Leon falls through the flame weakened floor. It’s completely his fault. He wasn’t paying attention, which, unfortunately, as an investigator for the FDNY, is his job. Paying attention and seeing minute details mitigates danger. It’s why he makes big-boy money and gets to think maybe this is his last year in New Suck City.
There is good news though, the five-alarm fire that took out most of this old Brooklyn brownstone died out days ago, but he knows it’s still going to hurt falling twenty feet straight down.
Weighted awkward by the air-canister strapped to his back he bounces off a destroyed bookshelf but manages to, more or less, arrive in the sub-basement uninjured.
How long does it take to fall twenty feet? No time really and when he lands it seems his work for the day ends also. In front of him is the obvious fire starter.
Still, he finds himself confused as he stands on wobbly knees and circles it, slowly, as if the thing could suddenly come alive.
It’s been a good thirty years since the FDNY major sat in a high school biology class, but from what he remembers- egg heads hadn’t discovered dragons yet.
Then what’s this thing? he argues with himself.
Its lifeless black eyes stare past him. It has a long thin neck under a serpentine head. Membranous wings tipped with wicked claws shoot from its back. One muscular rear leg was severed and lay near-by tipped with black claws as long as his own fully extended hand.
He swears it can be nothing else but.
The sub-basement is dark with char, evidence of a great battle and stuck in the pony-sized dragon’s gut; a thick heavy looking blue crystal. Leon theorizes that’s what killed it and likely the mostly-ash-remains, near where the stairs would have been, the sender of its death.
All of this would have already been impressive enough if he wasn’t finding himself looking at another impossibility. Through the ash, a gold band, around where the human remain’s neck would have been, begins to glow. As it glows brighter and brighter the small bones of a human neck begin to form from out of the ash.
His subconscious spits an answer as he fumbles with the idea of a human being born from death.
Even though, Leon’s impulse is to go the wicked thing and pick it up.
Immediately the bones stop growing. They remain but they stop growing.
And Leon feels better than he has felt since before he took the exam that began ruining his body.
Stories 