Ryan was among the last of the Friday rush to leave campus. He had been held up, and he found his party waiting for him just outside the main entrance.

Anne sat on a slatted bench around a tree isle and pointed a wand at the ground. A red line extended from its tip to the brick pavement. It wandered onto a stalk of weeds and flared, and one of the leaves wilted and hissed.

Sam barreled into it. He rolled over the bricks and spun around to tear the smoldering stalks up with the swish of his body as much as his jaw.

The red dot had already moved, but he didn’t give chase. He waddled after it, stalking it from afar. He wasn’t interested in the light itself but rather, the flames that sometimes erupted from it.

An ignition wand. It was a weak trinket, barely more than a toy. Its enchantment certainly couldn’t pierce a person’s aura—they had tried—and it sometimes didn’t work if you tried to ignite something near a person. Anne had still picked it as one of her choices from the Kobolds’ hoard. She thought it might come in handy to create distractions and navigate traps. Unlike most of them, she could also empower it with her blessing.

She was sitting, though, and playing with Sam. The other five idly chatted while they waited. They looked bored to Ryan.

He jogged the final stretch to make up for lost time.

“There he is!” Navid said.

Jason asked, “What did Mr. Walker want with you?”

So they had heard the announcement. That was a relief. It meant they had known he would be late in advance.

“Sorry!” Ryan called as he caught up. “He wanted to ask about my new Class.”

Navid stepped out from the group to meet him with a grin. He theatrically thrust his hands out like an old person, like he was about to applaud him with limp hands, and proclaimed, “The four hundred and fifty-seventh [Drake] of the League, in the flesh!”

Ryan ducked his head and mumbled, “Screw you,” past his blushing cheeks.

[Drake]. Apparently, it was the first among a rare family of Classes. The Registry had only managed to source four hundred and fifty-six recorded cases of it in the brief history of their nation, but the vast majority of that number came from unreliable records on the first two generations—the records of knight orders, adventurers guilds, militaries, and noble houses, or simple schools, businesses, and local administrations.

There were bound to be more unrecorded cases, but the exact number didn’t matter. The fact was, the list of reliable accounts of dragon-related Classes in the past eighty years was about as long as the list of reliable accounts of dragon encounters—which was to say, many people didn’t believe dragons existed at all.

It was a family of Classes that had begun to go extinct, and there were only six living [Drakes] in the present—well, seven now. Garen was one of those. Ryan another.

Never mind that they got almost the same Skills as everyone else, people wanted to know why the Class was so rare. Their school, which was dedicated to discovering new possibilities, and the Registry funding it, especially.

“So,” Lisa said, “what did you tell him?”

“That I have no idea?” Ryan shrugged and kept walking. “He asked if Garen taught me any secret dragon slayer lore and I told him he let me swing his sword around once seven months ago. I don’t know what he expected me to say. I fought some imaginary drakes in the Theatre and got the Class, that’s all.”

The five people around him watched him, hanging on his words as they followed at a slow pace, but when he finished, their group sort of … deflated. Like a sigh of disappointment had gone out of them.

Or maybe relief?

Garen hadn’t taught him anything, Ryan knew that for sure. He walked a few steps in silence and glanced at Lisa out of the corner of his eye.

She was still watching him.

“So, uh,” he fumbled, “did you— Is Micah not coming?”

Anne and Sion walked hand-in-hand, but Anne only looked curious and a bit awkward at the mention of him, and Sion kept one eye on their surroundings with a stoic expression like the junior bodyguard he was.

“Hm? Oh, no. I invited him, but he had plans. Apparently, his mom somehow got her hands on one of the in-depth reports of what happened last Friday, and Micah did something stupid, so now his parents are throwing a fuss. He went home to spend the weekend with his family and get some school work done.”

“What did he do?” Jason asked.

Lisa pressed her lips into a thin line. “Apparently, he tried to ‘hold off’ Morgana on his own while he told the others to escape without him.”

Their group stopped.

“Morgana?” Ryan asked.

“Morgana’s dead,” Frederick pointed out.

“Ancient shapeshifting spirit or whatever.” She waved him off and tugged Sam away from an insect column by an invisible leash attached to his harness. “A minion of those new ghosts.”

Frederick frowned. “So he fought Morgana?”

“It sounds like something Stranya would do,” Sion commented with an exasperated note of respect and concern.

Navid only let the awkward silence linger for half a second before he cut in, “Well, all’s well that ends well!”

Unlike the rest of them, he hadn’t stopped walking, but he had been lagging behind. When he overtook them, he dragged them forward with his presence alone. “I have gym with him. He looked spry so there’s probably nothing to worry about. The Tower is closed and he has school work to focus on anyway, so it’s not like he’ll have the chance to do anything as stupid as challenging a third Brood Guardian anytime soon.” He smiled and switched topics. “How was your guys’ first week?”

“Our history teacher wants to ‘make up for lost time in advance,’” Lisa grumbled.

Frederick groaned and walked sideways ahead of them. “He already announced two quizzes, one before the Harvest Festival and one right after to ‘make sure we don’t drown our brains in alcohol.’”

“He drowns my brain by talking.”

“Right? That voice.”

Anne looked over her shoulder at them. “Did your grammar teachers say which book you will be reading?”

The conversation turned to school and news. Ryan’s thoughts wandered to a lonely room with a large window he had once climbed through. An old wooden desk and some alchemy equipment hidden beneath a bed.

He pictured Micah sitting there, alone while his parents worked, scribbling away in silence, and he pictured Micah standing alone against Morgana, and the thoughts that had to be going through his head while he scribbled away in silence.

Hadn’t his hand still been bandaged on Tuesday?

Ryan only shared two courses with him. They hadn’t coordinated their choices like they had last year.

He wished he were someone else to climb through that window once more and distract him for a while before his parents got home and ranted throughout dinner. He wished he could be that person without also being ugly on the inside. But he wasn’t.

I’m just me. Guess I’ll have to figure out who that is first.

He thought of a tall case leaning against his dorm room wall, then, and the books about [Drakes] he had borrowed from the library.

It was kind of exciting. In the low, persistent way of new things that could endure for days—hopefully, more than a week. He wanted to feel like this and not the way that had him laying in bed in the dark.

Far more exciting right now was something else, though. Every step brought them closer until they walked through a familiar gate into an unfamiliar scene.

A flock of chickens watched them with bobbing heads. When they saw Sam waddle in, they fluttered up to a branch of the tree that had been reshaped into their coop.

A figure dashed by one of the second-story windows. Voices drifted through the walls beneath the sounds of fluttering wings and clucking. And they stepped into a cloud of smells of such variety, Ryan had to slow down to sort through them all.

There was the smell of ash, a day or two old. The smell of paper, old and new like libraries and fresh stationery. He caught the trail of something musky and animalistic low to the ground—a pet?—and trails of something musty, like old clothes.

Of course, there were the familiar smells, too: the deodorant of his party members—Navid was especially fond of his—and the smell of smoke and spices drifting from the back of the property where Lisa cured her monster jerky.

More than that, though, was the omnipresent smell of the woods.

It suffused the air like an actual cloud. Ryan almost thought he could see it like particles in a sunbeam when he stepped into the shade of the building.

It wasn’t the smell of pine trees, grass, and flowers. And it wasn’t the smell of autumn leaves or spring pollen. It was a cold smell found in the shade, on rotting trees that lay in the forest like ancient bones, and in wet basements and weathered shacks. A mix of earthy scents. Not all of it was pleasant.

It was the smell of moss, mushrooms, and mildew.

Oh, Ryan realized.

Lisa fished for her key, but the door opened from within before she could insert it into the lock, kicking up the smell of spores like the entrance to a forest cave.

Then, an older, taller Lisa with a scar along her neck greeted them. “You must be Lisa’s friends. I’m her mom. Come in, come in! It is so exciting to finally meet you.”

A pair of feet stormed down the stairs. A head with long, dyed red hair shot over the railing to grin at them. “Children!” the unfamiliar woman cried in much the same way someone might cry out, ‘Puppies!’

Two men, one short and pale, the other tall and dark, both built like bricks and with natural red hair, sorted through stacks of food crates two meters high in the kitchen.

A monkey crawled on the ceiling with a filched papaya in its mouth and fled through the window.

Beneath it, a younger man watched them from outside, thick arms crossed over his chest.

They followed behind Lisa in the narrow hallway. There wasn’t a good time to stop and introduce themselves to everyone, so he just nodded and repeated, “Hello,” in passing.

Were these all members of Lisa’s family? If so, Ryan couldn’t see the resemblance. Aside from her mom, who was the spitting image of Lisa even more so than Ryan was of his dad—why hadn’t she ever mentioned that before?

Maybe some of these people had married into the family? One of her parents might have done that, come to think of it. Had her mom and dad both grown up in the commune, or had one of them stumbled upon the Sages of the Witch’s Forest and fallen in love?

Lisa didn’t lead them into the living room—and the living room wasn’t nearly as tidy as he was used to either. Food crumbs and paper scraps littered the couches, the table, the ground, and the carpet. Hair, lint, and dust clung to the pillows which lay scattered across the room, and streaks of ash stained the floor in a circle around the fireplace as if some dog had rolled around in it.

Ryan shot a look at Sam, but the whelp didn’t react to the sight of the mess. Probably innocent then …? Had Lisa grown him a conscious?

There was a worrying thought, but considering the situation he’d just stepped into, it found its way to the bottom of the list of things to be concerned about.

He sniffed and glanced around, but the smell of spores was omnipresent. His heart fluttered a little when Jason and Frederick fanned out from their group, wandering closer to the windows and the doorways leading into the other room and the courtyard outside.

Where were the myconids hiding?

Actually, where was Garen hiding?

They pooled in the door frame to the living room, and Lisa rattled off their names in a quick and easy introduction, then switched over to her family, pointing and naming them, “Aber, Faer, Niva, and Viglif. Anyway, we just wanted to check on—”

She had only stopped for two seconds when she turned to lead them upstairs again, but the red woman—Niva, Ryan hammered her name into his skull—stood on the bottom steps and blocked her path.

“Hold on, Lisa. What’s the rush? Let us get to know your friends!”

“Yes, Lisa,” Navid teased her. “What’s the rush? Let us get to know your family!”

“School just started. We should all,” she hissed at the vultures, “be busy. We only came to check on the Draconic Salamanders and finish up distributing the loot, so let’s focus on that first.”

“If you want to know about those beings you captured,” her mom said patiently, “you would probably want to speak to us?”

Lisa hesitated, her hand gripping the railing like she was about to haul herself up the bottom steps. “I can appraise creatures.”

“I’m sure you can, but we have been running diagnostics on them all week. Some of us might be able to offer you a unique perspective born from our experiences.”

Aber—Aber, Aber, Aber, Ryan thought—leaned against the door frame into the kitchen and smiled. “I have some experience dealing with magic like this. They remind me of when I first began my apprenticeship with the Heswarens. Speaking of which, is that Annebeth Heswaren I spy?”

“Hello!” Anne stepped forward with a sunny smile. “Do you know me?”

“What, you don’t remember me? I guess I should have expected as much. The last time I saw you, you were—” He began to bend forward to gesture, hesitated with a parted smile, and straightened again. “You were much smaller than you are now. We missed each other this summer. We might have journeyed together during your practicum had I not been so busy at home.”

“Oh, that would have been exciting! But it’s rare the prodigal daughter returns home.” She turned to Lisa, joining Navid with a teasing smile of her own.

“I could tell you, Lisa caused quite the stir. A feast to welcome her home, a feast to say goodbye; she kept bugging us during her work to help her with her pet project, to procure rare ingredients, to look over her work, to help her train her magic …”

Navid gaped. “You trained!?”

Ryan caught himself looking at her in surprise, too, which was idiotic. Of course, Lisa trained. How else would she have gotten to where she was today?

“I train all the time,” Lisa defended herself.

“As if. You study, perhaps, if the fancy strikes you—”

Lisa’s mom quirked an eyebrow at that. “I would love to hear more about that if we have nothing else to talk about.”

“And since I have nothing else to say,” Aber smiled, “I could go into so much more detail on the trouble Lisa got up to while she was home—”

“Fine, fine!” Lisa sighed and let go. She shambled into the living room, defeated, and raised her head to ask, “Can you help us, please?”

“What are these?” Aber asked in the silence that followed.

The clock stood at half-past midnight. Her friends had left. Fourteen Draconic Salamanders hovered like bubbles in the living room. Their adorable baby wings were curled around them …

… stitched onto their Teacup Salamander bodies like some mad science experiment, like pudgy human baby arms stitched onto monkeys.

Revulsion had been her first thought, and it lingered. She saw hints of it reflected in the eyes of the dragons around her—muted by the years of their life and their scientific curiosity—but every thought that had followed had been a cascade of pity, grief, protectiveness, and rebellion.

Her siblings would tear through a city like a plague, plundering, burning, and killing indiscriminately. She loved them anyway, and she wielded that love like a weapon, but the Theatre had turned it back on her. And then some.

Lisa had captured as many of the Draconic Salamanders as she could. Then she’d stepped back into reality.

Somewhere around the time when she had been exterminating Kobolds—mindless, annoying Kobolds—she had realized what she had done. It was like she had gone to a play and cried so much during the performance that she had crawled onto the stage and stolen some of the props to ‘save’ them.

What now?

What do I do with you?

“They’re unmade?” That was as much an answer to Aber’s question as it was an attempt to sort through her thoughts. “I think? Except, unmade are made out of nature essence and have patterns and crystal anchors and these are made with … my friend calls them ‘concept essence.’”

“They reek of Hes.” her aunt Purjana grimaced, and like a smell that brought a childhood memory to the front of her mind, her words spoken with authority brought the lingering stench of the beings to life.

They smelled like fire and earth, charred meat, ash, and bones. They smelled like spicy foods, like piss, and like sweet berries. They smelled familiar. Like her siblings, but only just.

There was an artificial quality to the smell. It missed the imperfections of mortal life. It missed the lingering scents of the environment. It missed the subtler smells hidden underneath what was obvious—the pheromones and particles on the air that activated nerves in her nose to transmit a signal to her brain.

These smells transmitted themselves to her brain, and they were just one shade off.

That revulsion reared its head again. Goosebumps shot up her human arms, as well as her actual body where it slept inside its heart. Her spine tingled, and Lisa was filled with a sense of wrongness that made her want to kill something or flee.

“They sound lovely,” Aber said into that moment, like the strange child he had always been, “and awful. But that is all of Hes. Sickening radiant chaos seeking meaning.”

Niva reacted differently, too, looking up at the bubbles of scales with a hint of wonder. “They’re little ideas made manifest.” She spun and switched out her wonder for pragmaticism, “Quick question, how are they not broken yet?”

“They are breaking,” her mom reminded them, “slowly. I have limited them from exerting themselves and shielded them from any outside forces that would accelerate their decay, but its cause lies in their lack of sustentation. If we do nothing more, they will break in a matter of days. We have to act quickly.”

“So inject ‘em with a bit of life-juice?” Garen offered.

“That would corrupt them.”

“So? If the kid’s toy is broken, you use glue to fix it. I’m sure Lisa won’t mind if—“

“Lisa?” Beren cut in. “No, no, no, what would she know to do with these? These are the animated idea of draconic features grafted onto another animated idea. They represent a rare research opportunity that we should study, not corrupt for a child.”

“She already has,” Purjana hissed and sniffed one of the orbs nearest to her. “What did you do, Lisa? You funneled magic into them to sustain them, bound them in dross constructs, and … what else? There is something more.”

“Preservation essence,” Lisa said, “but that wasn’t me.”

Allison shot to attention for the first time since her family had taken control of the situation. “Was it Micah?”

“No. He wasn’t even with us in the Theatre!” Lisa sat on the sofa surrounded by stacks and boxes of files and binders. In the low light of the lamps after dark, she summoned the will to glare at the woman … and found her response lacked its usual bite.

“I was just checking.”

“That does change some things,” Beren mumbled. “If we want to preserve them, we should isolate and use the corruption Lisa has already caused as a lever—with better methods, of course.”

“Already threw a rock through the window,” Garen nodded sagely, “might as well reach through the shattered glass to open the door.”

Lisa hadn’t gotten the staring match she had steeled herself for. It left her fumbling.

Viglif stepped into her point of view, then. In his human suit. Her reaction was delayed by her recognition of him, and then Lisa wrestled with an awkward feeling in her sternum. She struggled to put a name to it other than embarrassment.

She didn’t feel that way about the rest of her family members in their human guises, but they were all hundreds of years old and used to working undercover.

Viglif wasn’t that much older than her and stuffed inside a human suit with a grim expression and grizzly arms.

Grr, the thought bubbled up from within her muddled mind.

He looked ridiculous.

He threaded his way through the clutter with graceful steps, bent his knees, and planted himself on one of the paper stacks as though he weighed nothing, and that all only added to the feeling.

“Are you okay?” he signed and the world seemed to quiet when it was just them.

The Draconic Salamanders bobbed overhead like lanterns in the night. The Sages of the Witch’s Forest discussed what to do with them.

Lisa signed back with her clumsy human hands, “Tired. Long day.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not much to say. We went to the ‘Theatre.’ It’s a place inside of the Tower that creates personal challenges for you …” She gestured vaguely at the ceiling.

Viglif hesitated, raised his hands a few times, and started over. “Was your challenge to capture them?”

“No, I wasn’t thinking, I just acted.”

“Why bring them here?”

Lisa looked him in the eyes. “You know why.”

He hesitated again and then gently, he signed, “Do you want me to break them for you?”

Surprised, she almost signed, “No,” on reflex, but she caught herself and considered it.

It would make things quiet again. It would solve the issues of maintaining them and figuring out what to do with them—and it would absolve her of the guilt she might feel if she failed to do either.

But it was shortsighted. She had saved them for the same reasons, her shortsighted emotions, but Lisa truly thought there had to be an opportunity here. Some way to find reason in the challenges of the Theatre. If only she could slog through the morass of tired thoughts that was her mind right now.

She shook her head. She appreciated the offer, but no.

“So you’re going to just let the adults solve all of your problems for you ag—” Wiggle cut himself off, but Lisa had seen it, and she blinked awake.

He gestured apologetically with one hand. It was something their family sometimes did during debates, a sign to apologize for your tone and word choice but not for intent.

She glanced up to see how far the discussion had progressed around them: the adults were arguing about how to divvy up the Salamanders for different avenues of research, and how important it was that they secure new samples. Could they get into this ‘Theatre?’ Would it even be able to challenge them? If not, couldn’t they just loot the entire place?

“No.” Lisa shot up. “No, you will not use them for random experiments.”

Her uncle Beren frowned. “Why not?”

“Because …” she floundered.

“Was there something you wanted to use them for?”

“No?”

“Then this could be an opportunity for you to contribute!” He smiled at her like he only remembered that child who wanted to help the adults on their projects.

Lisa would contribute, but she would do it competently, not by letting the adults bully her out of shiny rocks she had picked up off the ground.

“Contribute how?” she countered. “Do all of you want to start new projects so far from your laboratories? Don’t you all have more important things to focus on now?” She said that to the group at large, and they immediately overwhelmed her with counterarguments of their own.

Purjana rolled her eyes. “We can multitask.”

Beren said, “It’s not like this investigation is something we will be able to commit all of our time and resources to.”

And Aber said, “It’s healthy to have a side project you can focus on?”

“What is the alternative here?” her mom said patiently, but it wasn’t the kind of patience that meant she would hear Lisa out. It was a kind of patience she recognized where they were willing to let her talk in circles until she proved herself wrong. “As busy as you are, can you maintain all fourteen of these things?”

“No.”

“As busy as we are, do you want us to maintain them?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“If there are any projects you would prefer that we worked on in your stead?” Beren tried.

“No.”

“Did you want them for yourself?” Purjana asked. “To control as minions? To feed your pet? To use as ingredients?”

She was shaking her head. “I— Not for myself? Maybe— I wanted to help make my friends stronger, remember? Just in case. What if they could use them as familiars!?” She turned toward Allison who knew more about the topic, but the woman shook her head in sympathy.

“You can’t just bind a familiar to someone and hope it will make them stronger, Lisa. Binding a familiar has risks and rewards, costs and benefits. It can impact how your magic works, which Skills you get, how you level.”

“Yeah, but Ryan’s a [Drake] so—!” Lisa said and snapped her mouth shut, eyes wide.

Oh no.

Everyone stared at her.

It was Garen who spoke up first, laughing weakly. “Ryan is a what now?” He dug a finger in his ear. “Care to repeat that, Lisa?”

Her voice was tiny, almost a mewl, as she groaned, “No …?”

Why, why, why? She hadn’t meant to let that slip so soon. Not now when all she wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep for a day or two.

But the room erupted into a babble of voices and frantic hand signs. “Was he the boy who was outside just now?” Niva asked.

“How did he become a drake?” her mom asked. “Did you tell him you were a dragon? Did you teach him any of our magic?”

Aber sounded more suspicious, “Did you do something to him?”

Garen teased, “Did you make out with him?”

“Drake,” Beren mused. “Does that mean he has ‘drake essence’ inside of him?”

“Ooh! I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Think we can catch up to him before he gets home? I’ll go get the rope!”

“Oh, Ryan from the—!” someone said a moment before Viglif climbed onto the table and frantically waved his arms around the room. Literally. His arms expanded until they took up a third of the room. They shoved some of the floating Draconic Salamanders aside, making them bounce off the walls and the ceiling, and he nearly slapped a handful of them in the face.

Sam rushed around the room to herd one of the bubbles that had floated into the hallway back into the room, jumping up to nudge it with its nose like a ball.

Viglif signed with forceful gestures, “Yes, yes, we are all very interested in seeing this Ryan for the very first time! Don’t let that distract you!”

Everyone shut up, some peeved, others amused by the youthful antics.

“Lisa, assuming Ryan even wants a familiar, that is one down. What will you do with the other thirteen?”

“I have more friends and these aren’t normal monsters, are they?”

“Aww,” Beren said genuinely, “Lisa has friends.”

Her mom was smiling, too, and patted her head.

Lisa couldn’t shrink away from her hand. There was nowhere to run if she didn’t want to knock one of the paper stacks over.

Viglif brought them back on track, arms shrunken back to their usual tree trunk size. “What is the difference between these and normal monsters?”

Lisa couldn’t say for sure, so she looked again to Allison.

“Unmade are made of nature magic. I can’t tell you what the difference is because I haven’t met any monsters like these, but I can speculate based on what I know of the golden blessing. Unmade should be better able to interact with the natural world. Stronger, more durable, better able to exert force. Some of that may be because of their alchemical formula, their ‘patterns,’ which make it easier to structure bodies for them, both temporary or permanent—similar to how unmade turn into real monsters over time.

“As for the golden blessing … you say these are frail, but unmade also if they leave the Tower, often in a matter of seconds. I don’t believe they would be frail as familiars. They should be better able to interact with magic, less able to exert physical force, but harder to damage or truly kill without magic. I imagine if you shot one with an arrow, it would puff into a cloud of smoke and reform—that’s one of the most popular Skills people get to protect familiars.

“They should also be less bound by the rules of physics, meaning things like incorporeality or flight might come easier to them. For the same reason, they should have an easier time shapeshifting, but I doubt they would be able to wander far from the concept they represent, in both form and the abilities they grant.

“The largest issue I can imagine, or rather what I can’t speculate on, is their opportunities for growth. Unmade can grow through a magical diet, through a physical diet, their minds can grow through the bond, and they can benefit from both blessings of whomever they are bound to. Some familiars have been known to grow spirits—elemental spirits, mental spirits. I don’t know of any ‘concept spirits,’ except for ghosts maybe …?”

She looked around in case someone else knew more about the topic and leaned back when she noticed her captivated audience for the first time.

“The Heswaren believe them to be extinct,” Aber offered, “the closest beings would be the Vim.”

“Oh. Well, maybe that can be one of your ‘projects’ then. My point is these wouldn’t be better or special so much as different, Lisa, different and unknown, whereas we have over a hundred years of research on normal familiars to draw from.”

“They are also corrupted,” Purjana reminded them, “by traces of dross life essence and divine preservation.”

Allison’s expression hardened at the reminder, but Lisa perked up.

“That’s something? And if I gave them a hint of divine life, that would be three out of the Six!”

Could she somehow use mana rings to give them some of Ara’s essence? That would be four. And they had Ele’s essence, reality essence, at home—

“Lisa,” Garen pulled her from her mad speculation, and he didn’t speak in a joking tone for once. “That wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.”

Oh, she realized. Right.

Bringing just two of the Six—or Seven, in his case—together had turned him into … what he was. It had turned her uncle into what he had become before his death. Before his execution.

Lisa held the magic of two of the Six in her—Per from her Spark of Life, and Hes from her Classes—and she was doing fine. So was Micah, she assumed. But pushing it to three? It was a risk her friends would pay the price for if things went wrong.

“So maybe not life essence. Still, it’s a good idea, right?”

“Again, do your friends even want familiars?” Viglif asked.

Allison squinted at his hand signs and tentatively added, “Would familiars be suited to their vocations?”

“We would have to meet with them,” her mom mused, “to discuss the proposition and get a look at their insides.”

Lisa panicked. “No, I can talk to them.”

“We have to meet them anyway if you want us to help make them stronger?”

“What, why?”

“What do you mean, why? What did you imagine we would do?”

“Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, make a potion that gives them [Lesser Regeneration] like the Northerners have?”

“A potion that would give anyone a life mark? That would be— It would not be impossible,” her mom said, “but it would be a task. No, if you want us to grant them regenerative traits, the best way to do it would be to tailor the mutations to them specifically, which means diagnosing them in person.”

“Then teach me how to do it; to cast the diagnostics! I’ll do it, I’ll get the data back to you, and then you can make the potions, and—”

“It would have the same impact as binding a familiar,” Allison said.

“It doesn’t have to be a literal life mark!” Lisa stopped herself from rolling her eyes in frustration. What a way to miss the point she was trying to make. “If you want a side project, you could learn to create a potion that gives them Skills!”

“To be clear,” her mom said, “you want us to maintain these beings for your friends in case they might want to bind them as familiars, you want us to devote our time and resources into teaching you divination magic or else to learn an entirely new form of magic ourselves to mutate them from afar, you want us to stop what is coming, and you want us to prepare you and them for whatever it may be in case we fail, which could take years, and we are not even allowed to meet your friends the entire time?”

“No. No, of course, you can meet them. I want you to meet my friends eventually.”

“Are you worried we won’t approve of them?” her mom asked.

“That we will refuse to help them if we meet them?” Aber added.

“No. I don’t know?”

“They’re normal kids,” Garen commented.

“Then are you worried we will do something to them?” Purjana smiled.

“You won’t,” she tried to warn her off, but the words lacked bite.

Niva perked up. “Are you worried they won’t approve of us?”

“No? Yes— I mean—“ The word slipped out, the damage was done, and then Lisa couldn’t hold it back anymore. “I’m worried you will embarrass me, okay!? I’m worried you’ll scare them off, or that you won’t, and then they’ll have you to turn to and they won’t need me anymore.”

Her mom opened her mouth to say something, so Lisa pointed a finger and barreled on before she could.

“That’s what you always do! You ignore me and take over my projects because you think you know everything. But you don’t! You don’t even know how to act normal. You look weird. You dress weird. You act weird. I’m worried you’ll slip up and reveal that I’m a dragon. That you’ll take it all away, my friends, my life here, me, and—”

She stopped to catch her breath and ran out of steam.

They stared at her sudden outburst and by the looks in their eyes, she knew what they were thinking. How childish she was being.

Maybe she was. But Lisa didn’t know what to do. Everything was slipping away. Everything was changing. She could see it coming and lacked the strength to stop it.

She couldn’t even stop her siblings from swooping into a city and setting everything on fire. Her parents? Adult dragons? How was she supposed to prevent them from doing whatever the hell they wanted? She was just a child in their eyes. And in truth.

But that wasn’t all she saw.

Her mom glanced down at her clothes with a bothered expression.

Aber’s posture sagged and he awkwardly rapped his knuckles on the couch.

Niva smiled, but she always put up a friendly front when she felt bad.

Purjana picked up a file, planted herself on the other sofa, and read, ignoring her.

And Viglif climbed off the table without looking at her.

“I’m sorry,” Lisa said, but she used the same hand sign Viglif had used earlier. ”That was hurtful. I didn’t mean it like that, I just— I’ve had a long day. Whatever you’re doing to maintain the Salamanders, could you please keep it up until morning? I can take over in the morning, but … I need to go to bed.”

“They’re not doing well,” Aber explained. He sat with his ankle resting on his knee, a cup of coffee in hand, gold bangles dangling from his wrist. He wore a nice shirt with drab summer colors and polished brown shoes indoors. It made him look stylish, maybe. Human.

They had put out a massive jug of lemonade and a charcuterie board for her friends, too. And maybe the ‘jug’ was a flower vase, but at least it was a nice vase?

Aber and her mom went into the differences between normal unmade and those of the Theatre, and the unique circumstances of their Draconic Salamanders, how the Preservation Field seemed to have imbued a hint of its magic into them.

“That probably gave them the corporeality needed to harm you,” Niva commented, “if they were supposed to be illusions in the first place.”

“That’s … interesting,” Navid eventually said, “but surely it is far more interesting to scholars such as yourself?”

“That’s what we said, too!” Niva hissed conspiratorially, then shot up straight, glancing at her out of the corner of her eye like Lisa was about to snap at her.

Lisa sighed.

“Why are you telling us this?”

“Is this about the loot distribution?” Anne asked.

Her friends had been delighted to sit down—probably because they thought they would get endless teasing material out of it—but her family had stuck to the script and barely ever gone off tangent, so their mood had shifted from tomfoolery to respectful interest to confusion.

Why did a bunch of adults they had never met before want to talk about magical theory with them?

She saw it in the glances Navid and Anne shot each other, the glances Frederick and Jason shot at the door, and how everyone reached for the food more and more often to distract themselves.

Oh no, their wide eyes seemed to say, what if Lisa told the truth? What if her family is nothing but nutty researchers who won’t shut up about their work?

If they had been spelunkers, they would have been tugging on their ropes for someone to pull them back out. Abort! Abort! It’s a trap!

Lisa found a bit of schadenfreude in the daydream, but it was nothing compared to her lingering nerves and the tentative comfort she felt just … sitting here. With her friends, her mom, and some of her favorite aunts and uncles.

She looked to the left and saw Sion, Anne, and Navid on the couch—and Ryan standing next to it because there weren’t enough seats and he’d refused to steal a spot—and then she looked to the right and there was her mom!

She had been relieved at the time, but it was too bad so many of her family members had already split up to head to the different cities. And it was too bad Garen and Allison hadn’t been able to here because they had people to talk to.

“Do you want to make sure we know the value of the Draconic Salamanders since Lisa claimed them in her share of the loot?” Anne said.

Ryan had been content pretending to be a statue for the time being, and Lisa pretended not to notice the looks her family kept shooting him, the times they stopped themselves from pulling him into the conversation, and she was sure Ryan had noticed as well.

Something about Anne’s words made him suspicious, though. “You don’t want to increase our shares of the loot, right? Lisa?”

“No,” she groaned when she realized where his thoughts had gone. “No, I’m not trying to trick you into accepting money from my family.”

He shrunk three sizes with a sigh, then puffed right back up again.

… At least he wasn’t acting as bad as he had when he’d realized who Garen was, Lisa told herself.

“No, I brought you here because, uhm … The thing is, they don’t have to break at all? Not all of them. I was wondering if maybe you wanted to bind some of them as familiars?”

She ended up looking at Ryan again, who didn’t look so much stunned as he did astonished, like he wasn’t opposed to the idea but needed a moment to consider it, maybe …?

Or maybe Lisa was just imagining—

“Heck, yeah!” Frederick burst out, jolting her from her anxious thoughts. “A dragon familiar sounds awesome!”

She cringed at his word choice and glanced around; her family didn’t look exactly amused by the comment either.

But Frederick didn’t notice as he jostled Jason, who sat on the armrest of the sofa next to him. He didn’t look nearly as excited. Which was to say, he didn’t look excited at all. He rolled with the punches, swaying as Frederick shoved him, and twiddled his thumbs where he had folded his hands in his lap.

“What are you trying to pull here, Chandler?” Navid said with light-hearted suspicion. He squinted at her. “Guilting us into adopting a pet with your box full of puppies?”

He leaned into Anne and, in a quieter tone, said, “I figure dragons are more like dogs than cats. I hear they travel in swarms in the North.”

Anne, looking at the four dragons sitting across the room from her, wisely chose not to engage with his comment. “How long did you say you could maintain them?”

“Anywhere between three to six more weeks by our current estimate,” her mom said.

Anne winced. “I don’t think our parents would be okay with us binding familiars on such short notice, if at all. At least, not Navid, Sion, and mine. I don’t know about …” She trailed off, leaning forward to glance left and right at the others.

Lisa stifled a curse. Of all the things she hadn’t thought about! Freaking parents.

“Pardon me, your parents wouldn’t be okay with that”—Aber gestured at the pair on the sofa—“but yours would?”

“Respectfully,” Frederick said, “my parents don’t give a crap, sir.”

“Wait, are you two not also Heswarens …?”

“Hah!?” Frederick shot forward, and Jason nearly fell off the armrest as he spun on the man.

“No?” Anne said. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That was terribly rude of me to ask. I just assumed.” Aber waved them off, clearly flustered. He raised his cup and murmured into it, “Please, continue.”

“Do I look like a Heswaren?” Frederick joked, holding his tan arm out in Anne’s direction. His smile was much friendlier toward her.

But Navid moved them along—apparently, he could be courteous when it came to adults rather than his friends. “My family can be somewhat opportunistic, but the real issue is not the challenge of the time constraints, it is the merit of the proposal. I mean, you said it yourself, these things are falling apart. And even if they are unique, does that mean they would make for good familiars?”

“We can only speculate,” Lisa said and stole Allison’s thoughts on the matter, albeit in different terms. Rather than get into the ideas of essences or the twin blessings, she said they used the same magic that many Skills used. “So they’re like animated little Skills.”

All the while, she watched the adults have a silent conversation on the sidelines, using invisible floating hands and spore clouds—and once they got wind of those, even Viglif and Faer weighed in from the other room, speculating on whether or not Frederick and Jason were bastard children or just from a subordinate noble house, like how House Shala was loyal to House Madin.

What? No, what are even talking about? Lisa thought at them, but she hadn’t learned telepathy yet either, so she settled for conjuring a spore cloud of her own—invisible to anyone without [Detect Magic]—and flung it at the couch, the equivalent of throwing herself onto their laps and saying, Shut up, shut up, shut up.

Why would they even think that in the first place? They weren’t siblings, and Jason wasn’t some bastard child. He talked about his parents. Frederick … she barely knew him, come to think of it.

“Still,” Sion said when she completed her explanation, “binding a familiar takes time. You have to think about what you want and how having a familiar could affect your vocation. Then you have to do the research, test for compatibility, do meditation exercises, pick out a good ritual and learn the spells for the binding … and you’re all busy right now. Even if you manage to do it in a month, will there even be enough of the monsters left to bind?”

“And defying the laws of physics is nice and all,” Navid joined in, “but any familiar can do that. Conventional wisdom divides the value of a familiar into four synergistic parts: Traits, Binding, Witch, and Minion. And flight? Breathing fire? If those are their only natural abilities, they are kind of generic—no offense,” he said to Frederick. “Generic can be good. It means they can mesh well with all kinds.”

“I’m good, man. I’m feeling lucky about this.”

Lisa smiled nervously because they had stumbled over the same issues as Allison—was private education such a monolith? “You’re right to be concerned about the time constraints, and you’re right that the Draconic Salamanders aren’t exactly perfect for your individual vocations, but they could be. I think we can fix them. I think we can improve them, and give them whatever traits you want them to have.”

Navid’s eyebrows shot up and he tilted his head back. “Explain that thought to me?”

Lisa looked at the awkward statue standing next to the couch. “Ryan can create Skills.”