The little girl with pink ribbons in her hair held a bouquet of pink flowers and smiled sweetly, a sight that should have lifted anyone's spirits... Unfortunately, Hill couldn't smile at all. The moment the female dragon appeared before Edna, he realized what he'd failed to account for. Arveiaturace sought the latest magical theories and more spells. Edna, who possessed Azuth's Encyclopedia of Spells, whose pages could be added to at any time, suited her far better than Laira did.
Besides, Laira would always be around. Azuth had so many descendants that the Mage God might not care about a girl several generations removed from him, as long as she wasn't one of his Chosen. Unless Edna became a Transcendent above level twenty, wouldn't that book eventually belong to Arveiaturace?
In a way, the White Dragon Queen's choice wasn't wrong. Her wild instincts really had found her the most promising master... Just perhaps not the one she'd originally meant to find...
Power and freedom... It wasn't as though a White Dragon had to want freedom above all else... Right?
Anyway, even if Arveiaturace and Arauthator both followed Edna, it wouldn't matter. Those two dragons had never been on the gods' radar. They couldn't affect anything important...
Forget it... Hill felt a little faint. Gripping his desk, he lowered himself back onto the sofa, then slowly raised a hand to prop up his chin. No matter how much he tried to reassure himself, he still couldn't understand how things had come to this...
Arveiaturace lowered her head and laughed delightedly, narrowing her cold, cunning eyes to slits. "I've always hoped to find a Mage friend I could grow alongside. Would you let me stay by your side?"
Edna froze and couldn't help looking back to her friends for help. She had