of fire dragons and singing stars
prologue
The clear night sky in Lima, Ohio, seems much the same as it is anywhere else. The blanket of darkness unfurls over the vast expanse, sequined with eons-old dots of light, and the warmth of the summer air rises up into it, vanishing into the cloudless black. People, cars and buildings all sleep within the ebon embrace of these slow-moving hours, and all is calm and peaceful in the slumbering town.
Some dream, some do not. And others seek sleep, and do not find it.
It is those wakeful few that sometimes look up into that sky, and see things that are not meant to be seen; and because they are not meant to be seen, they generally do not believe that they have seen them.
Because no one, in this world, in this day and age, believes in things like dragons.
No one, perhaps, save Rachel Berry.
She was just a little girl that one eerily still summer night when her fathers brought her outside to gaze up at the stars, and she saw the giant, elegantly stretched shadow of something with enormous wings and a sinuous tail, haloed in the light of an impossibly bright full moon. Her fathers had missed it, of course; they'd been too busy chatting away to each other, as they always were, about whatever silly things grown-ups talked about - and somehow, Rachel knew that this was something she shouldn't mention to them. A soft, dry voice had spoken in her mind, and gently advised that they could never, would never understand what she had seen, and it was better for everyone if she kept it to herself, close to her memory and locked away in her heart.
There will be a time, little one, that strange voice had said, and Rachel trusted its wisdom completely.
So she did as she was bidden to do, and never told a single soul about the night she had seen a dragon flying past the moon, silvery light glinting off its scales, and its great golden eye had found her sitting on her little lounge chair in her fathers' backyard, and winked at her.
Rachel is older now, and she has seen many things, but nothing has ever compared with that. And still, every so often, a strange, inexplicable feeling rouses her from her bed, twisting in her gut, and causes her to crawl out her bedroom window to sit on the roof – quietly, ever so quietly, it would not do to wake her fathers with this – and watch the night sky for a dragon in flight.
And on those nights, when that feeling takes hold of her, she feels neither heat or nor cold, no matter the temperature outside, and the soft, dry voice intones:
The time is coming. Make ready. Hold fast. A storm approaches. You will be needed. Soon.