Nichal lay on the bed in the ruined ziggurat in Somber Tune, watching Master Sai work at the alchemy set in the corner. He'd laid down on top of the bedclothes to wait. He watched Master Sai use his scaled hand to grab the beaker full of wyrmsblood that he had processed. They had managed to find a burnished scale in a small set of ruins high in the western foothills. Master Sai had insisted it had belonged to one of the drakes that infested the ruins, but Nichal was certain it was too large to have come from them. Then it had just been a matter of time before Master Sai had managed to make the wyrmsblood into the potion that would give Nichal the strength of the Great Ones. And here they were.

  Master Sai sighed. "I don't have anything to bind you to the bed," he said, striding to Nichal's side. "So hopefully your reaction to this won't be as violent as orcs' tend to be."

  Nichal's eyes narrowed. "What?" he asked. Then he spotted the stiletto in the orc's other hand. "Is that a knife?" he asked.

  "It has to go in the blood," said Master Sai. Without any warning, he jabbed the knife into Nichal's shoulder. Nichal only cried out briefly. "Here goes…" Master Sai said. He twisted the knife to open the wound and poured the wyrmsblood into the gash.

  Nichal screamed. It felt as though Master Sai had poured raw fire directly into his veins. It was not long before the fire spread everywhere within him, searing away his flesh, his vision, his thoughts. He thrashed. He bit. He rolled. But mostly, he screamed.

  And then it was done. He was still lying in the bed in the ruined ziggurat in Somber Tune, staring up at what remained of the ceiling. He heard the scratching of Master Sai's charcoals as he wrote at the table with the alchemy set. He felt the chill of the air of the Vale pricking at his scales. But mostly he felt as if every muscle in his body was on the verge of falling asleep. Or perhaps the opposite: as if they were just waking up.

  Nichal pushed himself out of the bed and took a shaky step towards Master Sai. Everything still tingled, but it was somehow different from the pins and needles of sleeping muscles. His legs were sturdy, and putting weight on them did not change the sensation flowing through them. Master Sai turned around to face him while the lizard stared at his hands. What was happening?

  "Well, you're not dead," said Master Sai. "That's generally a good sign."

  "I feel…" Nichal began to say. But how did he feel? "Odd." He blinked. That was a new word, but it was very accurate. "Everything feels odd."

  "Can you be more specific?" asked Master Sai. "I've never done this on a lizard before, so the more precise you can be, the more likely I'll be able to refine the procedure." He spun back around on his stool. "Wait, let me write this down."

  "I…" Nichal tried to say, but he shook his head. "I don't have the words." He looked around the room. It wasn't just him. Somehow, the walls tingled too. And the bed behind him, with its newly-shredded blankets. Had he done that? How long had he been out? "Everything… vibrates." Vibrates was good. He didn't know how he knew the word, though.

  "That's another good sign," said Master Sai, scribbling in his journal. "That's how the mana feels to the dragons."

  Nichal nodded. He didn't know what that meant, but he knew it was correct. "Mana?" he asked.

  Master Sai put down his charcoal and stood up from the table. "It's a Kinosian word that made it into Draconic unchanged," he said, walking a circle around Nichal, who craned his head around to follow the orc's movement. Master Sai was holding out his golden arm as though he were feeling the air around the lizard. "It's the energy that the gods used to create the world. It's in everything."

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "Everything feels like this to you?" Nichal asked.

  Master Sai shook his head. "I can only feel it in my arm," he said.

  "That's why you feel everything with your bad hand," Nichal said. Words seemed to be coming much easier than he remembered.

  "It is," said Master Sai, stepping back a few paces from Nichal. He pointed a single talon towards the lizard. "It's also why I point when I'm using the dragons' powers." Nichal could feel the bone-deep tingle in the air as Master Sai gathered the mana about him. He could even tell exactly what Master Sai was about to do with it, but that realization came just a moment too late. "Obey, slave," commanded Master Sai.

  Nichal winced as the shackles lashed his mind and, for just a moment, he managed to hold them back. But then they settled into place. Nichal stared forward, unable to respond.

  Master Sai sighed. "If you can't resist me, you'll never resist a dragon," he said. Then he shrugged. "Well, I guess you have to start learning somewhere." And he released the shackles.

  Nichal lost track of how long they stayed in the ziggurat, practicing methods of masking and shielding the mind from the shackles of the Great Ones. Not that there was time to tell in the Shadowed Vale. Occasionally they'd make the hike across the hatchery grounds to Coatl-ome's egg chamber to share a meal. The Great One always castigated Master Sai for stealing her food, but Nichal noticed that she always had plates ready for both of them. He tried to get them to stop fighting all the time, to be nice to each other, but neither ever listened. Still, Nichal came to love them both. In the midst of an endless nightmare, he'd found a family. Maybe someday, after they were all free of the Vale, he'd be able to figure out why he'd ended up there in the first place. But for the time, his ragtag family in the shadow of the Eternal Nightmare was more than enough.

  Eventually, though, his lessons had to come to an end. He stood at the foot of the bed in the ruined ziggurat, breathing heavily and glaring at Master Sai where he stood beside the alchemy table. Master Sai again held out his scaled claw. "Obey, slave," he commanded.

  Again, the shackles came. Nichal, who had long since learned to sense the shackles well before they psychically manifested, had already blanked out his thoughts to give the shackles as little room to find purchase as possible. He growled as a thin strand of them latched into his brain and, lashing out with the psionic whips Master Sai had shown him, knocked it free. "No," he gasped.

  "Good," said Master Sai, and Nichal beamed. "Not good enough to stop a dragon, but good."

  Nichal laughed. He was laughing far more often now. He had done it. At last. "Thank you, Master Sai," he said.

  "How do you feel?" Master Sai asked, walking the familiar circle around the lizard, golden arm outstretched. "The wound from the infusion looks like it healed over nicely."

  "I feel very good," Nichal said. He stretched his arms and bounced on his clawed toes. "Full of energy." He considered. There was a word for this. "Young?"

  Master Sai stopped in front of him and looked up into his face. "How old even are you?" he asked.

  Nichal stopped bouncing, his mirth fleeing from the question. He tried to think back, but his first memory was of the shackles. "I don't know," he said. "I don't remember my hatching. I only remember the Vale, and there is no way to measure time here." He tapped into what he now knew were the ancestral memories of the dragons, carried along to all their children through their blood. "My kind is full grown and mature in less than a year from when we are made, so older than that."

  Master Sai frowned up at him. "One year," he said. "You're one year old."

  Nichal considered. "Probably at least two years," he said. He still didn't know how he'd gotten trapped in the Shadowed Vale, and he found it hard to believe an immature lizard would be of much interest to the Eternal Nightmare.

  "Well happy birthday, Nichal," said Master Sai.

  Nichal smiled. "Thank you, Master Sai," he said. He glanced at the alchemy table. "Did you get good notes?"

  "Yes," said Master Sai, collecting his journal from where it sat on the table. "I record everything that I do. I even went back and redrafted the research notes on creating wyrmkin that Coatl-ome stole from me."

  "So you could make my potion again?" Nichal asked.

  "I suppose," said Master Sai. "But it wouldn't do any more for you."

  "But it would for other lizards," Nichal said.

  "Nichal…" Master Sai said. He sighed. "We're never going to find another dragon scale here. You know that, right?"

  Nichal walked to the orc and grabbed his free hand. "We won't be in here forever," he said.

  Master Sai sighed and stared at the floor. "Yes," he said eventually. "My notes are quite thorough. I expect even a relatively novice alchemist could follow them."

  "Thank you, Master Sai," Nichal said.

  "Don't thank me yet," said Master Sai, pulling his hand from Nichal's grasp. "We need to escape Syn first."

  "We will," Nichal said. "I know it."