“No, you can’t force me to do this! Let go of me!”
There I was, screaming my lungs out because I couldn’t handle the emotions boiling inside my heart, rising through my veins until they finally exploded as words, sharp as knives, coming out of my mouth. Someone passing by would think I was overreacting or simply being crazy, perhaps dramatic. But how would they know? How could they possibly understand that the woman screaming isn’t me, but the little girl I used to be?
I was born in a palace. Not because I carried royal blood, but because my mom was a scientist working there. She was a witch, a genius, who used her powers only to make progress in humanity. My dad was deceased when my mom was pregnant, so growing up, it was just her and me. One day, while she was working on a new medicine and I was watching her from afar, one of the dragons that are kept in the palace to be experimented on went wild. They are usually extremely tame and everyone adores them, but something must’ve triggered his natural instincts to harm everyone who had an interaction with him. He killed my mother right in front of my eyes, and I, determined to become a scientist like my mother, promised myself not to experiment on dragons.
Now, I’m a 32-year-old woman, whose country is in a war with the horrifying creatures of the forest. I’m one of the last five witches in town, and they need magic to win this war. They force me into facing a dragon, maybe my mother’s murderer’s daughter. I scream, I cry, they don’t listen. I give up, for the sake of my country. “That’s what your mom would want you to do,” I say to myself, “She didn’t raise a coward.”
One of the maids in the palace used to say, “Fear is the best medicine.” I always believed that she was right. Because not even five seconds after I started to fight with that dragon, I was burning in the flames that came out of her mouth. I was right about avoiding them, but the maid wasn’t right about what she said. The best medicine is not fear, it’s experience, just as they say: once bitten, twice shy. I knew how reckless a dragon can be, so I protected myself by avoiding them, until it was time for me to finally go back to my mother’s arms…