Hunting - a Wings of Fire Applyfic

Prologue

Some stories begin with 'once upon a time...,' or 'there was once...' or 'a long, long time ago...' Some stories are fantastical and filled with princesses and magical beings and warm, happy endings. Some stories show the true nature of our world and ourselves and our boundless potential.

I rather wish my story had all that, but sadly not all wishes come true, contrary to the tales in the writings I've read so many times.

I'm sure you'd wonder why I'd start my story like this. The answer may come to you in time, through the happenings of my tale, or maybe not, I could never know.

If you so wish, as ironic as that statement may seem, you may read here what I have placed down to ancient sands, to crumble to the dusts of time. You may discover the events of the Hunting, as I have now so fondly named it, and the stories of magic and princesses and almost happy endings found there. But, read at your own risk, for it is not every day one's feeble, mortal existence is infringed by such happenings as the Hunting.

Now, off I go. I have another world to see, the world locked inside my deepest memory.

_____

Night. Peaceful, beautiful, full of magic. Wide, uncontainable, awe-inspiring. Empty, cold, endless.

That was how the little dragon would have described the usual nights of the deep winters in the Kingdom of Ice.

Night. Loud, distraught, blinding. Cramped, constricting, frightening. Overfilled, hot, rendering escape useless.

That was how the little dragon would have described the night that the Goddess came.

It started as any other night, wide and open and bewitching. The little dragon had gone to the snowy cliff where he was born. He had looked up like he had so many other nights, had absorbed the phenomenal beauty of the thing everyone else took for granted. He had thought of his tiny insignificance within the universe - his universe, he realised - and how little his actions in his lifetime would effect the spacetime continuum and the lives of any other insignificant little dragon who might find themselves in the same situation as he.

Little did he know that, even though he may have thought he and everyone else in his world seemed insignificant, they were rather fundamental in the shaping of this universe, and, by extension, the lives of those living within it.

The night the Goddess came is a prime example of such a thing.

The little dragon sat at the cliff, doing what he always did, when something changed. An ordinary viewer of the sky and the night may not have noticed the little change, but the little dragon did.

He squinted at his lovely night, which had suddenly grown quite unfriendly and hot, and stared into the endless expanse.

There, a speck. It may have ordinarily passed as a star, but not this time, not in this little dragon's night.

It spun almost merrily around the sky, like a dragon on the best flight of its life. As it twisted it changed shape and colour, and as it changed shape and colour, it became larger and larger, and as it became larger and larger, the little dragon realised that it wasn't, in fact, growing larger, but rather coming closer to his beloved night.

A boiling anger sprung up deep in his insides as he watched the speck - which had become a blob, which had become a figure - spinning through his night.