[Sample of published book]
Welcome, to the sizable world of Pocket Dragons.
For thousands of years, the Pocket Dragons have been sharing the Earth with humans. Spread out all over the world, they survive in the cities, in forests, in places frozen...
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Azara perched inside the rib cage of what was likely a several million year old skeleton.
A dinosaur skeleton, the humans called it. A pterodactyl, to be precise. The reorganized bones were hanging above the stream of visitors below, and Azara sat on the bones of what was likely her ancient ancestor, watching them. She was nibbling on a chunk of muffin that she had snatched from the museum cafe, careful not to get crumbs on the ancient bones.
She really didn't understand why the humans cared so much about these bones. After all, they were more likely her ancestors than theirs.
Yet day after day, year after year, the humans flocked to the Natural History Museum of London. Considering their comparatively short lifespans, Azara thought as she peered down at the slowly moving mass of heads and limbs, they spend their time on such strange things.
It wasn't to be said that Azara didn't have an interest in history. She loved strolling the halls - out of view of the humans, usually before opening time - and studying the replicas of creatures long since their heyday and the bones of the creatures that led to become the pocket dragons and the humans.
Unsurprisingly, there was a lot more on the history of the humans than there was of the pocket dragons. The dragons knew, of course, that they had been around for millennia before the arrival of bipedal apes, and that their ancestor's tiny bones would have long since disintegrated, so the humans resorted to a lot of hypothesis.
Despite their errors, it was almost amusing reading the little blocks of text they stuck on planks in front of the skeletons and replicas and pictures and seeing what they thought, what they knew, what they theorized. Many of the texts were augmented with information provided by a dragon professor or historian - very few dragons were allowed into professions, but in certain places such as Britain, it was possible. She had even once attended a class taught at Cambridge that was led by an old pocket dragon professor. With a two-hundred year lifespan, it was not surprising that the dragon knew far more that the human professors.
She finished her muffin, careful not to leave any crumbs on the skeleton. Azara mainly made her home in the museum, wandering the halls and the cafes and the gift shoppe. She knew how to stay out of sight of the security cameras and guards. Why the cameras were keyed on dragons and not the far more suspicious looking humans, she still didn't understand. As if a dragon could take off with a 1-ton mosasaur bone. As if a dragon would even want to.
Very few dragons dabbled with the human's lifestyle. Most dragons didn't bother with money or purchasing things... After all, why would you even need to if you could sustain yourself on insects and table scraps and wild fruits and berries?
Azara waited until there were fewer people below to notice her, then leaped off the skeleton without causing it so much as to rustle. She glided towards a window that was open just a slight, and darted through the narrow area into the brisk outside air.
