I awoke to a very lovely morning. The sky was delightfully overcast in that way that promised rain but not for a while (I do really love the rain), the birds were chirping quietly, and the screaming was--hang on, why was there screaming?

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes to clear the sleep from them and looked across the river. Every tent was gone and the hunters were milling about in rage. They also all look absolutely drenched. I looked around my little campsite and saw that nothing was disturbed. I fetched my holy symbol from my pack and rolled up my bedding. I took a moment to fetch one of my more official looking mantles I brought just in case and draped it over my shoulders like a shawl. I immediately felt more confident and ready to tackle whatever bizarre events were going on across the river. A good outfit will do that for you, I’ve found.

I repeated my little river crossing trick and looked for Abel among the shouting hunters. I spotted him directing a few hunters to try and organize the mess. He scowled at me as I walked up.

“Morning priest, so nice of you to finally join us. Would your mysterious patron have any insight or wisdom to share as to why all of our tents are gone and we got woken up at the crack of dawn by a freak microburst?”

I blinked my eyes slowly, taken aback for the moment that Abel knew weather terminology. (I was an avid reader and you pick up some odd things reading through books, so I knew what he meant.)

“I will...have to commune with the divine. I wonder how such a phenomenon could affect you all on this side of the river but not me on the other side.” I hadn’t meant to say the last part aloud but sometimes my musing gets the better of me and I forget to guard my tongue.

Abel’s expression grew even more annoyed. “Never mind your little playacting, little priest. Why don’t you use that fancy magic of yours and get a good fire going so we can dry out our things. Knowing our luck, the water will have ruined our supplies and we’ll be on lean rations while we hunt this beast.” He grumbled and shook his head as he finished speaking. I nodded and started looking for a good central portion of camp.

I was glad yet again that I brought my own supplies. I briefly recalled the shadow I saw crossing through the sky as I went to sleep last night, but I pushed it from my mind as I gathered up wood for a bonfire. I could create a fire that big purely with magic alone, but I didn’t want to have to drain more mana that I had to, given how frequently the hunters tended to get injured. Sometimes I swear they pay far less attention than they used to because they know I’m there to patch them up. With some fuel to keep the fire going, I set about molding mana from my core into the elemental flow of fire. My core responded well to the shaping, fire being one of the easiest varieties of elemental magic for me to work with. I sometimes liked to think it was because my core itself was like a little fire burning merrily in my chest. Setting fire to the branches was simple enough and in not time at all I had a nice blaze going.

I was in a fairly good mood after seeing the hunters out of sorts, so I indulged and used a bit of mana to shape some sticks into a proper drying rack for the hunters to use. I hummed happily to myself as I worked, both from the joy of working with magic and because any magic involving plants seemed to work a little better with some song. It was a trick I had picked up from Maple, much of her work involving a good knowledge of plants and their quirks. The interesting bit with working plant magic is sometimes you get unexpected side effects. I was delighted to see little blossoms form on the branches making up the rack as my magic ran through them. Rather pretty really.

“Hmmph, priestess can’t do anything without making it weird.” A rough voice behind me ruined the moment immediately. Henrik was throwing his things on the rack with nary a care.

“Teara teaches that it is a virtue to appreciate the efforts others go to on your behalf. To spurn such gifts is to invite the displeasure of the divine.” I put on my most pompous priest voice while I held my holy symbol forth in an obvious show of piety. I stifled a grin as Henrik looked like he was going to respond but the bonfire flared briefly and he nearly had his eyebrows singed.

“Truly, the ways of the divine are mysterious. Blessings of the Pantheon upon you, good hunter.” I managed to stride calmly back to the riverbank before chuckling over his expression going from annoyance to surprise. Unfortunately, I was too caught up in my mirth to notice Otto approaching me from behind. Before I knew it, his foot reached out and hooked my legs as he pushed my back and sent me flying into the river. 

Now, if you’ve never been pushed into a river, you might not be fully aware of how incredibly unpleasant it is. Rivers tend to be COLD. I had been having a rather nice morning enjoying the misfortune of my usual tormentors and one of them had the unmitigated gall to ruin it? These were the thoughts racing through my head in a vain attempt to deal with the shock of how cold the river was. Thankfully, my rage caused my core to heat up, the internal fires of my mana reserves warming me and giving me the clarity to orient myself and breach the surface.
I swam over to the shore, on the side where I had camped last night. I could hear Otto chortling under his breath as I tried to get all the water out of my vestments.

“You alright, priestess? That river is mighty cold, it would be a shame if our precious healer fell ill due to her own clumsiness.” Otto shouted to me, thinking himself ever so clever.

“I am not a clumsy priestess. I mean, I’m not a priestess, I’m a priest. And I’m not clumsy. I know very well who tripped me!” I grumbled to myself in an odd mixture of annoyance and delight. I mean annoyance and rage. Who would be delighted to be referred to like that especially after being dunked in a river?

Thankfully all these mixed emotions made it easier than usual to draw out my mana, emotional resonance is often very helpful in wielding magic, and I was able to coax the water out of my vestments without denting my reserves. Knowing my luck, I would just spend all my mana dealing with the fallout of the hunters’ pranks and then one of them would poke out an eye or some other such injury.

Otto called to me yet again. “If you are done with your morning ablutions, your holiness, then pack up and get ready to move out. Leader says we’ve wasted enough time already and that dragon ain’t getting any less threatening while we dawdle.” He waited for me to nod back to him and walked back to the center of camp. It was going to be a long day.

                                                                                                                      ~~~~

Well, I wasn’t wrong. It was a long day. A long day of nothing. Most of the hunters seemed to be too tired from being rudely woken up to come up with ways to make me miserable, so I got to enjoy a pleasant, but boring hike through the woods as we climbed higher into the foothills and approached the peak. We would likely reach the base of the mountain tomorrow but it would be another couple of days to reach the summit, where the dragon was said to have their lair.

I wondered what a dragon lair was truly like. The stories tended to be vague and contradictory on the subject. It was known that dragons liked to stake out territory to roam in and they would defend that territory if anything dared disturb it. It was sometimes said that dragons hoarded wealth from raiding nearby lands and demanding tribute from those in their domain. Others insisted that dragons had no need of wealth and instead carved wondrous but bizarre homes out of the land. Crystalline caverns, floating islands, even trees turned to stone and hollowed out were said to be the creations of dragons establishing their nests.

Thoughts like these occupied me along the hike. I had been dreaming of dragons since I was a child, several decades ago. I would spend long hours drawing dragons, reading about them, wondering what their scales felt like or what it would be like to soar through the sky like they did. I tried a few times to talk about such things with others but it was like I was speaking another language. People would look at me as if I was mad and wonder why I would spend time thinking about such destructive beasts. But Maple was right, they aren’t beasts. They are beings of freedom, unbound by what others think or the roles imposed on them. Even the tales of their destructive nature seemed a bit overblown, considering there were several dragon domains that existed quite peacefully with the townships around them.


I realized with a start that my daydreaming had gone on longer than I thought and night had fallen. I wondered why Abel hadn’t called to set up camp but what bothered me more was how far ahead the rest of the expedition was. I jogged to catch up, catching the attention of one of the rearguard hunters.

“Why haven’t we stopped for the night?”

The hunter sighed. “Abel thinks we lost too much time with the delays this morning and wants us at the peak before we rest. I don’t know how he expects us to even find the damn thing in this darkness. The moons aren’t even out to guide the way. You step carefully, healer. I heard some of the lads ahead were up to some mischief, planning ways to make you stumble. I know they mean well enough, just a good laugh among the boys, but you can’t do us any good if you are weary from excitement. So stick close to me and I’ll try to keep you out of trouble.”

I was taken aback by this hunter’s kindly tone compared to the rest. He was an older man, his hair more grey than brown and his face worn by long days spent outdoors. I thought he seemed a little familiar, but couldn’t place him.

My confusion must have been apparent since he chuckled and spoke again. “You patched up my leg last winter after I got caught in a trap one of the other hunters had set incorrectly. I would have been out for months if you hadn’t healed me. Some of these lads think such things are their due, but I remember a time when we were thankful for any goodwill sent our way.” His gaze was distant for a moment, remembering old times perhaps. “Anyway, the name is Gent. You’re Sarric, right?”

I stared at him, unsure how to process what I was hearing. None of the hunters had ever been the slightest bit polite to me, much less treating me as a person.

“Yes, that’s my name. Sarric.” I wasn’t terribly fond of the name, I was the only Sarric in town and it never seemed to fit me well. Still, I suppose I must be thankful that nobody had figured out a mean nickname based on it yet. “I appreciate the offer, Gent. A night hike is going to be miserable enough without whatever pranks they’ve cooked up.”

He nodded. “Truth be told, lad, I’m not sure why they seem to have it out for you so bad. Seems a bit foolish to me to mess with someone who keeps you from death’s door. Nevermind the idea of messing with a servant of the divine. What did you ever do to get on the bad side of so many men?”

I sighed. “I really don’t know, Gent. It's as you say, I heal them up without complaint but they can’t seem to stop themselves from making my life miserable. Every time I get dragged along to one of these expeditions, it’s just mockery and pranks and abuse the whole way through. I can’t tell you what I’ve done to make them hate me because as far as I know, I’ve done nothing. But I never really fit in with any of these men when we were younger and I guess that bothers them somehow. Still, it is nice to know that at least one hunter isn’t trying to figure out how to give me new scars.”

He gave me a thousand yard stare for a bit and then nodded and picked up his pace, pulling just ahead of me in a way that meant I was to follow. We walked like this for some time in companionable silence. It was nice actually. He pointed out a few little snares meant to trip me up and even one elaborate setup meant to make me stumble face first into a pile of rotten fruit. That would have been unpleasant. It was nice to relax my guard for just a moment.

The night grew darker and darker as we walked, the forest closing in around us. Gent periodically pointed out the signs he was following to make sure we stayed on track with the expedition. After a while, I got tired of tripping over roots and having branches smack me in the face and so I used a bit of magic to amplify my night vision. I know some require words or formulas and other foci for all their magic but I often found myself achieving the effects I wanted with intuitive actions. I saved those sorts of tools for specific kinds of work. I offered to do the same for Gent but he just smiled and said he had worked out his own method years ago. I was surprised, most hunters all but ignored magic.

Magic was a skill like any other, anyone could master the basics with as much effort as it took to learn to read. True mastery was something that had to be developed and took much more time and effort but the basics were available to all. That being said, it seemed many of the hunters, the younger ones especially, had this notion that using any magic was cheating and that a true man would solve problems without such tools. I couldn’t even begin to grasp the logic there, but it did give me a bit more of an edge than I otherwise would have had against them.

I peered ahead, wondering how far we were from the base of the mountain. My limbs were aching and tired from the exertion and the little spells of invigoration I was using on them were starting to prove insufficient. I was about to ask Gent how much farther he thought it was when the trees thinned and we reached a clearing. We were very close to the mountain and I could see the shapes of the hunters at the far edge of the clearing. I was about to call out to them when I felt wind whooshing behind me and a large shape passed overhead.