I have a confession to make. I have a soft spot for dragons. They are my favorite fantastic beast, always have been and probably always will be. I’m not talking about the dragons in Skyrim or on Game of Thrones, as cool as they are, because technically they are Wyverns and I’ll never get over my disappointment. My kind of dragons come from World of Warcraft and Dragon Age. Have you seen that cinematic about Deathwing? How about the undead dragon from Wrath of the Lich King? Now those are my kind of dragons. You can have those links here, and here, by the way and they are well worth watching.
Melody is the best representation I have of my own take on dragons. She deserves a full novel all by herself, but hopefully this excerpt will satisfy her for a while.
Melody MacTyre woke up alone in the snow, amid a ruin of fallen and broken trees. Her head was swimming and her throat ached horribly, as if she hadn’t had a drink in days. She stared at the sky in confusion, unaffected by the brightness of the sun as she looked past it into the countless stars.
“Move,” said a voice in her head, a voice not quite her own. “Get up!”
“I can’t,” she mumbled, the words feeling like fire in her neck. She looked down without moving her head, peering stupidly at the great limb pinning her legs to the ground. “I’m stuck….”
“Move the branch!” growled the voice.
Her leg moved, and involuntary jerk that sent the heavy branch tumbling away in a spray of powdery snow. Melody’s eyes widened and she stood up, looking down at her torn and dirty breeches in awe. The pain in her throat temporarily forgotten, she reached down to grasp a length of broken oak that would have taken ten men to move. With barely a thought, she flicked her wrist and sent the log soaring away into the forest.
She swore softly, nearly falling back into the snow.
“Well done,” said the voice. “Told you!”
“What’s going on?” asked Melody as the burning in her throat returned. “Wh… what’s happening to me?”
“Us,” corrected the voice. “It’s happening to us. I’m you too… or at least I’m your new memories.”
Melody’s head spun and she staggered away, her movements as quick as the wind. She came up hard against an unyielding outcrop of stone, shattering the rock with her shoulder as she tried to catch herself.
“Watch it!” cried the voice. “Take it easy! Act a little more human or we’ll never blend in!”
“What are you talking about?” screamed Melody, a low growl ripping from somewhere deep in her narrow chest.
“We’re a Blood Dragon now,” the voice snapped. “I’m your ancestral memories. The one who turned us should be helping us, but right now I’m all that we’ve got. So shut up and listen!”
The girl froze in shock as a vision of a tremendous creature with shining red, black, and purple scales popped into her head. The dragon spread its sail like wings and roared, spouting flame from its open mouth. She felt the beast inside of her at the same moment, straining, begging to be unleashed.
“No!” commanded the voice. “Not here, not yet!” Melody subsided, her breath coming in great, heaving gasps as the voice continued. “Blood Dragons don’t need to show their true form. You have all the power you need as you are right now.”
“My throat,” she choked. “It hurts.”
“It’s the thirst,” said the voice. “We have to feed!”
*
Melody dropped the last wolf to the ground, wiping the blood from her mouth as her fangs retracted. She looked around at the four others, feeling equal parts horrified and exhilarated. The wolf pack, once so terrifying as she followed her trapline, had been no match for her newfound strength and ferocity. It had been a simple thing to chase them down and drain them, their jaws not even scratching her skin in the few moments they had to fight.
“I killed them,” she panted, the thirst finally sated. “I… I drank their blood!”
“What did you expect?” asked the voice. “You’re a Blood Dragon now, a member of one of the three great dragonflights. You’re kin to the most powerful vampires in the world!”
“Vampire?” she whimpered, sinking to her knees as she stared at the slaughtered wolves. “Dragon? No, no, no, no, this can’t be real….”
“It’s real,” snapped the voice. “But whoever turned us attracted attention. If we don’t get out of here soon, we’ll be in trouble.”
Melody’s legs started to move by themselves and she was suddenly running, a drab blur moving through the winter woods. Her trapline was one of the longest in the area and the trek to her cabin, which would have taken days in the deep snow, took less than an hour. Though nearly twenty, Melody, and orphan, had spent almost two years posing as a fourteen year old boy, earning his income by trading furs. The remote cabin and trapline offered a hard life, but compared to the life of an orphan in the colony, Melody thought it preferable. Even as it was, it was getting harder to avoid curious glances every time she went into town.
“You won’t have to hide like this anymore,” said the voice as she opened the cabin door.
Unbidden memories of the men that the other girls had warned her about came to her mind.
“You’re stronger than them now….”
“Then what are we running from?” she demanded as she went to the hearth. The winter cold didn’t bother her, but the familiar ritual of lighting a fire was comforting. “If I’m a Blood Dragon, what’s there to be afraid of?”
If you enjoyed the story so far you can find the rest in my book Dragon Wings, available on Amazon Kindle. If you would rather have a hard copy, Amazon is happy to oblige.
My Life as a Garden Gnome 