by Olinda Brown (@olindabrown_)
Adult Fantasy
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Query
A GUIDE TO LIVING WITH DRAGONS is an adult cozy fantasy complete at 90k words. Fans of Violet Thistlewaite Is Not A Villain Anymore by Emily Krempholtz, The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, and The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst may enjoy the emotional healing, cozy atmosphere, sweet romance, and dragon shenanigans.
Orelia simply wants to move far away from the mage guild, spend her days snuggled up in her new cottage, and tend to her vegetable garden. Instead, she has to deal with a cantankerous house dragon, joints that keep dislocating, and a grandma plotting to set her up with her neighbour. On top of all that, the Lord who owns the village is scheming to sell the land from underneath them all.
When Arden, her sweet and rather good-looking neighbour, asks if there’s anything she can do to help his dying fields, Orelia is reluctant to use her magic due to past trauma. But if the village can’t improve its crops, she will be kicked out of her new home—a place she is coming to love and that makes her feel safe. With the help of Arden and the dragon, she experiments with potions to improve crop yields, hoping to stop the sale by proving the land is still productive.
But the Lord has been planning to sell the land to a developer friend and level the village to build warehouses for their ‘machine revolution.’ He won’t let a meddlesome, burnt-out mage get in the way. Healing the land and saving the village won’t just require investigation. Orelia will have to confront the past she is running away from in order to hear and heal the land—and herself.
I’m a chronically ill fantasy writer and farmer living in rural Australia. Like Orelia, I’m also trying to keep my joints from wriggling about, but I must make do with plastic splints rather than vines.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
First Five Pages
Chapter 1
Orelia ignored the coin dragon gnawing on her finger in her pocket. The little creature was bonded to a silver coin she’d received as change when she paid for her lodging in the previous town. The innkeeper had been eager to find someone to take the dragon, and Orelia was more than happy for the company. She trudged towards the stables beside the auction yard, looking for a carriage driver who could take her out to the cottage she had just bought.
She stepped under the lean-to beside the Tanshara stables, finally getting out of the rain. The hood of her coat was soaking through and her hair would start sprouting flowers soon. It was a common occurrence for nature mages, but this far away from Thalissium, it would not be a regular sight for the locals. She would have to deal with people’s stares, and she was too frazzled and exhausted to handle that kind of intense attention.
A peculiar mana signature caught her attention as an animal was led into the auction ring. Most animals had a light creamy colour to their mana and an ambling energy, whereas this one tingled along her senses. She hadn’t actually felt mana quite like that before, so, out of curiosity, she darted back into the rain and wriggled her way through the crowd to the edge of the ring.
The creature before her was not what she expected. It was a ceraqi—its body was the shape of a horse, but double the size, with a rhino tail and horns. Ceraqi mana was usually vibrant yellow, and it always zapped against her senses—a result of them being an experiment at combining horses and rhinoceroses. They were generally quite placid animals, but when threatened or angered, they were known to maul people. However, Orelia’s past experiences with them had been nothing but heart-warming.
She’d never seen a ceraqi’s mana so dull and quiet.
This ceraqi made her heart and stomach sink, and she clutched at her chest as if the action could ease the pain gripping her inside. Long scars cut across his rump. An even gnarlier scar extended down from his near hock to fetlock. His mane was rubbed raw in places, and a fresh, red wound stood out on his dark grey shoulder. Even his horns had been worn down to nubs.
“Starting at ten silvers for this well-trained beast! He still has some years left in him!” the auctioneer yelled over the mumbling crowd and pounding rain.
At least no one was paying attention to Orelia, so they missed her sob and warm tears rolling down her chilled cheeks. Her affinity as a nature mage didn’t give her the ability to see into the ceraqi’s mind and feel what he was feeling in that moment, but it was obvious to her how his physical condition had affected his mana. He was thin, beaten down, weary—just like the look in his eyes.
“Ten silvers,” a man called out.
Orelia clutched her coin purse in her pocket. She had just spent most of her remaining savings on buying a cottage in Yensura, and the rest needed to tide her over until she could start earning money.
“Well, he’ll fetch a good carcass price,” someone muttered beside her.
She whipped her head around to stare at the man, who scrunched up his nose at Orelia’s intense gaze.
“What?” she squeaked.
He scoffed and jabbed a thumb towards the man who had placed the bid. “That’s the meat buyer. New here, aren’t you? No one wants the trouble of dealing with those beasts. Horns,” he hissed under his breath. He squinted as he tried to get a better look at her under her hood.
She pulled her hood closer around her face. Not every mage had vibrant hair colour, but everyone with vibrant hair colour was a mage, and her ice blue hair wasn’t exactly hard to miss.
“Any other bidders?” the auctioneer called out.
No one else wants him?
Orelia pulled out her coin purse, the dragon still latched onto her hand. She frantically tried to count how much she had left without tipping it all out and over the ground.
“Going once!”
“Twenty!” Orelia shouted before she could even count how many coins she had left; she knew she had twenty at least.
Her head was still bent low and blinkered by her hood, so she didn’t notice if anyone raised their hand to bid, but the auctioneer called out, “Twenty-five!”
More tears sprung to Orelia’s eyes, and she held her breath to stop a sob. She couldn’t count fast enough, and she kept miscounting. She had just wanted to catch a covered carriage out to Yensura and settle into her new home far away from the Guild. But she couldn’t leave this creature to the mercy of a meat buyer, who only cared about how much fat and muscle was on his body.
“Thirty,” she squeaked out.
“Thirty-five!” another voice shouted.
She counted her coins roughly enough so she had an idea of what she could work with: sixty-five, give or take a coin she might have miscounted. She shoved the purse back in her pocket and encouraged the dragon to crawl up her sleeve so they were kept out of the rain, and so she could still shove her other hand up that sleeve to hold on to one of their claws for comfort.
If only she could live surrounded by nature rather than humans. Though that hadn’t gone very well for her last time. Second time's the charm, right?
“Fifty.” A good cough cleared her throat so she wouldn’t sound so much like a swamp witch. “Fifty silvers.”
Meals would be rather lean from now on. Her foraging skills weren’t too bad at least.
The meat buyer shook his head.
“We have fifty for this fine beast. Going once…”
Please. No one else bid. She just wanted something, anything, to go right for her.
“Going twice… Sold! To the young lady at the front.”
Her breath finally released easily from her chest, though it came out closer to a sob. The ceraqi’s head was low as he was led out of the ring and the next poor animal led in. Orelia had to turn her head away so she couldn’t see what state the animal was in or which bidders showed interest. She didn’t have anything left to give.
Mud clung to her boots and water dripped off her long coat as she stepped into the stone-floored auction office. She kept the hood pulled over her head.
“Lot thirty-five, yes?” the woman said. Her dark blonde hair was pulled back so tightly into a bun, Orelia wondered if her grimace was from pain.
Orelia nodded and pulled the coins out of her purse, her fingers fumbling for them as the vines held her finger joints stable. They wrapped around each joint on her fingers and thumbs, snaking around her wrists and up to her elbows. She had been travelling for weeks, and the stress from just everything had led to more dislocations than usual. The metacarpal bones of her thumb and index finger strained, almost popping out, and her vines tightened instinctively, securing her fingers together and her thumb back into proper position.
“Fifty silvers, please. You can go collect him from the yards.”
Orelia stared down at her vine-covered hand holding fifty silvers. The golden-scaled coin dragon had crawled back down her arm to latch onto the back of her hand with a silver coin in their mouth. The dragon was barely the length of her entire hand and no more than two fingers wide at their belly.
She glanced up to see that the woman’s eyes had followed her gaze. The woman kept a completely neutral expression. Coin dragons weren’t unusual; they were the most common type of bonded dragon. It was simply a matter of life that some tiny dragons bonded to coins, and they were traded as a part of the coin—though that had led to most people treating coin dragons as mere objects rather than living beings.
Orelia refrained from grimacing at the thought, but also came to the conclusion that it was most likely her pale, vine-covered hands that drew such silence.
So much for hiding that she was a mage.
“We accept coin dragons,” the woman said.
She must have assumed that was why Orelia hesitated, which it partly was, but she was actually frozen in panic that there would be some remarks about her being a mage.
Orelia had originally intended to hand the coin dragon over to whoever took her out to Yensura. She didn’t want to take the dragon with her, as coin dragons loved travelling, and she was near the end of her journey.
The woman held out her hand, and the coin dragon hopped over without hesitation. The woman didn’t flinch at all, and her gaze softened at the dragon’s trill.
Maybe she will ensure the dragon finds someone nice for their next journey.
It was a small consolation on an otherwise tumultuous day. She handed over the remaining forty-nine silvers and got a small paper receipt in return. She shoved it into her bag and hid her hands back in the sleeves of her coat.
“Is there anywhere nearby I can buy some tack?” Orelia asked, grimacing at how light her coin purse had become.
The woman didn’t spare another glance at Orelia and flicked her hand airily beside her. “There’s a saddlery across the road.”
Orelia glanced back at the coin dragon who was perched on the counter and cocked their head at her distraught smile. It hadn’t really occurred to her before, but once she arrived in Yensura, she likely wouldn’t have a coin dragon again for a long time. In her time as a mage working for the Guild, she had many pass through her care, and although there were some periods of time she didn’t have their company, she never had to be alone for long.
Safe travels.
Even though she was overwhelmed by the need to curl up and cry, she couldn’t. Too many people were around when she stepped out of the office, and her best plan was to get out of town as soon as possible. The sooner she got to her cottage in Yensura, the sooner she could crumple into a mess and not care about picking herself up the next day.