Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Dragon's Gate
    The Dragon's Gate
    The Dragon's Gate
    Ebook87 pages1 hour

    The Dragon's Gate

    By Goldie McBride

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    From the moment Bastien achieved his life’s ambition and passed through the Dragon’s Gate, nothing has gone right! Instead of the magnificent Dragon he’d expected to be transformed into, he was a miniature dragon who could do no more than produce a puff of smoke—not fire. The evil wizard he ran afoul of transformed him into the magnificent Dragon he’d expected to be, but then enslaved him. He’d begun to lose hope of ever escaping when the wizard sent him to slay the lovely, incompetent sorceress Ariana.

    Finally! He had some hope—if only sweet Ariana could get one spell right!

    Published: June 2016
    Length: 21,599
    Word Count: Novella
    Genre: Dark Fantasy
    Rating: Spicy/Erotic

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew Concepts Publishing
    Release dateAug 10, 2016
    ISBN9781603949446
    The Dragon's Gate

    Read more from Goldie Mc Bride

    Related to The Dragon's Gate

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy Romance For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale

      Feb 4, 2019

      The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale
      9 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading Guide

      Jan 2, 2022

      Summer Reading Guide
      6 min read

    • Article

      Wounds That Won’t Heal

      Oct 30, 2017

      Wounds That Won’t Heal
      7 min read

    • Article

      'The Hazel Wood' Has Few Uses For Enchantment

      Jan 30, 2018

      In Melissa Albert's dark take on fairy tales, 17-year-old Alice has spent her entire life on the run from her family legacy: a terrifying mythical world created by her grandmother, a famous author.

      3 min read

    • Article

      A WING AND a prayer

      Sep 28, 2021

      A raven saved my life Cate McMurray, 47, from West Midlands I ’d always known I was different. As a small child, I used to see and hear people who weren’t there. One day, I was playing hide ‘n’ seek with my two sisters, and tucked myself away in a cu

      4 min read

    • Article

      Rose - Tinted Glasses

      Nov 10, 2021

      From the corner of her eye, Becca watched a small pack of drunk pixies adding salt into her grandmother’s bone china sugar pot. The sugar pot was the oldest thing in the house, even older than grandmother herself. There would be hell to pay if it bro

      12 min read

    • Article

      Evenings with Clarice Lispector’s Newest Translator

      Apr 24, 2018

      1. “I’ve been working on the translation nonstop—it’s like I’m in a trance,” Magdalena Edwards told me in early March 2017, while preparing a gin and tonic at her house in Santa Monica. I walked there from my place—we live very close to one another.

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Bridle

      Oct 10, 2021

      Saliva pooled on her tongue beneath the rusty depressor. She endured a constant urge to swallow, afraid of choking on her own fluids. The taste of metal and blood are so akin, it is easy to mistake one for the other. This early in the day, blood was

      11 min read

    • Article

      Mammy Dearest

      Mar 20, 2022

      Noelle McCarthy, the broadcaster, podcaster and journalist, has two obsessions: her mother and Dracula. She has written a memoir, Grand: Becoming my mother’s daughter, in which both characters flounce across the pages, one with fangs wearing a cape,

      8 min read

    • Article

      My first year WITHOUT MY MOM

      Mar 16, 2020

      My first year WITHOUT MY MOM
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Aug 19, 2022

      Books
      4 min read

    • Article

      Left To Lose

      Jul 10, 2022

      Around the time she gives up her name, it starts to feel like this entire revolution isn’t worth it anymore. The world is probably lucky that Kelian—she still remembers Kelian, in spite of everything—is there to pick up the pieces, the way he always

      11 min read

    • Article

      Fiction Roundup

      Sep 10, 2021

      This is an endearing story about a little café on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast run by Thirapatheegadu Reddy, who’s known as Tubby to his friends. He has a small but dedicated staff who help him prepare the homely dishes for which his establishment i

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      Spooky Storyteller

      Oct 5, 2022

      Spooky Storyteller
      2 min read

    • Article

      Cricket Ceague

      Apr 1, 2019

      Penelope Berkeley, age 9 Mars Hill, NC Night had fallen, and Luna awoke from where she had been sleeping in a cornfield. She moved steadily through the stalks with barely a sound, keeping her eyes on the glittering glass rooftop of the greenhouse in

      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘It’s Really Strange To Be Reminded Of Your Perpetually Dead Parents’: Frieda Hughes On Her Famous Literary Family And Her Magpie Memoir George

      Apr 28, 2023

      ‘It’s Really Strange To Be Reminded Of Your Perpetually Dead Parents’: Frieda Hughes On Her Famous Literary Family And Her Magpie Memoir George
      9 min read

    • Article

      Too Many Cats

      Nov 19, 2019

      Too Many Cats
      11 min read

    • Article

      Meet the Writer

      May 27, 2023

      Meet the Writer
      4 min read

    • Article

      MONICA McINERNEY

      Sep 24, 2020

      Bestselling author Monica McInerney returns with her eagerly awaited 12th novel, The Godmothers. Described as a “great big hug of a book”, the story follows Eliza Miller’s relationships with her watchful and loving godmothers, Olivia and Maxie. Fol

      2 min read

    • Article

      Cherished Volumes

      Jan 21, 2020

      The oar dipped methodically into the wateras my dad guided our canoe across the shimmering lake. Sunshine warmed my bare shoulders, and I listened in rapt attention while my mom read from the volume in her hands: “The birches in the hollow turned as

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Witch Finders

      Jul 16, 2020

      Beth pulled her cloak tightly around her. It was the very last day of October and the air was damp and chill. Dead autumn leaves lay in deep piles in the woods and smoke curled into the night air from her cottage. Not far to go now. She bent her head

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Dragon's Gate

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Dragon's Gate - Goldie McBride

      1

      The Dragon’s Gate

      By

      Goldie McBride

      ( c ) copyright by Goldie McBride, May 2016

      Cover art by Jenny Dixon, 2016

      ISBN 978-1-60394-

      New Concepts Publishing

      Lake Park, GA 31636

      www.newconceptspublishing.com

      This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

      Chapter One

      Ariana was weary as she settled in her favorite spot in the woods near her cottage, but not so tired that her heart wasn’t thumping uncomfortably fast as she stared down at the heavy, ancient volume she’d settled on her lap.

      It had been her mother’s book of spells, but it looked so ancient, was so worn with time, that she was certain that it must have been passed down to her mother from her mother, or perhaps even further back.

      She still found it difficult to believe her mother was gone—cut down in the prime of her life, slain by evil bastards that had had no reason to take her life.

      She found it even more difficult to accept that her mother was, indeed, the witch everyone in the nearest village to their tiny farm had called her.

      She must have been to have owned the book of spells.

      And yet Ariana could not recall that she’d ever seen her mother cast a spell.

      Mayhap it had belonged to her grandmother, after all, and her mother had only kept it because of that?

      The leather binding had been thick with dust when she’d pulled it from the secret hiding place beneath the floor, but then she supposed that there had been time enough for a great deal of dust to shift down onto the cover through the cracks between the floor boards in the time since her mother’s death.

      That was not necessarily a sign that her mother had not used the book anymore than the fact that she had not seen her mother practicing the black arts. She had been crushed by the loss, so burdened by grief that she had no clear idea of when her mother had died. She just knew that seasons had passed since that awful time, not how many.

      It bothered her that she could only recall that it had happened in winter—not which winter.

      How many had passed since that horrible time? Two? Three? More?

      If nothing else, she should have marked the time of the anniversary of her birth, but it was almost as if she was frozen in time. She had no clear notion of how many springs she had seen in her life, only that she had seen fifteen at the time of her mother’s death.

      And she had been angry with her mother.

      Because her mother had told her there would be no husband for her—no babes of her own to coddle.

      She had reached an age to wed only to discover that the villagers shunned them, feared them, and that was why they had been so isolated—not because they were so far from the village as she had always believed. And that was why she could not expect any young men to come calling.

      But she had not understood, then, that they were shunned and feared because the villagers suspected her mother was a spell caster. It was because they knew her mother was a witch.

      She shook those thoughts—all of them.

      It didn’t matter how many years had passed since her birth when age wasn’t the enemy that would deprive her of having a family of her own.

      And it didn’t matter how long her mother had been gone or that she’d said horrible things to her before she died. It couldn’t be changed. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t undo what she had said or the way she had behaved in her anger. She would simply have to learn to live with the pain of her guilt on top of the hurt of loss.

      Releasing an unhappy sigh, she carefully opened the book and just as gently turned the pages as she scanned each for a spell she might try.

      She’d begun to wonder if she had any magic in her at all. It seemed logical to conclude that the spell book was proof that there was magic in her family and, if there was, that she must have inherited some of it along with the book.

      And yet she’d tried and tried before she’d succeeded in doing anything.

      Not that she’d managed to correctly cast any spell at all!

      But she had managed a smattering of magic. Enough to convince her she must have inherited the ability after all.

      If her mother had taught her the skills ….

      But then maybe her mother had not been able to? Maybe she was right to begin with and her mother had not had the magic? Maybe the magic had come from her grandmother—long dead?

      Or mayhap, her grandmother had passed into the other world before she had had the chance to teach her daughter? And thus her own mother had had no skills to pass down?

      She dismissed the puzzle after a few moments. If she ever managed to figure it out, mayhap she would find a spell that would allow her to communicate with her mother or her grandmother or both?

      The important thing at this point was to teach herself what she could, to learn what she could.

      Because the book of spells was crumbling to pieces with age.

      Already there were spells that were lost to time because the page had crumbled and she had no coins to buy more of the parchment and no knowledge to make the sheets herself even to try to preserve what was left.

      She might well find a spell to help her preserve the book of magic, but otherwise she had only a very narrow window to learn what she could before it completely crumbled to pieces and left her with nothing at all!

      She supposed she should have just left it to rot. She knew she really shouldn’t be messing with something she didn’t understand.

      And yet it seemed to bring her some comfort, to fill the void left by her loss and the ‘never was or would be’

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1