Food Chained
By Ives Benton Eaton
(Author’s note: Ladahūnā, the language of elves in this world—called “Āen” by them—uses separate letters for long and short vowels. To aid pronunciation in Ladahūnā words translated to English, macrons have been placed above long vowels, so “Zōēā” is pronounced “ZOH-ee-yay”. The “th” digraph has a cedilla mark below the “t” if it is a “voiced th”, as in the word &ld

Talk to the Animals
By Ives Benton Eaton
“Here, leezard, leezard, leezard…”
—Gidget the chihuahua, voiced by Carlos Alazraqui
“Come on, Būshān. Try again.”
Būshān was Zōēā’s young emerald green python, now just over ten feet long. This would normally not be a good pet for a young adult human or even a young adult wild elf, such as Zōēā was, but Būshān was not simply a pet—she was the animal companion of a veldami, a green-witch, a wi

Homecoming
By Ives Benton Eaton
You wish to explore the world? Why just one? A world lives in every tree in the forest.
—Chesirā, veldami of the Shāhūnā
The Shāhūnā village was hidden up in the canopy of the rainforest, a web of vines and woven branches and hanging bags for storage and platforms with braced and waxed leather rain flies to keep them dry. They used knotted ropes and hoists to reach their homes, both of which were pulled up when not in use to keep a foe from seeing the

The Dragon
By Ives Benton Eaton
Princesses? Dragons don’t care about princesses, except when they’re hungry. But then dragons are usually hungry. You’re all meat to a dragon. Adventurers? You know how the Draconic word for “adventurers” translates? It means “food-that-delivers-itself”.
—Iversin Gretz, loremaster and adjunct librarian the Magna Bibliotheca at Spellkeep
Aragandaferithondacanathee was as much of the creature’s name as any other

The Sixth Path
By Ives Benton Eaton
I run my prey to exhaustion whenever I can. Their meat is so much more tender then; their fear and despair the most delightful of seasonings.
—Gratelankularugovistafiskor, dragon of the Path of the Tooth
Being hunted by a dragon can be stressful.
Particularly when one has stolen from that dragon. Nothing quite angers a dragon so much as that.
Zōēā, a wild elf of the Shāhūnā (known to humans as the Boa Tribe), and Langōval, a sylvan elf of the nort

Duel of Drakes
By Ives Benton Eaton
Yake pursed his lips, holding in the first reply that came to his mind. Instead, he nodded politely. “You have done us a great service.”
“Perhapsss. And perhapsss not. Consider this: Losing a game is one thing; you can be eaten knowing that you have done your best. But losing a game when you know that there is a solution that you have not found is intolerable, because it suggests that even your best was not good enough. This might be a more e

Spellkeep
By Ives Benton Eaton
—and with a puff of displaced air, they reappeared in a rolling green meadow.
A nearby river, bordered by smooth stone roads, filled their ears with the roar of its rapids and scented the air with fresh, cold mist. Wisps of white cloud dotted the deep blue sky. Orchards of citrus fruits and fields of grain, rippling in the gentle, warm breeze, patched the surrounding lands in shades of green and gold. Snow-capped gray and lavender mountains, from whence the r