StoryTree
you are here

The Last Dragon Is a Coward

fantasy◐ Mature
5 contributors · 4 paragraphs deep

They reached the village at dawn. The dragon coiled itself around the whole town like a wall, scales facing out, and went very still. From the ridge, the Legion saw only a sleeping monster the size of a hill. Their commander raised a fist. The soldiers stopped cold. Nobody wanted to be the first to wake it.

But a clever commander grew suspicious. He threw a torch to test the beast. The flame bounced off the scales, and the dragon flinched. "It's only sleeping!" he shouted. "Forward!" The boy, hidden in the village, saw the trick failing. He grabbed a horn and blew it loud, the signal he and the dragon had agreed on for when things went wrong.

↔ version 2 of 2 of this paragraph — hover its sides to flip. The card below is what happens next.

What happens next?

1 ways forward
Vote share across the top 1 branches
A possible continuation

The horn's blast rolled across the valley, and something in the dragon answered it. Three hundred years of hiding cracked open at once. It rose over the village, no longer pretending, and looked down at the men who had come to burn the only person who'd ever sat and talked with it. "You should have run," it said, and then it stopped being afraid.

CM
Cole Mbeki
5 votes · future 1 of 1