The English translation of the Wattpad Featured & Wattys 2015 Winner story.
... And the moment you allow that tiny evil enter your heart, the moment you act in a manner unbefitting your race, the moment you start complaining about life - they...
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.
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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."
