Gallery

The Mouse King arrived with an entire Court of Mice. The tinny sound of tiny trumpets caught Mantis’s attention, and she walked carefully towards the royal procession, eyeing the trumpeters and drummers, the soldiers marching in step in their neatly-pressed uniforms, and the royal carriage in which a velvet-lined wallet lay inside out for the Mouse King and Mouse Prince Consort to sit upon and chat as they were pulled along by two harnessed orchid mantises. Mantis gave an excitable b...

One day, a strange effigy appeared too close to his territory. It glowed brightly in the calm of night with strings of lights that thrummed even from a distance. Made of dead grass and red decoration, it looked like a suitable sacrifice to some terrible god. Shasi and Yetzu waited as patiently as they could together for the night when flames would consume the crude recreation of a goat, when they could, from a distance, enjoy something great and terrible, and the horrible people gathering wou...

A dark shape slithered under the ice, a shadow approaching a ship. Had anyone seen her, they might have been alarmed, but as it was, they had too many other things to worry about. First, they had sailed too far north, into waters that were far too cold already, at the wrong time of year. Second, the ice had begun to form its winter shape, thick and heavy almost overnight. Some of the men came out with picks and hammers, but the progress they made was miniscule, and they were for...

In the dream, there was a dome of glass. Hooves moved as if running on the ground as the dragon glided smoothly through the air. The gleam of its nose always told it when it was too close; the glass distorted the glow and its own faint reflection, twisted, elongated in nearly the same way no matter where it approached. Its ears pinned back, and it tipped its head forward, tapped its velvet-covered antlers against the glass. The noise was soft, high, short — surely fragile, but...

The world below was cold and still. The snow gleamed in the moonlight, softly glowed save for where it was broken by countless steps, belonging to person, animal, and dragon alike. There were many places where the paths diverged, where people peeled off towards a village and where various herds went their own ways. Morrigan wasn’t quite following them, but there wasn’t much to look at tonight. There were a few clouds higher up and in the distance, and most other birds had wisely mi...

It didn’t have to be this way. They’d gotten along for long enough, stayed out of each other’s way when necessary and worked together when needs must. They could have stayed peaceable, could have made it to the end as a team rather than turning against each other at the last minute. He’d tried to be reasonable, but Flamekeeper stomped closer to the half-built bower nest Igni had been working tirelessly on for days now. Long stalks of grass had been woven by beak and by f...

The stars wheeled slowly overhead. They were far from the only spectators of the four dragons moving below — countless empty eyes peered through the tall savanna grass, following the flickering flames of the two dragons that took the lead. Flamekeeper and Igni blazed a path through the dark, pushing the shadows back, but the surrounding gloom always pressed back again and quickly, a suffocating presence that dimmed the light of the skies overhead, wisps and tendrils of shades flickering jus...

Flamekeeper’s long antennae twitched, her head perking up at the distant but distinct feeling of change. Something in the air — a sudden drop in pressure as the wind picked up, rustled through the tall grass that sprawled in every direction in great rolling plains. Overhead, the white clouds began to billow and build, growing dark with rain. “Something’s coming,” Flamekeeper said, unable to keep the anticipation out of her voice, the undeniable thrill. Igni’s flame...

Jack knew this place. Even overgrown: the flowers choked with weeds, the trees with dead limbs untrimmed and dragging the ground, the ivy that covered everything like a carpet except for the pond which was green with algae — Jack recognized the palace gardens. The sky was empty, devoid of sun, moon, or stars. No clouds, no breeze, just an aching sense of emptiness that stretched on and on to a dark, muddied horizon without any of the landmarks Jack could recognize. It wasn’t...

Lia found the hut perched precariously on the edge a floating island. It was, quite literally, perched — long legs sprawled akimbo from the bottom of the quaint cottage, at the ends of which were birdlike feet which curled around the angle of the cliff. The cottage itself was even and level, but it was precariously suspended above a rolling sea of clouds and a fathomless plummet to the bottom. Near the hut were a handful of dragons, some romping happily through the heath while others...

The breath between winter and spring stirred a sense of nostalgia that Jack did their best to ignore. They were partial to winter; the cold and the dark were familiar friends and made the brief flashes of warmth and light all the more meaningful. Then, a lifetime ago, they had been prodded and plied until they let summer in. They’d found themself in love with the transient seasons between the extremes, in the new growth of spring and the slow settle of autumn. That lifetime was gone ...

Jack had been simply minding their own business when Keshet lost her mind. They’d been hard at work, deciphering a runic text that had fallen through the Chronoscape to find if it contained anything useful when they heard a series of worrying clinks that only got faster as the minute dragged on, accompanied by absolute pandemonium inside their skull. Jack was not great at tuning out their dragons. They got better at it, as time went on and as more voices joined the cacophony, ...

Keshet was flying high over a red desert, the sand turned into shades of fire by the setting sun. Wickedly sharp rocks cut through the light like claws, casting long, dark shadows, as if night had started coming up from the ground. It was pure luck that the glint glanced off her eye, that it had been caught by the sun, that she was the exact type of dragon that she was, that she immediately folded her wings and dove towards the ground, half thinking that she would have something shiny ...