“For god’s sake, Bargleblaster! Cool your jets!” I bellowed over the rushing wind.

  “You’re not my dad!” the green dragon snapped at me.

  “I–” I didn’t have a comeback.

  “Hah!” Bargleblaster swooped low, leaving another trail of brown smoke behind him as he unleashed his breath attack on an unsuspecting herd of surprisingly adorable deer-cats. I had no idea what their proper name was, but they looked like cats with weirdly elongated legs, bouncing along like kittens chasing an invisible ball when a dragon wasn’t dive bombing them.

  They meowed loudly as they burned to death in Bargleblaster’s poop fumes.

  “Jace, how did Dagrun keep this idiot under control?”

  The red dragon shrugged mid-flight, which was impressive. I always stuttered and dropped when I tried to do that. “We were up in the mountains. Once you’ve killed a thousand yetis, it loses its charm.”

  “How many yetis are there?”

  “Oh, loads. They breed like rabbits. Have you considered a new line of cyborgs? They’d make pretty good pilots, I reckon.”

  “No, I haven’t– that’s not a terrible idea, if there’s that many of them.” I filed that one away for later consideration. “What kind of punishments did you get?”

  “Disapproval. Dagrun just had a way about it. If he was really off, she’d seal him in his lair, but usually a disappointed comment would do the trick.”

  “Jace, Baconbaker doesn’t strike me as the kind of dragon that a headshake would work on.”

  “You saw the size of her head, right?”

  I pondered it for a moment. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  I opted for a different approach in the end. By constantly flying behind and below him, I was able to intercept the green sociopath every time it looked like he was going to stoop on more innocent wildlife. Hunting for food was fine, slaughtering flocks or herds, or whatever the collective pronoun was for these cat-monsters might be, was not ok.

  “But I get gold!” Bargleblaster complained.

  “Bagle-ator, there are better ways to get gold!” I argued when I finally got the little bastard to explain his motives. “And you must have made a pile of shinies at the battle.”

  “Oh yeah, I did. Nearly a hundred K!” he bragged.

  “Kid, I made a billion, with a Carl Sagan B, at the auction. Killing isn’t the best way to make gold.”

  “A billion?”

  “Yeah.”

  He flicked his wings and threw himself at me, tangling my wings as he landed on my back. The spike at the end of his tail slammed down into my back. “Gimme!” he snarled.

  Six of my eight tails curled up and shoved him away, then my wings snapped back out to turn a plummet into falling with style.

  “Dammit, Baconbummer! The hell is wrong with you?”

  “If we kill you, we get your hoard,” he snarled. I watched as the muscles on his back contracted for a breath attack.

  “If you hit me with your shit-breath, I will end you. You won’t beat me, and I’m being very forgiving about that little assassination attempt. Don’t spoil it.”

  He reluctantly relaxed, brown smoke rising from his nostrils as he turned his head back to the front. How many rich dragons did I know? Other than Dagrun, and frankly, she was too big to even think about taking on anytime soon.

  “Not fair.”

  “Bankingbonker, we’re going to a place with unicorns! Actual unicorns, real-life my little ponies with all the friendship you could desire. All I want is the horns; you can have the rest. Good gold, premium biomass, it’s a win for you!”

  “Why us?” asked Jace from off to my right.

  “You guys deserve the good stuff.”

  “Probe that up your arse, Bob,” the red dragon replied with a chuckle. “Real reason?”

  “You guys are the only two who can shapeshift. We won’t be able to fight as dragons under the trees, according to Kat.”

  “Why not just burn the forest down and drive them into the open?” Bargleblaster snapped. “We’re dragons, duh.”

  “Because we don’t want to piss off the elves more than we have to.”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  The Sylvan Silverbark was a vast, primordial forest. Situated hundreds of miles east of the last Imperial settlement of the human nation, it rose like the earth had decided to become a furry, cladding the ground in bristles.

  Said bristles reached a couple of hundred metres high in places, and as they were mostly evergreens, even with the thin layer of snow that covered the rest of the land, they looked vibrant and alive. We circled down and landed at the edge of the woods, shadows growing darker as the densely packed trunks hid beneath their own canopies.

  I shifted back to my human form and pulled out a set of clothes. Tossing a pile of tunics and trousers onto a nearby rock for the other two to use. When I turned back, I found Bargleblaster was nearly seven feet tall as a human. Tanned skin, black hair and deep green eyes peeking out from beneath the unruly mop.

  “You did not look like that back on earth,” I muttered.

  “I improved things a bit.”

  “No way did you have that chin.” It was lantern-like, rectangular, and could only exist in a meme.

  “What about him!” Bargleblaster snapped, waving a hand at Jace.

  “...That’s… not human,” I said thoughtfully.

  Jace appeared to be a little grey man, with large almond-shaped eyes of total darkness set above a nub of a nose and a lipless slit of a mouth. He shrugged, the tunic sagging at the shoulders, and his trousers fell down. I tossed him a belt.

  “I’m not a human, so why would I choose to look like one?” Jace grumbled as he pulled his trousers up and cinched the belt tight.

  “Peer pressure?” I offered.

  “You don’t strike me as someone who succumbs to that. Why should I?”

  “Fair enough. Let me go first. I don’t want you guys getting hurt. I’ll grab them, you bag them. Ok?”

  “We aren’t delicate little humans… humanoids,” Bargleblaster corrected at a glare from Jace. “We’re dragons too.”

  “Which of us has god forged scales?”

  “You do,” Bargleblaster muttered, swinging a foot back and forth to scuff at the snow.

  “And which of us hasn’t spent all their time in this world hidden away on a mountain top?”

  “Well, you, but–” Jace began.

  “So I go first. I grab ‘em, you put them down. That’s the deal.”

  “Fine,” they both grumbled.

  Stepping into the forest was like entering a whole new world. The air tasted different. The tang of the cold mixed with the pitch and pine scent of ancient evergreens. I glanced around nervously for a moment, then strode forward. If I were playing bait, I might as well put on a good show.

  Winter changes nature. Things sleep. There are no baby butterflies or stoats frollicking through the greenery. Either you got enough food to survive the cold months, or you didn’t. There’s an austere beauty to it, and as we headed into the woods, threading our way through the trunks and keeping our eyes and ears open for trouble, I found a weird sense of peace.

  A peace that nearly proved to be my undoing. Something pinged off my shoulder, knocking me onto my back on the ground. Floor-Is-Lava flipped me back to my feet in an instant. I didn’t even need to think about using the Dragon-Fu move.

  But I was too slow. Bargleblaster had already rushed past me, long legs eating up the distance as his bony skull smashed through the lowest branches. He vanished into a bush, thorns and spiky leaves scattering in his wake.

  “Dammit!” I snarled, but before I could move, he emerged with a three-foot-long snake dangling from his right hand.

  “Store it. Level thirty-four, and I got six hundred gold for it!” he said happily.

  “What was it?”

  “Slithering Snoot Shooter. Should we feel bad about killing other lizards?” Bargleblaster asked with disarming honesty.

  “Hell no,” I said. “Meat is meat. And it ruined this tunic. The bastard deserved it.” I looked at the long rent in the shoulder of my tunic. It hadn’t been an expensive one… but it was still mine, and like most car insurance companies, I rarely felt that repair was the most cost-effective option.

  A series of ambushes followed. Jace and Bunglebouncer got a series of kills, and after a brief interrogation each time, I began to notice a pattern.

  “They’re giving us more gold than they should.”

  “Nah. Yetis give like three-hundred times their level,” Jace said as he walked carefully in my shadow. We’d found a couple of species, something like a beaver crossed with a funnelweb spider, that liked to strike the weaker members of the party. My reflexes had been put to the test.

  “Most stuff only gives a hundred times, at best.” I was pretty sure of those numbers. Outside of sentient species that was.

  “The humans gave ten to two hundred times their levels,” Bargleblaster offered. “Maybe these fuckers are smart.”

  “I hope not, because if they are, then we could be in trouble,” I mumbled, eyeing the trees and shadows suspiciously. We had left the edge of the forest behind us hours ago.

  “Nothing they can do against us. We’re dragons, baby!” the wannabe-Asgardian crowed, waving his fists in the air over his head.

  “When you’re deep in enemy territory, it is best not to draw too much attention. When we investigated a new planet for assimilation, the forerunners always suffered heavy losses if they triggered widespread awareness of their presence,” Jace replied, his depthless eyes moving from side to side. “I wish I had my probe.”

  The attacks became more coordinated as we kept going. Snakes, unibunnies, beaver-monsters, rolling blobs of leaf mould that dropped from above and tried to smother us. We became twitchier, snapping warnings and instructions as the environment forced us to focus on survival.

  The boys, well, the boy larping as Thor and the little grey dude, both had cuts and gashes, their clothes torn and stained with blood by the time we cautiously entered an open meadow hidden deep in the forest. I glanced up and felt a flood of relief as I saw the sky for the first time in hours.

  The bushes rustled. Beady eyes caught the sun, staring out at us as we put our backs together and raised our fists.

  They emerged into the light slowly. Monstrous versions of things I’d have considered cute back on Earth. There wasn’t a wolf, bear or tiger among them. I’m not weird for thinking snakes are cute, and there were a lot of snakes. They slithered between the legs of the larger creatures, hissing as they slid towards the front of the formation.

  We turned slowly, trying to keep everything in view, our backs pressed together forming a triangle of draconic doom. It was a waiting game. Whoever moved first would set the battle in motion, and then the chips would fall according to fate.

  I was fine. Clear sky above me, scales reforged by that asshole Tesla, whatever happened, I’d be fine. But the thought of turning up at Dagrun’s place to get my egg back for Esme and having to explain why a couple of her charges had died didn’t bode well. Size does matter in some circumstances, and Dagrun had the advantage in that regard.

  “Wait for it,” I muttered. I could feel their backs tensing as they prepared a breath attack against the adorable army of fuzzies gathered around us.

  “For how long? We should probe and be gone,” Jace muttered.

  “What is it with you and probing?” Bargleblaster demanded.

  “Unto each their own.” The mob around us parted directly ahead of me, and I saw my first unicorn.

  “I expected you to be taller,” I said. “Hand over the horn, and no one has to get hurt.”