Underground Moonlight

Moscow, Russia
7 years before the end of The Dragons' War

It was a cold night, I was resting near one of the subway exits, waiting for the evening to go out in search of food in the city, but when I opened my eyes, the dragon that had accompanied me for the last few months was nowhere to be found. In its place was a naked girl hugging me, but she was not human, I could see a pair of horns protruding from her forehead, in addition to a large tail and a sharp tip that could be used as a weapon. Not long after that, the girl woke up and looked at my face. She tried to speak, but didn't say anything understandable, but in just a few minutes of practice she managed to speak, her first words were to call me Daddy. Trying to understand what had happened while I was asleep, I thought it might have happened, but nothing out of the ordinary had happened. But the girl's behavior, and the fact that some of her features resembled those of the dragon that had accompanied me until the previous day, made me suspect that perhaps they were the same.

The girl seemed to realize what I was thinking and weighed in on who she was. According to her, it was the same dragon I had been taking care of all this time, and for which she was grateful. She also told me a bit about what she knew about dragons. Apparently, like in a video game, dragons could gain power by killing living creatures, and when they had enough, they could evolve into something else. In her case, it seemed that when she saw how much I cared for her, but I was all alone, she decided to focus on her evolution to make her form as close to human as possible and keep me company. She also told me that she has always been a female, but apparently the two genders are so similar in some of them that humans can't tell which gender they are.

She also wasted no time in giving me other advice that she had always wanted to tell me, but had not been able to until now, such as that the flashlight I was using was a danger and that I should stop using it if I wanted to move more unnoticed between the tunnels. They could tell the difference in lighting from much further away than I thought. For my part, taking the opportunity to talk to her and get more information, I asked her about the dragons, their goals, and why she decided to stay with me. But she answered me that being raised by me, she simply did not know her species as much as I did, because all she knew was her instincts. She also told me that she chose to stay with me, even though her instincts told her that I was only food for her, because I had taken care of her like a father all this time, and that without my help, a weak and small dragon like her would have probably just been eaten by another stronger dragon. So she stays with me because I am her father, and because the other dragons of the subway were also her enemies.

That night while we were talking, now that she was more human, there was a full moon, it was so big and bright that we even left the tunnel to see the landscape on the surface better. The moon reminded me that there was still something I knew in this horrible world, the only other source of light that existed in the life I had. The only one that was beside me, that made me happy and that I could enjoy. Thinking about it, I decided to give the dragon girl who accompanied me a name, because I could not call her dragon anymore, she did not deserve it, and seeing that her company was also the only other pleasant thing I had, I decided to call her Luna, moon in Spanish.

Determined to follow Luna's advice that using the flashlight would sooner or later attract more dragons, I decided to find a pair of night vision goggles. But they weren't easy to find in an abandoned city guarded by dragons. So it took me a couple of nights just to find something. But I could never find anything that was intact, so later I picked up some broken pieces and started trying to patch something together with the pieces I had. This also took time, but eventually I managed to get a pair that worked, so I stopped using the flashlight and just wore my glasses.

As time went on, things started to get even more aggressive as the winter got more intense. It was so cold and showed no signs of stopping that even I, coming from a tropical country, could no longer remember what a warm day was. The dragons hated it too, because as the temperature dropped, they stopped going to the surface and preferred to stay in the tunnel instead. Which meant it was more dangerous for us. Luna, who had not gotten used to the idea of wearing her clothes at first, also began to like them when she saw that they helped her stay warm.

As the temperatures continued to drop, it became impossible to go to the surface because the cold and the large amounts of snow that were there made it impossible to find anything. So our food began to become scarce, and being two people made the situation even more difficult, but even when Luna said that she was fine with eating anything or leaving her behind, I did not think about whether she wanted that possibility, because at that point I really saw her as my own daughter. Our food also began to decrease at the same time as that of the dragons, but the solution they had was much more direct, the dragons just began to eat each other in order to eat something. This caused some dragons to evolve even more than before and become more dangerous than others, but none of them resembled the human-like Luna in the slightest.

Thanks to the map, I also realized that the dragons were more organized than I thought. I thought they were uncontrolled beasts, but the more time I spent in the subway making the map, the more I noticed how different types of dragons made watch routes through the same tunnels, as at certain points there were always guards, as the smaller and faster dragons were the ones that were farther from the nests, making them the explorers. Almost as if there was a specific type of dragon race for each task, and these in turn had routines and behaviors. And with that, a weakness, because if I knew how they acted, I could set traps and kill them.

The moment of truth came when we were about to run out of food that I spoke clearly to Luna. It came down to us hunting a dragon to eat it or starve to death in a few days. The reaction of the two was the same, so we started trying to kill the little ones with traps. I made a spear with an iron bar, while Luna, who had superhuman strength and resistance, could turn her hands into claws and kill them with them. The plan was a success, and although dragon meat was not tasty, hunger was the best spice for food.

Over time, Luna became overwhelmingly strong, fast, and ferocious. As our confidence grew, we began to hunt larger dragons, and Luna grew stronger and stronger. It even got to the point where she killed one of the biggest dragons we know with her bare hands. But despite the fact that she no longer needed me to survive at all and that I was now more in the way, Luna never changed the way she treated me, still calling me daddy and doing everything I say to her to the letter without complaining. Although she was less than a year old, Luna looked like a 15 year old girl. Although, as she explained to me, this was due to the fact that dragons grew differently than humans, and her appearance reflected her power and level more than her age.

On the 14th of February, the day a year had passed since the dragons had attacked the White base, and the day before Luna's birthday, something surprising happened, for strangely enough, it was a fairly sunny day and even hot enough to go outside. From what I thought about Luna's birthday, I thought about taking advantage and going to the surface despite the risk so that she could enjoy the day, because we had spent so much time in the subway that I realized she was never on the surface when the sun was up. She was amazed to see the clear sky and the sun, the size of the world, and to see for the first time a world free of dragons. I, for my part, felt guilty for taking so long to show her such a thing, so I apologized to her. The dragon girl replied that she always knew how difficult my situation was, and that it was not my fault because it was simply out of my reach. She also saw the world and told me that although she was a dragon, she also believed that dragons were responsible for destroying a beautiful world like the one I had told her about. Luna told me that her dream was to kill dragons and live with other humans. But knowing that she was a dragon too, that was impossible. Luna hugged me and asked me if it was possible, so I promised her that when all this was over and the war against the dragons was over, I would take her on a trip around the world and show her how everyone would accept her as a human and not as a dragon, that even I would take her home and introduce her to my family.

But that was a promise I could not keep, because that day was the last time I saw her alive. On our way back to the subway, we decided to go through a new tunnel that I had not seen before. But I quickly discovered that it was in much better condition than the others I had seen before, and consulting the map I saw that we were in the northern part of the city, so I thought that maybe this was finally the tunnel that exited from this place. Luna's and my joy was such that we didn't pay much attention to where we were going, until suddenly I felt something click against my leg like a floor, it was an anti-personnel mine, but with a superhuman reaction, Luna jumped over me and she protected me with her body. We both managed to escape unscathed. But while we were still recovering, we heard thousands of screams and grunts in the tunnels around us. More dragons were coming in swarms to our location.