Rivka dreamt of fire, searing through her veins as inhuman hunger flared within her mind. The flame buoying her, driving her, unleashed by her. She felt the rightness of it and her invulnerability, the joy of lofting into the air under the strength of her wings, the thunderous calamity that was the lash of her tail, the screams of tiny things as she devoured them with her fanged maw.
She woke with a start, jerking up in bed as a semblance of a horrified roar tore itself from her very human throat. It was not just a dream though, she could still feel the pulsing burn of flame within her body and her stomach was wracked with hunger. She stared at her unfamiliar surroundings wide eyed.
This was not her room. This. Yes, this was her cabin aboard the starliner. Far from the comfort of her bedroom in her family home. There was no sound at all but instead the slightly queasy waver of reality from the smooth operation of the vessel's well tuned jumpdrive, fluted crystalline vaulting, soft indirect lighting glowing gently into life as the room detected her wakefulness. She had been sleeping curled in one corner of the gigantic bed wearing simple white cotton underwear to clash with the thin and filmy magnificence of gold damasked nanosilk.
The room was of course at the perfect temperature and she could hear nothing apart from her own heartbeat and breath, the kitbag with her sparse belongings in one corner whilst the smart furniture of the chamber waited to take whatever form she might desire. She wanted to be home. Her younger brothers, her parents, her friends, all lightyears behind her and growing ever more distant.
Just a week ago she had been a normal student. A relatively normal student that is, both of her parents being mages meant that Rivka was expected to inherit their power and thus be in the top percentile of Imperial society, just below the nobility. Which is to say that her mother was a major in the planetary garrison and her father a doctor while she attended a prestigious institution requiring significant family wealth or a strong magical bloodline to attend.
Her life was promising! She was popular, outgoing, excelled in her studies. Her homeworld of Thellonov might be a backwater periphery world but prospered under the benign neglect of House Sepra, left to organise itself democratically and ignored outside of annual tax payments, fixed payments growing less relevant each year as the world developed further.
Whilst she was not raised in luxury Rivka had a happy childhood and never really wanted for anything apart from perhaps the time and attention of her extremely busy parents, with far too many hours spend with tutors or at mandatory clubs and activities despite their best efforts. The only sour spot had been a year before where she failed to Awaken when tested for magical aptitude, an early Awakening would have been propitious and indicated enormous strength after all, apparently she would be denied that or perhaps even lack magical talent at all.
Both of her parents were capable mages though and so she was due annual testing until age twenty five, a mage of any power being far too valuable to miss or allow to be undereducated. Thus when she turned sixteen she was to be checked once more, this time more anxious, if she failed to Awaken once more then she would definitely be no more than average in her powers.
The testing had taken place in a reinforced chamber away from the main grounds of the school, adjacent to the athletics fields, the girl taking her place upon the smoothly contoured chair surrounded by glyphs, mana nodes aligned before she was infused with a surge of unaligned power. When she was tested at fifteen she felt a huge surge of... Something, strength, vitality, that then faded gradually away without her able to channel it in any way.
This time she instead felt fire, the mana igniting something inside of her. She roared, the power surged as the infused mana set off a chain reaction of within her body and her soul. She rose from the chair as wards shattered and burnt around her, incandescent, panting, feeling as if her body was a fragile glass shell containing an inferno.
Then her human form broke and shattered as she surrounded herself in a corona of heat. Her wings unfurled, a lash of her armoured tail smashed open the wall behind her. The reinforced structure was torn apart from the inside as she rose in a halo of flame and glowing bright enough to burn as an afterimage into the retina of all who beheld her, unleashing a torrent of flame into the midday sky above.
She was a dragon.
Her awakening killed six people including two mages and hospitalised another fifteen but was viewed as a triumph. Her homeworld might have been irrelevant and largely ignored even by its feudal overlords as irrelevant. A dragon though? A dragon is never irrelevant even if humanity ruled the Empire. Whilst pure blooded dragons are almost unknown within human space their kind could, ever so rarely, breed true even tens of generations later. A dragon needs no source of outside mana but is a self sustaining nova of power and even fresh 'hatched' as Rivka was, a ten ton winged monster with scales harder than diamond yet flexible as a feather. Needless to say her inherent magical aptitude was also far beyond any human apart from the greatest scions of the purest bred noble houses.
And the hunger. She Awakened needing to eat, her mind numbed with the desire to feast upon flesh and turning upon her own school, her classmates, tearing into athletics fields and screaming teenagers. It took less than a minute for Imperial Legionaries to deploy from orbit and subdue her but by that time she had killed six people including a pair of faculty mages and maimed or seriously injured another fifteen.
After her fiery rampage was subdued by orbital response forces the injured Ravka found herself thrown cattle and gorging upon fresh, bloody meat, a rare luxury even for her high status family, wolfing down entire animals. Hundreds of kilos of raw flesh to temporarily stymie her hunger.
Whilst she was able to finally return to human form she was informed that she now had to eat for her dragon self and that despite the tremendous power and infinite possibilities of her awakening she now had a sharply proscribed existence. She was also faced with the horror of having murdered six people all of whom she at least vague knew, that she had outright eaten three of them whilst another trio were incinerated.
The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
The rulers of her world stepped in, abandoning the benign neglect that head lead to the flourishing of Thellonovo as they took possession of her... 'Sponsored' her, to be educated in the sector capital as a ward of House Sepra. Refusal would have seen her responsible for both the destruction of her Awakening and also the unsustainable cost of her appetite. Acceptance? Elevation to some form of 'nobility' as well as the finest possible education. This was not a real choice.
And so she found herself in a luxury suite aboard a starliner, a sixteen year old girl who had never left orbit of her homeworld before, left with an allowance and expense account that was beyond anything she would ever had thought reasonable even with her elite background. But... That was not enough, surely she deserved more? Quashing that part of her was a constant struggle alongside the temptation she had to fight the urge to assume her 'true' self and allow all to behold her new draconic magnificence.
That was far too much introspection for one morning. Rivka shoved herself up to her feet with an overly abrupt motion, set her jaw, closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “Room. I require a shower and breakfast.” Her stomach growled. “Breakfast should be primarily meat and twenty times normal volume.” As she spoke, the room complied. One wall silently and smoothly irised open to lead to a well appointed bathroom whilst a table and single chair rose from the floor at the opposite side, the wall slithering somehow before plates heaped with lightly seared steak began to slide forth. Another rumble.
She felt fire again as the warm room felt abruptly chill, a flare from her eyes, then her self control crumbling. “No!” A sharp motion of her left hand before both clench to fists. “Shower first.” It took every ounce of her self control to stalk toward the bathroom, strip away her clothing, then march on in with her bare feet thunking the smooth tiled floor. Activating by itself, the shower brought a welcome infusion of actual noise to the suite, she closed her eyes, sighed, luxuriated in the perfectly tuned flow of water across her skin. Then soap mixed, just enough, more water, a subtle vibration and surge of manage from the nodes in the walls as she felt her body cleansed.
At this point Rivka allowed herself to sigh, to relax, stretching into the press of the high pressure water, luxuriating as it combined with the pressure of cleansing mana to near massage her form. She stepped from the shower to directed gusts of heated air to dry her skin as she stalked nude to the table and perched her behind upon the chair. Then she tore into the massively oversized breakfast as she swallowed down steak after streak, a tenth of her human form body mass almost in near raw meat as the wall continued to issue forth new platters.
Eventually though the gnawing hunger faded and the gnawing internal fire began to relent. A napkin was just present, extruding from the tabletop then fading back into it after she wiped her chin, she stood. “Mirror.” The wall in front of her breakfast table turned perfectly reflective as she considered herself. She looked across, studying herself, she remained tall, athletic, but not quite as she remembered. Was her skin ever so perfect? Did her dark skin previously have that burnished, almost bronzed hue to it? Was her dark hair so vibrant? No. Also her eyes had been brown instead of a burnished gold with vertically slit pupils. A shake of her head then before she ran her fingers through damp hair and turned to prowl across to her bag. She did not take any time to put away her stuff after arriving last 'night' just before the liner's departure, instead dropping the thing onto the floor before collapsing into bed and tousled, fiery dreams.
The liner. She fought to recall what she knew about starliners. This was the Star Of Thuania, a mid sized but brand new vessel. Seven thousand passengers? She was travelling first class which was normally limited to the nobility and wealthiest of commoners. Her 'peers' would be wearing haute couture and lavish attire custom tailored to them. She had.. Some fairly nice dresses? She found herself emitted a low, frustrated growl, a low and rumbling noise hinting at something far larger than her human frame.
She needed to try to control this and fought down the urge to swell back into what was already starting to feel like her 'true' self. No, she would wear a dress, not rampage down the corridor as a scaled monster no matter how shiny and glorious said scales might be. Even if her stomach still rumbled with a low hunger. Instead she picked a vertically ribbed mini dress in burgundy and black, front fastened with asymmetrical buttons, high necked and short sleeved to be paired with flat black pumps. It was nice! Nicer than almost anything else she had worn, bought by her parents just before she left, also slightly crumpled even after she shoot it a few times.
Now suitably armoured she prowled on out of the extravagant gold and crystalline lair of her suite and into the similarly ostentatious corridor beyond. In her preoccupation with her... condition, Rivka forgot to wear the complimentary HUD contact lenses that would allow her to see the ship's augmented reality thus ensuring that she was now completely unsure of where to go, fortunately her first class suite exited to a mezzanine floor suspended over the High Concourse, with breakfast being served below to a scattering of outrageously clad figures. Was that woman wearing nothing but a constellation of thousands of translucent levitating crystals? Did that man have four people carrying his shimmering cape behind him? She straightened her back before stepping to the edge and descending the grav chute down, legs kept close together.
Upon arrival below she was first bowed to by a very dapper clad and athletic young man in a dark suit, she blinked, a smile, a warm. “Thank you!” Then a tsk from the side as a blonde teen perhaps a year or two older than herself interjected. This younger man was wearing some manner of military uniform tailored to his slender frame, a profusion of gold braid combined with chameleonic fabric obviously set to obsolescent glimmer instead of camouflage.
“So you are the mysterious denizen of Suite 3.” His accent was definitely not one she was familiar with, she peered up to him. “Why are you greeting the servants? I know you boarded from Thellonovo but...” A slight shake of his head. “What are you even wearing?” Rivka found herself clenching her fists, a surge of fire within her as her jaw set, a pressure wave of power emanating outward.
The boy's eyes went wide then, a half step back. “W-Control yourself!” A moment of further assessment, a slight shake of his head. Did somebody else mutter something about bumpkin mages? People are definitely looking now. “I am amiss though, having not introduced myself. I am Na-Baron Isaias Toledo of Abreu. Whom might I be addressing?”
Fighting down the urge to... To eat him? To burn him? Something undiplomatic, Rivka then set her expression into something approximating a smile as she tried to remember what she was supposed to say here. “I am Rivka Karri Nagel. Ahh, Ward of House Sepra.” That was not quite right. “Draconic Ward of House Sepra.” The boys face was paling. She added. “I am being sent to the sector capital to continue, or begin, my education. A pleasure to meet you Lord Isaias.”
She extended out her hand for his, he looked down at it as if she was about to grow claws. Could she grow claws? She asked herself that whilst suspecting the answer was yes. “Draconic Ward.” He was measuring his own words altogether more carefully now. “That would explain a great deal Miss Rivka. But show more control in future. You are powerful and valuable but fire and biting will not get you very far. I am aware you only Awakened a few days ago however. Also the correct term of address is 'Your Excellency'.”
No! She was fairly sure that she did not have to take this from anyone. She was a dragon, she was glorious and terrible! Rivka shoved that part of her mind back into its box, a deep breath, eyes closed a moment then. “Thank you. Your excellency. As you said I am new to... This.” She motioned expansively to the utter luxury of their surroundings. “Could you answer my questions over breakfast though?”