The Dragon's Cry

The following is a choose-your-own-adventure type of story. You may follow any path through it that you choose. If you find a dead end, please add to the story in any style you wish (within reasonable limits, i.e. keep the POV and characters intact, stick with the metric system, etc.), with some limitations -- avoid writing more than three consecutive episodes, or claiming all branches off of one episode -- and send your contribution to the Literary Guild Listserv.

Introduction

You are a weredragon named Shree. As a weredragon, you possess the ability to change your appearance from human to dragon, and an intermediate stage between the two. In human form, you are just a couple of centimeters shy of two meters tall and weigh around ninety kilograms, which is rather light for your race; your slender body, long limbs and neck only make you seem all the taller. Your eyes are ice blue and can see in the darkness up to sixty meters. Your short hair is a green-black color, the color of your scales in dragon form. Your racial heritage is apparent in the two small bony ridges running along your temples, the short fin-like crest on top of your head, and the long, tapering, prehensile tail behind you. In half-dragon form, you retain some of your human appearance, but you become taller, your skin turns into scales, your ridges and crest grow more pronounced, and you acquire a pair of large wings, approximately ten meters in span, which allow you to glide but not to fly. In full dragon form, you are twenty meters long from nose to tail, have a forty-meter wingspan, and are able to produce an earsplitting shriek - hence your name - audible up to three kilometers away. (You cannot breathe fire.) It is an effort to change between forms, however, so you are not disposed to do so on a whim; usually you need to remain in one form for at least two hours before changing to another. You are nineteen human years old, a very little time in dragonkin's usual centuries-long lifespans, but since weredragons age at the same rate as humans, you are not as relatively young or immature as a nineteen-year old dragonling. Almost that long ago, beyond the reach of your memory, a human found you alone and nearly dead of hypothermia as you lay buried under a bank of snow, only a few kilometers from the village in which you now live. She pulled you out and took you to her home, where she nursed you back to life and health. For a full year she and her husband searched fruitlessly for your parents, but to no avail. Meanwhile, despite themselves, they became quite fond of you and decided to bring you up themselves. You grew up exclusively in a human environment, and your surrogate parents' affection grew into real love. Even though you were different, you were happy. But sometimes you still wonder if your real parents are alive...

Now you all own and manage together a popular inn on the edge of the village, serving a variety of local delicacies and exotic dishes at good prices. The place is regularly packed, making for good business. Ever since it opened, you have been an integral part of the business; you are something of an attraction, not only because of your looks, but also because some of the dishes you make have done much to earn the inn its popularity. Three years ago, just when you were starting to get tired of all the attention, your mother made a serendipitous find: a famous traveling band, giving performances in the towns they traveled through, offered to perform at your inn for three nights. Your father (with help from you and several friends, of course) promptly knocked down a wall and built a covered stage to give them a place to perform. The idea was to use it as a second pantry, but ever since then, you have been gladly sharing the spotlight with numerous groups of musicians, performers, minstrels, and whatnot, who come to your inn from diverse and faraway places, drawing crowds -and new delicacies- from all over the land.

Lately business has been declining for no apparent reason. Once-regular patrons come infrequently, and casual diners not at all. The last band to perform here left six weeks ago. The stage, always brightly lit and strewn with performers' trappings, has been dark and empty ever since. You are all alarmed; if the inn must close down, you have nowhere to turn...

• Start the adventure...

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