Colette had always been an imaginative girl, given to flights of fancy and adventures when she really should have been working, and consequently unsatisfied with her life, but she couldn't shake the feeling that something important was going to happen today. Something so important, even she couldn't guess what it might be. The feeling stayed with her as she left her parents in their tiny hut, as she crossed the fields green with spring growth, as she strolled down the dirt road to the village of Salisey. While it wasn't uncommon for people to be around in the late morning, she couldn't help but think there were far more people up and about than normal.
Several children, less than a dozen years, the lot of them, were gathered around in the center of the village, as well as several curious adults pausing for a moment from their work. She might have thought nothing of it, but she soon found her brothers Philippe and Julien among them.
"What are you doing here," she asked crossly, placing her hands on her hips as her light blue eyes glared at them. "I expect you probably have something else you're supposed to be doing."
The pair of ten-year-old boys were not at all ashamed, and Julien smiled brightly as he pointed, "There's a stranger over there, Colette." Sure enough, there was a decidedly unfamiliar man, smiling pleasantly and appearing quite friendly, but there seemed something odd about him as well. "I think he must be an Englishman; he doesn't speak French, anyway. Philippe doesn't believe me."
His twin scowled. "It doesn't sound like English to me, he must be from somewhere even further; Poland, or the other side of the world, even!"
"How would you know, you don't even speak English," Julien replied.
Colette hushed them and sighed. "Well, he can't be of that much interest to you, then. You're probably supposed to be helping your brothers, aren't you? Go on, then."
They ran off, grumbling under their breath, but the stranger had caught Colette's attention. Guiltily, she decided to postpone her own duties for a while and approached him curiously. There was a couple of local men speaking with him in stilted English, and they looked up at her approach. "Telling all kinds of stories," one of them told her, "Might be an old-fashioned bard, the imagination he's got, but not one of them's got any truth to it."
"Good morning, fair lady," the stranger said with a joking grin. He had dark green eyes. He actually wasn't all that old, either, three or four years older than her, perhaps.
She smiled politely in reply. "Welcome, good sir. I'm afraid my English is not too good, but may I ask what has brought you to this village?" She'd never pretend her English was perfect, but it must have been enough for him to understand.
He nodded and answered, "We--I was searching for something. For some people, but I got a bit--well, a lot, lost. But this place's as good as any."
Colette furrowed her brow. "For what?"
He eyed her speculatively as the men wandered away, and he leaned forward slightly. "Do you promise you won’t tell anyone?" he asked in a whisper.
She stared back at him warily, but her curiosity won out, and she nodded. "Alright then," he said, and led her away from the village, into a field shielded from sight of the village by a range of trees. She regarded him a bit nervously, wondering what he was going to do. Her parents had told her not to trust strangers, especially Englishmen…
He carried a strange pack slung on his shoulder, and he lowered it to the ground, opening a long hole in it. "Just don’t scream, okay?" Before she could think about that, he pulled a…creature, out of the bag.
It was very small, perhaps the size of one of their barn cats, but it looked nothing like a cat. Covered in gleaming silver skin, it had the form of a monstrous lizard with clawed bat’s wings upon its back. Its legs ended in wickedly sharp claws, and when she gasped at it, it opened ferocious jaws in a hiss.
Frozen with fear and not daring to move, she only watched as the man removed a collar from the creature’s neck. Then she screamed.
"A demon!" she screamed as the monster suddenly grew to a gargantuan size, and she turned to run away.
The man—obviously a warlock—uttered a curse and grabbed at her, placing a hand over her mouth as she tried to scream again. "This didn’t go the way I’d planned at all," he said, and after that, Colette wasn’t certain at all what happened; everything disappeared, and it turned black and cold, and she wondered if she had died and she was now in hell; that’s when she fell unconscious.
"I don’t know, I just panicked," a voice—the same man from before—was saying when Colette woke again. "I didn’t mean to—kidnap her."
"Wow, better fix this soon, Joavan," someone else replied, "And the clutch is supposed to be hatching any time now…"
Colette gave a little gasp, and the two men realized she was awake. "It’s okay, no one’s going to hurt you," the man she’d met before Joavan—said.
"Where am I?"
"Well, we’re not from Earth…" It was some time later when the man—a dragonrider—finished explaining everything to her, and Colette was still far from certain he was telling the truth. He’d even brought his dragon—the silver creature from before, and not, apparently, a demon from the netherworld after all—over to meet her. He’d taken care to appear far less frightening than before, and even apologized politely for scaring her.
"And there’s a whole clutch of these creatures?" she asked, still staring at Kierath in awe and trepidation. "And you want me to bond one of them?" On second thought, this was too strange to be true, and perhaps she was just dreaming. She’d wake up in her home in France any time now…
"No one’s going to force you to," Joavan said, "And if you don’t Impress, I or someone else will gladly take you home again. Hopefully…without creating a huge scene…"
If she had not been under so much stress, she might have given more thought to it, but as it was, she nodded. "Alright then. Just…okay."
"Well…good, "Joavan said after a pause, "Because I think the clutch is hatching now."