My name is Elena Malone-Squire-Watkins. I’m eighteen years old. I started out my ordinary life as just Elena Watkins, but my journey has led me on so many life-changing adventures and revealed so much about my past that I can’t even begin to explain the name change.
My life hasn’t always been easy, considering I grew up with a dragon for a father. That was a small piece of information he declined to share with me.
Ever since I could remember, we’d moved every three months. I never knew why until the night I finally got my answers, the night I discovered who my father really was: a dragon. That night my father died saving my life.
That was how I came to be in Paegeia, a world hidden behind an enchanted wall inside the Bermuda Triangle. It used to be part of our world, my old home realm. Magic, dragons, shifters, you name it, roam free behind the enchanted wall now, living alongside gifted people who can tame dragons, bonding with them in order to share their abilities.
They are born with a special mark and are known as Dragonians – dragon riders.
I was born with that mark too, and a pretty darn dark one at that.
A mark no one thought really belonged to me, including me, because of what my father was.
It turns out that only children born from humans can become Dragonians.
Still, that mark was my ticket straight into Dragonia Academy, an elite school for dragons and gifted dragon tamers.
The teachers at the Academy taught me everything I know today. Magic, the art of fighting and handling weapons – two axes to be exact – but most importantly, learning about dragons and their riders.
While the whole idea of dragons and their riders threw me for a loop, things were about to get a whole lot stranger. I soon learned that some of those dragons and tamers were actually meant for each other. Their souls were somehow connected, coded in each other’s DNA, before birth. Their destinies and what they would achieve together had been written in the stars before time even existed, and this future could only be seen by Moon-Bolt dragons that could reveal them in a form of a riddle.
These bonds are known as dents.
How it all works is still beyond me, it’s extremely complex and not something that can be easily explained, but needs to be experienced. Dents are extremely rare and are revered as the oldest form of magic, even in a world as magical as Paegeia.
So you can just imagine how lost I was in this new world, having to deal with the fact that dragons weren’t just fairy tales and learning that magic really did exist, on top of losing the man I knew as my father.
That was when I’d met Becky and Sammy. Becky was a human and fellow Dragonian, like me, and Sammy was a Fire-Tail dragon. She is kind and the bravest of all dragons and I was honored to call them both my best friends.
After a few months of living in my new world I fell in love with a boy named Lucian, the Prince of Tith, who stole my heart and my very soul. He was everything a girl could ever want, but it was not meant to last. He died almost a year ago saving me from Paul Sutton, a wyvern who’d claimed to be my dragon. I believed him because of my foretelling, a destiny the Viden had predicted.
A day will come and a day will go, a choice I will have to make otherwise the truth will never be known.
It was a mouthful, and gave no inkling of what it was I needed to do. That’s what had propelled me on all my journeys and how my life suddenly lead to so much death.
I’d really thought wyverns could be tamed, but I learned the hard way that it was not possible – by sacrificing the love of my life.
The worst part of it all was, on the day he died, I changed into a dragon myself.
A small detail no one had ever shared with me.
The dragon inside of me was named Cara, and she shared my body. She gave me freedom; she helped me get over my fear of heights and gave me courage I’d never thought was possible. Her presence also made losing Lucian -a bit more bearable.
During my journey to find out who I really was, I learned that Cara had died a long time ago, saving my life as an infant, and she had awoken when Paul tried to kill me.
Her mother, Tanya Le Frey, had been Queen Catherine’s dragon. It turns out Queen Catherine is my biological mother. Shocked? Not as shocked as I was.
Many years ago, Tanya sacrificed her six-year-old dragon, Cara, so that I could live.
Cara wasn’t supposed to wake, but I guess being in such grave danger at the hands of Paul gave her no choice.
This brings me to my final revelation. I am the Princess of Paegeia. The daughter of King Albert and Queen Catherine. This meant I had to kill the dragon part of me; I had to kill Cara, in order to claim what was mine. The Rubicon. A dragon that was all ten dragon species combined who was predestined for evil. If I hadn’t discovered who I was, he would’ve turned dark, taking my soul with him.
His human form was named Blake Leaf. He was my best friend Sammy’s brother.
He was the kind of guy who would make your legs turn into goo by just looking at you, but he was as arrogant as they come and as stubborn as hell. And the worst part of it all was that he’d loathed me ever since I was brought here, but for an unknown reason had ended up saving my life on more than one occasion.
I guess I finally knew why he’d done it; it was the part that was fighting the evil in him – because he’d known from the beginning who I was – how big that part was, I didn’t know.
Unfortunately we shared one of those special bonds, a dent, and our destinies were written in the stars.
This destiny was something I didn’t really believe in because of this messed-up love-hate relationship I shared with him.
So now I am coming to grips with the knowledge that the man who raised me was not my father and my mother had never left me, she died. Also that my real father was the greatest man who’d ever lived and that I am unable to free him or the people of Etan from the spell of an evil sorcerer because of a promise I’d made to him during my ascending – a promise that wasn’t mine to make alone.
But none of that matters as my dragon is the last person/creature in this world who would ever dent, even if his life depended on it. That knowledge wasn’t an easy pill to swallow.
Blake wants absolutely nothing to do with me; he’d made it clear on so many occasions. I know everyone blames his dark side, but I know better. It isn’t his dark side. For some reason he just doesn’t want me as his rider.
But I know I will get there; somehow I will find a way, as I always seem to do. I have no choice, as I am, and will always be the princess of my new world.
