It was 1966. That was the year I left the Dragon Realm for good.
I guess I don’t have too much issue with admitting I can be… difficult. I know damn well there’s a darkness in me. It’s more than scale-deep. It runs right through my blood and pumps all three of my hearts, and I’m well aware of that.
I’ve never been an easy man to know, an even harder one to like. I would guess I’m damn near impossible to love.
Annaleia would agree.
When I made the decision to leave, that darkness inside had all but taken me over. At the time, I had no friends and I’ll admit this too, yeah it was my fault. Honestly, I didn’t care. It was easy for me to leave the Realm and enter the world of humans. The Dragon Realm was bullshit anyway. It was under crooked rule, tyrannical and sideways. A new king and queen would take over at the turn of the century and turn that train wreck around. But in ‘65, the Realm was stifling. And I needed out.
So I started looking for my next exit, comparing the other realms to each other.
Being a dragon means living forever, more or less. As far as humans are concerned, it may as well be forever. You’re talking thousands and thousands of years, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years. The upside of that I guess is no wrinkles or arthritis and you get first dibs on the classics and good stocks. Yeah, like most of my clan brothers I own stock in the good shit, and I mourned when Steve died. I’ve also got one hell of a selection of rides.
The downside of living forever is that after a few centuries, you’re seriously sick of the same equally-immortal faces, the unendingly same personalities. Married couples think they have it rough after forty years? Try forty-hundred with the same crowd. It’s like an extended family of bitter, jaded megalomaniacs with the power to back up the attitude. Imagine Thanksgivings.
They say people never change. But that just isn’t true. Humans do change, to some extent. They grow old and they grow up, most of them. Well, they grow old. Dragons on the other hand really don’t ever change. And that shit gets old. It’s bad for any kind of dragon, but especially for black dragons. Others learn to deal with the constancy through careful diplomacy. Maybe the way Vulcans do on Star Trek. I don’t know.
But black dragons would be Klingons in comparison. We get really damn impatient. We get antsy as hell, and we don’t suffer fools. The end result is that after a while, we either leave or all hell breaks loose. And after all this time, the Dragon Realm knows it. No one tries to stop us when we take off.
In general, we pick a realm we haven’t been to or one we know we fit into well or at least one where we won’t be bored. We’ll take on the forms of that realm’s creatures and species, then spend a few decades mingling with their kind. But me, personally, I have a soft spot for the mortal realm. I just seem to keep coming back.
Dragons can become just about anything. I’ve been fae, shadow, shifter, were-beast and even vampire. And that’s just within the mortal realm. But only the oldest and most powerful of us can manage to doppelgang other supes right down to their specific powers, much less hold the disguise for long. So we usually just choose to be human. I am one of the oldest. I can remain in an altered form for an admittedly long time. But humans intrigue me.
Humans are fucking crazy.
And they like junk food, just like dragons. We’ve got three hearts. It takes a lot of energy to keep them beating. There’s no inhuman creature in any realm as fond of sweets as dragons. I have to say “inhuman” because when it comes to loving sugar, mortals might just have us beat.
Plus, being human allows dragons to keep a foothold in the mortal world, which tends to come in handy from time to time. You’d be surprised how many dragons are in positions of power in the human realm. You’d probably be even more surprised that those dragons don’t… do more while in those positions. But as full of it as it sounds, the truth is, we try not to interfere more than necessary. Interference can make