The Doppelgänger of Dormond Street by Sue Harry

5. Mrs Verity Somers

I am a dragon. Like my father before me and his mother before him. When the earth was nothing but a burning, black rock, we were alive. Back then, there had been thousands of us all over the planet, but as the large land mass, that the whole worlds population now lived upon, raised up from beneath the sea, everything began to change. First came the doppelgängers of the spirit world, the Merfolk born of the sea, then the werewolves born of the forest, and finally men, born of the Earth. All used the powers that were given to them by The Earth to attack our old, our young, and our sick. They all did this, not for sport, or for food, but for our scales, our teeth, and our bones, flooding the Land with magical talismans used for power and for the bloody territory wars.

We could have lived peacefully with our young neighbours. For many thousands of years, we tried, but hunger for dominion grew wildly within each of Earths new children, they grew weary with what they had each been given, and they all eventually would train their sights upon us.

Heartbroken by loss, and sick of betrayal, we decided to fight back. We didn't speak back then. We were complete in thought, and in feeling, and had use no for language. Before The Decision was made, we chose which form we would take as individuals, depending on what suited us. This was our right, to shift our shape, like the fiery, liquid rocks that had birthed and empowered us. However, after The Decision, to protect our species and to regain our numbers, we shed our mammoth size, our shimmering scales, our horns and wings, our teeth and our mouths that were full of magic and deadly volcanic fire.

We could have turned every last one of them to ash but instead we became them, lived with them, and sought out the strongest lines among them, lines that we could empower to bring about our plan. Unlike us, these children seemed to need to be ruled, subjugated and dominated by one another, and after all they had done to us, we were happy to give them their wish.

We deeply respected the Earth that had given us life and were unwilling to take lives ourselves, but we were keenly aware that the Earth did not just give. It took. She took back every life it ever gave, every tree, hill, mountain, flower, animal and Spirit. She reclaimed what was its own, at varying speeds, by the force of its own will. She lived, and respected all those who respected her, and no other creatures loved and feared her more than the Dragons.

For this reason she gave us the power to choose The Seven. Seven bloodlines to carry Her Curse and rule them all. Naturally, the children rebelled and saw The Curse as some kind of gift, a gift of power. They regarded them as a new species, born from the youngest of them, the weakest of them, mankind, and of them, their weakest, woman. They hated them, fought them, killed as many of their newborns as they could, but they found that, against these women, their biggest weapon, magic, was useless to them.

It all culminated in a war, that the children of the sea, the forest, the spirit world and the Land, were ill equipped to win. For we stood quietly behind these women, pouring the Earths terrible power into them. We gained their trust and taught them valuable lessons that they would never have learned, had we left it up to them. We were teachers, or maids, or traveling salesmen with some Earth Stone that they would need. It took nearly twelve thousand years but order was achieved. We were patient. We had The Earth, and time, on our side.

The years of peace stretched out behind us, and we grew to love and sympathise with the ones upon whom we had placed so heavy a burden. The Decision had been a logical one, however, many of us could see that it had also been cruel. And we were not cruel. Our survival had depended upon The Seven and their offspring, but at the time we could not have foreseen, nor even comprehended, the tragic personal cost.

Dragons could happily exist alone in a volcano for a thousand years, and spend the next thousand on a island with their family. Emotionally, we could survive under either condition because, whether we were physically alone or not, we were all connected to each other through the Earth. We had no real concept of distance, as to us, there was none. The physical connection that our neighbours cherished so much, was secondary to us and almost inconsequential, and although we understood suffering and loss, death was not a concept we truly fathomed, because we remained connected and were able to commune with our dead through the Earth, which was why we had neither cared, nor accounted for the toll that the Earths curse would take upon the women of The Seven.