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Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

Tanarah held her breath, one hand to the rocky, dank inner cavern wall and the other stretched out for balance as she picked her way along. In recognition and celebration of their nineth birthday, her fathers — Daddy, in particular — had at long last consented to actually allowing her and her sister to begin practicing with real weapons. The sort that could kill someone, used properly, though Daddy had been sure to emphasize the very real danger and weight of responsibility that came with such things.

Tanarah had been, needless to say, thrilled.

Upon choosing what they wanted, their grandfather Kilian had set about to specially crafting to their needs as young learners. Tanarah proudly toted two, twin blades, each only an inch or so shorter than her forearm and similar to those that had imprinted to grandfather himself: too long to be merely daggers, but too short to be swords. Hers were not imprinted to her, but in practicing with them, Tanarah felt certain all the same that she would take her grandfather’s path in terms of class. She wanted to be a warrior.

Unfortunately, despite her certainty in that regard and best efforts to demonstrate her progress and readiness for proper hunting in her training sessions with her fathers, neither had consented yet to taking her or her sister on a real hunt. So, Tanarah was out on her own. She wanted her sister beside her for the proper part of it, of course, but given that she had never actually taken anything on before, she reasoned that scoping out the surrounding area, getting a feel for where an ideal location might be, and perhaps taking a stab at it herself first wouldn’t be out of order. She didn’t want Talanah to get hurt, after all, and while they generally performed best together, taking on a little of the initial risk herself in order to gain her bearings seemed very reasonable.

She crept further along the cove tunnel. To be entirely fair, she wasn’t exactly sure what she expected to find different than on any other given day, since she and her sister had often explored the rocky coves and outcroppings surrounding their house and on down the beach. Thus, when some hour or so of listless exploring came up all for naught, Tana supposed she oughn’t have been disappointed.

Except that she was.

Surely, if everyone who was anything hunted real beasts and everyone needed to face off against a certain number of dragons to prove their worth in stupid coming of age rituals before authority figures, dragons couldn’t be that hard to find. Eventually, she gave up on the coves and settled for moving farther out—as far down the rocks as she could get until the incoming swells were crashing up so close and so roughly against the rocks at her feet that she occasionally felt in danger of being swept away by them and out into the tide. When a particularly gutsy seabreeze dusted her cheek with ocean spray, the wind skittering through her hair and sending several loose tangles of black dancing into her face, she shoved her fingers back through them. Trapping and taming them — at least temporarily — she squinted out over the glimmering sea, white-yellow with the reflected light of the high sun, and then back, towards her house: a distant speck.

After careful examination of the way forward suggested that she would either need to stop where she was, or attempt to swim out and follow the shoreline to the next point with above-sea rocks—and risk being bashed against the breakwater—she frowned, and turned her sights up. Up. Up, up…

She crimped her fingers, ‘gripping’ and releasing empty air several times before leaning in to the rock, finding a grip and—with a hoist and a scramble, she began making her way. Fortunately, for her young and by virtue of that short limbs, the cliffside surrounding at least this particular shoreline made for a fairly simple climb: ample foot and hand grips, uneven spurts of ledges and grooves from within which to notch small fingers or boots—or even come to stopping points on.

Tanarah couldn’t be sure how far, exactly, she climbed, other than that looking down provided a satisfying amount of vertigo, and ample incentive not to fall. Then, she came upon a lip. Not simply a groove inward, but a full ledge that dug back into the rock, as though someone had cut a slice into the side of the cliff face. Hoisting herself onto it, Tanarah crouched. Even huddled down, balanced on the balls of her feet, if she reached up straight from the crouch, the tips of her fingers brushed the ‘ceiling’ of the groove. Narrow, but nicely flat, and deep.

She squinted into the darker shadows of the nook, scuffing her boots along rock and grit as she edged in a fraction deeper, away from the side of the cliff face. It almost looked as though something was glinti—

Before she could finish that thought, the source of the glint moved.

She froze.

For several seconds, her pulse beat hard in her throat: thrill, excitement, curiosity, and wariness all meshing together. Her fingers hopped to the hilt of one of the blades at her hip and fumbled to draw it. As she did, the glint stepped forward, one talon in the sun and then half of a brilliant, glimmering green body stretching out with all the lazy confidence of a feline as it turned keen, poison yellow-green eyes on her.

A dragon nest, she thought.

She had managed to come upon a real ysali dragon nest—with more than one, at that, apparently, since moments after the first crawled from the deeper shadows of its nook, answering scuffling and movement came from where it had just emerged. The only problem, Tanarah supposed, was determining how she might kill it.

This, she considered in retrospect, was something she likely ought to have thought through at some earlier point in more detai—

The dragon screeched. And lunged.

For all that ysali dragons were ‘well known’ to be the smallest and weakest of all dragon breeds—even going so far as to considered pathetic by some standards—there was something distinctly not pathetic, and in fact, rather more intimidating, about having the full weight of a poisonous, taloned, and toothed flying lizard acting as a battering ram against one’s chest. Tanarah’s back hit rock, a slash and clack of her blade only just managing to dissuade the beast’s teeth from sinking into her neck, but that was—apparently—only a very temporary persuasion, since the wailing, shrieking and snarling to follow suggested it was still very cross at having her over as a house guest.

She scrambled, boots scuffing earth as she tried to wrench her way away enough to actually attack but her feet only skidded on grit over stone, refusing to gain purchase for the first several seconds until—

“Kkkyyyyyyyeeeeeeiieeee!!” a second of the batch screeched, adding its two cents and causing her to cringe as she grit her teeth.

She kicked. “Off—get off!” she snapped, as though reasoning with them would help, and accompanied the words with a jab and roll. All of it felt ridiculously fast-paced. A rake of pain here as talons dug into her side. Dirt in her face and mouth. Loud chattering between so many vicious little beasts she thought she might go out of her mind, and they were going to rip her apart tugging at all ends of her like pack hunters fighting over a downed prey beast.

She snarled, kicking and twisting, lashing as she did. She wasn’t going to be—

But then, she spotted the poison. Green magic seeping out like a cloud. She stopped breathing, all but clawing at the earth to drag herself back and away. When her hand slipped, causing her to lurch with terrifying rapidity backwards and towards—oh gods, it was a long ways down. Tanarah wrenched herself around, onto her belly, and squirmed to jerk out of the light, sheer-fabric jacket on her top and crumple it, stuffing a portion into her mouth because maybe, if this particular poison was gaseous, it could spare her a half minute to breathe a little less of it. Then, ignoring the suffocating pound of her pulse in her throat, Tanarah wrestled out from beneath the current biting grip at her boot, and hoisted herself over the lip.

The frustrating thing about climbing was that, even on the best day, going down was never as easy as getting up, and — unfortunately — it was infinitely more important to do well. If something couldn’t be climbed to begin with, that had few negative repercussions. If something could not be gotten down from, well—things then became much more problematic.

Climbing down a rocky precipice to avoid poison while multiple dragons attempted to eat her was not on the list of fun and exciting new experiences Tanarah had ever really wanted to add to her list. They bit at her, roared, and dragged. Needless to say, she did not make it nearly as far down as she would have liked before things went truly afoul. One had purchase in her hair, and the other at her leg when a sharp yank dislodged any hope of real grip on the cliff face, and Tanarah was skittering, teetering, slipping—slipping—she lurched, kicking off in a split-second decision, away from the cliff entirely and—

She synched her arms around a scaly neck and legs messily around a taloned foreleg. The grip was poor, at first, and for the span of a half-breath she thought that surely this was, frustratingly, destined to be the moment she died. But then, a shuffle and twist—combined with the way the dragon conveniently jerked in a manner that actually accommodated a better grip due to the way it jostled her weight—and Tanarah was latched on.

This wasn’t, unfortunately, the end of the story, of course. Not only was the ysali decidedly not pleased at all to be used as an impromptu fall-stopper emergency parachute stand-in, but it was not an especially big beast, and with Tanarah saddled to it like an oversized package delivery, the beast began to lose altitude. Closer, closer, closer came the ocean. Tanarah’s heart stuttered against the cage of her chest—thud, thud, thud—in anticipation of opportunity, and then, as a wave swelled in: she let go.

Topple, twist, splash—!!

As the water enveloped her, rushing up around on every side, Tana kicked, diving down, down and out with the swell as it retreated, not wanting to be dragged back in with it only to be mashed nicely against the rocks. She knew she was bleeding. Knew that she might well either be poisoned or concussed, due to the spinning and needle-pricking dizziness in her head. But, more than that, she knew that right now, if she didn’t keep going right now, all her momentary upsets would be for naught because they would be the last of anything she ever experienced.

So, she kicked forward through the surf, holding her breath as long as she could and heading parallel to the shore, terrified that the moment she let her head come above water, she would have something after her head again. At the same time, however, she only had so much breath in her already overworked lungs, and needed to at least know where she was. Seconds later, she kicked to the surface, gasping, coughing, sputtering, and then biting back a groan as she squinted, pushing hair and water from her eyes in order to survey the scene.

It didn’t take long to spot the ysalis: a little green mass of them, bickering at each other and swirling around like overly large insects acting in disturbed hive mind. They must have at least temporarily lost track of her, to be so cross and self-focussed. Drawing as large of a breath as she could, Tana slipped back under the surf and began making her way towards the sandy, safer portion of the shore to beach herself.

By the time she made it, everything hurt. She spat out her jacket and wrung it out before pulling it onto herself, shaking her soaked hair, and then beginning the process of assessing her injuries. She was bleeding—no great surprise there—in multiple places. Arm, neck, cheek, side, hip, leg. Several looked as though they would benefit from quick attention by her father to insure they didn’t become grossly infected with ysali poison. Her clothes were tattered, and not even one ysali orb to show for it.

After crawling well away from the push-pull of the inward rolling surf, Tanarah flopped back into the dry sand, uncaring that it would stick to her, uncaring — for the moment — of how some of her issues may require fairly immediate attention. For now, the sand was warm, and as she glanced furtively towards the long cliff, its rocky expanse, and the jagged rocks at its base, a small, irrationally pleased laugh bubbled up from within her. Quiet, wheezing, and breathless at first, then fuller and more genuine.

So, very well, it had been a failure. But she had lived! And, gods, what a story to tell her sister when she got back—scaling high into the rocky peaks, braving the crashing surf, finding an alcove of real dragons, fighting them off for life and limb, attaining multiple battle wounds to prove it, and then all the rest! She had actually ridden one. Sort of. Or, rather clung to it from the underside in last ditch effort not to fall to her death, but really those were just details. She might, perhaps, eliminate a few unnecessary and embarrassing technicalities, but surely it was worthy of a good spin.

Gradually, an altogether far-too-pleased grin stretched its way onto her lips, baring white teeth behind dark skin with a satisfied glint, and she forced herself upwards, pushing to a sit and then a stand.

Really, it wasn’t so bad.

For a first attempt.