The Dragon Bearer {ON HIATUS}

Chapter 1 - Sketchbooks and Fortune Tellers

Eleri Lewis perched on a battered wooden chair at her family's equally battered dining table, engrossed in a book. Perhaps she should have been occupying her time with something slightly more productive, like getting ready for her younger brother's birthday outing, but she wasn't too bothered by her parents' increasing frustration until her father walked into the kitchen and physically pulled the book from her hands.

"For God's sake, Eleri. You're not taking a book with you, you hear me?" He took a step back as she tried to snatch it back. "It's your brother's birthday, and I'm not having you sit on a bench with your nose buried in Charlotte Bronte's World of Magical Faraway Hobbits."

"Actually, I was reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," Eleri replied, irritated at the fact that she'd been disturbed. She stood, pushing back her chair and wincing slightly as it scraped against the linoleum floor.

As he turned to walk away, her father said, "And for God's sake, go and change into your good jeans, those ones are almost in rags. Why do you always have to be such a scruff?"

"Has it ever occurred to you that maybe girls don't always have to wear perfect, pin-neat clothes?" Eleri was getting dangerously close to the edge, and she knew it. But she always had to test the boundaries. Inherited her mother's headstrong nature, as many family members said. And besides, what was a teenager without a tendency to push her parents' limits?

"One day you're going to go too far, my girl, and then you'll learn about the punishments I had growing up," her father said, but it was good-natured rather than threatening. He shot his daughter a look, then tossed her book back.

It slid across the table and hit Eleri's hands with a thud. She snatched it up and ran upstairs to get changed.

The first thing she noticed was that her sketchbook, usually carefully sat on her desk amidst half-empty paint tubes and cotton buds for smudging pencils, was lying open on her bed. She knew she'd put it in its proper place the night before; there was no way she had slept with it clasped to her chest like a child and her doll.

She picked it up, flipping through to quickly check if anything was defaced or missing. It wouldn't matter so much if it were any other of her drawing books, but this one was important. Her prized possession. She cared for it as dearly as if it were her own child.

Back when Eleri was eight and just finding her feet in the art world, she had the desire to create her own universe. Like any other child her age, her first thought was to make a Candyfloss Land or a Wizard World. But then she'd looked down at that odd little birthmark on her right forearm, and inspiration struck. She set to work, scribbling in dozens of dragons on paper at the dining table. Her brother Angus, then three, clambered up beside her and attempted to help by grabbing at the drawings until Eleri yelled at him.

She thumbed her way through the dictionary, trying to find the perfect name for the world. Narniania? No... too similar to Narnia, and even she knew it sounded stupid. Querencia? Good, but it just didn't sound right. After three days, and learning that a cerecloth is a cloth used to wrapping corpses and a paracosm is a detailed imaginary world, she stumbled across the word serendipity. Before she even read the meaning, she felt bubbly and knew that was the word.

And so Eleri began filling a brand-new sketchbook with the separate areas of Serendipia. She began with the map, sectioning off areas and giving them names. It started off simple, with the Village Square, Cobblestone Hill, and other names found online when she was allowed to use the family's chunky computer. She'd expanded the world over the years, and now her sketchbook had grown fat like a lamb before slaughter, its wire spine coming away from the pages and loose papers spilling out.