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To Shape a Dragon’s Breath: A Review

Anequs is a young Indigenous woman born and raised on the island of Masquapaug, far from the colonizing influence of the Anglish people. After spotting a Nampeshiwe, one of the dragons once common in the area, she quickly goes home to tell her family what she has seen. Uncertain if it was really there or just a vision, she ventures back out the following day and finds not the adult dragon, but a Nampeshiwe egg—the first one seen in generations.

When the baby Nampeshiwe hatches in front of the entire community of Masquapaug, she chooses Anequs to be her bonded partner. Anequs names her Kasaqua and becomes the first Nampeshiweisit (dragon partner) in the memory of anyone on the island. Now Anequs would’ve been perfectly content to stay in her family home and raise the dragon there until Kasaqua, in a moment of fear and pain, releases her breath weapon. Seeing the raw destructive power even a baby dragon possesses convinces Anequs to follow her older brother’s advice and apply for Kuiper Academy, the Anglish dragoneer school in the distant city of Vastergot.

Soon, Anequs is off to another world, one where the white men control everything from how history is taught to who gets to be paired with a dragon. The school accepts her application, but the threat of death for Kasaqua if she can’t learn to be tamed to their standards looms over everything.

Anequs doesn’t fit in at the school, since she wasn’t raised in Anglish society. She doesn’t know the rules that she’s supposed to follow, and so she rapidly befriends the other “misfits” of sorts, including an autistic student (in one of the most accurate and sympathetic portrayals I’ve ever encountered in literature), the one other Indigenous dragoneer, and one of the laundry maids. She spurns the use of the assigned surname Aponakwesdottir, insisting that the only name that she needs is Anequs. She can read and write, which is more than many of the white students and professors expect of her. In short, neither Anequs nor Kasaqua are what the students and staff and Kuiper anticipated. Nor is the school what Anequs had hoped for, with the narratives and views of white men dominating every aspect of the society. Now she must navigate adolescence, dragon-rearing, school, and an openly hostile culture that would prefer her not to exist.

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is brilliant. The world is simultaneously strange and familiar, set on an Earth in the early industrial age with technological innovations driven by dragons, who can break matter down into component elements with their breath. The breadth and depth of the worldbuilding is staggering, with tremendous care put into the little details. The scientific processes are as thoroughly explored as any contemporary fantasy’s magic system, with almost every aspect having a real-life counterpart. I loved following Anequs as she learned about the world beyond the boundaries of her island, and I can’t wait to come back to the world of the Nampeshiweisit.

Moniquill Blackgoose’s To Shape a Dragon’s Breath is out in the wild today. Go catch yourself a copy.

My utmost thanks to Random House/Ballantine and NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The Dragon

This one’s for Chuck Wendig’s Terrible Minds Writing Challenge. Our instructions were to write a sci-fi story about a dragon, only not necessarily a mythical one. It’s a short piece, well under the 2,000 word limit, but it was something that came to mind immediately after reading the challenge prompt.

“The Dragon”

 

“Are we starting?”

“Yes ma’am. We’re recording right now. You can start wherever you like.”

“I was there that day. They said that there’d been nothing like it since the old calendar, since the bombings on Earth. I never saw footage of those, but I’ve heard statistics. It amaze me still to realize that we used to live in such numbers that the loss of a couple hundred would be considered relatively insignificant. That that could’ve been the better option. I don’t know what exactly this new weapon was. Just the name all of the news outlets on the colony gave it. The dragon.”

***

“Yes, she was the first one to call it that on the intrasystem media. I asked her about it afterward. She said it seemed like a good fit. Something so destructive that it couldn’t possibly be real. She was never the same after that day. Nightmares kept her from sleeping, and eventually she just… she couldn’t stop seeing them.”

***

“What do you remember most about that day?”

“The smell. I’ll never forget the smell. Melting metal, charred flesh. I can’t eat barbecue anymore. The masks could only filter out so much, and we didn’t have them for the first wave. And the heat. Even when we got the bunker gear, we couldn’t stay on site for too long. Dozens of folks were dropping just from the heat.”

“You were with the first responders?”

“We all were. There weren’t enough of us. We didn’t have adequate supplies, or enough people. How can you plan for a disaster on that sort of scale when there’s been nothing like it used for centuries?”

“Had you ever seen footage of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

“Once, when I was a kid. They told us that no one had ever done anything on that sort of a destructive scale since. People kept pointing to those two bombs as one of the worst things that humanity ever did to itself. I wish they’d been right, that we’d never come up with anything worse.”

“You said supplies were inadequate too. Would you like to elaborate?”

“Well, there was no way we’d ever have the rescue equipment or the medical supplies to treat burns of that intensity on that large of a site. No colony would. The governors would never allow the funding for recovery for a disaster that they couldn’t foresee, and half of them are too young to have learned about the bombings back on Earth. They’d dismiss them out of hand and say that we should be prepped for real emergencies. Loss of atmosphere, gravity failure. Things that you expect to happen on an orbiting colony. Not the heat, not a fire so sudden and massive that it burns through 85% of your oxygen supply in a matter of seconds. Not some lunatic trying to hurt or kill everyone. We were damn lucky we didn’t lose the whole colony.”

“But you kept trying, despite being understaffed and under-supplied?”

“We had to. 12 hour shifts and then some, to start. You know how critical the first hours are in a recovery effort. More people died, but we kept trying. We had to, damn it. We had to know that we were doing our best. It was the only way we could keep going.”

***

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted it. My understanding is that the work on the project was so compartmentalized that no one team could’ve put together a solid idea of the whole. Different groups of engineers and scientists working on components on different planets and colonies. No communications other than what was absolutely necessary would’ve been allowed. Tell one team they’re working on one project under one code name. Take their work and have an unaffiliated group start working on it from there under a different code name. Never let the right hand know what the left is doing, you know.”

“Hence why there couldn’t be a contingency in place.”

“Exactly. No one knew what The Dragon was capable of. Just that it was a dangerous weapon.”

“And someone set it off in the middle of a civilian population center.”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe the attack itself was premeditated?”

“We’re done here.”

***

“How many people died?”

“In the initial burst? Estimates say over half a million. The Dragon’s Breath, the mishmash of various ailments people caught in the aftermath is still killing people. Nearly double that.”

“Do you honestly believe it was an accident that the weapon was discharged on the colony?”

“I’d like to believe that, but the investigation is ongoing.”

“Thank you for your time.”