The Wishing Map is a full-length fantasy that is being posted episodically at this site. To read the previous episode click here. To read it from the start, click here.

Aided by her brother Zack, Gina battles a shape-shifting monster.

The creature began searching her mind again. It had already tapped her dearest hopes and her deepest desires. Now it was looking for something she feared. Despite her efforts to close her mind, her thoughts vaulted back to the image of the Hadessian Dragon in B’frona’s book. “No!” she grunted, and in an act of extreme willpower, tore her eyes away.

She gripped her sword with both hands and prepared to swing, but was unsure where to strike – because the creature was changing again. Its spindly legs were growing thicker, its tentacles were dissolving, its face was growing longer. It was returning to the form of her dragon pup Puff.

“Hah! Not this time!” she shouted. “I can kill you even if you do look like Puff, because I know you aren’t–you’re just an ugly, stinking lie!”

But the Beast wasn’t done. Its baby scales were growing stiffer and larger, thickening and separating. Its teeth were beginning to jut out from its ever-expanding jaws. At first Gina thought it was merely an adult version of Puff. But it wasn’t just growing, its very nature was changing.

Its scales were becoming heavy, as if made of some dark primordial ore, its wings were thick and leathery, and the tip of its tail had split into a two-pronged spade with jagged tearing edges. Smoke trailed from its nostrils and its jagged horns, once tender nubs, now inclined aggressively forward, ready to impale anything that came near. Most frightening of all were its eyes: it had exchanged the gaze of adoring trust for the glare of undiluted hate. I will cause you unimaginable pain, said those pitiless orbs.

Was this what Puff would become? The Questing Beast was bigger than a house now, with row upon row of scalpel-like teeth extending endlessly down into its gullet. “The thousand-toothed Hadessian Dragon,” B’frona’s book had called it. Below this perverted Puff’s jawline was a collar of murderous man-made thorns. Flaming mucous streamed from the creature’s jaws, and its eyes glowed with the same smoldering hate.

Gina and Zack were below the creature now, surrounded by massive tree-like legs. Zack staggered to his feet, his swollen neck still streaming with blood. Gina stared at him, suspended between guilt and fear.

The broadsword suddenly jerked in her hand, as if to say, “Now!” “OK! OK!” Gina shouted, breaking from her trance. “If I have to die, at least I’ll do it defending my brother. After all…

“He almost died defending me!”

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Thoughts: Love is the tenderest and toughest thing there is — the only thing worth living and dying for.

To read the next episode, click here.