Dawn of the Dragons

Chapter Two

Ten years later...

Nikolai never understood why the people of his village feared dragons so much.

His parents, his teachers, everyone always told him how dangerous they could be. Wicked, evil, vile, malevolent and disastrous were some of their choice words, but no one ever told him why.

Everyone considered him a child, " lil' Niko" they called him. Just because he was only a child when they arrived on Hearth, just because he'd been the youngest. But he was tired of being treated like a child, he was 12 now and he wanted to know more. More about everything, he hungered for knowledge.

They had told him how long, long ago humans had polluted the planet with chemicals, how they had destroyed life, how they'd brought on the apocalypse. They told him about how the government, the important group of people who ran everything and made big decisions, had decided to send people into space so they would survive and repopulate the planet they used to call Earth. They told him about everything the humans had done, explained to him all that they remembered they were told, so that we would never make the same mistakes again.

They told him about electricity, cars, television, internet, nuclear power plants, and even about roller coasters. They taught him to hunt, make a fire, gather food, recognize poisonous plants from live giving herbs, they taught him to make a shelter and how to make weapons.

But the one thing no one taught him about was dragons, and so he decided to find out for himself.

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He grabbed his hunting gear before he left, he often went hunting like this so his parents would know where he was gone, and besides he also needed to check his traps and snares to see if he’d caught something.

But by the time he reached them, disappointed to find them empty, he was beginning to realize how foolish his plans had been. How did he expect to find anything out about the  dragons like this? The only people who knew about them wouldn’t tell him, and he was unlikely to find something out here. Dragons were a rarity, the likelihood of him stumbling upon one was small, and what was he supposed to even do when he found one, spy on it, he thought.

He was starting to get hungry and was wishing he had something to take back home for his mother to stew when he saw a deer, or at least it looked like one, it ran by so fast. Nikolai ran after it, bow in hand, arrow strung, wondering what it was doing here and why it was running. He pushed all his thoughts from his mind and concentrated on the deer, when he got close enough he aimed and fired. He heard the animal cry out, it was in the clearing just ahead of him when he heard a great whooshing sound behind him, he looked back but saw nothing, but when he walked forward into the clearing he gasped, staring mouth agape.

Not at the deer, although it was the first one he'd ever shot on his own, but at what stood past the deer, Nikolai couldn't believe his eyes, a real live dragon, right in front of him, and he had just shot the dragon's prey; the deer.