hissing, screeching, what I could only describe as rolling Predator-like clicking. Rapidly. Maybe speaking to someone I couldn’t see? If so, it sounded urgent. And angry.
I started backing away like a vintage meme of Homer Simpson fading into the bushes.
But then he cut off and froze. Right before he whipped his great green head around.
And looked straight at me.
Training
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
And I stared right back at him with an old Weird Al Yankovic parody song going off in my head.
The picture on the digital wall blinked out, along with the writing, and the wall turned black.
He was massive, even with his wings tucked in neatly against his shoulders. His tail was so long, it extended nearly to where I stood.
It scraped against the stone floor when he turned fully around to face me.
Twenty feet of emerald-green dragon peering down his long snout at one extremely underprepared she-wolf.
I recognized the white shimmering scales on his underbelly. They were the same ones I’d noted earlier on his torso—right before he knocked me out with that black disc.
They rippled in the bright sunlight streaming down from an opening in the ceiling. Other than his chest and underbelly, he was entirely shades of iridescent green that sparkled likegemstones. Even the horns crowning his head were a deeper shade of green.
He took a step toward me, and the sunlight disappeared, his form casting me in shadow.
As my wolf vision adjusted to losing the light he’d blocked out, I thought,He’s magnificent.
And possibly dangerous, a small voice pointed out in the back of my head. Probably my sense of self-preservation.
I, personally, had zero control in shifted form. A late bloomer who’d grown up toothless—as my kind called wolves who couldn’t yet shift—I’d been so relieved when my first turn finally came after moving to Scotland. Less stoked as an adult with the nightmare of full moon scheduling and having to cage up in my teeny Toronto mini-studio.
Some of the more ancient cultures, like the Norwegian Wolves and the Irish Bears, could hold on to their humanity while shifted. But I had never encountered, or even heard of, a dragon shifter outside of romance holos.
And I was not the kind of waify starlet they put in romance holos.
“Hi,” I squeaked since I’d just spent a week in a kingdom where I’d been warned several times: “If you see a bear, don’t run.”
I really, really should have let Aengus stick around long enough to answer that third question.
The emerald dragon made a loud breathing sound. Like a sigh. That released smoke. The residual heat of it waved over my skin.
