Josh dreams of dragons.
He thinks it's just a welcome escape from everyday life. Until one morning, he wakes up with scales, wings, and a tail.
Josh faces a harsh new reality: he has become something that shouldn't exist outside the pages of his fan...
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The red-eyed beast slid out of the forest with unsettling, silent nimbleness. Ares walked up to me and held my gaze for a long moment. As in the dream, the dragon had a perceptible aura of cold authority. He was not physically much larger than I was, but there was something more about him that made my tail coil inward and my mouth go dry. When he looked at me, I got the sense, as I sometimes did with Rofar, that he was reading me on a deeper level. But this just added to my anxiety. I had no idea if he would fight me again, or employ another strategy get what he wanted.
The black dragon spoke. "I smell blood on you, hatchling. Did things get a little messy in there?"
I looked down at my paw. The man's blood still coated the tips of my claws where I had pressed down on his chest. "I...It wasn't..."
"Humans," he spat, interrupting my halting response. "So much violence, when you get right down to it. Such hateful and petty creatures."
"What do you want?" I asked, not intending to convey as much fear in my voice as I did. But I knew what he wanted. It was just as Rofar had warned. Ares had come to try and turn me into one of his followers.
"I want you to get to know me a little better," he said. The black dragon's bearing was nonchalant, and the statement sounded suspiciously benign to me, even magnanimous. "Am I correct to assume that I am the first dragon you have met in the flesh?"
"Um, yeah, I guess."
"Well then," he continued, lending a silky smoothness to his voice as he lowered his back legs into a seated position. "Let me speak with you about matters that concern our kind. Because, you see, whether you accept it yet or not, you are no longer a human. We are dragons, Ayreth. We are something better, something more than we once were. This is something you must embrace eventually."
I didn't like him putting it like that. Like there was no choice in the matter. I didn't want to be better than I was before. I knew I was different—that much was undeniable—but I didn't want to start thinking there was a superiority in that. There were humans in my life that were too important for me to let thoughts of such supremacy infect me. "I'm not ready to do that," I said. "You can fight me all you want, beat me all you want, but my mind is my own. I don't want to be better. I want to preserve the relationships that are important to me. My family is still my family."
"Family," Ares snorted, looking off to one side and flicking his blade-tipped tail disdainfully. "Now that is something I have experience with. Your precious pal Rofar probably told you all about my history. And you probably think your situation is different. You think, how could your family possibly turn on you? How could they reject one of their own for something you cannot control? You've convinced yourself that everything could be overcome because 'family comes first' and all that nonsense." Pausing for a brief moment, he looked back into my eyes, wanting me to hear the full finality of his words. "You are wrong."
