The Vixen

Part 1: Servant

When I lost my job and joined the army, I didn't think I'd ever see any real combat. With the Islamic State already bombed to hell and everything gone quiet in the Ukraine, I expected to be pushing papers around an office somewhere with an occasional visit to a firing range.

Well, I saw combat alright, but can you really call it combat when your side gets its ass resoundingly kicked? In our defence we were up against an army we hadn't been trained to fight: an army of monsters from another dimension. Not tentacled monstrosities (although there were a few kooky looking things like that among them) - real monsters, like in the storybooks: centaurs and harpies and fox people and wolf people and lizard people. Our war was against a bunch of fairytales, and like in the fairytales they had magic.

Oh yeah, and dragons. It turned out tanks and helicopter gunships were no match against dragons.

Nothing's really a match for dragons.

Don't ask me for any details of this first battle against the therians: you probably know more about it than I do, especially if you've ever watched more than five minutes of the History Channel. No, I didn't really see much combat since I ended up on the receiving end of the swing of a dragon's tail about five minutes into our initial engagement. I was knocked off my feet into the air and when I landed everything went black.

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Being dead didn't seem so bad. I was aching all over but I was also warm and everything was peaceful, except for a rather annoying beeping sound.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I opened my eyes and realised I wasn't dead. I was in a hospital, lying in a bed with the sheets pulled up to my neck.

I grabbed the sheet and pulled it off. I wanted to check if I had everything. Apart from the bandage around my torso everything was where it should be. I made doubly sure my dick was still there.

A leg I could do without, damn, even a leg and an arm. But I was very attached to my dick.

I lay back. My ribs ached. So that explained the bandage. I lifted a hand to my head. Yeah, another bandage there, too. I must have landed on my head after taking that spill thanks to the dragon.

I lay there wondering what had happened to everyone else. There was a curtain around my bed so I couldn't see how full the ward was. From what I'd seen there had to be more casualties, though.

The curtain was swept aside while I was looking at it and a woman dressed in white walked in, her face buried in a clipboard. Ah, the doctor. She'd have some answers.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, not bothering to look up.

"Okay I guess," I said. "My ribs are aching like hell, though. Say, doc, how did the battle end up? We won, right?"

Soft laughter from the doctor. "I'm afraid not."

She looked up from her clipboard and I saw then that she wasn't human. Her skin was green, shimmering with the soft glistening of scales. Her eyes were large and turqoise, the pupils slitted like a reptile's. I scrambled back away from her and she smiled with a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth.

"Don't be alarmed," she said. "You're safe here. Your government has surrendered to us unconditionally so you're no longer an enemy."

I slumped back against the head of the bed. "We... we lost?"

She nodded. "Badly."

I relaxed, then. So the war was over. I'd survived. We'd lost, but I'd survived.