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Whispers preceded her. Destruction followed.
Most thought she was just a legend, a precautionary tale passed down through the generations, a story to scare small children. Those who knew better were in no position to contradict them.
The legend starts, as so many do, with a peasant girl. Righteous and kind, the dutiful daughter taking care of her aging parents until she was married off to carry on the bloodline if not the name. As is the case in so many legends, a war began, or continued, depending on who you speak to. The army set out to draft all eligible males and among them was the girl’s aged father. Being that her entire existence revolved around helping her parents the girl simply could not allow her father to go to his death. As everyone knows she presented herself as a man and joined the army in his place and proceeded to fight bravely and rose through the ranks. In the heartwarming stories about the goodness of humanity she was offered riches and titles for her service but chose to go home and resume caring for her parents. That is the nice ending.
But you aren’t here for the nice ending are you? You want the story of the demon queen and her dragon of destruction.
The girl did join the army, and she did fight bravely. She witnessed horrors in towns where they were too late to beat back the enemy and she learned to kill in more ways than she could count. She discovered a taste for the enemy blood and every time she came across someone she couldn’t help the taste grew stronger. She started searching for ways to become stronger, faster, more destructive.
For years she searched and rose through the ranks due to her ferociousness and her willing to do anything to the enemy. She talked to the eldest of the eldest and traveled to remote areas to discover a way to obliterate the enemy once and for all.
Eventually she was approached by a man. A man who had been watching her quest and reveling in her thirst and high upon a mountain top overlooking yet another destroyed village he approached her.
“Be my wife and you shall never want for power.”
They were the only words he said, no introduction, no explanation, but as she looked at him the girl knew he was the answer she was looking for. She agreed.
The wedding was a grand affair set in her hometown and attended by all manner of creature although the girl was the only one who seemed to notice them. Her aged parents were thrilled that despite her life in the army she had found a respectable husband and that they didn’t have to worry for her anymore. They would contentedly slip away in the next few years never knowing what their daughter would become.
Still dressed for the ceremony the girl and her husband went to their bed and with one hand he caressed her body, learning every part of her, claiming it for his own. With the other he took one perfectly sharp nail and began carving into her skin, embedding himself in her, forever entwining them.
When she awoke the next morning a dragon tattoo covered her skin and her husband was nowhere to be found.
It wasn’t long before she discovered that her wedding clothes would be her forever clothes, before she realized just what had become of her husband and the power they could wield together.
The enemy was gone within a week.
But the girl wasn’t content.
It had been years of bloodshed, of searching, and now that she had the power it couldn’t go to waste. She traveled the world, finding new enemies to destroy, new villages to save, unleashing her husband and watching as everything was obliterated. Her clothes grew tattered and soon she looked more ghost than girl. Stories spread, some worshiped her, others loathed her, all feared her.
For every time she unleashed her dragon husband a bit of her humanity went with him, fueling him. He needed her to reach his true power and she needed him to reach her goals but more and more it became about his power and one by one her goals disappeared leaving only bloodlust.
The girl was clever however. She could feel her humanity slipping bit by bit, but it was when her husband destroyed a city filled with innocents and she only felt a mild anger at their fate that she knew something had to be done. She had to be in control. He had wanted a willing host to combine with, one he could manipulate into obeying his will. Instead he got a strong willed warrior with a heart. They battled for control. She won.
She knew she couldn’t keep him in control forever, that he’d need to be released from time to time and she knew that she too had developed the taste for enemy blood far before being able to wipe out armies with a swipe of her arm. But she chose.
Together they roamed the worlds. While on occasion she let him out to stop an enemy before they moved to full destruction, more often she let him out for revenge.
It’s almost poetic. The girl who always believed in good was the bearer of such destruction doling it out to those who deserved it most. Had the original enemy never come she would have stayed in her home town and watched her parents until they died, married a peasant and been watched over by her own children until she died.
Instead, she became a legend. Don’t push your sister, she might come get you. Don’t enslave thousands of people, she definitely will. In every slaughter in history there are references to suggest she was there. Letting her husband out to play while fulfilling her own need for vengeance.
So if you see a girl with a dragon tattoo, run as far and as fast as you can. But she’ll probably catch you anyway.