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Chapter One
Kadie
The stars swirled around me. I stretched out my silver wings and it felt as though I was stretching them across the entire world. My wide eyes drank in everything. Each star was a pinprick of light, another world that was far away. One of them was our ancestral home, but I had never set a claw on it. I probably never would. This planet was my home, Earth.
It wasn’t always easy to live here though. The indigenous race didn’t understand our kind. If they learned there were people among them who could shift into dragons in the space of one breath, it might create a worldwide panic that would see the world broken in two. We lived in secret, generation after generation, hoping that one day we would find a way home. In the meantime, I surged through the air, feeling it wrap around my wings and across the intricate scales of my lithe body. I flicked my tail and opened my powerful jaws, enjoying the sweet taste of the air at this altitude. I swept across forests and mountains, watching the plains peel away below me. The moon hung in the air like a silver coin and I wondered how long it would take me to ascend towards it and reach it. I often thought about flying to each of those stars, wishing that I could experience life on all of them. Were there people out there who felt the same as us? Who felt lonely, overwhelmed, and scared sometimes?
I wondered whether there was anyone like me.
I hovered in the air, flapping my wings to keep myself steady. I angled my head towards the moon, staring at it, when a flicker of movement passed across my vision. It was my father. He was a huge dragon, at least twice my size. His body keptgoing and going, stretched out like a huge behemoth. He jerked his head to the ground, indicating that we should land. I sighed inwardly, annoyed that I could not just stare at the moon all night.
I followed his path down. Trees swayed in our wake and small animals scampered away. There were other flying creatures making their way through the forest. They were wise enough to set their instincts aside and hide in the branches, surrendering the air to us. We swooped down and eventually landed on the bank of a lake. It was a wide, watery circle. The surface was glassy and smooth, offering a perfect reflection of the sky above. I stretched my neck out and looked into the water, seeing the narrow, reptilian head staring back at me. I blinked and then shifted, watching as my human form took over. Flame red hair sprouted from my scalp as my scales receded, turning into milky flesh. My body, moments ago hard and powerful, was now soft and sensitive. Instead of being lean and lithe, I had a voluptuous chest and hourglass hips.
Every time I shifted back from being a dragon, it felt as though the world lost something. The human form, while being more mobile, did suffer from limited senses. But I was the dragon, and the dragon was me. My soul was twined and twisted with these two essences. Ancient, magical blood flowed through my veins, making me more than a mere mortal.
Some people might even have called me special, although I didn’t think this was true. It was just my nature, and there were plenty like me around.
Dad shifted as well. He was a head taller than me, his dark hair peppered with grey. He had a stern look on his face. “You weren’t thinking about it again, were you?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, not seriously,” I pouted.
“You know that it’s too dangerous. And you have to stick to the areas we have deemed as safe. Humans have all kinds oftechnology now to investigate the skies. It’s getting more and more dangerous to be a dragon. If they should ever find us, then it’s all over.”
“I know Dad! You don’t have to tell me the dangers.”
“Really? Because I know that look in your eyes.”
“What look is that?” I angled my head back down, hiding my face from him. Sometimes, it annoyed me how well he knew me, as if he knew my own mind better than I did.
“The look that says you’re willing to throw caution to the wind in the name of doing something spectacular, just like you did when you were a kid.”
“And I almost made it too,” I bit back.
A moment of silence passed between us. He reached out to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Kadie, I just don’t want you to get hurt. We almost lost you last time and-”
“I’m not going to do it Dad. I’m not going to try and fly to the moon again. I was just a kid last time. I had a stupid idea in my head, and I let it get the better of me. I thought I could do the impossible, but now I know that the impossible is, well…” I trailed off, letting the implication do the work for me.
“Okay. Good. I just wanted to make sure. Like I said, it’s getting hard to be a dragon.” His words were cloaked in tension, and he sounded tired.
“You think we’re ever going to find our planet?” I asked, turning to look at him. He shrugged.
“I don’t know. I guess we have to believe because it’s the thing that keeps us going.”
“Should it be though?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’ve been here for long enough. Isn’t it worth thinking that this is our home? We might as well agree to put down roots here because it’s the only place we know, and it doesn’t seem like we’re going to leave any time soon.”
He withdrew his hand from my shoulder and his eyes narrowed. “You shouldn’t speak like that, Kadie. There were dragons who thought like that too a long time ago.”
“And what happened to them?”
“They were driven away because they lost faith. There’s no place for that kind of talk in our thunder. We keep the dream alive because it’s all we have, and it’s what we’re going to pass on through the generations until one dragon takes us all home. It’s what father passed down to me, what I’ve passed down to you, and what you’ll pass down to your children too.”
I looked back towards the lake. He spoke with such certainty, as though it was already ordained that I would end up having a family. I wasn’t sure that was in my future, but there was no point telling him that because he would only say that, eventually, I would change my mind. It wasn’t much of a legacy though. Recently, I had been thinking that we dragons were being held back by our adherence to the old traditions. Instead of finally shrugging off the chains of the past, we were still dragging them behind us, focusing on some ancient, shared memory instead of trying to build a new life here. It was no use trying to tell the elders that, though. They were prideful and stubborn, and they would not listen to anything that went against their view of the world.
“I think I’d like some time alone to think, Dad. I’ll head back soon, and I promise I won’t try and fly to the moon.” I hated that I had to add this caveat. I was an adult now, but still, he didn’t trust me. I guess I would always be a kid to him. He stared at me, and I believed he was considering whether to compel me to come back with him, but in the end, he simply nodded and jumped in the air, shifting as he did so. He did not come back to earth. Instead, he soared into the air, as majestic a sight as ever existed, and disappeared into the shadows of the night.
