Mythics

Hunting

The boy who was running through the forest couldn't have been more than fifteen years old.

The men hunting him had been looking for him for months; chasing him all the way from Nashville to Chicago, where they had finally caught up with him and were now pursuing him. The boy was far too unique to blend in and everyone else in hiding were not to be trusted to protect him.

He stopped for a moment to catch his breath; there were too many trees for him to be able to fly away if he did Change into the dragon and it was beginning to dawn on him that he would most likely get out of this either in a body bag or shackles. And he didn't want to die.

The soldiers had almost caught up with him, he could hear the dogs barking behind him.

The Change always hurt, reshaping bones and muscle into something three times his size needed his absolute attention.

At the last second, right when the dogs were going to tear into his flesh, human skin changed to scale and the beast inside him was awoken. The dragon was the size of a bus even though he wasn't yet fully grown; with muscles hardened by years of flying from danger, and a wingspan that was as wide as the dragon's body was long.

It was believed in some cultures that the moon gave people certain powers and the boy wished even now that the moon would grant him the possibility of escape, but that didn't stop the men who chased him.

For every one man he killed, two more took his place, each carrying harpoons coated in a special tranquilizer that was created specifically for larger Mythics. Larger Mythics like a dragon.

The boy couldn't stop them all and began to feel sluggish. He felt himself shift back into a human again, the soldiers taking advantage of that and brought forward a cage that attached to a truck. A cage made of steel.

Right before he succumbed to the tranquilizers and collapsed on the dew covered earth, the boy heard one of the guards ask, "So this would make the last of them?". He didn't find out until later that the soldier was talking about his kind. He was the last of the dragons. His name is Bellamy Ward.

Five years later

Bellamy awoke to sound of screaming. It was like that almost every day, a prisoner who displeased the guards or a new experiment created by the scientists.

He looked down at his very human hands to see that the screams had made him partly Change, his nails had grown into dragon claws. That much he was still able to do; Bellamy had not fully Changed since he arrived at the prison. But he could Change parts of his body, like his nails, which he had planned on using to get out of the prison.

Except I have no idea where this prison is. He snorted to himself.

Today was viewing day; that was when one of the "specimens" like him were chosen as an example of how far the scientists have come in combating the Mythic "problem". He gritted his teeth and gripped the sides of his bed with shaking hands.

Five years of this almost every single day had been slowly driving him mad, and not just from the pain; Bellamy had not been allowed outside like the other prisoners. No, he was much too powerful and special for such a risk, unlike the others who were mostly elvish criminals. He just needed to see the sky again, if only once.