If you go hunting a tiger...

- 10 -

Emil, thanks for the preliminary reading.

The flight was short and ended with a rather unpleasant contact with the floor, onto which the dragon carelessly placed me. It's a good thing he didn't throw me.

The net had partially disappeared, and only my mouth and hands were tied, and my legs had fetters so that I could barely walk.

The dragon (Or is this his servant? Now he was a guy of about twenty-three, dressed in a red and purple robe from the tenth century) turned me around a little and pushed me in the back. I hobbled across the huge ancient hall of the castle in the direction indicated. We passed under the arch, which changed colour from white to green and then turned white again. The arch didn't match the style of the grey stone walls at all, and it looked new. It looked like some kind of detector.

The corridor we walked along was quite long and led us to the foot of the stairs to the tower. I pretended that with such fetters on my feet and no way to balance with my hands, I couldn't climb the stairs. But the trick didn't help. The convoyer grabbed me with his arms and... It was probably that same teleportation that fantasy novels talked about.

Everything around us turned into a flickering of colour spots for a moment, and we found ourselves in a spacious room, from the windows of which we could see snow-capped mountains, over which the dawn was rising. And there are no signs of habitation. Bad. It is not clear how to escape from here. And it is unknown whether it is possible to escape at all without a helicopter or a teleport. Alnorria is a tiny island, and its permafrost zone is packed with tourists looking for a change of pace between summer skiing in Austria and Italy. However, this doesn't mean that there are no deserted wilderness areas between the hotels in Alnorria where it is impossible to survive without equipment and mountaineering training. Not to mention warm clothes and food supplies.

And only after realising this truth did I notice the completely mediaeval furnishings of the room; the only modern things here were the window panes, lamps, and a heater. It was standing next to a very fat woman with an emaciated face. It sounds strange to mention emaciation together with fatness, but that's exactly it: she looked as if she had been loading sacks of potatoes for three days without sleep or rest. Not in terms of clothing; her robe was clean, fresh, and quite expensive, but the general tiredness of the woman herself evoked associations with slave labour in the fields. This thought was also encouraged by the fact that the woman sat behind an extremely huge frame with dense silk and embroidered.

"This is Alex, my wife," the guy told her.

What?! I even jumped at such a statement. And the woman screamed hysterically:

"This is Blackrocks! Throw her into the abyss immediately!"

This shit even better than previous... By the way, these two maniacs speak Old-Alnorrian.

And there isn't the slightest hope that I have gone crazy; I ended up in the clinic, and a beneficial injection of haloperidol will stop this delirium.

"She's a Terrent," the guy objected to the woman.

"You're a weakling and a shame for your father," the woman hissed. "But he," she said, putting her hand on her stomach, "senses sacrilege blood in her!"

"Blackrocks' blood runs through all the old families of Aesa. Even you."

"It is as fresh as morning dew in her!" The woman got angry. "Who was her mother?"

"A refugee from Rudlig," the guy snorted. "And Dave Terrent was married to Fiona Lightwell."

"So her mother is a whore who cuckolded Albert Terrent with the Blackrocks! And her brat can only be a whore!"