The children; they scream. They cry out for anyone to hear their pleas.
The parents, they guard flesh with flesh from the onslaught of steel.
Blades are in flurries and hell has risen. The world burns.
Two creatures dash about the fiery realm, dodging falling rubble as they attempt to find the exit.
Barely reaching the last remaining exit in time, a feeling of relief washes over them. Looking out into freedom, the pair is truly lucky.
Though, one of the two realizes something. Something they forgot in the confusion; and comes a halt.
The other tries to pull her friend forward, but she will not budge, "We have to go now!" the priestess shouts, her voice panicked.
A woman cries back, "No! I can't leave them!"
"We have to! If they find me, Lower Earth will fall to ruin!" The priestess said, feeling anxious as she reached her hand out.
The woman slaps the priestess's hand aside, "Run away then! I'm not leaving my family here to die!"
The priestess stood amongst the rubble and watched as the woman dashed away into the burning city.
She began to growl and then yelled, "Oh for fuck's sake!"
She looked into the burning citadel and out to freedom and cursed, "If I'm to die someday... I'd rather not die a coward." And ran into the all consuming flames.
Behind her, the exit collapsed into smoldering embers. The city was completely sealed from the outside world.
~~~
"Ugh... where am I?" Groaned Verity. She shook her head.
Looking around, she sees no sign of life, only the dreary walls of a blood stained cabin.
Lining the walls and hung upon massive hooks were the dead bodies of several, in easily understood terms, monsters.
It was like a butcher's storehouse, the amount of raw meat was simply nauseating... and perhaps, she would be next.
Trying to move around, Verity found that her tail was nailed to the hutch floor. A happy surprise to her that she again had a tail at first, but then such jubilance slowly morphed into a dreary sort of dread when she realized such a thing trapped her in this place of death.
Trying to move forward even slightly sent a jolting pain throughout her entire body. Her flesh was bloody and broken.
And even though she could, tearing off her tail wasn't an option, Verity doubted she could survive losing any more blood in her condition.
After a long moment of suffocating silence, the doors to the small hutch creaked open and a scarlet clad man drenched in rain stepped upon the floor.
His eyes opened in shock at seeing Verity awake and watching him with golden eyes, causing his yawn to be cut off immediately.
Screaming, he cried, "Hurry father! The beast is awake!" And ran off with lantern in hand.
Verity's eyes trailed the figure until he vanished into the tenebrous night. Leaving the poor wyrm, yet again, alone.
Though, before her loneliness could creep any further, a party of men ran out from the forest.
In their hands, crude tools of bloodshed and massacre. Cruel looks upon their faces, muddling their visages to all but the most keen of eyes.
They slowly spread apart to welcome a giant of a man to the front. His arms looked like they could crack rocks and the cruel look on his face seemed to be permanent unlike the rest of his men.
He walked up to Verity and grabbed her by the underside of her head, lifting her into the air.
After what felt like hours, his voice finally followed, "Speak beast, I know you are capable."
With a defiant growl, the wyrm unknowingly summoned several spectral swords that hovered overhead and all pointed at the giant man holding her in the air.
Tapping ever so slightly into her eye, Verity enhanced her tail and ripped the very boards along with the nail, straight out of the ground.
The muscular man didn't let go though, instead, he tightened his grip and plunged his bare hand into her scaled chest.
It took Verity everything she had to focus on the swords and command them to move according to her will.
Taking control of the ghastly blades, she sliced off the man's hand, of which was still buried deep in her chest.
Wincing in pain, the man still did not let go. He looked into Verity's eyes and slammed her to the floor. Smashing the wyrm through the wooden boards.
Hand firmly attached to her neck, he crashes his knee down upon her chest; sending a shockwave throughout Verity's entire body.
Verity lets out a cry of pain as some of her ribs cave in.
All she can hear as her consciousness slowly fades is the man demanding, "Speak beast! Speak!" Time and time again.
Though, when she feels the familiar caress of death slide across her scales once more, a jolt of energy flies throughout her.
She throws the man off her and into the ceiling, causing pieces of wood and debris to fall to the floor.
All the other men run out like fearful mice, Verity seems to think she's scared them off.
That is, until the whole roof caved in, crushing her under its weight.
Verity lets loose a shrill screech as she wrestles her way out of the pine wood field of debris.
But just as Verity seems to think she has made it out, a bloody hand reaches out and grabs her tail, pulling her back in.
Now wielding a broken piece of wood as a weapon, the man stabs the wyrm in her right haunch.
Propelling himself forward by pushing off the broken board, he reaches for Verity's eye, tearing it out.
Verity's left eye is all that's keeping her soul within this wyrm's body. If one were to rip it out, such would essentially be like pulling out her own soul.
With the wyrm's eye in hand, the man watches as Verity's body collapses beneath the rubble.
Assured of his victory, the man tears his own left eye out and shoves Verity's eye into the socket in its place.
Only, the eye does not fit. Examining the eye more closely, he notices no runes, no engravings, only a golden iris.
The man quickly jerks his head up, realizing his mistake. Though, no sooner does his head shoot up than his head get torn off by Verity.
His headless corpse falls to the ground with a loud 'thump', such echoing throughout the fallen rubble.
Breathing heavily, Verity heaves a sigh. Carefully leveraging her tail, she removes her eye from the man's desperate hand and gingerly sets it back into her right socket.
Using the last of her magic, Verity reattaches the eye back with the rest of her flesh.
Using the last of her strength, the wyrm crawls out from underneath the debris.
Using the last of her will, the legless dragon looks out from the cliff and slides herself off.
~~~
Waking up to the feeling of water splashing against her head, Verity cracks open her old but young eyes.
A rain sprinkled forest stares back.
Pushing herself up right, she finds most of her wounds healed. The nail in her tail had fallen out during the fight and the wound it had left was almost entirely healed.
The only problem being the human hand still lodged in her chest, flesh holding it in place.
Verity physically had no way to pull it out, she had no limbs and the hand was stuck in there good enough that her tail couldn't pull it out.
Her lack of a neck hurt the most though, she could not bend her head far enough down to touch the hand.
The most Verity could do was bite off the tip of the middle finger. To which, she had already done so by accident.
Reluctantly giving up on trying to remove the hand from her chest, the wyrm focuses instead on getting used to her still very new body.
Verity moves it in all different ways and positions to see exactly what she can and can't do.
She figures out that her tail is, in fact, extremely flexible despite its bulky size. Being able to wrap around her body from tip to base if she really stretched it.
Although, that's all Verity learned. She spent most of her time simply getting used to moving around and learning how to use her body in the most efficient way possible.
At the end of her discoverance, she still didn't feel entirely comfortable with her body, but she had taken a huge step into understanding her flesh and had learned some things that were unapparent to her before.
Now Verity looks out deeper into the forest, ever so curious to what could be out there. She needs enemies to fight to learn anything more, and enemies she will get heading deeper into the green undergrowth.
What Verity does not know though, is that she is not the only predator in the forest and others won't take kindly to having their prey stolen from them.