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Was thinking about Halloween and ended up taping this story.
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The Silent Familiar
The Wizard Niccolo was not happy. At the age of 183 — youthful for a wizard, but improbable for an ordinary human — he had thought certain things well out of his life. Sudden changes in his daily routine were one. And romance was another ““ even if it was his familiar’s romance, and not his own.
“Could make an omelet with it, I suppose,” he grumbled to his familiar, the tiny dragon Olivia. She sat on the cluttered mantle, wrapped around her egg, still marveling at its production and entirely too pleased with herself. A pair of alabaster candelabra sheltered her in a thicket of gilt spirals, and a stuffed salmon, labeled “First Prize ““ Thornstone Village Centennial Celebration,” regarded her with a sour gaze.
“Master,” she said, blinking luminous eyes. “Have I not served you well?”
“For the most part,” he admitted.
She stayed silent and after a pause, he said, “Yes, invariably, Olivia. But who will hold your loyalty, that egg or I?”
“Both,” she said and stoked her scaled cheek along the egg’s smooth surface. “But I will never value it higher than my service to you.”
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
(fantasy, novelette) She was thinking complicated thoughts now, about things she was not sure that dryads ever contemplated: what it would be like to take an axe to a sailor, to cut a human down as they had cut her tree down. Sometimes they were so close. But there were so many of them, and she was chained.
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