The press, accustomed to Emilie, was growing a little weary and turning a little more to politics, with the elections not far off...

Everyone knew that Emilie was a human in the body of a dragon, and this was no longer a secret. And she longed to return to a normal life with her family, friends and fan club.

Deep down, all she could think about was going out with her friends and meeting someone who wouldn't be shocked by her looks, and one day starting a family of her own.

But on no account did she want to repeat the bloody pattern of her mother and grandmother Tiamat.

She could still see in her memories the children captured and devoured in the caves of the Arab palace and how her own mother had conditioned her little brother and sister into hideous man-eaters. She herself had been bitten by her little sister.

Her greatest fear was running into a shapeshifting dragon man and siring monsters. She herself had the power to transform humans or any living creature into a hybrid dragon with her venom. It was despicable, abominable and the opposite of everything she was at heart.

Fire rose in her throat when she thought of it.

Like a recurring nightmare, she saw people chained up, eaten alive and sacrificed to her grandmother, and when she was captured, she was drugged and covered in tribal tattoos that made no sense to her. Even the draconic (Faeyrune's infernal) script meant nothing to her.

Her human soul resisted the call of blood and barbarism.

Then the memory of the trap set by Imperator (Blackthorne for Daathr), which led all Nato forces and dragon hunters into a nuclear trap. Thousands dead.

Tiamat wanted her and had killed all her friends and fellow dragon hunters.

Dragons decapitated in an infernal machine...

She had saved her little brother Azur and her little sister in extremis.

Even her mad mother, who had sacrificed herself to take her children's place, hadn't changed Tiamat's mind.

She herself had killed another brood to test her machine and relaunch her ship.

Emilie couldn't remember exactly, except that there was a huge explosion, blood everywhere. Imperator and Tiamat torn apart by the explosion and their own sacrificial machine.

This was how she wanted to get extra heads and become a great hydra to rival deities....

She was a mad, power-hungry creature with goals beyond comprehension and logic that only she understood.

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It had all happened 2 years ago... but it still felt like yesterday.

She had single-handedly pulled the 3 surviving dragons onto the beach, waiting for help.

She begged the military to spare her mother, who was seriously wounded and unconscious. She wasn't executed just because she too was a victim of manipulation, and had truly gone mad from the diabolical tortures inflicted and her constant struggle to survive a raging hydra.

Emilie regained respect for her mother for having confessed everything to her adoptive father, Luc, ignobly slaughtered by Imperator, all of Tiamat's plans. Her willingness to make amends, to ask forgiveness of the countless human victims and her sacrifice in taking the place of Emilie and her brother and sister... She had at last reacted like a protective mother.

Emilie had used her body as a shield against the soldiers, and finally everyone calmed down when they saw that Tiamat had finally been defeated and sent back to hell.

Emilie did not change back into a dragoness that day. She walked along the river Meuse with the students, arriving at the town center on her two-legged feet, where she and her friends looked at the shop windows of the Grand Place shopping mall.

The time was ripe and she finally boarded the bus and settled down at the back to go home to the countryside.

As she watched the road go by, memories flooded back of her first human friends, when she was a baby dragon and still knew how to get into a car.

Looking back, she'd had some good times as a child.

The bus took a kilometer-long detour to drop her off in her village, Mont, where many friends and neighbors were waiting for her.

Her brother and sister were probably busy at home, Asur probably on the games console with his buddies, and Ochria probably helping Celine cook (Mom, my aunt, in fact) on the farm.

Even though we were human-sized, we still had dragons' stomachs.

Her teenage sister also had a boyfriend, and Emilie was jealous. She was waiting and hoping to see her explorer friend Erich again.

She entered the house and was greeted by her family, and after kissing Céline, she asked: "And Reich? Still no news? His plane should be arriving in Brussels tonight? "

Céline shook her head.

Emilie really wanted to see Reich again and had polished off all her scales and covered herself in perfume.

Perhaps in her lair (the dragon's room), the evening would end on a romantic note and not in a bender like the last time Reich had carried her.