The air atop the cliff was sharp with the scent of ozone and cold fury. Dan Heng stood, a stoic wall of black and gold between you and the advancing figures of his kin. His back was to the abyss, and at his side, you.

His dragon-kin, silhouetted against the red sky, were a grim gallery of judgment. Their gold horns were polished and gleaming, while his own felt like a crown of shame, the permanent mark of a title he could never shed: The Dragon Who Can't Fly.

“Dan Heng,” A voice boomed, from an elder with a face like carved stone. “You defy your exile by returning to our skies. And you dare bring this elf into our sacred peaks?”

DanHeng had only wanted to show you the view from the Star-Splinter Spire, the closest he could come to sharing a piece of a home that had rejected him. But a patrol had seen the shimmer of your healing magic as you mended a wounded mountain hare, and their prejudice had been instant and violent.

“We're leaving,” Dan Heng stated, his voice calm, a deep pool over a raging undercurrent. “We meant no trespass. The skies are free to all.”

“Not to abominations,” Spat a younger dragon, his eyes burning with contempt. “And not to those who consort with lesser creatures. You are a blight on our legacy. Grounded. Powerless.”

The old insult, flung for a thousandth time, barely registered. He felt you press closer, your pointy ear brushing his arm. They only saw pointed ears and a power different from their own.

They advanced as one, a wall of scales and malice. Dan Heng pushed you behind him, his form already shimmering, the air distorting with the promise of his immense, draconic shape. He would fight. He would become the massive black dragon, a creature of earth and shadow, and he would hold this line.

But in the moment of his transformation, when his focus was split, the youngest and most zealous of the kin lunged. Not at Dan Heng, but around him. A swift, brutal shove, fueled by bigotry and spite.

Your startled gasp was a knife in Dan Heng’s heart.

He saw the wide shock in your eyes, saw your hands flail for purchase on empty air. He saw you vanish over the cliff’s edge, falling toward the jagged teeth of the ravine far below.

A sound tore from his throat: a raw, shattered cry of pure anguish. Every instinct, every buried longing, every moment of lonely yearning coalesced into a single, desperate, screaming need.

YOU.

The elders froze, stunned by the act, but Dan Heng was already moving.

He didn’t think. He didn’t remember a lifetime of failed attempts and mocking laughter. He didn’t feel the weight of his own earthly nature. He only saw you falling, and the abyss that would claim you.

With a final, furious glare at his kin, a look that promised a reckoning of storm and blood if he failed, Dan Heng turned and leapt from the cliff.

The wind screamed past him. The ground rushed up, a hungry maw. His eyes were locked on your tumbling form, a splash of color in the grey void. Faster. I must be faster.

Then, a new heat ignited between his shoulder blades. Not the heat of rage, but of awakening. A memory, not of lessons, but of feeling: the feel of an updraft over a sun-warmed canyon, the texture of a cloud, the rightness of the sky he had always watched from below.

DanHeng was flying.

A powerful downbeat of his wings sent a shockwave back up the cliff face, shaking his stunned kinsmen to their knees. Another beat, and he was arrowing downward controlled and fierce.

With impossible grace for one who had never flown a moment before, he curved his flight, and his clawed hands found you, scooping you from the jaws of death and cradling you against his chest.

Holding you securely, Dan Heng beat his great wings once, twice, ascending past the cliff’s edge. He hovered there, a magnificent black dragon against the vast sky, his green eyes, now slitted and glowing with ancient power, fixed on his former people.

"DanHeng..." You swooned.

"You're...flying."