"Who the hell are you?"
"Uh, sorry, am I interrupting something?"
The wizard - not a bearded wise man, but a young rich wizard with a close cropped goatee and an absurdly expensive getup - glared at the girl in the entranceway to the great circular main floor of his workshop.
"Why are you here? You don't just, walk into people's private workshops, you know."
The girl shrugged, her long, shining brown hair cascading down over her shoulders.
"Honestly, I don't know. I just heard a loud horn and suddenly felt like I had to come in."
A look of pure annoyance crossed the wizard's face. He grasped the ancient artifact horn in his hand tightly. Has something happened to the enchantment? Why isn't it working?
He glared at the girl. "Out."
She nods curtly, and leaves...
The evening light shines across the workshop; alchemical equipment and stacks of tools cast strange-shaped shadows onto rows of books.
"Inexplicable." The wizard says to his young apprentice, his voice twinged with annoyance. "The dragon summoning horn's enchantment is perfectly functional, according to every other test. So why didn't it work? I thought there was a great dragon living just outside the city."
"Maybe there's a dragon in the city, trapped somehow?" The apprentice offered, pinching a lock of his hair together with his fingers.
"Unlikely. It's very hard to restrain or trap a dragon, and this piddly little town doesn't have the huge underground of older metropolises. Someone would notice if a dragon was stuck in a warehouse."
The wizard shrugs, and raises the horn to his mouth once more. He blows into it, unleashing a great bellowing sound.
For a few minutes he waits at the workshop window, waiting for the billowing of wings. It does not come.
An hour later, with the sun now gone for another day, the wizard sits by his workshop's fireplace, his apprentice reading a treatise while he sips brandy to cool his rage at this complete disaster of a day. When, suddenly, the door cracks open -
And it's that same girl again, panting with exhaustion.
"Why in the five Underworlds are you back here?!" The wizard yells.
The girl blubbers, raising her hands defensively. "I don't know! I had to come! I heard a horn again, and, I just felt this weird, like, urge. Like I had to show up. I was halfway across town preparing dinner! I had to sprint out my front door with barely an explanation!"
The apprentice looks up from his copy of Larekkham's Treatises On Changed Forms, and glances at his master.
"Teach, uh, I think I might have just figured out what's going on."
The wizard scowls. "Alright, kid. Hit me with your theory."
The apprentice puts the book down and adjusts his round spectacles.
"This girl is the closest dragon."
Simultaneously, the two of them interject. "What?"
"No, she's perfectly describing how the horn functions. As an item of ancient pact - an ancient deal between a dragon clan of old and a human queen who came to their rescue - it gives the nearest dragon a compulsion to seek out the one who blew it, and hear out if not necessarily obey their request. And that's exactly what she's experiencing."
The wizard rubs his temples. "So you're telling me this, completely random town girl, is a fucking, dragon?"
"Dragons are shapeshifters who can take human form. And there are several legends of people turning into dragons. I think it might not be infeasible that she's a dragon and isn't even aware."
As the two magi debated, the girl stood there, listening. Confused, yet...
The thought that she might be a dragon somehow didn't seem unbelievable. She loved the sky, she was always strangely comfortable around fire, she was always oddly tough since she was little... She looked at her hand, closed her eyes, and pictured sharp talons. The image came easily, and felt... right.
"... you're talking absolute bunkum. Those legends have no basis in fact."
"And yet they occur in every culture with regular contact with dragonkind"
"So you're telling me those absurd rumors from Vallealas aren't cover for some kind of draconic takeover but are entirely true? Their heir just up and turned into a dragon?"
"Yes, it's entirely plausible!"
The girl clears her throat. Her fear is gone, burned away by a feeling of power and warmth welling within her chest. She opens her eyes - revealing changed, inhuman ones, metallic-yellow with slitted pupils. The wizard and his apprentice fall silent, gazing into them in shock.
"If you need a dragon, I'll be your dragon.", said the young dragoness.
