Pre-Read: Travels of Anne: Eccentric Dragon - Chapter 2

                                                                               Chapter 2

A raging torrent of blistering fire blasted forth and engulfed Anne from head to toe. She was sure that if any ordinary human got within a hundred paces of the lancing flames of Dragonfire, they would be cooked alive. If they stood where she stood, inside the eye of the flaming storm, they would be turned to naught but ash. 

Anne, being a red dragon herself, was immune to all flames, even those of her father, which were laced with draconic energies. 

As she couldn’t see anything other than white and gold standing within the flames, Anne stepped forward, raised her hand, and smacked down on her father's snout. She heard a faint, shocked whimper, then a loud thump before the flames ceased. 

“Father! It’s me, Anne! This is my form! My boon!” Anne said happily as she attempted a small twirl, failing horrendously and causing her to stumble around. 

Her father, Aderk, The Lord of Scathing Flames, rubbed his snout as tears filled the corners of his eyes. He took a wary step back as he inspected her from head to toe— face scrunched up in mild confusion. “Daughter is dragon… Form make bigger.” 

Anne shook her head, feeling her new hair whip back and forth with the motion. “My form made me a human! I can interact with my horde, father!” 

Aderk began to circle Anne, lowering himself as he stalked around her. His face was distrusting as he snarled, baring his teeth. “Become dragon… or perish.” 

Become a dragon? I am a dragon!

“What do you mean?” Anne frowned as she followed her father with her now-narrowed eyes. 

“Return form… Now!” Red and gold flames billowed out from the sides of his maw, and embers trailed from his nostrils as he sharpened his gaze. 

Registering her father's words, Anne figured there must be a way to revert her change. For all that she was enjoying her human form, it would do no good for her to fight her father. He was mighty indeed but still quite dull. She had a sneaking suspicion that she could defeat him, but she didn’t want to test that theory. 

With nothing really to go on, she imagined her dragon form and willed a change.

Form…

Her body shifted into a tiny pale red orb of light, making her look like a pixie. She gazed around as the small orb, and felt nauseous from the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. She watched as her enchanted items fell to the floor and got coated in molten gold and silver from the nearby melted coins of her father's horde. The small red orb undulated rapidly, then expanded into that of her dragon form. The bright red light dimmed, revealing her scarlet scales, two long horns, and yellow-slitted eyes. 

Anne huffed, flaring her nostrils and sending superheated air toward her father. “Happy now?” 

The flames billowing from Ardek’s maw retreated, his face softened, and he stopped stalking around her like she was some kind of prey. “Daughter form human?”

Once again, like many times before, she saw disappointment ooze from her father. Anything that wasn’t a dragon was inferior to him. Of course, she thought the same, as it was just a fact. But she understood that people didn’t get to choose what they were. The goblins fearfully retreating from her father's chamber with their dead in tow did not choose to be goblins. They just were. It was unfair to blame them for something out of their control. 

Anne sat back on her haunches, showing she was not a threat to her father as she spoke. “That’s correct, father. My form is a human.” She smiled, her pearly white fangs on full display. 

She watched as her father's face morphed into a mixture of emotions. First, there was the obvious disappointment. Next came a hint of pride. He finished with a mixture of sadness, which alarmed her. 

She had seen her father be sad only a clawfull of times. Each time was memorable, as it appeared in the aftermath of killing her kin. 

She backed up, hoping the nagging feeling deep within her wasn’t correct.

Her father slumped to the ground. The tears that previously wetted the corners of his eyes from the pain of getting smacked ran down his scales freely, but he was smiling.

He locked eyes with her as his face slacked. He thought to himself for a moment but eventually said something she would never forget.  “Annezaroth, you have grown.”

Anne’s eyes widened in shock as her father spoke a complete sentence without any pause. Her surprise only continued to grow as he continued to talk. 

“Time has come to leave me. To create a family of own.” It was evident that he had planned these words, and it wasn’t some random time of enlightenment, but the fact that her father had planned anything was shocking.

He walked toward her, his falling tears evaporating into steam before they touched the stone floor. He then wrapped his neck around hers, intertwining them as he hugged her for the first time. 

“Love.” He rumbled. 

Anne threw her arms around her father, returning the hug. Tears fell from her clenched, closed eyes as she responded. “I love you too.” 

She could feel the deep rumble of satisfaction from his chest as she finished the words. For a moment, she wished that this peace would never end, but that wasn’t meant to be. He broke away, then looked clearly at her face from paces away. “Life alone… hard. Come back… soon.”

He turned and quickly climbed atop his horde, leaving her with warring emotions as liquid cold and silver washed against her feet. 

She had just gotten his blessing to leave. A moment she knew would eventually come, but she didn’t expect it to be for another hundred years at least. She’d spent her whole life around the mountain, always wondering what was out there in the wide world.

Her books gave her ideas about what was out there—mentioned people and creatures from places unknown. Oh, how she desperately wanted to meet those from her books, join them on adventures, and become a part of the stories themselves. 

Now was her time. It was time to leave, and she knew what she would do. She would travel far and wide to find those she had always wanted to meet. Go on heroic journeys and triumph over evil. She would learn the ways of the humans, and once she was done, she would reveal herself: a perfect ending, one befitting her story. 

But first things first, she needed to pack. 

Anne quickly picked up her enchanted items from the floor, blasting them with a bit of dragon fire to rid them of lingering liquid metal, and returned to her den to prepare. She was glad her items weren’t ruined for once, thankful that many enchanted items were unbreakable by most means. 

Once in her den and surrounded by her horde, she opened her enchanted bag and started throwing everything she owned inside. It was a bag of holding, a dimensional storage pouch able to hold many items in a separate realm for storage. While the ones she owned weren’t as large as the ones mentioned in her books, she had many. Time and time again, the strength of numbers reigned supreme. 

The bag's opening expanded well beyond what was physically possible to facilitate items of any size—another unique perk of enchanted items found in the world's dungeons. She effortlessly toppled an entire bookcase into a bag, books and all. 

Once she filled one of her bags, she started on another, then another, and so on, until her den was a simple cavern—one unbefitting one of her nature. 

The only downside with packing this way was that you couldn’t—or well, shouldn’t, put a dimensional storage item into another. She had tested it in the past, and let’s just say the results were… vacuous. She learned the hard way that things lived in the realm connected to dimensional storage items, but they weren’t all that strong—to her. She stuffed all the bags into her stone, claw-made chest and grasped it in her claw.

Anne looked around her former den and let out another blast of superheated air. She had lived in this small cavern for well over three hundred years, and for the first time, she was leaving it behind. She felt a strange pang of melancholy at the thought, but excitement quickly smothered that pitiful emotion. 

Leaving Zanathar Peak wasn’t anything new, as she had flown the skies above beneath many moons for food, but leaving for more than a day? That was new. It occurred to her that she didn’t know where Zanathar Peak was in the world—geologically. She had never seen a map before, and Zanathar Peak wasn’t ever mentioned in any of her books. Perhaps the humans had a different name for her resting place. 

She smiled at the thought of what she must do. She would have to scour the land for a settlement or a city, enter, and find her required bits of information—almost like… an adventurer. This would be her first quest. 

Anne’s jovial tail smacked thunderously on the stone floor, crackling webs and shards of stone launched into the air from her uncontrolled strength. Immediately, she turned and strode into the hallways of their—her father's abode. 

She traveled down the winding corridors until she reached the exit, a large open mouth of a cave that rested near the height of the peak itself. Peeking outwards, she saw a familiar sight. She could see miles upon miles of green and blue from up high upon the snowcapped mountains. The vast green forest below stretched farther than the eye could see, and large blue lakes sprinkled the picturesque landscape below. 

Anne took a few steps back to get a running start and then lept through the exit, fanning her large scarlet wings to take flight. Her wings caught the wind as she dived down low, and she pulled up from her dive, causing her to glide as she soared through the sky. She had no direction to fly toward. So, for the first time in her long life, she explored. 

She flew up high near the clouds for around an hour before dipping low to skim atop the treetops. The leaves were ruffling as she blasted by at unsurpassed speeds, and she scanned through the treetops, occasionally spotting the occasional fleeing deer, squirrel, and numerous colorful birds. 

She grabbed a deer for a quick snack and drank from a nearby lake before continuing in her search. The hours flew by peacefully before she noticed that the forest was beginning to thin, and off in the distance, she saw a settlement of civilization for the first time. 

It was small, certainly not one of the cities mentioned in her books, but most likely a home for thousands. She flapped her wings, picking up speed as she rose high up into the air to circle it from above. From her dragon-eyed view, she noticed it must have been a town or village. It was surrounded by a reasonably tall—for humans or their like—wall made from wooden logs, and within the walls lay what must have been hundreds of buildings. She watched as people walked down the busy streets like ants and planned her entrance.

Surrounding the wooden walls lay a good few miles of flatlands, containing pastures containing docile and domesticated animals, fields full of various agricultural crops, and smaller buildings, likely homes for the farmers. While the area was relatively flat, there were still copses of trees sprinkled across the landscape. One of the farms even had a circular layout, seemingly built around the copse itself. 

She knew they had little to no chance of spotting her up near the clouds. At most, they would see a faint red dot high in the sky if they even bothered to look up. She also knew that dragons weren’t welcome sights. To be fair, she understood why they wouldn’t want one of her kind to swoop in and see what was happening. Most, even her brothers and sisters, would have ransacked the place for their hoard and, in the process, gotten a quick snack or a few employees. 

Thankfully, she didn’t need to enter as a dragon. She could join their little settlement as one of their own. 

Anne tore away from the city and flew a few miles back into the forest before finding a small clearing in which to land. Taking off and flying was as simple as walking, but landing was always challenging. She lowered herself slowly, throwing the occasional mighty gust of wind with her flapping wings as she touched down, sinking into the forest floor with her claws.

Anne exhaled some superheated air in satisfaction before imagining herself as a human. Her form was coated in a red hue film before she shrank into that tiny orb of light. Just like when she shifted from human to dragon, the process seemed the same.

Seconds later, Anne stood in her human form in the now much larger-looking clearing and bent down to pick up her stone chest filled with her belongings. She flipped it right side up, then sorted through her bags of holding to find the one with her chosen outfit. Once she did, she took her time to equip the items like before, much faster now that she had experience. 

Now clothed, she attracted the now empty bag of holding onto her belt and picked up the large stone chest filled with the rest of her precious hoard with her human arms. She never really noticed how big it was before but realized it was pretty unwieldy to grasp in her human form. The span of her arms was just at the cusp of grasping the chest comfortably, but even so, it blocked her view with her now short stature. 

Realizing that this wouldn’t be a feasible way of transport, she dropped it onto the ground. The stone chest let out a loud thunk as its weight caused it to sink deep into the forest floor. She walked around the chest and clasped the stone handle attached to the side. Experimentally, she started to drag it after her and found that this would be a much easier mode of transportation. 

While it did leave a giant gouge into the forest floor, life was adaptable. Also, it wasn’t her responsibility. Once she got closer to the settlement, she would change her tactics. After all, she wouldn’t want a trail left behind for all to follow. 

Anne smiled as nervousness mixed in with excitement. She gave herself a good look over, ensuring she looked presentable before her foray into civilization. She wore a faint gray enchanted robe with silver and gold mixed into the seams, most likely from the mishap with her father. As a magical item from a dungeon, it morphed to fit her form. So, it was next to impossible for her to have it on wrong, even though it felt a little short. Her dark leather belt tied it off at the waist, and she had her bag of holding attached to its side. Her dark brown leather boots matched well with the rest of her ensemble, and her jewelry looked plain and straightforward—able to be worn with most outfits should she choose another.

Anne gave her cheeks a good slap, causing a boom to thunder out into the forest. Nearby colorful birds were shaken off their branches from the shockwave created, and they fluttered off elsewhere, fleeing from her presence as they should.

“Okay! My time is here! It's my moment!”

Anne grabbed her stone chest and began her trek toward civilization.