Dragon Defiant — Viola Grace

Born nameless in a tank, they try and make her into a weapon, but she chooses defiance.


Eltrinia sounds like a good name, and Lem comes naturally. After falling through the sky during a lightning storm, Eltrinia is free of the tube that they grew her in, and while she doesn't yet know her name, she knows that she needs to get in touch with society.
A fisherman and his wife take her in, and a shore patrolman offers to take her to safety, but minimal contact with him tells her all she needs to know. The valley wants her back, she is expensive, and they have scouts looking everywhere for her. Her captor thinks he is in charge, but that is when he meets the lightning.
After that, things get a little blurry.

Excerpt:
The first awareness she had was of being jolted from left to right. Voices were shouting an alarm, and she was being rocked violently from side to side.
She went from seeing flaring light through her lids to a warm silence that was broken as the entire world around her rumbled rhythmically to life.
She braced her hands against the wall of the tank she was in. She kept herself from rocking wildly from side to side. She didn't know who she was or what she was, but she was in fluid, and there was something attached to her limbs.
She heard a soft voice speaking in her ear, it was explaining words and concepts. She looked to the left, and an audio output device led to the small wires that ran into her skull.
The world around her was dark and humming as she rocked back and forth with the movements.
Who am I?
The thought echoed in her head as she swayed.
There were shouts from outside, and whatever she was in shuddered and skidded to a stop.
There was screaming, and then, the vehicle she was in was torn open. A creature made of light grey-green scales grabbed her and tore her tube away from its moorings. The dragon flapped its wings and pulled her upward and away from the small town that she was in.
She watched the ground move away from her, and beads of water swelled and coursed across her tube. Rain. It was raining.
A dragon made of onyx and shadow struck the one carrying her, and the tube fell, end over end, toward a wide and slick surface.
It felt like she fell forever, but when she saw the lightning, she knew that her cascade into the world had only begun. Forever would have to wait.

She stood up on the shoreline, naked and confused. The tube was long gone, swept away and taken under by the waves.
She looked down at her arms and felt her skull. The holes that had let fluids and sound in were closed. She was whole. She looked down at herself and nodded. Adult female. Not human. The blue light that crackled and moved across her skin was not something humans could do.
She took her first few steps, walking without purpose. The tiny house on the bluff above the shoreline had a light in the window. That meant humans, and that could mean food. She looked from side to side and found a set of worn and silvered stairs.
She gripped the railing and began the climb. It was so strange; every touch was new. The skin of her feet was new, her hands were soft, and when she dragged them across the railing, bits of wood worked into her skin. The pain was peculiar, but it didn't stop her, and she left a trail of blood up the steps.
She walked to the house and knocked on the door. A man opened it, and a woman behind him gasped.
She wanted to speak, but it wasn't in her head.