Sharna was hungry. There was no way she could deny that anymore. She had, for quite a long time, but she knew she was reaching the end of her endurance. She strained against the chains holding her in the cave, only to be rewarded with the ear-splitting sound of claws against granite. Why had she ever trusted a wizard? She should have known from his cryptic remark about "solving her knight problem" that he was up to something. She had given him scales plucked from her tender throat for his spells, and what had he given her? As powerful a sorceress as she was, even for a dragon, she could not break a chain spell which had obviously taken days of preparation. After stranding her in her own home, he had run off with some cheap magical rings from her treasury. Obviously, he had assumed that anything in her treasury was worth her life. But glowering about the past would not keep her alive. Neither would anything she could do.

A light blocked the doorway. Sharna looked up, berating her hunger-dimmed senses and positive some self-centered knight out to slay a dragon had found her. Ah well, she thought. At least the end will come quickly. But when she raised her head, she saw not a dusty night, but a small girl dressed in peasant clothing. Before she could consider the indignity of being gawked at by peasants, she caught the girl's power aura. This was no simple human. There was an air of magic about her, and it wasn't surprising when she muttered some words of power under her breath. The power built in the cave. Positive that this was the end, Sharna closed her eyes and braced herself.

Five minutes later, the end had not yet come, and she was getting stiff from "bracing for death." And, to her added embarrassment, the human had walked out. Sharna was tired of this. She had been deceived, starved, and frustrated, and now this human had the nerve not to kill her! She dug her claws into the stone floor. If she was going to die, it was going to be on her terms, not those of an amateur wizard who knew one good chain spell! She gathered her strength and ran for the cave entrance, awaiting the jerk of chain which would surely end her life only to go barreling into the sunlight in a painful mass of wings and claws. She sat stunned for a moment. Had the chain spell been weaker than she had first thought? Had she had more power reserves stored somewhere? Or, worse than any other thought, had that human removed the spell? The very thought of being indebted to a human made her shudder. But before she could contemplate this strange turn of events, she caught wind of a herd of sheep, and she was in no mood to defer to humans for the sake of avoiding knights; her hunger was a more immediate issue.

Fully sated, and full of the waters of a fresh stream, she curled up in the shadow of a small hill. As much as she loathed sleeping in the open, she was not going back into that cave again.