The first creature leapt not at me, but at Cassie. This proved to be a bad idea.

  Before it was even halfway to her Cassie had a Shield up, causing the poor thing to slam info a localised wall of force face first. She then hefted her wand and cast another spell, telekinetically grabbing the monster and slamming it into the stone floor. Hard.

  Meanwhile another two jumped out at me. I managed to cut down the first, side-stepping the body as it flew past me. The second managed to reach me and clamped down on my arm, absolutely ruining my sleeve but not really accomplishing much else.

  A quick spike of chitin through the mouth sorted it rather quickly, although even in death it remained attached to my arm. After a bit of wild shaking, I just moulded my arm around its teeth until it fell off.

  I spun in time to see Cassie repeating her performance with another creature, dropping it in a quickly spreading puddle that surrounded her. “I feel like you could be more efficient,” I called to her as I impaled a newcomer on my sword.

  “With what?” She asked. “My famously hard to control element? I don’t want to bring Mildred’s house down on her. Or us.” Another corpse added to the expanding puddle.

  “Fair enough,” I called back, ducking under yet another pounce as I lashed out with claw and blade alike.

  The assault continued, their numbers only growing as the little scaly fiends appeared from seemingly nowhere. Nonetheless, we continued to cut down the horde. I wasn’t really worried about me, since they had already proven that they couldn’t break through my chitin.

  I was worried for Cassie, though. She was using Shield almost constantly, since without her lightning it was her only spell quick enough to stop a pouncing monster. She seemed to be holding up fine, but I knew how stubborn she could be sometimes, so I wasn’t taking it at face value.

  As more and more monsters flooded the halls, I started thinking of ways to be more efficient. I could take them out easily, and defence wasn’t an issue, but I was just about limited to one at a time. Cassie had clearly come to a similar conclusion about her own methods, having turned to flinging her attackers at each other, causing small explosions of water upon collision as multiple died. Funnily enough, everywhere the creatures went turned as dry as bone.

  Turning my attention back to my own issue, I had an idea that I reckoned would be rather enjoyable. For me, anyway. I took a leaf from the many magical creatures that had decided that more limbs were better, and got to work.

  From my back sprang tendrils, tentacles and other such appendages, each of which was longer than I was tall and had strategically placed chitin blades formed on their edges. There were ten clustered on my back by the time I was done, and I spread my arms wide as these tentacles sprang to attention. I ignored the gentle buzzing in my brain as I readied myself to begin my clean-up operation and swept each of my towards the ever encroaching horde.

  Then I collapsed.

  As it turned out, the (mostly) human brain was absolutely not meant to process fourteen limbs at once, no matter the circumstances. It was definitely not meant to do so after being so used to a meagre four.

  The sensory information alone was overwhelming, not to mention the idea of actually controlling each of these things independently. I barely processed the feeling of being swarmed by the monsters. The only parts of me that they could even damage were my joints, all aptly protected by my spasming body, and my newly formed tentacles, which were devoured in seconds. Almost on instinct I cut of the connection to my brain, rescuing myself from the feeling of being unable to control my own body.

  I could still, just about, get a vague read on my body via my vitae, if I actively checked. I hadn’t really tried that before, since the situations I normally detached myself from had all been fairly dire. Even though the impressions I got were vague and instinctual, they were enough to allow me to dissolve my new tentacles.

  With that done, I hesitantly reconnected my brain, leaving out many of the signals for control and sticking just to sensory information. Once I was sure I could take it, I fully submersed myself back within my body.

  When I regained control of my body again, I discovered that I wasn’t exactly in a great position. I swiftly detached my brain from the majority of my sensory information again, because I really wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Wow, I really wish I’d thought to do that back fighting Matthais. Could have saved me a whole load of trouble.

  While my chitin was able to hold up to the attacks of these little creatures, it seemed that I was far from impenetrable. In the spot where my tentacles had been, the scaly fiends had managed to burrow into my shell, tearing into the softer flesh, muscle and fat beneath. They weren’t far in, because I hadn’t been out for long, but it was very unpleasant to see and, for a brief moment, feel.

  Rather than deal with that situation I simply reabsorbed most of my body, briefly shifting into the same form I’d taken to chase Hansen. After scuttling away and briefly facing a reality where I was smaller than these monsters, I shifted back into my bug-like form. On the spot I christened it my war-form, because I was tired of procrastinating naming it.

  “There you are!” Cassie called from the other side of the room. She was pressed up against the wall nearest to the stairwell, holding back the tide with spell after spell. She was looking strained, but no more than she should be after so much casting. “Where’d you go? I lost sight of you for a sec.”

  Thank the gods, she didn’t notice. She definitely would have freaked out if she’d seen that.

  “I was trying something out,” I called back, all the while grabbing, slashing and crushing the little fiends. “It didn’t work.”

  Cassie shot me a brief grimace, catching a monster in mid air and straight up snapping its neck, tossing the body into another one before it could dissolve properly. “Shame. Listen, I think we need to hold the stairs! There’s too many of them!”

  I briefly scanned the room, seeing yet more crawling out of the shadows. I didn’t know how there were so many, but they weren’t slowing down. I scooped down to grab my sword and made my way over to Cassie, making sure to stomp on as many of the little fiends as I could along the way.

  It didn’t take me long to get to her, which was good because she seemed all but tapped out. “You good?” I asked over the squealing, crunching and scampering of the monsters around us.

  “Just fine,” she panted. “We really need to go!” She gestured to the stairs with her free hand, barely managing to defend against the swelling horde. I could barely see the floor anymore, and the only thing stopping us from being overrun was the fact that they could only really come at us from one direction.

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  That wasn’t going to hold them forever, though. Their numbers seemed to be holding pretty steady, but that didn’t stop there from being way too many for two fighters of our calibre to deal with, especially with Cassie tapped out from before.

  “Yeah,” I grunted, slapping a flying creature out of the air. “Maybe the height advantage will help.”

  Before Cassie could answer she was distracted by the creatures. She still found the time to shoot me a look as she flung another creature away from her, all the while catching a second mid-air that was heading for her outstretched arm.

  “You’re meant to be sticking to simple stuff,” I pointed out as I slashed at a creature that tried to scuttle between my legs. “Two spells isn’t simple.”

  “Not the time,” she wheezed. She was starting to look pretty rough now. Her hair was plastered to her head from the sweat, and her skin was pale. Her hands were moving too much for me to tell, but if I knew the symptoms well enough they were probably shaking. Yet she still held out, managing the gestures all the same.

  I cursed under my breath. “Alright, time for you to go. You’re overdrawn. Come on, up you get.”

  She opened her mouth to argue, but I shoved myself between her and the horde. “No arguing. Up.”

  She huffed, but did as I said. I was relieved when she started to fall back, abandoning her position to start climbing the stairs. At the same time, the pressure mounted as I had to try and hold the stairwell alone.

  Almost immediately I started to struggle, barely catching several creatures as they tried to slip passed me. My body reacted instinctually, a single tendril slipping out from the top of my forearm. It wasn’t as long or complicated as the ones I’d tried to make, but it still kept the sharp edges, and for some reason I didn’t quite need to control it. I could, but it seemed to react on its own too.

  I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to puzzle out what was different about this strange new limb, so I just accepted it and pushed on. I found myself falling into a sort of flow state, almost anticipating where I needed to be.

  More of those tendrils rose and fell across my body, as long or short as they needed to be, present for a moment before vanishing back into vitae. I was barely cognisant of them, by the time there was more than one at once, my brain only capable of cataloguing whether or not I was holding the line.

  Somehow, despite the strain I was feeling across my entire body, I just managed it, for a while. The creatures crawled around me, leapt at me and bit me, but I held my point. I wasn’t really paying any attention to the individual creatures, or to myself. Each of us were a statistic, a binary figure of whether or not I had been passed. So long as I held the line, everything was fine. I could have been there seconds or hours, it wouldn’t have mattered.

  That said, as I began to slow down I recognised that it couldn’t last. Ever since my awakening, it had gotten rarer and rarer that I grew physically tired. It could happen, certainly, but more often it was my mind that failed me. It grew rarer still after my Changing, yet it was happening now. My reactions, both physical and in terms of my shifting, were getting sluggish.

  I knew that I was failing when the first creature made it beyond me, presumably chasing after Cassie in her weakened state. I swiftly executed it, but that served as a distraction that allowed more to scuttle past me. They also tried to take me down, clambering up my frame in an attempt to bring me to the floor. That didn’t end well for any that tried, but they were relentless enough to still prove a problem.

  My trance-like state of mind shattered, and I realised the carnage that had been wrought. I was wading through ankle-high water, although the water level was swiftly dropping. There were score marks from my sword, claws and tendrils all around me, although whether they were from misses or from simply slicing straight through the creatures I didn’t know.

  Shaking my head in a vain attempt to clear it, I staggered back as I tried to catch my breath. Suddenly I was being overrun, and it was all I could to make it back to the stairs. The moment I did a wall of cyan light enveloped the stairwell, causing the creatures to crash into it like a wave against the shore.

  All of the noise suddenly ceased and I realised how loud it was in the basement, the enclosed space ringing with the screams and shrieks of those awful things. Now that it was quiet, I felt almost physically affected by the lack of noise.

  “Well done, dear!” A raspy voice announced from behind me. I turned me weary head to see Mildred standing at the top of the stairs, looking down on me completely casually. “I would have stepped in earlier, but you looked like you were enjoying yourself.”

  Am I seeing things? Is she doing this?

  I would have answered back, but I simply couldn’t find the energy. Instead I began the treacherous, award-worthy climb up the ten steps that separated me from Mildred. A few seconds into my pilgrimage I felt a buzzing break out across my body, and a moment later a force lifted me and carried me the rest of the way up the stairs. It gently deposited me at the doorway to the storage room before disappearing, leaving me to slump over.

  After a moment of collecting myself, I looked up to see Cassie leaning against a wall, presumably having been similarly rescued by the geriatric woman in our midst. “Hey,” I groaned. “You’re looking… great.”

  She coughed out a laugh. “You should see yourself,” she commented.

  After a brief scan, I saw what she meant. At some point they must have figured out that they needed to target the same points on me with each attack, because they’d managed to break through my chitin in multiple places. Each of those wounds were weeping green blood, and were surrounded with scoring where their bites hadn’t quite landed in the right place. I hadn’t even noticed, because I’d never reconnected myself to my body’s pain response.

  “Damn,” I muttered. “I’m bleeding all over this nice carpet.” My priorities were clearly in the right place as I healed up my wounds, retracting the several blade-tipped tendrils that had sprouted up on my body like weeds. I’d deal with that later.

  For now I wanted to see what Mildred was doing, so I crawled back into the storage room until the basement was back in sight. The horde, which had been a screeching tidal wave when Cassie and I had been down there, were now sitting silently, staring at Mildred. Every single one of them, dead still.

  Mildred, who was staring intently at the stairs, looked down at me as I made my way slowly into the room. “Ah, you want to watch, dearie? Fair enough. Do be careful though, it may get a little bright.”

  With no further words, Mildred raised a hand and twisted it, her fingers writhing in a dozen ways that no joint should move. I noticed that her fingers had blackened like charcoal, with flakes of embers glowing as they moves. Unlike most mages I’d met, Mildred had clearly decided to make a show out of her spell, announcing her incantation loudly rather than muttering it to hide what she was casting.

  “Flamma Quae Mare Exurit!” Adding to the showmanship of her spell, Mildred raised both arms in time with the crescendo of her spell, the incantation coming out in a sing-song voice that I found rather impressive given her age.

  I watched in awe as light began to flare from the basement, the cyan shield shifting to a pale orange before settling on a scorching crimson as it held back the destruction being wrought behind it.

  Inside the ward, flames had erupted from every individual monster, cracking their scales from the inside as they escaped through mouths and eye sockets. However, these flames were not yellow, orange or even blue. They were white, through and through.

  As the monsters perished, their bodies liquidated in moments, attempting to form puddles to escape the flames. Yet somehow the fire latched onto the water like dry kindling, fuelling itself as it feasted upon the liquid. In less than ten seconds the water was consumed utterly, and just like that the fire disappeared again.

  The basement fell still and dark, the scarred stone melted in places and practically glowing in others, yet it still stood in one piece. I was pretty sure that shouldn’t be the case, but I had just watched fire eat water so I didn’t know what to believe.

  I hesitantly turned back to Mildred, who smiled kindly down at me. Her fingers were back to normal again, but if I really looked I was sure I could see a tiny flame flickering deep in her eyes. Or maybe I was seeing things. I wasn’t sure anymore.

  “Oh dear, you do look rather tired. Why don’t you and your friend come and have a seat in the living room, dear? I made you some more tea.” I was utterly flabbergasted at how casually she was acting about this entire situation, but I didn’t know what to do about it. Without a thought in my head, I found myself nodding along to her suggestion.

  “Wonderful!” Mildred trilled, pottering back out into the hallway. “Come along, come along. Your tea will get cold without you.”

  Extract from 'The Mage's Guide to Training With Dragons'

  "I am sure that many readers will have read the title of this volume and come to the conclusion that it is a fictional novel, perhaps even a comedic title of some sort. I am sure that many of you will be wondering how it could be anything else. I am completely certain that those of you who, upon completing your apprenticeships whilst displaying exceptional skill, are currently very confused why your master just handed you this volume with a completely serious expression while insisting you not show it to your colleagues.

  Let me be absolutely clear: This volume is a completely serious guide, and ignoring its instructions could have grave consequences should you find yourself in a situation to implement them. I beg that you learn these notes, that you may put them into practice at a moment's notice should you need to. This guide is targeted toward mages of such exceptional skill as to need it, so if you have somehow come across this guidebook, I imagine that you will never need to use it. Nevertheless, you will not be harmed by the knowledge contained within.

  With that preamble out of the way, I would first like to clear up a common and incredibly harmful myth: Dragons are not creatures of myth. They are living, breathing creatures. People, by every metric held by reasonable folk. In spite of that, they should not be treated like just another person. They all hold incredibly power, as well as the obscene lifespans to learn how to effectively leverage that power, whether it be physical, mental, magical or social.

  Next, I will run through a series of common introductory phrases to use upon meeting a dragon. The most frequently used for most of you will be 'Velthraxia Ichn Drage'. This is to be used when greeting an elder, or one who is greater than you in the social hierarchy. It can also be used informally as a greeting to one who you wish to acknowledge as superior to you, which is why it is the most common used from mage to dragon.

  The inverse of this phrase is 'Velthraxia Ichn Heme', to be used when addressing an inferior specimen. Of course, Middle Draconic is an incredibly context-dependent language. As such, you shouldn't be confused when a dragon that you are addressing responds using a similar yet altered phrase.

  For example, if a dragon were to great an inferior, they would instead say 'Velthraxea Ichno Heme'. The language itself changes based on the species and rank of the speaker. For those interested, the draconic form of the first greeting would be 'Velthraxea Ichne Draga'.

  Another phrase, again similar yet context dependent, is for use with draconic hatchlings. As dragons are educated in groups, those Archmages-in-the-making who are sent to study with a group of dragons will often have classmates, as their teacher will be a guardian of exactly four, with you joining as a potential fifth if you can prove yourself. This situation will demand two more phrases from you, depending on the age of the hatchlings.

  If the guardian's wards are still young enough to appear childlike when they take a humanoid form, then you should use the greeting 'Velthreseia Ichn Lesi'. If they are old enough to appear adult in humanoid form, or even be granted a degree of freedom of movement, then you should instead use the phrase 'Velthreseia Ichn Drago', which roughly translates to 'Hello, Great Child'. Despite seeming sarcastic when written in Althesian, it is seen as a sign of proper respect for those approaching adulthood.

  The final set of greeting phrases for you to memorise are those that will only ever be directed towards you. The first is an expression of derision: 'Velia Ichni Heme'. This has similar connotations to calling someone a weakling, and often times arguing back will lead to a trial of combat to determine the truth of this accusation. This is not advisory.

  Alternatively, dragons have an entire greeting phrase meant for those that they not only respect, but actively acknowledge. For those unaware, most dragons operate on a territory-based society, where one individual must have a good reason to enter another's territory. The only major exception to this is when hatchlings are involved, both for teaching and for assigning a guardian.

  If one is acknowledged by a dragon, for whatever reason, that means that they will be treated like another adult dragon, and the area around them, although smaller than a dragon's by necessity, will be treated with the same respect that they would treat another dragon's. This is an incredible honour, and will be recognised by the phrase 'Velthraxea Ichni Marche'. This roughly translates to 'Good Tidings, Magus', as much of draconic hierarchical structure is based upon magical strength. It is highly encouraged to return with 'Velthraxia ichn Frixze', which is the closest draconic has to a simple 'Hello' between equals. It is an incredibly formal language.

  Of course, relying solely on these greeting phrases will likely make you appear stilted and underqualified. This is intentional, as the best way to learn such a complicated language is through exposure. Many dragons, especially those that are currently guardians to a group of hatchlings, will aid you in learning to properly speak the language just so that they don't need to hear you speak it incorrectly.

  Remember, if you do not have the sufficient magical capacity for near-constant casting, then phrases beyond simple greetings will likely be beyond you, as the human throat is incapable of creating many of the sounds required by Middle Draconic. For example, aggression is dictated not by the raising of a voice but the layering of it, through the use of magic. This is just one of many ways that draconic society and language have developed around their huge magical ability, but that is a topic for another volume."

  Extract End

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