“What the fuck is this shit?! Where’s my fucking computer?! What the fuck?!” Seething, Ryan pounded his fists ineffectually against his reflection in the portal. Each hit sent waves rippling along the shimmering surface, distorting his reflection as if he were splashing against the surface of a pond.

“I just downloaded fucking Sekiro! What the fuck is this cave?! WHERE THE FUCK AM I?” Ryan gave one final blow with all of his might, but his balled fists painfully bounced off of the hard surface of the portal with a loud *smack*. With fists stinging and bruised, Ryan pulled his phone from his pocket, and seeing that he had no signal, screamed his frustration into the damp, musty darkness of the stone room he had suddenly found himself in, completely unaware of the large shadow emerging from the darkness opposite the portal.

Sereath was one of the castle’s least most important guards, not quite high enough in rank to sit in on the royal throne room, or to accompany the young Princess when she frolicked in the royal gardens, but important enough to be entrusted with things that had the potential to harm the royal family. He came from a long line of guarddragons tasked with keeping the castle peace, just like his father and grandfather before him.

But Sereath’s lineage was only part of his choice in career, and like other dragon species more suited for certain jobs due to their natural strengths, he was especially suited to being a guard: having a body both lithe and quick, he was as agile in the air as he was on the ground, his golden eyes were sharp, able to pick out a mouse in a field from dozens of dragonlengths in the sky, and able to see clearly even in the darkest night. His frame was full with lean, rippling muscle beneath a crimson hide of thick plated scale, strong but not too bulky like some of the heavier-built dragons. Short, bony spines ran down his backbone and lined either side of the end of his tail; a strong weapon beside his razor-sharp claws and teeth. While two ebony horns curled elegantly upwards from the back of his skull, buffed to a mirror polish by some of the kobolds kept as personal servants of the castle guard, they shined in the dim torchlight, both a weapon and a testament to his maleness. Sereath wasn’t a vain dragon, but he knew of his handsomeness and wasn’t afraid to strut for the appreciative eyes of the dragoness maidservants, lifting many a lady’s headfrill in response to his charm.

Most days he was tasked with guarding the doors that led to the keep or vetting the cattle brought in by the royal herdsdragons, and occasionally, such as today, guarding a painting. But it wasn’t an ordinary painting, actually, the painting itself was ordinary, but what it covered was not. Behind the painting, built into the wall of the castle’s basement, was a passage that led to the Portal in the North, so named as it was the furthest North of the four portals spread throughout the continent. It had been found first, in a natural cavern, and after the first Expedition, the Castle North had been erected around the portal to protect it.

While no one knew of their origin, nearly everyone knew of the evils they contained. The First Expedition had happened not long after the portals were discovered, a half dozen brave dragons had volunteered to travel through the portal to see what it connected to.
At the time, no one really knew what it was or if it even connected to anything, the adventurers were not expected to come back, and when they didn’t immediately they were regarded as brave heroes. It wasn’t until hundreds of years later, when the few survivors returned looking as if they hadn’t aged a day, that the nightmarish truth about the portal was revealed with their tales. But after nearly two millennia, many of the scrolls recounting the horrors found by the adventurers who had crossed through the portal were lost to time and rot, even the oldest scholars tasked with studying the portals knew only vagaries of the evils witnessed beyond them.
But even the passage of time could not erase the mythos of humanity.

Humans… a chill crept down Sereath’s spine, sending a shiver across his scales and setting some of his spines on end. Humans were the two-legged haunts of nightmares: small, but numerous and powerful, wielding flames that burned hotter and brighter than any fire, nearly blinding those who were subjected to their power.

The tales of the horror wrought by humans were brought back by those adventurers who had managed to survive, only to find that those they had left on this side of the portal were long gone, having aged close to a millennia. Those who had returned from the portal had been driven mad by what they had seen and returning to a place that had long thought them dead and forgotten, had sadly chosen to take their own lives or live feral and maddened in the wilderness.

The elders, after hearing the horrors told of humanity, had tried to close the portals to protect dragonkind, but their efforts were unsuccessful. Instead, they locked the portals away, forbidding any more expeditions through them. In the two millennia since that first expedition, with no further signs of humanity, the human’s legend had become that of stories told to hatchlings to keep them mindful of their parents lest they be stolen away by a human in the night, never to be seen again.

Still, just the thought of humans existing beyond the portal gave Sereath chills and left him mentally counting each second during his shift guarding the painting, willing time to move faster so that he could leave this scary place and return to the castle proper. He uneasily shifted from one paw to the next, eyes glancing toward the staircase that lead up to the castle, just praying to see his replacement descend so that he could leave this foreboding place.

And then he heard it: a soft moan… from behind the painting…

A thousand thoughts flashed through Sereath’s mind: his instincts told him to run, run up the flight of stairs, past the guard at the top, dash through the castle to the courtyard, spread his wings, and take flight to somewhere far away from here, where no human could ever hope to get him, but the sense of duty drilled into him through his decades of training kept him in place.

It was his duty to keep the castle and its people safe, it was his duty to seek out the enemies of the King and Queen, it was his duty to know what went bump in the night, and right now, it was his duty to check the portal room.

So with a heavy, defeated sigh, he pulled at the edge of the painting with a claw, swinging it away from the wall on the hinges that lined its opposite side, and stepped into the darkened corridor.

Ryan’s mind was so clouded with unadulterated rage that his reaction to the large, red dragon stepping into the dim light cast by the torch ensconced on the far wall, was to scream at it. “And fuck you, you big ugly, shit lizard! I fucking take Friday off for fucking gaming and I get fucking kidnapped! Fuck this portal and fuck YOU!”

Ryan threw his useless phone at the dragon, the small black rectangle sailed through the air toward the dragon, but came up short, bouncing off the ground with a sharp *crack* as the screen shattered, and skidded a few feet across the stone floor to just before the dragon’s feet.

The dragon, three times Ryan’s height at the shoulder, recoiled with a high-pitched squeal, ducking his head beneath a wing and pressing his muscled bulk into the stone wall of the portal room.

“What are you fucking scared?” Buoyed by his blind rage, Ryan advanced on the shaking dragon.

Sereath, hearing the human growing closer, scrunched his body in on itself tighter, he had never been this scared, not in all of his years of defending the castle. His big heart thundered in his chest and tears streaked down the scales of his cheeks, he wrapped his tail tighter around himself and wished it was all a dream, a dream that he would wake up from now at any moment.

Ryan approached the dragon, the videos from first contact still fresh in his mind. Not even a year ago, six dragons had popped up out of nowhere in the middle of Nevada. It had been all over the news, everyone had thought dragons were myths, but here six suddenly were in the middle of America, not far from Las Vegas.

At first they were terrifying: belching flame and razing the small towns around where they had first appeared, the military had tried to stop them, but even some of the strongest weapons were ineffective against their natural armor and agility. However, the dragons were smart, and soon some of the most decorated psychologists and doctors had worked out a system of communication with them, but the dragons were also foolhardy, confident in their natural strengths, and had demanded concessions with the human government.

Sick of the sudden and unwelcome intrusion into the heartland of America, the US government had detonated a small thermonuclear bomb at the nearby Nevada nuclear test site within sight of the dragons as a show of strength. Those dragons unfortunate enough to stare at the blast had quickly gone blind and became easy targets for the military, while those few who still had sight had been cowed into great, scaly lapdogs at the potential for destruction the human race employed.

Overnight the dragons became laughingstocks, nearly everyone on the planet had seen the video of a dragon, shaking like a leaf, being petted by a young child. After a few days, once the public outcry of compassion for the now terrified dragons had reached a fever pitch they were allowed to return to the portal they had come through and hadn’t been seen since.

After witnessing all of that and now seeing another dragon curled up tightly in fright, Ryan wasn’t one bit afraid to give its quivering form a disdainful kick.

Sereath peeked one golden eye from beneath his wing and saw that the human was close, oh Gods he was right in front of him! This was it, this was his end, everyone knew of the human’s power and bloodthirst, he was going to be burned alive, and so young too! He hadn’t even gotten beneath the tail of the shy, purple dragoness who worked in the kitchens and liked to sneak him little morsels when he passed through on his rounds.

And suddenly he felt it: a kick to his tail, barely a poke, but all of his courage—and the contents of his bladder—left his body to puddle on the floor.

Seeing the growing puddle Ryan let out a short bark of mocking laughter. “You fucking pissed yourself! What a fucking pussy-ass dragon!”

The human’s shrill cries sent Sereath’s pulse skyrocketing, he turned to flee, duty be damned, but his claws caught in the delicate membrane of his wing and in his haste, sent him stumbling nose-over-tail to collapse on the dusty floor in a heap. The last thing Sereath heard was Ryan’s mocking laughter before he gratefully passed out from the shock.