The harder you step on nature's tail, the louder she'll bawl. And the harder she'll bite you when she, sooner or later, inevitably does – not for revenge, but simply to get you to move your foot, you poor dolt.

Fact of life

"... but there are nights when the branches of the ancient trees of the Great Forest part and the moons' silver rays fall on the dark world of the Alae. These are nights of immense merriment, when all Al Emenayit Eale gather on the banks of the underground Dar Lake and sing Sheamiea – the great song of life. Turning their snouts to the sky, they praise the Infinite and their exalted Nae, while Alasais benevolently turns her gaze upon them. The light of Her Eyes penetrates the earth, rendering even the rocky depths transparent like the flesh of a glass frog.

This gigantic lens, strewn with mica sheets of fallen leaves, jagged with roots and animals' burrows, scatters across the lake's smooth surface a thousand rainbow speckles. Dar comes alive. Myriad tiny translucent fish rise up from its depths, their scales ablaze with colored flames, ever brighter; the fans of their fins open and, whirling in a frantic dance, one after another they begin their ascent..."

It was on this verbose moment that Anar's literary journey through the "mysterious depths of the Great Forest" was fated to end. The Alae rubbed his bruise and slipped the book into his rucksack. His Highness' head had been tormenting him depressingly often the past few days. Apparently, Anar's intuition had decided to take a long-awaited vacation, along with his internal thought-filtering censor and royal manners.

Any normal hero desiring to advance towards his crusade's end must mature; he must transform himself from a reckless adventure-seeker into a full-blown Hero: a creature of presence, swollen with pride at the awareness of his own strength and the gravity of his chosen path. But Anar and Aniallu clearly didn't fall within the category of "normal heroes." The deeper the passages of the Forbidden Catacombs took them, the more Alasais' wise Shadow resembled one of those "wool-eared bimbos" who only knew how to hang around gossiping while nibbling on mouse ears swiped from others' pockets. And the sianae's companion was no better, showering her with questions (each more inappropriate than the last), scampering about the tunnels with "unseemly friskiness" and laying endless plans for the future.

Before long the notebook he kept for recording said plans came to resemble a rich Anlimorean bachelor's dance card at a fancy ball, with scads of names, addresses, dates and appointments scrawled upon it. He wanted to travel around Naeria in its entirety: from high-in-the-clouds Briaellar to the underwater I'nel'or; from rakish, bohemian Lar'aert'aemori to punctilious Elidan; from Agadar Academy, where he might still find some traces of his stolen childhood, where he had first decidedly opposed his deranged mother, found best friends and met Aniallu, to the enigmatic Dream Valley – a realm of stupefying mists that had bound firmly his parents... the dragon, Lord of Wind, and the cat, Alasais.

Anar could not recall without smiling the thing that had prompted him and Aniallu to talk about the rather unique genealogy of his supposedly pureblooded highness. It had all begun with a yet another incidence of Anar's "sleep-flying."

He bumped against something and woke up. Something cold and rough scraped his temple, almost tearing the skin. Anar opened his eyes – was it a stalactite... or a stalagmite? He could never remember. Gravity had lost its power over the Alae, and he couldn't say with certainty just where his sleeping body had ended up. Was he hovering under the ceiling of a cavern, or hanging over its floor? Grumbling, Anar grabbed on to the unidentified stone formation and twisted his arm so as to turn away from it. A gaping chasm yawned before him. A suspension bridge, like a flimsy olive ribbon, joined the precipitous walls of a colossal ravine. It jutted out from the base of a wide stone staircase at the bottom of which slept Aniallu, curled up in the cup of a dried fountain. She looked like a scoop of ice cream in a bowl. Anar's bedding cooled slowly not far away...

He scowled in annoyance – it was hard to imagine a more ridiculous situation to find oneself in. Anar couldn't resort to a "normal" levitation spell. The space surrounding him was teeming with traps set to spring in response to any such magic. He did not know how to manage the mysterious force that turned him into a flying kite, nor what sins he had committed to merit such punishment. He could only hope that he'd be able to push off the ceiling and land safely on the bridge. Anar spun in place a few times to get the right angle, then kicked the stalactite and off he went. But instead of gliding in a smooth arc towards the staircase, he plummeted like a rock, straight down.

The wind whistled in his ears as he fell, bringing tears to his eyes, pressing his quivering entrails against his spine from the inside. His own shirt, puffed up like a bubble, seemed to want to strangle him with the loop of his collar, the top button cutting into his throat. The Alae shapeshifted. Straightening himself out with a few powerful waves of the tail, he stretched to his full length, opened his paws and spread his fingers. The air slid through them like smooth silk, mercilessly beating the membranes.

Although Anar was suffering in silence, Aniallu still sensed something was amiss. Leaping from her "bowl," she hustled to the bridge and spread herself out over it crosswise, then thundered:

"Stop falling at once!"

This irritated cry struck Anar like a whip. He was so shocked he couldn't at first comprehend... that he was no longer falling. The air had once more caught him up in an invisible net.

"That's better," mumbled Aniallu. "How did you get up there?"

Anar had no choice but to impart the tale of his misfortune to her.

"Could you get a rope?" he asked.

"Nope. It would be a shame not to take advantage of this opportunity to educate you."

"Are you mocking me?" Anar muttered, offended.

Tugging with his paws awkwardly, he floundered in the air, endeavoring to look this whiskered spiny anteater in the eyes. The same eyes that were laughing back at him.

"Can we then?"

"And just what, dear school mistress, do you want me to do?"

"Fly to me!"

"How?

"Want it and fly."

Anar wanted it desperately, but no matter how piercingly he stared at Aniallu, imagining himself standing next to her, he couldn't budge an inch. He was already starting to lose patience when the sianae squinted slyly and, signaling for him to wait, disappeared beneath the lip of the bridge. She came back momentarily, but instead of holding the coveted rope, her hand was smeared pink by a large chunk of salmon. Waving it in the air, she tried to lure Anar towards her as one would a coddled house cat.

"Heeere kitty kitty! Come on, fly to me, kitty. Ah, what a nice chunk of fish I've got here! Fresh, thick, yummy in your tummy! Heeere kitty kitty kitty!"

The salmon really did smell intoxicatingly good. Anar thought he'd never smelled anything better in all his life. His whiskers tilted forward unequivocally; his tummy rumbled demandingly.

"Ooo, you better watch out or I'll eat it myself," the sianae went on, dividing the chunk into two halves connected by a thin silvery skin and sniffing them greedily. "My mouth's watering so much I could drown! Come on now, before it dries up!"

Anar swallowed hard. The salmon occupied his attention entirely. It called to him, held him spellbound; it seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger... until he stuck his nose in it.

Aniallu tossed the chunk away, grabbed Anar by the scruff of the neck, and pulled him to the bridge.

"That's how you do it, just without the fish."

Not completely understanding her words, the golden cat growled indignantly.

"I'm not taking it away from you. Here, enjoy. I'm just saying, for future reference."

Anar threw himself at the treat with a hungry growl befitting such a situation. The fish disappeared painfully soon, and he licked the floor a couple times in vexation, gathering the last morsels.

"There you are. Someone's satisfied, while someone else is going to smell like yummy fish all day and want to devour herself," mumbled Aniallu, her fingers twitching squeamishly.

Anar felt ashamed of his selfish outburst. A true knight, he resolved not to abandon the lovely maiden in her time of need and, leaving the floor alone, moved on to her hands. He was perfectly straight-faced licking her pink wrists as she twisted them this way and that, shutting her eyes tight with pleasure with charming immodesty...

"Hey, like it or not, we're going to have to bind your paw for the night," Alu said finally.

"No need. You'll have an excuse to give me that incredibly delicious treat again," Anar exhaled blissfully, reluctantly letting her go. "Or... or it wasn't about the fish? You did something to my head, didn't you?"

Aniallu nodded. She looked abashed and was obviously surprised when Anar announced:

"Exquisite flavor! You ought to use it more often."

"And you don't mind that I got up in your head?"

"No. It wasn't a sock you convinced me to gobble down, after all. And then, my precious royal hide was in danger."

"In the good old days that wouldn't have seemed a good enough justification for you," Aniallu noticed.

"The old days... As far as I understand it, my spontaneous take-offs were... a blast from the past? Can you explain how I do it?"

"No, of course not. I can't do it, after all," Aniallu shrugged.

"How can I do something a tal sianae can't?" Anar persisted.

"It's commonplace. Tal Sianae Aniallu is a purebred Alae, a true daughter of Alasais. The heir to the throne of Rual is a halfbreed, heathen spawn," Alu added.

"Do you mean to say I've inherited these tricks from my father? Can a gift from a foreign god even be inherited? And why are you calling me a halfbreed for the second time already? Or... my dad... was he an elf? Or a human?"

"No. Worse," Aniallu assumed a sorrowful grimace. "He's a draaagon! A Mercurion's Dragon – a spike-tailed progeny of our Lord of Wind[1].

"But dragons are... sooo big..." Anar stepped back, dumbfounded. He stood fast, lifting his front paw in amazement, exactly like a kitten seeing his reflection in the mirror for the first time. Juxtaposed with his menacing muzzle, the sight was most amusing.

To avoid bursting out laughing, Aniallu shifted as well.

"Yes, dragons are tall," she let out a muffled bark of laughter. "Actually, like us, they have a couple forms they can take."

"But it can't be!" Anar banged his tail against the floor in frustration. "I don't have scales, or wings..." he involuntarily glanced behind his back and was immediately ashamed of it, judging by his flushed nose.

Aniallu lowered her eyes, pretending she hadn't noticed.

"We're too... different!" he went on. "This time you're mocking me for sure, right?"

"No, I'm not!" she said firmly, not leaving him any hope. "In the name of the Great and Furry! Can you really know so little about yourself? Amialis never told you about Krian, or about Dragon Fangs and Dream Valley?"

"I've heard of the last two. They're the places my mother traveled to once, by the will of the goddess. The Dream Valley was where she met my father – an Alae, I always thought – languishing in isolation from other cats," Anar uttered, using distinct, choppy phrases. "Mother rescued him from that putrid swamp that strips creatures of their sanity. Except, to her misfortune, she fell in love with him... and brought him to Rual..."

"And what happened next?" Aniallu urged him on. "Go on, tell me," she gestured impatiently, "and then I have something to tell you, too." She laid one paw on the ground, then the other, stretched out to her full length, put her head on her folded paws, and pricked up her ears.

"But my father, as it turned out," Anar went on, "brought the putrid stench of a foreign faith to our blessed city, which had already poisoned him from within. He was beyond curing, and so the priests advised her to exile him. But mother... mother left with him, wanting to heal him of this monstrous affliction and bring him back to the city a true servant of Alasais. Then the priests became convinced that she too had succumbed to the temptation of this wicked, foreign god, and when Amialis protested their order to kill her husband and return, they forced her to renounce the throne. That's it... I think. And for the name 'Krian,' I've just now heard it from you for the first time. My mother never told me... what my father's name was."

Aniallu was silent for a moment. "Krian, Krian an Saei. He wasn't a purebred dragon. Krian was visiting his granny in the Dream Valley, the same woman you inherited your gift of visions from. That's where he met your mother. They fell in love and got married, and she planned to bring him to Rual to rule beside her. But this order was too tall for even your almighty mommy. The priests bristled at the prospect of being ruled by a non-Alae, and declared that they wouldn't tolerate it. Amialis was outraged and publicly abdicated. She later regretted it very much, but it was too late. And that's the whole tale. She wasn't saving anyone, and Alasais wasn't ordering her to do anything. Amialis didn't used to be the way she is now... In her youth she brazenly broke the priests' interdict in going out for a look at the outside world, and I told you what happened next. As to how you can fly without the aid of magic, that's because your race is somewhat akin to the wind and the air."

"Unbelievable..."

"Mercurion's dragons are extremely freedom-loving. All of them would have considered my trick with the salmon a gross offense, far too intrusive... Yes, that would be the very best case scenario."

"And the worst?" Anar inquired.

"Something like rape, only worse. Suggesting a thought or desire to a dragon is the most heinous of crimes, deserving of punishment by death."

Anar whistled.

"Then I guess we should be glad I'm only half dragon... Are there many such... volatile hybrids like me in Enhiarg?"

"About thirty or forty. We Alae are known for our ability to procreate with practically any sentient creature who more or less fits... err, our size."

"And half-breeds aren't considered... freaks?"

"No. They're considered lucky," Aniallu said with a sigh of envy.

"Why would that be?"

"Because Alaean blood works like a catalyst, significantly boosting the natural abilities inherited from the other parent. Let's say a glowworm father (that is, an Elaanite) and an Alae mother have a child. Their son or daughter will be able to command lightning that flies a lot further, penetrates defensive barriers more easily, and inflicts a lot more damage than dad's lightning. And you've got to admit – that is something to envy."

"How are these abilities transmitted from parent to offspring? Through the body or the soul? Or the spirit?"

"The spirit."

"And how exactly does that go down?"

The sianae gave a silent moan. His insatiable curiosity was obviously not about to subside any time soon.

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[1] For information on Mercurion's dragons, see Appendix 2.