Fight or run.

Those two things, Gronn knew well. It was all he had known in his one hundred and seventy-seven years of existence. A short lifespan compared to the higher bloods atop the highest ranges of Torr Valeris. Yet still long enough for him to reflect.

As a hatchling in the crashing rapids of the Valian ranges, he ran. Ran and ran. Picked up snippets of food here and there as he dodged hungry jaws and sneaked under prying eyes. By running, he knew how to be afraid, and knowing fear, he knew how to survive. He grew used to fear, immune to it, and by the time he achieved his first real kill, fear had been engraved into him so many times he felt it as his ally, something not to overwhelm him, but something for him to know and use to hone his instincts.

As the moments passed into days and the days flowed into months and the months crashed into years, there came a time that he made the choice to fight more than he did to run. He hunted and killed and ripped and tore past his salamander stage into a drake, and by his hundred and twentieth year, he became a fully fledged dragon.

Never once did he ever question why it was that he fought. Why he desired so strongly to get stronger. Why every single dragon kin around him, whether they were salamanders or wyrms or drakes or even dragons, always felt a calling pulling them towards the distance, to the horizon, to the far-ranging skies where the great peak of Torr Valeries stood mighty and tall, piercing past the veil of the clouds high above, above even the boundaries of this very world.

Become strong to ascend the peak – a message inscribed into the instinctive code of every single dragonkin in existence. A powerful instinct as impactful as that which drove fight or flight in all living creatures.

At first, he knew not why that voice beckoned to him. Where it came from. Then, when he grew strong enough, his scales as large as the brick and mortal homes humans dwelled in, he could come near to the base of Torr Valeris, past the countless mountains surrounding it teeming with fierce and dreadful life.

There, he came into the fold of the true dragons that dwelled within the hallowed heights of Torr Valeris itself, and his quest for strength became instead one of servitude. For to reach higher and higher up the rungs of the great mountain, he had to serve the higher blooded, and he did so, unquestioningly for fifty years.

For he knew no other life.

Nothing beckoned to him more than the never-ending desire to ascend Torr Valeries. Even his unquenchable thirst for strength, the desire to eat and rest and grow stronger and stronger, was all so that he could reach the top of Torr Valeris.

Thus, he entered into Valerikynthimos's service, for she as one of seventeen higher blooded dragons – original descendants hailing from Val, the great elder – held authority to grant passage to the heights of the mountain to those she deemed worthy.

Thus, he culled the bloodlines deemed unworthy. All dragonkin beyond the Valian ranges: dragonkin that had split off from the original blood of Val and rejected the eternal message of ascent.

He did not think much of it. For thirty years, he obeyed. He fought dragons like himself. He killed dragons older than himself. He culled dragons far younger than himself. It did not matter to him, for that was simply the way of life, of living with the blood of the dragon running through one's veins.

Death simply meant you were not prepared. The flight instincts too undeveloped, for often the dragons that left the brutal environment of the Valian ranges had grown lazy and weak in their far-flung foreign lands lording over mortal races much weaker than them. They had forgotten the primal instinct of fear that was crucial to making one strong.

They were weak, and so they died. That was the judgement he made. The judgement he laid down upon them. A judgement that came naturally for there were countless others that would have made the very same judgement upon him when he was weak.

It was only when he had a hatchling of his own, taken in by the allure of an impure dragon in the far flung reaches of the south, that he came to realize the value of life. When he looked into the wondering, so very innocent and blank eyes of his offspring, he could only see potential. Infinite potential.

And who was he to cull that potential, to determine it weak and unworthy?

"So, what will it be, dear Gronn?" Valerikynthimos's voice rang through the air, anchoring Gronn back to the present. "You were oh so close to reaching the heights of Torr Valeris. If you do not fail this task, I may yet forgive your imperfections. I may yet still allow you to enter the vale where your blood may be recognized as worthy."

Gronn stared into the eyes he had put himself under for fifty years. Thirty of those years hunting, twenty of them pretending to serve while saving. And yet, that did not change the fact that those were all years he was not free.

He set his jaw, steadying his head back to ready for a charge as the muscles around his body and back tensed and rippled, his wings stiffening and spreading to his sides.

The elf would take care of those Gronn had saved. All the hatchlings, eggs, wyrms, and young drakes were due to make their way south, away from the grasp of the higher. It was already too late for Valerikynthimos to undo what Gronn had done.

And it was selfish, but he remembered. His arm and the seer.

He had a life to lose. A life he had lived in eternal servitude, first to the curse in his ancestral blood, then to the higher dragons that perpetuated it. If he was going to lose this life, then he wanted to do it while feeling free at least once.

Gronn roared, for he was never one for many words, and he thrust his wings backwards, propelling himself forwards. His wide tail straightened behind him with a solid push, sending him hurtling forwards like a meteor of muscled destruction. His enormous, plated jaw was open, and his bladed wings thrust forwards, ready to skewer Valerikynthimos.

"Disappointing. And I was ready to take in another consort," said Valerikynthimos as she closed her eyes in disdain, thin veils of membranous flesh slithering over the inky orbs.

The four frills around her neck gathered a colossal amount of magical energy, enough to warp the space around her. The emerald wing clan drakes around her scattered away, shrieking in fear.

For the slightest of instants, the elements ran wild around her. A torrent of fire so large that it could engulf an entire forest flared up from one of her frills, a tidal wave of water capable of engulfing an entire city pouring out from another, a surge of hurricane force winds from another, and a veritable mountain of glistening crystals erupted from the last.

Then each of the four elements shrunk into four rapidly accelerating and hyper condensed orbs around her frills.

Gronn was near now, to the point where in the next half second, he could bite down on her neck and tear her throat apart. He knew that if his initial charge could shatter through her magic barrier, that if by some miraculous chance his jaws could set around that neck, then he could kill her.

But that did not happen. All that Gronn saw was light so brilliant it even blinded him as the four orbs shot towards him.