General Mustafa whipped his head towards the heavens. The sky was cloudless, an empty canvas of an artist who had run out of ideas. Not a single balloon-of-war was in sight, no birds arced through the air.

He combed the skies carefully, squinting his eyes. He was not a young man anymore, and his eyesight was not what it used to be. Rubbing his spectacles against his shirt, he perched them back on his nose and resumed his search once more.

Perhaps a false alarm? Dragons didn't exist anymore. Everyone knew that the last dragon had been slain by Sir Galahad in the 1980s with a Remington Model 4, atop Mount Vesk.

Suddenly, a respite from the sun's heat. Mustafa shivered, not at the sudden cold, but at the black shadow that fell across the freighter.

The lizard circled the train, once, twice, and settled comfortably on the tracks ahead. They were still moving at full speed, and she did not seem the least bit concerned.

There was a shriek of claw-on-steel. The locomotive crashed into the dragon's outstretched claw, 200 tons of engine and metal and coal screeching to a halt. Mustafa was thrown back against the hard linoleum floor, and he bit back a shout of pain as his head crashed against the tiles.

He was lucky he hadn't lost consciousness, he thought. Painfully, he pulled himself back to his feet. Shattered glass littered the floor. The bolted doors were warped from the impact, but not so much that they were inoperable.

Mustafa opened the door and stepped into the daylight.

There she sat, steam hissing lazily out of her pointed snout, forked tongue licking her scaly lips.

"So," she said. "Would you like to do this the hard way or the easy way?"

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/r/theBasiliskWrites