Independence

A/N I love all my reviewers!! You don’t know how happy you’ve all made me. When I saw the response I got for the first chapter, I was practically jumping around like a super energized bunny. Thank you! You guys make me feel so special.


Chapter 2: The Chosen

Dragon Country was a large continent with a population of over a million Dragons and roughly three million humans. The human population in the world vastly outnumbered the Dragons but as Dragons had incredibly long lives, it seemed only fair in Mother Nature’s eyes that the dragon population was kept to a minimum, so to speak.

Dragon Country was divided into eight states with seven states ruled by the seven different dragon clans and the eight run by the high council of dragons. The eight state surrounded on all sides by the other seven states made it the very center and heart of Dragon Country. The Capital, as they called the eight state, was the central region in which dragons from all over the Country and all over the world would gather once in every four years for the Ceremony of the Chosen.

The ceremony was a long held tradition carried down from the elders of their race. It was held in order to choose suitable mates for the submissives that were brought from Naga to their homeland. Thousands of dragons who qualified for the position of mates made their way every four years to the Grounds of Choosing in the Capital in hopes of obtaining a mate.

The ceremony itself was formality where the heads of the different clans would present a number of candidates from their clans who were eligible and stood a chance of gaining mates. But with the small number of submissives however, competition was sure to be tough.

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The Grounds of Choosing was really a large open field, where stands were set up to accommodate the Chosen and spectators that had come to watch the ceremony.


The number of humans and Dragons that were flooding into the Grounds would give anyone a headache just by looking at them. The human head representative of the high council gave a huge sigh as he stared at the number of vehicles, personal jet planes and helicopters that were arriving from different parts of the world into the Capital. With that many number of people on the grounds, complications could arise faster than you could say, “Trouble”. And he didn’t even want to think about the number of Dragons that would soon be arriving in their reptilian forms that very evening. Even the thought of there being the slightest complication made him want to start pulling out his already graying hair. His job was on the line here, one slightest complain from the Dragon race would get him sacked faster than he could say “Huh?’.

“Mr. Woodstone, the Chosen will be arriving in twenty minutes,” said his secretary as he threw a glance at the large clock hanging near the window of the office.

With another sigh and a glance at the clock, Albert Woodstone turned away from the window overlooking the grounds and began adjusting his necktie. It would not do to look improper before his employers now would it?

“How do I look, Sanders?” he asked as he turned to face his secretary.

“Ready to take on the world, sir,” said his secretary with an encouraging smile as he glanced at his boss who was wearing a hand tailored suit and tie specially designed for the occasion.

“Well, it certainly feels that way,” he said with a grimace as they exited the office and began making their way down to the Grounds of Choosing.


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The stands surrounding the area gave the Grounds of Choosing an arena-like atmosphere. Thousands of humans and dragons seated among the stands began cheering as the Chosen arrived in beats of large wings and thunderous roars as they appeared above the grounds. Dragons from many different clans circled above the crowds, showing off their aerial skills to the audience below.

When the heads of the clans, in their large reptilian forms, made their descent onto the grounds however, the crowds grew silent. As it was part of the ceremony, silence was required until the list of names of the Chosen, written on scrolls, were handed over by the heads to a representative of the high council. The representative, usually someone trusted by the dragons would hang the scrolls onto high poles positioned in the center of the grounds to present the names of the candidates for all to see.

Albert Woodstone stood proudly in the center of the grounds smiling at the crowd and the heads of the clans that had landed onto the grounds of Choosing. The seven of them were some the oldest and most powerful dragons alive in the world. Most of them were over five hundred years old and with that much history backing them, they were probably the most influential of their race.

Where once there stood seven large dragons, seven human-like forms now stood facing the head representative carrying coloured scrolls, in accordance to their clans, in their hands. Albert Woodstone gave each of them a winning smile and a small bow before taking the scrolls and hanging them onto the poles.

After the last scroll was hung, the crowds broke out again in cheers and the seven heads shape-shifted back into their reptilian forms and took off into the air to join the Chosen in the sky. With loud roars that echoed through the sky and the grounds below, the circling dragons above flew off towards the Hall of Viewing leaving behind the cheering crowds and the Grounds of Choosing.


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If looks could kill, the two men standing guard at the each side of his box would have been dead twice over. Cursing under his breath while occasionally glaring at the two bastards, Lex started pacing up and down his box. The top of the box was high enough so that he could stand up straight without hitting his head but low enough to make him feel claustrophobic. The boxes were specially designed for submissives who were meant to be small and short but in his case, he was neither small nor short.

Lex didn’t possess the tiny stature that most submisives were born with. Perhaps it was due to his human upbringing? He had learned long ago from the nasty bullies back in school that being small in stature did nothing but cause you to lose your lunch money.

He recalled then asking his father for permission to take Karate lessons. Karate had been tough as he had been tiny compared to the other kids his age. He remembered getting punched around a lot and coming home to father with large purple bruises, but let’s just say that after years of Karate lessons, the bullies never bothered him ever again.

Lex grinned, recalling the expressions on their faces the day he had trashed them till they had turned tail and ran home calling for their mothers. Those were some of his better memories of school life. The first few years before that though, had been absolutely miserable.

Lex growled and turned to glare again at the guards. Those assholes were just standing there, occasionally leering at him with lustful eyes. They were humans though and Lex knew they wouldn’t try anything. After all, he was sure that they valued their life and facing the wrath of angry dominants was surely something no one would want if they wanted to have all their body parts left in one piece.

Still, they shouldn’t even be giving him those lustful looks. It made his skin crawl and his stomach nauseous. He didn’t need any reminders that there would soon be dominants coming into the hall to ‘admire’ the ‘displays’. Now, he supposed, he knew how animals felt like in the zoo. Like animals.

Lex groaned and flopped back onto the fluffy maroon pillows. Colour aside, it did feel pretty comfy. He wondered if he could just gather all the pillows and hide under them until the whole bloody event was bloody over! No way was he going to sit there, bat his eyelashes and look adorable while the dominants checked him out.

Now glaring though, glaring was good. Yup, he decided, he was going to settle for glaring.

Lex took a glance about the hall. It reminded him of the large exhibition halls he’d seen back at home in the city. Only this hall was ten times grander with sculptures of dragons and various animals carved into the pillars of the hall. The ceiling was painted with dragons and magnificent battles that had taken place between the dominants of his kind over submissives they had laid claim on. The whole room was carpeted in dark red, matching the colour of the carpet in his box.

There were small high tables placed around the room decorated in red tablecloth and silver candleholders, reminding Lex of a cocktail party. Well, a huge party for over thousands of dominants who would be leering at him and the other submissives over a glass of wine or champagne.

It was at that moment Lex felt like doing something he had not done ever since his schooling years, he felt like crying.

How was he ever going to get out of this one?

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Lucien Crescent glanced around at the other dominants that had landed behind him outside the Halls of Viewing. He waited for all of them to shape-shift before studying their blank faces which he knew they were schooling to hide their obvious excitement.
He smirked inwardly, and almost chuckled out loud at the expressions on some of the younger ones faces.

“May you be blessed this night,” he said as he gave them an encouraging smile.

They answered him with smiles of their own and made their way towards the Hall of Viewing.

Lucien smiled at the retreating backs of the members of his clan. He had been like them once, young and eager to obtain the perfect mate. After hundreds of years however, he had learned that unlike the other dominants of his kind, he had never felt the slightest bit of attraction towards the submissives that were brought in over the years.

Nothing about them appealed to him.

It was true that they were adorable. They were small and delicate, the perfect match for large dominating dragons such as those of his kind. And he, like every other dominant, felt the instant urge to protect and dominate the weaker submissives. But even then, he could think of none of them as his life long mate.

“Some days you just feel so old,” said an amused voice, snapping Lucien out from his train of thoughts. Lucien turned to find his old friend and fellow council member walking towards him with a smile, his eyes following the forms of the dominants from his own clan as they headed towards the hall.

“Mathew,” he acknowledged, tilting his head to nod at his friend.

“Lucien old friend, it is good to see you,” said Mathew with a warm smile as they clasped hands in greeting.

“We just saw each other last month,” Lucien said amusedly. The rest of the dominants from all the clans were already flooding into the hall and deciding that they should probably be joining the rest of their clans, they started heading towards to Hall of Viewing.

“Actually I was talking about the fact that it is good to see someone else sharing in the misery of attending this occasion for the one hundredth and twenty sixth time,” continued Mathew as they neared the entrance of the building.

“Actually, it’s the one hundredth and twenty fifth time for me,” replied Lucien with a small grin.

“Details,” said Mathew with a nonchalant wave of his hand.

The very first thing that the pair saw as they entered the Hall was the large number of dominants that seemed to have crowded in one specific area in the hall, namely the center where the submissives were kept in glass boxes. The two of them shared amused glances and headed towards one of the bars set up at a corner of the hall. The human bartender gave them a small bow as they approached and handed them a menu.

“I propose a toast,” said Mathew as they sat down on the high stools at the bar. Mathew lifted up his glass and smiled cheerily at Lucien.

“To what?” asked Lucien, staring at his old friend who seemed almost too happy for his liking.

“To blessings and new beginnings,” answered Mathew with an amused glint in his eyes.

“You mean to disappointments and another four years of misery,” replied Lucien with a smile.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Optimism, remember?”

“I lost my optimism about a hundred years back.”

Mathew merely lifted an elegant brow and Lucien conceded with a small,” Fine.”

If only to get some alcohol into his system, Lucien found himself toasting along with his old friend, knowing he would need the alcohol to get through the night.


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Lex sighed as he ran a hand through his dark brown hair. The distant roar of dragons told him that any minute now the dominants would be heading towards the hall. The roars were hard to miss really, even if he was distracted.

The whimpering submissives around him were telltale signs that the others had heard the roars as well. Bloody dominants! Didn’t they know that they were scaring the other submissives?

Lex glanced towards the box where his brother was kept in. His poor brother was shaking in fear and even went so far at to hide under a few maroon pillows.

“When I get my hands on those bloody dominants, I’m going to use them for target practice,” muttered Lex grumpily. His poor Angel, why couldn’t they have left him alone? Couldn’t they have at least given him some clothes to put on? The poor boy was probably freezing.

‘Wait a minute,’ thought Lex as he stared down at his own body and his eyes widened in panic.

Blood hell, they didn’t give him clothes either! He had been naked all along?! Glancing towards the other submissives in the glass boxes, he realized that none of them were clothed either.

What was this? Some kind of showcase?

Throwing a glance at the guards at the side of his box, he finally realized why they had been leering. He had been waltzing around naked the whole time!

Lex berated himself for being slow on the uptake; he should have realized he was butt naked. Didn’t people realize when they were naked?

Burying his face into his hands, he groaned.

‘Calm down Lex, there’s nothing wrong with being naked,’ he told himself.

‘Just look at the other Ri’s, they look perfectly fine,’ he continued as he glanced at the other Ri’s that had gotten over the fright and were traipsing around their glass boxes in nothing but their own skin. They looked around curiously at their surroundings, seemingly unaware to the predicament that they were in.

But then again, they had been living in the island all their lives. What did they know of dominants or clothes for that matter?


They had been captured in their human forms and back when Lex was running away from the hunters, he too had been naked. Back then there had been no time to worry about being seen naked. When your ass was on the line, decency didn’t seem that important. And he did mean that literally.

It is known that when submissives shape-shift into their human forms, they are left naked in human skin. Dominants however, had the ability to gather certain characteristics from their alternate reptilian forms such as fangs, claws and subsequently, skin that was really leather which they use to cover their bodies when they shape-shift into human forms.

In Lex’s opinion this seemed hardly fair. Why were the submissives the ones that were left naked? But then again, Lex never did like dominants anyway so anything about them would seem unfair to his stubborn mind.

Rubbing his temples to sooth the headache that he had been cursed with thanks to the hunters and their dart gun, Lex knew that he had to formulate a plan to ensure that he got out of this bloody situation. Contrary to what he had thought of before, lawyers couldn’t do anything for him if he was one the dragon race. Human laws did not apply in Dragon Country, after all.

Lex knew that he had to get out using his own efforts. Escape seemed the best option at the moment and he knew that that was probably the only option he really had. He didn’t think the dominants would let him go without a fight, a fight which he knew that he would surely loose. Submissives were highly rare and he definitely knew that the dominants would not be willing to forget about the existence of even one submissive that they had found. Lex sighed in frustration. ‘Looks like running away is the only choice,’ he thought.

But where would he go? He could always go back to Naga but that was the area where they would think to look first, wouldn’t they?

A picture of his apartment suddenly flashed through his mind. He thought about his warm and cozy home waiting for him back in human society and he realized that he didn’t want to give up his life as a normal human. He never wanted to be a submissive in the first place, why couldn’t he go back to living like plain old Lexis Rivers?

They would never think to look for a human with an identity or a job or with social relations with other humans. Lex smirked, knowing just the thing to do.

He would pretend to be just another submissive that had come from the island with no knowledge of humans or dominants. He would act like one and even whimper like one if he had to, anything to convince the dominants that there was nothing special about him. Their guards would be lowered around him and when he escaped, he would go back to his old life and his old apartment.

His brother however, was another issue altogether. He had to find some way to free his brother before he was mated to a dominant. Most dominants usually gave a certain grace period to the submissives before mating so that the submissives would get used to their presence and to their new lives in Dragon Country. He supposed he could use that time to break his brother out Dragon Country and make their escape.

But first, he had to go back to his old life. He had to create an identity for his brother so that the Dragons wouldn’t think to look for him as a human. ‘A little hacking here and there into the government files should do the trick,’ Lex thought in satisfaction.

Now all he needed to do was find a way to escape.

The sound of excited murmurs growing steadily louder in the hall broke him out of his thoughts. The sight that greeted him when he looked up from where his face was buried into maroon pillows made him want to do the same thing that his brother was currently doing, hide.

It seemed the dominants had finally arrived.




A/N Some of you guys did mention about the information overload in the last chapter. Really sorry about that but I really wanted my readers to understand more about dragons before I continued the story. There’s much more to dragons really and that was only the tip of the iceberg. So, readers bear with me okay? Hope I don’t start boring you guys out but if I do feel free to tell me.

Care to leave a review? (hint) (hint)