The Animal Tamer's Forest

In today's world, most people dismiss odd claims; the glanced sighting of a mysterious creature, or secret sounds, who's whispers no one else could hear, to just brush off their shoulder. However, not everyone shares in that sheltered lot. If when in the distance when a BOOM! you hear within, and dare question what it was... Stella Hart knew exactly what it was. She won't tell you of course, but that BOOM! may have been partially caused by her.

She has a slight issue with being... Less than kind to creatures that she should have been kinder too. But we can't start there of course! Let's start a bit earlier, perhaps this morning, shall we?

It was a clear day, no rain, all warm sweet sunshine, as she sat on her favorite perch (an abnormally large mushroom), a perfect place to read. Undisturbed, undetected, unwatched for she was warry.

"Stella?" came the familiar voice she knew too well as her father's. She sighed as she closed her book, tucking it briskly away, and yelled back to him. "I'm right here father!"

Soon, he breaks through the bushes and finds her standing innocently right there. "It is time for your daily training" he tells her. She is not all that happy about this, as training is always boring, but she goes with him to the empty grove they use for spell work. Stella's father set down his glasses and looked around them. "You know what to do" he said to her.

Stella moved to the middle of the grove and sat down in the lotus position. She then put her hand out and made a strange noise, very similar to a chipmunk's normal sound. Soon, about 10 chipmunks ran to her and crawled up her arm.

You see, Stella wasn't a normal girl. She came from a long line of witches. Her ancestors focused solely on the communication with animals in the forest they lived in, and Stella had become very familiar with the craft.

All she had left to learn was to be gentle.

Stella had anger issues, to put it nicely. That flared like fat in the fire. Once ignited, she didn't know how to back down, and the creatures of the forest didn't like that. Normally, by Stella's age of 13, she would be at the level to talk to the creatures that didn't come out for normal people, Dragons. But those animals do not bode others anger lightly. Stella's father was scared to put her out there, and let her talk to them, as her tongue was like to wander so he limited her to birds, chipmunks and squirrels.

Stella looked at the chipmunks and began speaking in what you would take as gibberish, but it is really the tongue of woodland creatures. A simple conversation went back and forth between them and after about 10 minutes, Stella and the chipmunks parted ways.

"Good job, dear. You're getting better with the creatures" her father told her. Stella nodded at him and asked him if she could go back to reading. "Yes, just come back to the house before it turns dark please. That's when the dragons roam" her father responded.

She wandered off. Stella didn't know why she felt resentment, but she did. She was angry at her father for only allowing her to speak to small animals. She wanted to continue her family's legacy. She stopped in the middle of the woods and yelled a horrible, angry yell. All the birds within a mile flew out of their trees and all the squirrels scampered worriedly away. Stella sat down hard on the floor and tried to make her anger subside.

"Why can't he just trust me?! I'm 13 and I can't even talk to a simple dragon! Mom would have let me..." she huffed.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard a loud roar, almost in response to hers, which made her stand up in fear. She looked around her, but saw nothing but trees.

Since there was nothing she saw, Stella continued walking through the woods, thinking it was just a figment of her imagination. "Dragons don't come out till the night time and it's still early afternoon. You imagined it Stella. You imagined i-" she stopped dead in her tracks because right there in front of her was a 20 foot tall dragon. Stella stood there, wide mouthed, staring at the dragon. She'd never seen one, and was too scared to run or cry for help, but the part of her that told to run and get help was fought by the part of her that felt the resentment towards her father. She thought, 'well, maybe I can prove father wrong! I can talk to this one and show him that I can!'

So she walked to the dragon calmly and acknowledged it in the tongue of the dragon. She wasn't supposed to know it. but she sometimes managed to spirit away books from her father's study. Even the book she was reading earlier was a book on dragon tongue.

Translated into Common Tongue, Stella said, "hello there, dragon. How are you today?" In response, the dragon nipped at her with sharp rows of teeth. Stella felt herself becoming angry, but stopped herself and tried to calm down. The dragon told her "you disrupted my nap with your horrible screech, you retched girl. Another animal tamer, huh? Useless if you ask me. Just meddlers in the lives of poor animals who live in this forest." Stella huffed. She told it "say ONE more thing like that and I will show you the extent of my abilities." The dragon seemed to glare at her, and said to her "I will show the extent of MINE!"

With that, the dragon unleashed a wall of flames from its big, smelly mouth. Stella brought up her strength and called forth as many birds as she could think of. They tried to come to her, but the wall of flames was engulfing too much of the forest, the birds couldn't take it. The dragon stomped her way.

Now remember that BOOM! we were talking about? Now you know it was more than your imagination. You heard the steps of an angry dragon.

It loomed over Stella. She glared at it and told it to bring it. The dragon responded by picking her up in its large jaws and beginning to fly upwards. Stella saw her father running towards that exact spot and wanted to scream at him to run, but knew she couldn't. The dragon would kill him if it knew he was there. Stella's father looked up and saw her in the dragon's large jaws, being carried away. Before Stella knew what was happening, her father yelled up in dragon tongue. "HALT FIENDISH DRAKE!" he yelled.

The dragon stopped rising, but didn't return to the ground either. It bared its teeth. "PUT HER DOWN! PLEASE, WHATEVER WAS SAID, I'M SURE SHE DIDN'T MEAN IT!"

The dragon took this as a challenge. All I will say to keep this friendly is that the dragon did what Stella's father asked of it. It flew away, not even wanting to stay and carry the joy of watching it's victim fall to the ground. Stella could feel the wind on her face as she screamed. The ground was coming closer by the second. In those last few seconds, the years of her life flashed before her eyes.

She saw her good times with her mother. The times they would cook together, the warmth of her smile, the sweet sound of her singing. She could also see the not so good times. The arguments and the hatred. She saw now how her immense anger brought the downfall of the family. She knew it was happening again. She knew her anger caused this. She knew it was her fault.

As she hit the ground, she saw her father looming over her. He was crying. That was the last thing she saw before her vision went black.

She awoke, but didn't have any sense of how long she was out. She was in the same grove, but the fire was out and animals surrounded her.

'Am I dead?' she thought to herself. Somehow, she knew she wasn't, but she didn't know how that was possible. Stella sat up and looked around. She saw her father sitting across the grove, sleeping. "Father?" she said. Her father awoke quickly and ran to her, pulling her in his arms. She noticed she should try talking to the animals, but when she tried, she couldn't remember how.

Stella looked at her father confused. He held up his hands and explained everything.

After she had hit the ground, he couldn't think of how to make Stella live. He was hunched over her body crying when something above him put the fire out at once. He looked up and saw an even larger dragon than the last. It didn't lower, but it spoke to him. The dragon told him these simple words before disappearing into the horizon: "you must loose something to gain something else. And that doesn't always mean a life..." At that, he knew what he must do. He used the oldest spell in any book he could find, and he took away Stella's powers. He knew that was what got her into this, and at that moment he knew she wasn't dead, but still dying. The only way she could have regained her strength was to make her a normal human.

"Don't worry, sweetie. You aren't alone. I stripped myself of powers too." Stella's eyes filled with tears as she realized what she had done. "But father!" she sobbed. "That means there will be no more legacy! If I just hadn't been so rude and selfish this never would have happened..."

Her father touched her cheek and smiled, tears in his eyes. "Stella listen to me. If it meant getting you for a longer time, it doesn't matter that we don't have powers. We can leave the animals to not be bothered anymore. And we can live normal lives, and get you some friends. I never got that opportunity, and neither did your mother, or her mother or father, or anyone. We can start a new legacy as normal people."

He stands up and offers his hand. "Come on, let's go start our new adventure, OK Stella?" Stella took his hand, and as they walked off into the new normal world, the animals went back into their caves and the sun set, leaving the woods forever undisturbed, and leaving the mysterious noises and other occurrences up to the responsibility of the forest.

So you see? Some things aren't always as they seem. So next time you hear that BOOM! give it some thought, and let yourself wonder what it really is.