"Better lucky than good!" Alberich quipped, the first time Feldspar's thrown javelin had ricocheted off a hanging shield and managed, after a few more detours, to pierce the bullseye from behind.

"Please don't ever say that to me again," Feldspar said. Alberich just laughed, like it had been a joke. Feldspar had been deadly serious.

Born with primal eyes - which by all accounts were just a random result of the fluctuations of the elemental leylines, not a mystic mark of a deity's blessing or of status as a chosen one or anything else - on Friday the 13th, everyone had always tried to make sense of Feldspar's luck in terms of two conflicting omens. Maybe the primal eyes canceled out the bad luck of his birthdate. Maybe he was especially lucky, to get something so rare and prized despite an unlucky birthdate. Maybe, some insensitive dragons suggested, the primal eyes were a curse - didn't it hurt, having rocks in his eyes? Could he see? Did they squeeze out of his tear ducts?

They didn't hurt, and he could see just fine. They were just his eyes. But his luck, that was another matter.

Falling into a Beastclan pit trap and breaking his wing, he managed to find a valuable necklace on the corpse of another dragon who'd fallen in and died. He nearly died of dehydration himself before he was found. The stunt with the backwards, ricochet-ing bullseye was just one time it had happened out of many; arrows, javelins, throwing knives, there was virtually no projectile weapon he couldn't fail into victory with.

Magic was hopeless. No matter how precise his incantations, spell circles, and reagent measurements, he conjured up birds when he tried to summon snakes, blew up objects he tried to enchant, and injured dragons he tried to heal. He didn't dare try the rapid-cast battlefield magic that would actually be useful to a warrior. Alchemy was out of the question.

So he abides by the rule of "better good than lucky." He trains, relentlessly, with every weapon to hand, determined to hone his skills to a point where he doesn't need luck. More seasoned warriors try to tell him that's impossible, but he can't accept that. If he accepts that luck will always have a role in his life, he accepts chaos.