Bonus Chapter

  Karma's Shadow

  An orange glow lit the faces of the group of adventurers sitting around their fire. Still unaware of the creature's presence, they laughed and joked about the enemies they'd successfully conned or killed in the last few weeks.

  Gear and ill-gotten loot filled the tent that they had stored the egg within, but with nobody left to guard the egg, there was no one there to hear the shell as it cracked.

  Moments were all that it had taken for the shadow to get used to the form of the small dragon, and for it to begin pressing outward against its ovoid prison. The sounds of its escape were inaudible over those of the fire.

  The black-scaled dragon stumbled lightly before finding its footing, flexed its legs, and stretched out the wings that hadn't yet grown to a size useful for functional flight. The wings weren't a concern, those could always be made. A strange coldness swirled within the creature's core, and it stopped to wonder at the odd sensation of a cold outside of its own shadows.

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  Acting on instinct alone, it let the cold feeling swell and boil up through its throat to be released from its maw.

  A dark antithesis to flame consumed everything before the beast. A cone of shadows burst outward from the front of the adventurer's supply tent, swallowing bits of light from the campfire.

  Bright flames peeled away from the logs, pulled and vanished into the hungry void.

  The adventurers leapt to their feet, swearing as they reached for weapons and abilities to launch in the direction of the threat.

  They were too slow.

  As they blindly threw everything they had at the growing darkness, it surged over them. In the center of their camp, the light of the fire blinked out of existence.

  Swallowed by shadow-flame, a section of the forest went cold and utterly dark.

  And as the dragon breathed in the silence, basking in its emptiness, that cold void spread from one tree to the next of its own accord… a wild, untamed, black fire.