hundreds of miles offshore, pouring rain, the setting sun just barely gilding the edge of the western horizon through the clouds, a ship is reading the depths of the seafloor. it is a research ship, ostensibly, but the mania its captain and crew have been seized by is far beyond ‘research’, resting on the bleeding edge between science and madness - here. they have found the mid-ocean ridge, where the raw bleeding flesh of the earth billows up and cools into new skin before being drawn away from the still-open wound. hours away, just offshore, that same oceanic floor, laden with millions of years of rich silt, buckles and subducts under the continental plate, stirring forth wonderful terrible geocatastrophe. but here, out in the middle of the ocean, the world holds its breath. the chief engineer has prepared the payload for the crane arm to pick up - dangle over the water - lower - release, and the thing dives, swallowed up by the black of the water as it yearns to fulfill its purpose. then there is little left to do but wait. the crew cluster around the screens, waiting one hour, two, three. the instruments of the payload tell them that it is now closing on a particular section of the seam between the two oceanic plates, a sacred spot avoided by oceanographers for generations, and then it vanishes. two tons of plutonium and its delivery mechanism, snatched out of the depths by the jaws of some ancient creature who now awakens from her aeons-long slumber. the oceanfloor bulges, cracks, is sloughed off. she shakes life into her nether regions and the hot magma clinging to her scales is flung off, cooling into pillow basalt. sapphire and amethyst light flares along her body, nose to tailtip, searing and blinding the deep-sea inhabitants who have let their curiosity drawn them to her awakening, and she pushes off with a mighty heave of her hindlegs to make her way to the surface. she is the Sun-Swallower, the Admiral Without Equal, the Sower-of-Derelicts. she is the Divine Tyrant, the Hoard Eater, the jealous god who claims sovereignty over all she surveys. she is the Alchemical Source and the Great Work, the Empress of Light, the arbiter of all grace and beauty in the world. her tail raises mountains and rends valleys, her scales are unbreachable treasures that dazzle the eyes, her jaws swallow fleets of ironclads and flocks of warplanes, her breath destroys and purifies and sublimates and transforms.
she is the Dragongirl, and she is awake once more.