The Dragon Taster
The goblet smelled of oxidized copper and bad intentions. Elara swirled the wine, watching the dark liquid coat the silver rim. To a human, it would smell like an expensive vintage from the southern vineyards. To her, it reeked of Midnightshade—a clumsy, amateurish poison that barely tingled the nose.
She brought the cup to her lips, ignoring the hush that fell over the Royal Banquet Hall. The King watched her, his face pale and sweating, though not from any poison yet consumed.
Elara drank. The liquid hit the back of her throat—a sharp, acidic bite that bloomed into a nutty aftertaste. It was rude, lacking the complex bouquet of a proper venom, but it would do. She swallowed, feeling the toxin sizzle harmlessly in the furnace of her stomach. A small hiccup threatened to release a wisp of green smoke; she swallowed that too.
“Clean,” she announced, setting the goblet down. “Notes of blackberry, oak, and a complete lack of imminent death.”
The court exhaled. The King reached for the cup with a trembling hand. But before his fingers could graze the silver, he slumped forward, face planting into a plate of roast pheasant.
Pandemonium. Guards drew swords on empty air. Elara didn’t move. She sniffed the air, ignoring the smell of panicked sweat to focus on the underlying scent. It wasn’t poison. It was something older. Mustier. Like water left to stagnate in a sealed crypt.
“The Crystal Blight,” the Royal Sorcerer wheezed, pushing through the throng. He hovered over the King, hands glowing with diagnostic magic. “The King has not been poisoned. He has been withered.”
Elara leaned back against the table, snagging a grape. Blight. Magic sickness. Inedible. Boring.
“The source,” the Sorcerer intoned, “is the Corrupted Spring in the Ironwood. Unless cleansed, the King will not last the week.”
A silence heavy with cowardice filled the room. The Ironwood was a miserable tangle of thorns and gloom, and the Spring was likely guarded by something unpleasant.
“I will go,” a voice cracked.
Elara looked down. Prince Valerius stood there. He looked like a stiff breeze would snap him in half. His armor was too big, his face too pale, and his nose was currently running.
“Your Highness,” the Captain of the Guard started, “you are… unwell.”
“My father is dying,” Valerius said, voice gaining a surprising steadiness. “I will go.” He turned to Elara. “And I will require the Royal Taster. If the woods are corrupted, I need someone to ensure we do not die of bad berries before we reach the spring.”
Elara sighed, a sound that rumbled slightly deeper than a human chest should allow. Babysitting. Wonderful.
The Ironwood
The Ironwood smelled of wet fur and rot. It was a damp, clinging cold that seeped into Elara’s human skin, making her ache for the tectonic heat of her true home. She pulled her cloak tighter, miserable.
Beside her, Prince Valerius sneezed for the forty-third time.
“Pollen,” he gasped, wiping his nose with a silk handkerchief that was seeing tragic amounts of use. “The Golden-Leafed Elm. My nemesis.”
“It’s a tree, Your Highness,” Elara said, kicking a path through the undergrowth. “It stands there. You could just… not breathe near it.”
“If only,” Valerius wheezed.
They had been walking for two days. Elara was hungry. Not human-hungry, which was a nagging hollowness, but dragon-hungry—a cavernous, existential void that demanded livestock. The rations were dried beef and hardtack. It was like eating gravel.
“Hold,” Elara said, stopping abruptly. The wind had shifted. The smell of unwashed bodies and cheap steel.
“What is it?” Valerius asked, hand going to his sword hilt.
“Ambush,” Elara said, just as an arrow thudded into the tree next to Valerius’s ear.
Bandits dropped from the branches, a dozen of them, ragged and desperate. Valerius drew his sword—a valiant, doomed gesture. He stepped in front of Elara. “Stay back, Elara! I will handle this!”
A ceramic sphere shattered at his feet. Thick purple smoke billowed up. Valerius didn’t even get to swing. He inhaled, choked, and collapsed, his throat closing up in an instant allergic reaction to what smelled like concentrated sulfur and… goblin dander? The indignity.
“Right,” Elara muttered. “Nap time for the Prince.”
A bandit lunged at her, a rusty scimitar aiming for her neck. Elara didn’t dodge. She couldn’t transform—too messy, too much explaining—so she simply didn’t move. She raised her left hand and caught the blade.
The steel bit into her skin, or tried to. It met resistance that felt like striking a diamond wall. Elara frowned at the bandit, whose eyes went wide.
“That’s rude,” she said.
She twisted her wrist. The steel snapped with a sound like a gunshot. The bandit stared at his broken hilt.
Elara slapped him. She pulled the punch, aiming for ‘dazed’ rather than ‘decapitated’, but she miscalculated slightly. The bandit flew backward, hitting a tree trunk hard enough to shake loose a rain of acorns.
“She’s a witch!” another screamed, charging.
Elara sighed. She sidestepped a spear thrust, grabbed the wooden shaft, and shoved. The attacker went tumbling into the bushes. She moved with a fluid, terrifying grace, doing the minimum amount of work required. A shove here, a trip there, a casual backhand that sent a grown man spinning.
Within a minute, the bandits were groaning in the dirt or fleeing.
Valerius groaned, the smoke clearing. Elara quickly rubbed some dirt on her arm and feigned a heavy breath.
“Elara?” Valerius coughed, sitting up, eyes streaming. “Are you… are you alive?”
“Barely, Your Highness,” Elara lied, kicking an unconscious bandit’s sword under a bush. “Lucky armor. And they were very clumsy.”
The Hunger
That night, the hunger was worse.
The campfire crackled, a pathetic flickering thing that offered no real warmth. Valerius was asleep, exhausted by his allergies and his brief encounter with the smoke bomb.
Elara stared at their horses. The bay mare looked delicious. Meaty. Warm. A quick snap of the neck, a little searing…
She caught herself drooling. She wiped her mouth, disgusted. Control, she told herself. You are a Royal servant. You do not eat the transportation.
She heard a rustle. Valerius was awake, staring at her across the fire.
“Your eyes,” he whispered.
Elara blinked. She had let the inner fire leak out. For a second, her pupils had been vertical slits of molten gold. She forced them back to human brown, a painful ocular contortion.
“Trick of the light, Your Highness,” she said smoothly. “The fire reflects strangely in the dark.”
Valerius held her gaze for a long moment. He looked fragile, shivering in his blanket, but his eyes were sharp. “My father says you have an iron stomach. I’m beginning to think you have an iron soul, Elara.”
“Go to sleep, Prince,” she said, turning away to stare into the dark woods. “We have a plague to cure.”
Fire and Ash
The Corrupted Spring smelled of death. Not the clean metallic scent of a kill, but the sour, creeping stench of decay. The water was black and bubbling, and the trees around it were twisted, weeping black sap.
Valerius stumbled, his face gray. The toxins in the air were hitting him hard. He was practically vibrating with weakness.
“There,” he rasped, pointing to the spring. “We must… purify…”
The water erupted.
A Swamp Hydra rose from the muck. It was a wretched thing, scales rotting off its frame, three heads hissing and dripping corrosive slime. It smelled of ancient, stagnant evil.
Valerius drew his sword, hand shaking. “For the King!” he shouted, voice cracking.
He charged. It was brave. It was stupid.
The Hydra’s central head lashed out. It didn’t even bite him; it just swatted him like a fly. Valerius flew backward, hitting a rock with a sickening crunch. His helmet cracked. He slid to the ground and lay still.
Elara waited. She checked for a pulse—faint, but there. He was out cold.
“Finally,” she growled.
She stood up. The human guise felt tight, itching like a wool sweater two sizes too small. She didn’t drop it completely—the cavern wasn’t big enough for her wings—but she let the seams burst.
Her skin rippled, hardening into iridescent, copper-gold scales. Her fingernails lengthened into obsidian talons. Her jaw unhinged, teeth sharpening into serrated daggers. The air around her shimmered with heat, the ground beneath her boots smoking.
The Hydra hissed, sensing a sudden shift in the food chain. It lunged.
Elara didn’t dodge. She caught the central head by the throat. Her grip was absolute. The Hydra thrashed, its other heads biting at her arms, teeth shattering against her scales.
“You taste,” Elara snarled, voice a deep, tectonic rumble, “like expired fish.”
She inhaled. The fire in her belly, suppressed for years, roared to life. It wasn’t the polite candle flame of a human camp; it was the heart of a volcano.
She exhaled.
A concentrated lance of white-hot fire erupted from her maw. It engulfed the Hydra, instantly vaporizing flesh and bone. The creature didn’t even have time to scream. The fire hit the black water of the spring, boiling it instantly. The corruption shrieked as it burned away, rising in a cloud of purified steam.
Elara held the torrent for ten glorious seconds, feeling the heat scour the cold from her bones. When she stopped, the Hydra was nothing but a shadow of ash on the cavern wall. The spring bubbled clear and blue.
She stood there, panting, smoke curling from her nostrils. She felt… good. Full. Warm.
She looked at Valerius. He was stirring.
With a groan of annoyance, Elara willed the scales back. It was painful, like shoving a foot into a shoe filled with glass. Her skin smoothed, teeth dulled. She grabbed a flask of oil from Valerius’s pack and smashed it on the ground near the ash pile, then rubbed raw soot onto her arm until it looked angry and red.
“What… what happened?” Valerius groaned, sitting up. He looked at the pile of ash, then at the crystal-clear water.
“Alchemist’s fire,” Elara said, clutching her arm and grimacing. “I found a flask in the bandits’ loot. Threw it just as the beast lunged. Nasty stuff. Burned my arm pretty bad.”
Valerius looked at the massive scorch marks that went halfway up the cavern walls. He looked at the pile of ash that used to be a three-headed monster. He looked at Elara’s arm, which looked less like a burn and more like she’d been painting with charcoal.
“You killed a Swamp Hydra,” Valerius said slowly, “with a single flask of alchemist’s fire.”
“It was a very potent flask,” Elara said, offering him a waterskin filled with the purified water. “Drink. We have a King to save.”
The Delicacy
The feast was loud. The King, hale and hearty, was laughing at the head of the table. Valerius sat beside him, looking healthier, though he still avoided the flower arrangements.
Elara stood at her post, invisible in plain sight.
“And to our savior!” the King boomed, raising his goblet. “To the Prince!”
Valerius smiled, but his eyes drifted to Elara. A servant approached her, holding a silver tray. On it sat a Fugu-Puffer—a delicate, spiny fish from the eastern seas.
“A gift for the Taster,” the servant whispered. “The chef says it is a rare delicacy, but deadly if the poison sac is not removed perfectly.”
Elara looked at the fish. It smelled of neurotoxin. Delicious, tingling neurotoxin.
She didn’t hesitate. She picked up the fish and popped the whole thing into her mouth, bones and all. She crunched down. The poison exploded on her tongue, a spicy, numbing sensation that was better than any wine. She swallowed, suppressing a satisfied sigh of smoke.
She looked up. Prince Valerius was watching her. He wasn’t smiling. He was studying her with a look of intense, quiet suspicion. Or perhaps, Elara thought as she met his gaze, it was gratitude.
He raised his glass to her, a subtle, almost imperceptible nod.
Elara smirked, feeling the warm buzz of the poison in her belly. She nodded back.
It wasn’t a bad gig, she decided. The food was terrible, but the snacks were to die for.