Dragon Fire: Chapter 1

Sonia Wellington opened her eyes, then wished she hadn’t. She had been disrupted from her dream by a crash of the bedside lamp being smashed to the floor. Sonia now wished even more she hadn’t opened her eyes; whenever anything went wrong in the orphanage, Ms. Peck always blamed her. Sonia was a mildly pretty girl, with long over-curly nutmeg hair, chestnut brown eyes, and a fair complexion. She had always wondered where her parents were, for she was certain they were still alive. Sometimes at night she would try to conjure up images from her memory, and sometimes she saw a woman remarkably like her, and sometimes a tear-streaked face with pitch-black bangs came to mind. Neither image was very sharp, though, so she couldn’t always see them. A sharp rap on the door rang through the air. All the other girls in the dormitory scuttled into corners; not Sonia. She knew that Ms. Peck was here to reprimand her for supposedly breaking the lamp, and she knew what happened if you hid from her. She opened the door, and Ms. Peck flew in and began to do what she did best: yelling at Sonia. Flew? Sonia wondered. Must be my imagination. Then she remembered the humiliation she was being put through, and the thought vanished from her mind as she listened to the woman’s rants. No one came to defend the poor girl; no one liked to be against Ms. Peck. The woman yelled her loudest at her, but Sonia had had enough. She opened her mouth to retort, but instead of words, flames shot out of her mouth. Not just any flames, however, no, no, brilliant blue flame came shooting out at Ms. Peck, singeing the top of her neatly bunned white hair. Sonia felt odd, and looked down at her hand. She nearly fainted-instead of skin, indigo scales coated clawed fingertips, and a pair of bat-like wings sat on her back to match. She turned back to herself almost instantly, but something quite odd was happening to Ms. Peck. She looked at Sonia with a deep look, that seemed to be a mixture of anger and I-knew-this-would-happen-someday-but-why-did-it-have-to-happen-nowness. While she looked remarkably unamazed, she seemed to have somewhat the same thing happening to her. Her eyes were narrowing, black feathers coating everything, and wings sprouting from her back. She was turning, in fact, into the raven she had always so resembled. At that moment, a teenage girl with short golden locks cut into a pageboy came in. “Excuse me, Morgan, but I must borrow Sonia for a moment,” she said , looking not the slightest bit concerned that she was speaking to a large raven. Sonia quickly followed after her, not stopping to ask the questions that were filling her brain such as “How did you know that that raven was Ms. Peck?”, "Do you know I just turned into something scaly for a second?”, and “How in the world did either of those things happen?” until they were in the orphanage grounds. The girl laughed, a high, twittering sound. “I’ll show you when we get there.” she said. “Where?” asked Sonia. She laughed again, morphing into a cardinal. “Just follow the birdie!”