I couldn't deny that the food in front of me, however, was an offending sight to behold. It felt as if my true form might take over or level this building - and drag this insignificant town into the cold, hard earth.

I had to take a gulping breath in order to fortify myself. I didn’t want to revert to a rabid creature of wickedness and become... bloodthirsty. Dryads were supposed to be the opposite of that. Despite how we carried ourselves around humans, we were a merry kind of Magic Blood: the rambunctious, ale-consuming, moonlight-revelling sort that worshipped sprawling fields, golden acres and sunlight-dappled groves. At our core, we thrived in nature and upheld the mysticism of living as one with the land, and definitively not shedding blood unless we had to.

But it had been centuries since our 'Golden Days'. The sacred teachings that we'd once upheld with unwavering devotion had long since been broken by one of our own, setting in motion a horrendous divide between Magic Bloods and humans, forcing us to sully our hands in order to survive.

My skin prickled, as though a sense of foreboding had been coded into my blood, warning me of an inauspicious danger about to shatter my world; and like the calm before the storm, the air crackled with tension.

I couldn't just run and hide, for I could sense a dark, malicious intent looming at my shoulder blades, the certainty of being hunted if I fled etching itself within my mind. Dryads were naturally flighty creatures; born to run and be tricksters. Our instincts were honed to flee, drink and make merry, making us the most elusive quarry, considering we’d rather bail when justification demanded that we stay and fight. Over the course of my life, I'd learned to master these base instincts that had been conditioned into me for centuries, but it was still a struggle every now and then.

Right now, there was broiling tension down my spine that I couldn't seem to shake off, and my heartbeat felt jarring in my chest as I stared straight ahead at the glass-stained windows in front of me. Maybe it was because a part of me already knew what to expect by now.

I stilled, the hairs on my arms standing to attention, my body going ramrod straight while all my magic screamed at me from a place deep inside of  my subconscious, in a dark corner that I wish I hadn't known existed - which cautioned against my better judgement to tuck my tail and run from the sinister entity appearing in my midst.

Yes, I'd felt this feeling many times before.

An unholy hiss stung the air... and then suddenly there was a menacing presence at my backside. It hadn’t been there moments ago. With the swiftness of lightning and the echoing remnants of thunder, it just snapped into existence. I'd felt the purring tendrils of darkness arrive out of some kind of animal instinct, and when a blast of whirlwind snuffed out all the candlelight, my head turned the barest bit to the side, a faint acknowledgement of the misshapen monster in the room.

Everything had also gone eerily silent, as if all the noise had been leeched from the building, along with the divine wafts of food. So, too, had the tiniest traces of warmth gone from the air, not that the chapel had been filled with an over-excess in the first place.

However, I felt my hands go instantly numb and saw my breath trail from my lips in a soft, wispy cloud, the windows of the room beginning to crystallize.

It was cold. Dreadfully, morbidly cold. The stench of death curled into my nostrils.

I didn't need to turn around to know that I was indeed, in the presence of my ancient enemy. He'd tracked me down, just like he always seemed to do, having very little faith in his sentries to track me down and assassinate me 'properly'.

"You are so... so... incredibly boring." I told him, spinning around slowly on the spot.

My jade eyes landed on the faceless blob standing behind me at last and I saw that he hadn't taken his humanoid form yet. He was still just a giant mass of shadow, pieces of his smoky form curling upward, arching. I observed as the wisps acted like prehensile arms, slithering around the ceiling structure. As if he wanted to smother every inch of the room, sprawling his lower and longer tendrils across the pews. Like some massive beast that wanted to claim its territory.

I eyed his non-corporeal form, which seemed to hang all over the place, unimpressed. There had to be a purpose to his visit, but he remained quiet, watchful, not yet in the killing phase of his greeting. I just sighed, staring at him while his shadowy arms slowly stalked toward me, around me, and then under my chin, jerking my head up.

He could choose when to make his shadowy form solid, as he did just now, which allowed him to touch me and raise my head. It wasn't long before the shadows dispersed and replacing that solid tendril was a human arm – and the enormous hand encircling my throat was firm; not squeezing it too hard, but tight enough to be taken as a threat.

The theatrics had been played out and now he was showing his 'other face', the face he preferred wearing around humans. It was a pleasant mask to behold, one that was said to inspire ballads and robust sculptures around the world, and yet because it was still an ethereal contrivance, I took real issue in looking passed it.

"You sent the heads of my men back... on pikes." Balthazar murmured.

Up this close, I could smell mountain air of his homeland all over him. It should have repulsed me, but it was refreshing compared to the sickening muck I’d been predisposed to lately. It only served to make me growl at him as he raised me up from the tips of my toes and dangled me mid-air.

His golden eyes blazed like the sun, and they were truly, truly wicked to behold after years of not seeing him. Such loathing gleamed in them.

I found myself unable to muster up much of a denial at his accusatory words anyway. It hadn't been a good day when his warriors had found me crouched by a babbling brook, trying to track a deer. They'd scared it off with their heavy-footed approach and I'd taken their heads as recompense. I hadn't been able to feed my sisters that day, and I'd sulked so terribly, but as per usual, to make up for my shortcomings, Galadryn had merely thrown on her hunting gear, travelling further south to hunt, nearly risking life and limb to find us food in dangerous territory.

She'd gone far into the heart of Truske Mhordale, also known as the "Orc Mountains."

"Find better help, then. For a Warlord, you should really be scarier, you know."

A flash of white teeth against luminescent olive skin, his snarl a vicious declaration of hatred that seeped into my bones. He rattled me, throwing my head back and forth, and still I just stared at him, acknowledging only his deadly expression that should have made lesser Magic Bloods shit themselves senseless.

As a Dryad, that list should have included me. If I had any sense at all, I would have been scared out of my mind, beseeching this powerful immortal for mercy and forgiveness. But here we were, doing this age-old dance of derogatory banter and threats... and the culmination usually led to an explosion of violence when either one of us couldn't stand it anymore.

His eyes took in my measure - my crusty, torn clothes, my filthy, dirt-painted skin and he sneered, "Looking fit for a pigpen. Your kind truly is the bottom of the barrel, Doralis."

I purred back, shrugging, "Sticks and stones, my lord. But if I may say, you look exquisite as always, Balthazar. For someone who gave up his throne to go hunting for a dirty, low-life Dryad. You must have been terribly bored… There's just no challenge in ruling a kingdom of bootlickers, is there?"

His hand tightened around my throat like a boa, intending to crush my windpipe and I snapped, unleashing my inner force of magic that I usually contained when walking around humans.

I felt the meteoric change in my features. It was an awareness that was written in my blood, and even without a mirror I knew that my eyes had taken on an otherworldly glow as my hair tumbled out of my cap, unfurling until each strand had taken on a viridescent hue – resembling the mossy grove of which I was born in.

Bluish-green veins slithered down my forearms as ivory claws jutted out of my fingertips, and I slashed at the wrist holding me up, only for Balthazar to drop me and blast me back into the dais with a torrent of dark, freezing magic.

The windows all blew out and my ears rang, the world trying to right itself as I glared at the unbothered male leaning against a pew, looking satisfied with himself while he examined his nails.

Every inch of his body oozing with feline-like grace and the undisputed arrogance of an emperor, destructive power a steady hum in his veins that he wouldn't even need to dispense at full strength to wipe me off the face of the earth.

He loved proving that despite his savage occupation as a Warlord, he was every bit the blue blood he was born to be, raised from a Draconian era long gone, before a lot of Magic Bloods had even seen the first ancient rocks of the world.

But I was a different breed. I didn't care much for the dainty, 'noble' illusion that he liked to pose in front of others. To me, Balthazar was nothing more than a flinty bastard whom I wish I could erase with a wave of my hand.

The stories about my ancient enemy being a serpentine character who hid behind a flowery face were all true. Perhaps it was our battles throughout the ages that had defined him so, although regardless of our affiliation, the Warlord was a striking dichotomy of malignant pragmatism and senseless charity – although more often than not, whatever ideal he implemented usually went hand-in-hand with another agenda, I’d found.

There was always a catch with Balthazar.

Balthazar was a relic dressed in regal attire, and those fine threads hugging his well-defined torso like a second skin were a poor attempt at disguising his black heart, I thought, staring at him with thinly veiled contempt.

He wore a tunic so dark, so black and void of colour that it seemed to swallow all refractions of light... and I was so utterly convinced that it was a reflection of his soul. Perfect symbolism. His legs – long, lean and proud were barely visible amidst the prowling fog of shadow that he always kept around himself.

And when one side of his face turned to meet my scorn head on, slid into a shaft of moonlight at just the right angle to highlight his chiselled cheeks and scarred eyebrows, his upper lip curled as if he could read my mind and feel my hatred pouring back at him in waves… It was right then that I also remembered… Balthazar was indeed, a psychotic and psychic nuisance.

This man was an insensitive brute in all the worst ways, but fate had ironically gifted him the ability to read the emotions of others. An empathic Dragon Faerie.

I recovered swiftly, angling myself against the wall by a statue, my left arm hanging limply at my side, dislocated at the shoulder from Balthazar's miniscule burst of power. He hadn't even tried to properly hurt me, hadn't even begun to tap into his deadly arsenal and I'd still gotten injured. He was overpowered and didn't bother pretending otherwise – the fact that I'd been pursued by this creature for most of my life didn't exactly bode well for my life expectancy.

As one of the last Dragon Faeries left alive, he was a thriving legacy unto himself and a weapon of mass destruction in his own right; very few matched him in age, knowledge, power or magical skill. Knowing all of this didn't make me any less of an antagonist when it came to our thriving blood feud, however, because many years had passed in abundance and we'd gone back in forth, the seasons nothing more than milestones for our games of slaughter.

"Take a hit, did you? My, my, my. You're getting slow, Doralis." Balthazar mused.

We both snapped our heads to the side just then, picking up on the thundering approach of humans. Swords clanged around the building as roaring, human voices dictated an absurd capture plan for the 'filthy Magic Bloods' hiding inside the chapel, but I merely rolled my neck, spearing a bored, flat look at the Warlord in my midst.

This was entirely his fault. Now – because of his blatant showboating of magic – I would have to fight my way out of here. This wasn't how I planned on exiting Duranta; but now the peaceful option was taken from me... all because of Balthazar, the damn Dragon Faerie.

Straightening my back, I told him, "You're a mutt, do you know that, Balthazar? If I didn't need you to pass the time, I would have ripped off your head many years ago."

"My head? You would have ripped off my head?" He burst out into laughter, clutching his middle. "You are delusional, as always, you dirty, uneducated Dryad. I pity you."

"And I pity that your wingspan matches your tiny cock, Warlord, but again, what do I know? There's just no educating us poor folk." As I spoke, Balthazar's feline grin began to wane, sliding off his face just slow enough that I knew it was a warning sign of impending wrath – and I didn't think that it was a coincidence either when the foundations of the building began to rumble under our feet, jolting me from my upright position.

Magic Bloods – Faerie males in particular, I'd found – were beautiful and vain creatures, but because of this lethal combination and their inhuman abilities, they often had the potential to reduce entire citadels to rubble with their tempestuous mood-swings.

Before the mixed colonization of Magic Bloods and humans in accepted settlements, I'd witnessed first-hand the upset that could occur when people insulted their wings, or hair colour, or other defining physical traits. Insinuating that they were undesirable, ugly, or anything less than 'breath-taking', awe-inspiring individuals to their face was comparable to putting a steak in front of a starving wolf... and expecting it not to bite.

It was highly unlikely.

Male or female, Magic Bloods loved to brawl; they inherently lived for the incitement of violent action. The men? Even more so, it seemed. The desire to do so was ingrained more strongly into certain types of Magic Bloods, too.

The Dragon Faerie in front of me had that discerning eye twitch and glazed look about his golden irises, the one I widely recognized, proving I was right; Balthazar's impulsive need to boast and correct my jibe about his "tiny cock" had just gotten bumped up on his list of priorities and removing my head from my shoulders... that was now a matter to be postponed.