Christmas story

"Once upon a time, in a world that never was, a water miller had a son who was named Branco Miller after his father. The little boy fell ill at the age of ten and turned grey overnight. The village wise man told the frightened father that it was not a disease, but fate. The simple man was even more frightened because he noticed that, despite the summer weather, ice flowers were crawling up the inside of the room window."

And so begins the world-changing journey of Icestrom, the ice mage (nickname Snowflake) his adventures with Amberfang the fire dragon.
I made the couple of them up on Sunday, simply poking fun at a dragon's Christmas clumsiness in setting fire to the main square tree in the town of Dragonlance that celebrates the winter solstice.
The red dragon has long been a popular symbol and figure for me, I could vary it a lot and put it into all kinds of stories.
In "Twisted Red" his presence is more symbolic, he represents the sin of the father, but there is also something mystical in my psychological knight novel. See my previous post.

Let me go back to the beginning of the story, to the main character's backstory. When little Branco got better, his father, on the advice of the village wise man, immediately took him to the town of Dragonlance and put him and all his few belongings at the mage guild building. After the child had easily completed the task of freezing a candle flame, he was immediately admitted, and the miller bid a tearful farewell to his son, who wept snowflakes of sorrow that his life had changed overnight. Hence the nickname Snowflake. But very soon he earned the phrase: "hell also freezes from him", a term used by his contemporaries and teachers to express his enormous magical potential. He was so powerful that mages could not place it on a their rating scale and so it was classified as a magical beast.

He completed the mage training easily and quickly, as the aim of the training was to strengthen the magical potential of each student and to master its use. Branco was born strong, and learning spells was no problem for him. Everyone else, however, was faced with the fact that here was a mage, an ice mage at that, akin to the world-shaping demigods of ancient times, but the world no longer really needed such creatures. He was sent on a mission that he was not supposed to survive, to hunt down a marauding, pesky fire dragon that had settled too close to the city. The plan was a good one, Amberfang would have been able to finish off the young and totally untrained in dragon slaying Branco, but fire and ice would have extinguished each other, both would have died in their fight. Contrary to popular belief, dragons are not mindless beasts, some possessing intelligence comparable to humans, and Amberfang's smaller stature for his species was compensated for by the merciful heavens with greater intelligence.

Amberfang offered the mage an alliance, he will be his magical beast, so they would both survive. Branco knew his classification was final because the Citadel council had also rejected his appeal of the decision. When he recognized the term in the dragon's telepathic message, he knew he shared a common destiny with the dragon and proposed a relationship of equals.
Branco returned to town with the very much alive fire dragon and requested his registration as a non-traditional adventurer. Branco signed up as an adventurer with Amberfang together after failing the mage's exam by leaving the dragon alive. Not that he was particularly interested in that anymore. He found a lifelong companion when he thought no one would ever join him because of his power, but the very dragon he was sent to slay, the beast recognized him as a companion. It gave him a realisation that boosted his confidence and encouraged him to find his own way.
Of course, the world was not at all prepared for the alliance of a powerful ice mage and a small but clever fire dragon.

Should there be a sequel?

But first I'm going to write Twisted Red, because I've already got a lot of things worked out for that.