Lily crossed the mountains twenty thousand feet in the air. She had decided to move further from the surface to prevent any interactions with dragonkind. A casual assessment of the range revealed numerous dragon settlements, or nests, as the documentation she read had called them. As far as she could tell, no dragons ever flew this high up. It meant she had no way to monitor the ground through her aura, but that was a price she was willing to pay.

To further their stealth, she merged the cloud she was piloting into a cold front that had turned into a small thunderstorm. Because of her domain, joining up with the existing storm actually eased the burden on her to carry all of them across the range. And because it was a natural phenomenon instead of a storm she created, it shouldn’t arouse any suspicion from the dragons. They had gotten lucky. Lily hoped the desert on the other side would be much less populated because this storm was going to die out on its way over the range. At that point, her extra cover would vanish, and it would be back to pausing three times a day to recover.

This last week of travel had been slower than Lily had initially planned. Instead of using cloud cover to move as fast as she thought they could get away with, half their time had been spent on overland travel as she worked to feed Sky and Snowball. Fortunately, it seemed that a week had been enough.

As far as Lily could tell, the changes and growth her bonded were experiencing from eating the strange monsters of this continent were slowing down and nearing their completion. They had experienced nearly a year’s worth of growth in the past few days, and it showed.

Snowball had originally resembled the non-magical animal known as a polar bear. Found only on arctic, icy continents, they were characterized by their large size compared to other bear species and their white camouflage fur. The only features that could set him apart as a monster were his eyes and nose, both of which were an icy blue instead of the polar bear’s black features.

With the accelerated growth from consuming monsters, Snowball was roughly a year and a half old physically. That was enough time for some of his more overt monstrous traits to manifest. Mainly, that meant the elemental components of his abilities were beginning to show themselves. Snowball’s thick, fluffy fur had chunks of brilliantly blue ice scattered throughout it, and a solid ruff of icicles around his neck was in the early stages of forming.

Along with these changes, Snowball’s size had exploded. Icecrag Bears could vary widely in size depending on their IP, and Snowball was shaping up to be on the higher end. Before his new assisted growth, the six month old Snowball had been eight feet tall standing up and half that on all fours. Now, he was ten feet tall without standing up. He towered over Erik and Lily, his head the size of their torso with foot-long fangs and eyes as big as Lily’s fist.

Sky had undergone a similarly massive albeit more subtle set of changes. Rocs were a magical species of animal with generally sub-human intelligence characterized by a control over storms and weather. They most often resembled non-magical eagles but were larger by an order of magnitude, with many reaching hundreds of feet in their wingspan when fully grown.

Sky was a monster variant of a subspecies, the Midnight Roc. These magical birds closely resembled harpy eagles and followed the behavior of their traditional cousins closely. Apex predators and ambush hunters, Midnight Rocs had magical adaptations that let them move quickly, quietly, and stealthily to strike with overwhelming force. Sky was growing to be a prime example of her species.

Midnight Rocs did not grow to be as massive as other Rocs, but they made up for it with a wider diversity of magical abilities. Sky had gained some of the lesser abilities of her subspecies already. She was already a dark-feathered bird with a black back and dark blue undercarriage. Now, Sky could cover herself in a magical darkness that rendered her invisible at night. She could use that same darkness to augment her talons, which had grown to massive size, to amplify their cutting power.

Sky’s talons weren’t the only thing that grew. Her overall size had tripled from where it was a week ago. Previously, she had been only slightly smaller than an actual harpy eagle. Now, her wingspan was almost fourteen feet from tip to tip, and she stood nearly six feet tall. She could look down on Lily and would mirror Caeden’s height when he wasn’t formshifted.

Her newly-enlarged pets were both a blessing and a curse. The added size was a boon to their combat capabilities, and they could easily fight on equal terms with the local 5,000 to 10,000 IP monsters without tapping into their burgeoning magical abilities. However, it also cost Lily even more shroud to carry them in her secret cloud ship. She had taken to sending Sky out to scout ahead simply to get some weight off.

Their overland travel had been nerve-wracking as her bonded rapidly grew larger day by day. Compared to hiding them in a cloud thousands of feet in the air, hiding them on the ground was nearly impossible. They had skated by on sheer luck more than any stealth they might have had. Sauma’s web-based detection net had been crucial to dodging a few dragons flying overhead. Apparently, the arachne Incarnation could even create super-light threads that could float through the air.

As the mountains began to pass underneath them, Lily dearly wished that the t next two-thirds of their journey across a desert would be less eventful than the last week. If not, hopefully, whatever new magic her bonded gained would make stealth a bit easier. Hiding such giant monsters was hard!

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Cat rolled around on the flat back of the Passenger Brute, laughing until she cried. Caeden was almost down there next to her. Only his effort to maintain the umbrella of Sharp over their heads that kept his mind focused. Otherwise, he would be doing more than just laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

The source of their amusement was the hatchling. A series of rain clouds had come over them in the last hour as the Brute climbed steep mountain terrain. Caeden, expecting the rainfall, what formed the umbrella of crimson energy that was currently protecting them from the elements. What he hadn’t expected was the baby half-dragons reaction to its first time seeing rain.

At first, he had been curious and warry, watching the droplets fly by the Brute’s side as they moved through the mountains. After a few minutes, the hatchling had worked up the courage to dart up and snap at a passing drop. Immediately, he jumped halfway across the Brute’s back, waiting for something to happen. Once he realized the rain wasn’t going to somehow vaporize him, it was open season.

So, now the sinuous emerald green baby dragon was darting wildly around the edges of the Brute, snapping manically at every raindrop he could reach with his tiny jaws. Flinging himself around so fast, he was constantly in danger of just throwing himself over the side. In fact, Caeden had kept a careful watch while making sure to create barriers of Sharp whenever it looked like the hatchling was heading directly onto the rocky ground.

It had turned into an interesting mental exercise. Caeden had to work to suppress his amusement while also maintaining two manifestations of Sharp that contradicted its nature. Every shroud had its own characteristics, even if a shrouded had the same domain as another. Each individual shroud was unique in one way or another. Caeden’s Sharp shroud naturally manifested in small, rapidly moving particles that would dart through the air in lines of crimson.

Forming the umbrella required him to force his manifestation to clump up into one big mass and stay entirely still. Even harder, forming the guard rail for the hatchling to run into meant he had to remove the sharpness from his Sharp shroud. If he hadn’t been practicing to accomplish just that for years, ever since he crippled his hand, it would have been impossible.

Forcing his shroud’s corporeal manifestations to take a form that went directly against its domain was a pain. It had taken him years of practice to do so. Learning about manifestation manipulation-or aura control, either term applied-had been validating for him. In his aura class Caeden had learned that what he accomplished was considered the height of raw manifestation manipulation.

Skill with mnemonics was generally considered more impressive, but removing a domain’s signature from one’s shroud was the highest accomplishment. In fact, being able to shift your manifestation’s base features was a feat in and of itself. One that Caeden had accidentally become highly proficient in.

That series of lessons had been some of the most confusing for Caeden. According to Captain Saorise, the visual component of a shroud was completely mutable. If he put in the effort, Caeden could make his thorns any color, not just a bloody red. Further, he could alter every physical property of his manifestations. Anyone could. It just so happened that his domain made all his manifestations red, small, fast, and sharp as a default, but any of those features were things he could change with a proper application of will.

Which felt odd to Caeden. The physical characteristics of a shroud were one of the easiest ways to determine what it was, as the default aspects usually reflected the domain. To him, it seemed obvious that being able to change those aspects of a manifestation would be a huge advantage, disguising the nature of your shroud to an enemy.

But the Captain’s entire series of lessons had been about why it wasn’t worth the effort. Very few shrouded used their manifestations directly in combat. Of everyone he knew, only Caeden himself actually did so. Most people were like Erik. They used their manifestations as a medium to use their shroud’s unique magical effects. Erik created his white strings to Stitch things together, not to beat his enemies with them. Only Caeden, using Sharp, ever relied directly on his manifestations.

Saorise had explained the inherent weaknesses of using his shroud as he did. The physical manifestations of shrouds were inefficient. For example, Lily could make a manifestation that acted as a hand for her to lift a weight in the air. But it was infinitely less shroud-intensive for her to use her domain to make some ice and then control that to do the same thing. Manipulating ice was something unique to Lily’s shroud, because her domain was Ice. Caeden couldn’t replicate that.

This was one of the main reasons that modifier shrouds were considered weaker than object shrouds. Caeden couldn’t directly manipulate a physical substance. He could make things sharp or remove the sharpness from them. That was it. Granted, he could make things infinitely sharper than should be physically possible if he stuffed enough shroud into an object, but the unique abilities inherent to his domain were less versatile than, say, the abilities to generate and manipulate lava.

Of course, Caeden cheated. His thorns granted a theoretically infinite supply of shroud for him to use, so it didn’t matter to him if using manifestations was inherently more expensive shroud-wise. It let him mimic some of the inherent advantages object shrouds had. But he couldn’t understand why others didn’t see the same benefits he did. Direct manifestation was powerful, he was certain. It had so much potential, considering you could grant your manifestations any physical property with the necessary amount of control. He’d just have to prove it.

“Hey, I think the weather is letting up.” Cat’s words brought Caeden back to the present. He had fallen into a trance while maintaining control of his shroud. He looked around, realizing that the storm was indeed slowly collapsing as it beat against the mountainside.

“It would appear so.” Caeden nodded. The hatchling had fallen to the floor of the Passenger Brute as the raindrops became more and more sparse. “And just as we were about to enter the mountain range proper, instead of crawling up the side of the first one. I hope we can find some ether here. I’m looking forward to using all the gifts we’ve gotten.”

Mountainous regions were notoriously more ether-rich than others.

“Well, maybe we can ask the locals,” Cat said, pointing to a winged shape flying toward them from higher up the mountain.

“Yes, hopefully, they’re open to the same deal as the others,” Caeden commented. It was a new biome, after all. He couldn’t be sure if the dragons here would be as willing to deal with them. But it seemed they were about to find out.