Poisonous Rage

Chapter One

Sundew breathed in, then exhaled. HiveWings. Cutting down trees, slaughtering my people. They are my enemy. You may want to kill Belladonna and most of the dragons here, but you can't. You need them to defeat the HiveWings so you can be with her. Keep it together. Use that rage against the HiveWings.

Sundew opened her eyes. They were back in the village after stealing the Book of Clearsight. Sundew had just fought with her mother, and now she was doing her daily ritual to keep herself from using her powers to strangle everyone in the village and running away to be with Willow.

You can't. Because if you do, the HiveWings will eventually find us. They know we're alive. They must have guessed that we're living in the last forest on the continent. If I kill my tribe, we'll be left with the others, who can't or won't fight. And we'll be wiped out.

Night had fallen. Sundew slipped out of her nest and flew to the place in the wall around the village where the vines and plants were weak. She knew this spot well, and the plants here knew her well. It took her almost no effort to open a dragon-size hole in the plants and walk onto a well-worn path.

She walked this path every night. She never allowed any plants to grow on or around it, save the most beautiful flowers and plants in the forest. At the end was a pond with flowers growing all around it. Sundew slipped a jade frog out of the pouch she always wore around her neck and placed it on the rock in the pond before slipping back into the undergrowth to wait. Sundew curled up on a flat boulder and watched.

After a while, a dragon melted out of the forest, her pale green scales, Sundew's favorite color, standing out against the brighter greens of the forest. She sat down next to the pond. Sundew got up and ran to the dragon she loved, wrapping her wings around Willow.