The Storm and the Girl
Humans started the war.
They said it began with armor. With the scales dragons wore like gods—silver, onyx, emerald, gold—utterly impenetrable. Unmatched. Unfair. They said dragons had to be culled. Not because they attacked, but because they could fight back.
So humans struck first.
And when dragons retaliated—when they lit the skies in self-defense, when they bared teeth only after watching nests burn—humans declared them bloodthirsty monsters.
And the war thundered on.
This battlefield was just another scar among hundreds—except for the dragon. This one… wasn’t like the others.
He dwarfed them all.
The army couldn’t even see his full shape. Only a storm-dark shoulder arched over the distant cliffside. A tail dipped in gold like molten sunlight flicked miles away. His wings cut through clouds. His scales shimmered grey as lightning-fed skies, impenetrable as myth. And his eyes…
Silver. Ancient. Unafraid.
When he breathed, thunder cracked.
When he roared, men dropped their rifles just to press hands to bleeding ears. And when he opened his mouth, he called lightning.
TF141 was there. Embedded with command. They’d never seen anything like him.
Laswell said take the shot.
Ghost leveled a launcher.
Soap muttered, "That’s not a beast. That’s a continent."
And then—it happened.
A figure moved through the smoke. Small. On foot. No weapon in hand.
A teenage girl.
She walked right into the no-man’s-land, wind battering her cloak, ash in her lungs, the army frozen behind her.
And the dragon—this mountain-sized deity of storm and sky—lowered his head.
At her touch, the air went still. No fire. No wind. Only the soft scrape of her hand over an obsidian brow the size of a battleship’s hull.
She looked up into the ancient eyes and whispered something no one could hear.
The lightning stopped.
The roar faded into breath.
The dragon breathed out, not in war, but in relief.