Trin has been raised with the knowledge that her parentage was unknown and she was human. Those two items were the cornerstone of her existence. An altercation at a baby shower leads to her discovering another side to herself. That side was big, crystalline, and caused the other dragons in her vicinity to bow their heads. Defending her friend had led her into this new shape, and now, she was stuck with it. Taken to the central hub of the dragon council, she trades her cooperation for knowledge and freedoms. She had been an independent woman a lot longer than she had been a dragon, and she wasn’t going to lose her lifestyle just because she could suddenly breathe blasts of pure energy. Along the way, she learns about where she came from, and it gives her an outline for the life she wants, with the dragon of her choosing. Words: 25,000

Trained, stalked, and marked for death was not her plan for the day. Time for a road trip to clear her head. Trin has trained to be stealthy, trained to defend herself, but when a bounty on her head threatens the safety of her friends, she has to get out of town. Visiting a friend and mixing business with her escape, she learns that dragons mixing their bloodlines may be more common than anyone thought. She spends enough time in Breaker City ordering tea and ceramics to figure out what she wants to do next, and what she wants to do is find out who and where she came from. Learning the details of her family tree leaves her shaken, but nothing can hold her back when it comes to following her instincts. Not even the very folk she came to meet.

Her aunt is her roommate, assassins are closing in, and she still needs a dress for the dragon ball. Buckle up. After finding out where she actually came from, Trin is now trying to hide from the family who wants her genes for analysis and who wants her aunt Meadra back. Hiding in Breaker City works for a while, but when kidnappers and assassins threaten those who have tried to keep them safe, Trin decides that a return to the capitol is what she needs. She knows where everything is and how to defend herself in the place she grew up. Hiding with friends is far superior to hiding alone. Apraxa is back from the sea kingdom, and she has no inclination to return for the present. Her mother is abusive, and her fiancé is a bit of a jerk. She joins their merry band and heads out with them to the dragon ball. If she can’t get over her fiancé, perhaps there is another dragon who would do as well. Meadra needs a mate for security, Apraxa needs one to spite her fiancé, and Trin is going to destroy any dragoness who gets near Brommin before she can. That nerd is hers!

Inheritor of a family vendetta, getting revenge on the dragons has side effects that raise a lot of questions. All Aeli wanted was revenge for her father. She planned and schemed in secret, finally carrying out a plot that she had designed as a disgruntled teen. She takes the spell to the dragon council and lets the ball go, shattering, spreading the banishment spell, and kicking all the dragons out of the city in one large cascade. Imagine her surprise when she gets sucked out into the open wasteland outside the city, and the dragons know who is responsible for her plight. Councillor Kreelo comes to her rescue and flies her to safety where she comes to grips with what her banishment means and how it will affect her life. She had no idea she was a dragon and thinks it is ridiculous, but how else would the spell grab her. She needs to undo the spell so she can return to normal. If anyone in Rekker City will accept her apology. Excerpt: Once the matron was out of the shop, Aeli caught a glimpse of the courier delivering down the street. She walked to the front of the shop and waited. The courier pulled up to the shop and stopped. Aeli waited while he came around and opened the side of his vehicle. The pallet of plants was what she was waiting for. Her father came out of the shop, dusting his hands on his tunic and wiggling his fingers. “What have we here?” “The medicinals we are low on because you used the last of them without sprouting the roots.” He sighed. “I get a little enthusiastic.” She grinned and nodded to the delivery man. “Can you wait and take the pallet?” “I will pick it up tomorrow, Miss Warrok. I am under pressure to deliver to city hall before the end of the day.” Aeli’s smile tightened on her face. She could feel it. “Of course. The dragons must have their deliveries on time.” He nodded and closed up his vehicle. “I am glad you understand. Thank you, Miss.” Her father was talking quietly to the plants in his arms, and she picked up three pots on her own and pried the door open before walking through to the back of the shop and out into the greenhouse. The plants would remain in quarantine until they were acclimated to their new home in Rekker City. Grand Master Mage Norman Warrok was chuckling and talking to the new arrivals, leaving Aeli to get back to the curb to pick up the last batch of remaining plants. She was just entering the shop when she heard a voice saying, “Where shall I put these?” She winced at the familiar and lightly rough voice. “Councillor Kreelo, welcome.” A chuckle came from him. “A pleasure, Miss Warrok. Now, where would you like them?” “Please follow me. We put them in the greenhouse until we are certain they are healthy.” She led the way and talked as she went, so he could follow her voice. “A wise practice. Is your father in?” She forced a chuckle. “He is speaking to his plants.” She opened the door to the greenhouse and stood aside as the dragon representative of their area passed her and found a space to put the plants.

Born nameless in a tank, they try and make her into a weapon, but she chooses defiancé. Eltrinia sounds like a good name, and Lem comes naturally. After falling through the sky during a lightning storm, Eltrinia is free of the tube that they grew her in, and while she doesn’t yet know her name, she knows that she needs to get in touch with society. A fisherman and his wife take her in, and a shore patrolman offers to take her to safety, but minimal contact with him tells her all she needs to know. The valley wants her back, she is expensive, and they have scouts looking everywhere for her. Her captor thinks he is in charge, but that is when he meets the lightning. After that, things get a little blurry. Excerpt: The first awareness she had was of being jolted from left to right. Voices were shouting an alarm, and she was being rocked violently from side to side. She went from seeing flaring light through her lids to a warm silence that was broken as the entire world around her rumbled rhythmically to life. She braced her hands against the wall of the tank she was in. She kept herself from rocking wildly from side to side. She didn’t know who she was or what she was, but she was in fluid, and there was something attached to her limbs. She heard a soft voice speaking in her ear, it was explaining words and concepts. She looked to the left, and an audio output device led to the small wires that ran into her skull. The world around her was dark and humming as she rocked back and forth with the movements. Who am I? The thought echoed in her head as she swayed. There were shouts from outside, and whatever she was in shuddered and skidded to a stop. There was screaming, and then, the vehicle she was in was torn open. A creature made of light grey-green scales grabbed her and tore her tube away from its moorings. The dragon flapped its wings and pulled her upward and away from the small town that she was in. She watched the ground move away from her, and beads of water swelled and coursed across her tube. Rain. It was raining. A dragon made of onyx and shadow struck the one carrying her, and the tube fell, end over end, toward a wide and slick surface. It felt like she fell forever, but when she saw the lightning, she knew that her cascade into the world had only begun. Forever would have to wait. She stood up on the shoreline, naked and confused. The tube was long gone, swept away and taken under by the waves. She looked down at her arms and felt her skull. The holes that had let fluids and sound in were closed. She was whole. She looked down at herself and nodded. Adult female. Not human. The blue light that crackled and moved across her skin was not something humans could do. She took her first few steps, walking without purpose. The tiny house on the bluff above the shoreline had a light in the window. That meant humans, and that could mean food. She looked from side to side and found a set of worn and silvered stairs. She gripped the railing and began the climb. It was so strange; every touch was new. The skin of her feet was new, her hands were soft, and when she dragged them across the railing, bits of wood worked into her skin. The pain was peculiar, but it didn’t stop her, and she left a trail of blood up the steps. She walked to the house and knocked on the door. A man opened it, and a woman behind him gasped. She wanted to speak, but it wasn’t in her head.

Working out tension during some light espionage seems like the thing to do while pondering her future. Eltrinia has been progressing. She is the master of the on-loan gallery, she takes tours of all ages around, and she has been recruited for operative training at the capital. Learning combat tactics in sparring matches with Trin is bizarrely fun. It is like looking into a tinted mirror. When she finally gets clearance for her first mission, she is paired with Inoth and must wait for her paperwork before she can go and play spy. They finally make their way to their assignment. It turns out that he gets to be himself, and she has to pretend to be an airhead. Yay. Inoth has been working on getting closer to Eltrinia, but circumstances and the dragon senator have been very effective at keeping them apart. When he volunteered to be her partner, there were a few snickers, but no one knew Eltrinia like he did. There was no doubt about it, he had gotten the pick of the trainees. She had skills that even he didn’t know about, but he was willing to learn.

Thrown from the life she thought she knew, Zzara has to restart her existence with no mother, no father, as a dragon denied. Zzara was excited and happy on the day it all fell apart. Her father had married another dragon and the new lady of the house had no interest in his mistress living on her new property. Her mother takes her own life, her father is trying to pretend that she doesn’t exist, but that is not something Zzara is willing to tolerate. Not anymore. The investigators bring her to her father’s house and Zzara makes sure that her father’s new wife understands what her threats brought about. She flees to the desert, a plan to start over at Rekker City, but she takes a few days to mourn. A hidden child, she had never had a plan for a life away from her mother. She meets those who are willing to help her make those first steps and then she is off and running.

Alone in a world that wants her blood, she seeks out friends who embrace her and a new home where she can grow and evolve. Zzara has been learning magic forbidden to dragons. When the mage guild catches on to what her tutor has been showing her, they are both in trouble. Helping a dragon to learn magic is a high crime. If the dragon wasn’t the child of Magus Warrok, the dragon wasn’t allowed spellwork. Zzara has few choices. Either she can remain in her friend’s home and put her in danger, or she can leave with the knowledge she already has mastered. It is a choice that forces her to make decisions she wanted to leave for another year. Emory guards the blood dragon. He has been waiting for this moment for years. The moment the call came out for guards, he got clearance from the elders and made his way to the capital. The blood dragon was shorter than he had imagined, but she had an intelligence and a will that never failed to surprise him. He had to remain on his toes when she was around, and keeping an air of mystery was his first line of defense.

When the winter has almost no sun, monsters wake and torment the locals until a dragon rises in the frost. Kabyl’s family has run a careful supply business, keeping the essentials in stock in order to help her town and the villages around it survive the long, dark winter. Rumors of beasts beyond the standard shifters are beginning to surface, and when regulars don’t show up for their fuel rations, Kabyl has to brave the dark and the cold to find out if natural death has taken her family’s friends or if there is something darker than death in the land of snow. A wellness check turns into a fight for survival, and Kabyl has to dig deep to stay alive. She had no idea she was going to find a dragon. The dragon was just as surprised.

Training to follow in her father’s footsteps goes well until she gets to the training center. Then, it all hits the fan. Kabyl has wanted to take peacekeeper training since she was six. Her dad had always tried to temper her expectations. Women didn’t usually have the physical skills required for the job. She worked hard, got strong, fast, and resilient and then…she turned into a dragon. Everything got a little confused at that point. The application had been sent, received, and accepted. Kabyl had been assigned a trainer by the diamond dragon, and he had been accepted as her partner by the peacekeepers. She isn’t sure what being his partner will entail, but as long as she has a shot at her dreams, he could call himself a forest-running elf if he wanted. Oh, wait, that is what he is. First, they need official training, and then, they can work on keeping the peace.