TWO MONTHS AGO, I almost died. Well, actually, I almost died a few times, but perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. Let me take you back to the night my father died on Interstate 40 in the clutches of monstrous talons.
My father and I lived a complicated life. He dragged me across the country from city to city, and town to town every three months as if my life fell victim to a celestial timer that would go off inside his mind. Even though I was forced to live this nomadic life, he never revealed the only question that was ever on my mind: Why? The last time we packed up to leave I didn’t give it a second thought; it was just like every other time, no answers from the stoic man pulling me along, only blank, determined stares. I didn’t know that this was the night I would finally get my answer to the question burning to ashes in the back of my mind. I sure got my answer that night, but I didn’t know the price that answer would cost me; my father’s life.
Dragons…
Freaky, right? But it was only the beginning. I had known my father all my life, and never once did I ever notice a scale or a puff of smoke escaping his lips when he was upset. Now that I think about it, I didn’t know how it could have slipped past me.
My father was a great man. A great man who died saving my life from four dragons the night I came to Paegeia. Now, you may be wondering how I fell into this mess. Paegeia is a magical world unlike anything us mere humans have ever seen. It is safeguarded and hidden from the humans behind an enchanted wall. My old world knew it as the Bermuda Triangle. History tells of hundreds of ships and planes that have disappeared once they have entered the Bermuda Triangle, but in reality they were simply lucky enough to slip through the barrier and into Paegeia. Many of those humans, like me, lost their minds. It is one thing to cope with the reality of entering an alternate world but the reality of dragons, magic and everything else that goes along with it must have been a complete sensory overload. I, on the other hand, was lucky. There were people in this world that didn’t know the meaning of the word “give up” and somehow their combined will not to lose me, pulled me through the strange and unexplained reality, and I was able to ground myself in my new life.
Thinking back, I didn’t think I would have been able to accept my new reality if I hadn’t been thrown head first in the deep end.
I learned a lot about myself in my first few weeks in Paegeia. For some unknown reason I was born with the mark of the dragon riders. A mark, I was told, that should’ve never been mine because of what I was, half-dragon. You see, my father was a dragon, and although I didn’t own a dragon form, I still carried dragon DNA. My Mom, on the other hand, was human. I never knew her as she had left when I was only a child. I have since come to the realization that she probably left when she discovered my father’s secret and didn’t bother to take her two year-old daughter with her.
Marks of the riders, known as the Dragonians, didn’t belong on people like me. Their carriers are human, born of two human parents; they were brave, fearless and not scared of anything.
Me… I’ve got so many fears that the pages of this book couldn’t hold them, and ever since I came here, I’ve doubted myself on a daily basis. That is until I got my foretelling from our friendly Viden, a wannabe pretending to be Rapunzel by choosing to live up high in a tower, a dragon who can predict a person’s future.
She was a Moon-Bolt, a dragon gifted with the ability to breathe lightning and see the future. At 300 years old, people said she was the best, but to me it seemed like all of her predictions came out a scrambled mess and she twisted them on purpose until they were unintelligible riddles. She also had the nasty habit of publicizing the futures of some, but only those she deemed special.
Mine could have been anything. The only information she gave me was that a day would come and go and I would needed to make a choice for the truth to be known.
I disregarded the message when I first received it, thinking she was playing a sick joke on the weird, new half-dragon. That was until I saw those famous words, my riddle, in her Book of Shadows. Not everyone’s riddle showed up inside that book, only when it was linked to Paegeia’s survival, would your riddle appear in black ink. Paegeians called them foretellings and they’ve been guiding people to their destinies for the past two hundred years.
That was if you could unravel what your riddle meant and fulfilled it, which brings me to the second time I almost died.
My foretelling finally made sense the day the King of Lions sword disappeared about two months back.
The sword was formidable; it had the ability to destroy evil. No matter the form that evil took, if it struck you and your intentions were not pure, you would disintegrate on the spot.
To find the sword was number one on everybody’s priority list. The only problem was nobody knew where to look for it. So I had this brilliant plan to seek the answer inside the Sacred Cavern.
The Sacred Cavern was a favorite story for most Paegeian children. What the cavern hid was unknown to everyone but five individuals. Only five women ever made it out alive, and they never revealed what truly lurked in the cave to anyone.
Unbeknownst to me, I became the sixth, putting my first child’s freedom on the line if I ever told a soul that the cavern tried to trick you with riddles, mind games and obstacles that could easily take your life.
I somehow made it through all the obstacles and received the ultimate reward. A look into a magical pond that could show you anything you wished to know, present, past or future.
There was a flurry of questions that ran through my mind as I stood in front of that pool, my Mom’s identity or why the dragons attacked us that night, but I gave it all up and chose to learn the location of the sword in order to save my new home.
I knew retrieving the sword from the thief who had stolen it wasn’t going be easy and the pond confirmed this theory. It showed me the image of a rider on the back of a Sun-Blast dragon on his way to the Volcano of Ekwador. The thief had been compelled and if my friends and I wanted to succeed in getting the sword back, we learned we would have to face the powerful and malicious Goran.
Goran remains Paegeia’s most powerful sorcerer to this day. Once, a long time ago, he was the trusted friend of Paegeia’s most beloved king, King Albert. However he broke that trust, turning evil and betraying his best friend and the entire kingdom. On the night the King and his Queen died, creepers sprouted from the earth, a plant that resembled giant beanstalks, consuming the capital of Etan with Goran still stuck inside.
Nobody, not even Goran, has been able to find a way in or out of Etan since. The Viden predicted that only the Rubicon, a very special dragon, and his true Dragonian would be able to free the people of Etan. The only problem with this prediction was that the Rubicon’s Dragonian had to be born from King Albert and Queen Catherine’s bloodline and they’d died childless.
So, as sad as it was, Etan was lost to us. Many people lost loved ones that night and it was still a painful subject for them to talk about.
To get back to the day I almost lost my life for the second time, Goran had possessed the rider’s mind and ordered him to steal and destroy the King of Lions sword.
Only nine of us, including myself, stood in his way.
Defeating Goran wasn’t easy and if it hadn’t been for Brian, the most courageous dragon I’d ever met, who sacrificed his life so we could live, none of us would’ve made it out alive.
The Dragonian stabbed me a twice and I almost died, but the Rubicon, Blake, saved me. I would forever be grateful for him, even though he was still the most arrogant being I had ever met.
I know now that going after the sword alone with only my friends for support was really dumb. We’d lost someone dear to us all and that guilt would stay with me forever. But it also showed me who I was, what I could accomplish, and that it doesn’t matter whose offspring you are, great things can happen to anyone….
