Bright bursts of lightning flashed across the night skies. Hurricane force winds howled into the darkness, ripping through the air like a violent maelstrom in the Eye of Jupiter. The skies were so turbulent that a blend of rain and hail streaked in all directions. It was a torrential downpour, except it was impossible to tell which way pointed down.

This was hundreds of kilometers above sea level.

A long black serpentine creature writhed in the stormy skies.

It twisted and tumbled in midair, as if struggling to fight against the overpowering winds.

Thunderstorms in the constellation of Shibien (紫微垣) — the Realm of Eternal Dragons — were harsh and unforgiving. Any Ryū (竜) foolish enough to fly into the heart of a storm was sure to be battered. The spirits of the celestial winds did not take kindly to intruders, and the five elements were quick to punish a dragon's hubris. Ever since the beginning of time, the Ryūjin learned not to trifle with the laws of nature. Even for a dragon, there were certain places that one shouldn't go.

'A dragon who flies too close to the sun is sure to be burned' — or so the old proverb goes.

No adult dragon would attempt something so futile and careless.

That said, 53-year-old Ume (梅) was certainly no adult.

By a sky dragon's standards, she was a mere infant who had barely hatched yesterday. Despite her young age, the flying eastern dragon was already enormous. Her brilliant black and blue scales sparkled like the stars in the night sky, and she was nearly half a kilometer long. It wasn't that large for a dragon, and truthfully she was still small compared to a fully grown Ryū.

Ume had flown straight into the celestial storm because she knew she wouldn't be followed.

She was desperate to run away.

Zetsubou (絶望) — her fiancé — was nearly ten times her age and twice her size. Ume's parents had essentially handed her over to him, which was absolutely not something the poor girl had been prepared for. She only wanted permission to leave the cave so she could explore the outside world, but her mother simply nodded and passed her to him. From now on, he would be her "guardian", and he would be responsible for taking care of her as her fiancé...

It was honestly a huge shock. Ume hadn't even left the nest that she had hatched in, yet her parents effectively pawned her off for marriage. Ume read hundreds of thousands of books during her fifty years stuck inside a cave, and based on her knowledge of various research materials written by humans, she knew the ultimate outcome of mating and sexual intercourse.

...Basically, they wanted her to lay eggs for that gloomy dragon of destruction...

......

What the fuck?!

Of course Ume couldn't accept that!

She wasn't even sexually mature.

It would be several hundred more years before Ume would grow old enough to pick her gender, and what if she decided to grow male parts during puberty??? Admittedly, Ume always knew that she wanted to be female ever since she was young, but would her parents still force her to wed Zetsubou if she decided to become male??

In either case, Ume immediately took off and fled into the wind.

('Where are you going, Ume?') Zetsubou's dreary voice appeared telepathically inside of her head.

He sounded genuinely confused.

"Anywhere without you!!" Ume snapped back as she tumbled through the celestial skies like a stray leaf blown in the wind.

('But you forgot to bring your lunch box.')

"I don't need it!!!"

With those words, the young rebellious sky dragon caught a transdimensional current and slipped into a random isekai world.

Ume disappeared without a trace.

Her fiancé didn't even get a chance to reply.

(...)

∎

ohko

Please don't have too high expectations for this story.

It's written for a roleplaying game (Adventurer's Guild - Sky Archipelago) on the ScribbleHub forums, so the plot will probably be rather unstructured and unplanned compared to a typical story. That said, if you would like to roleplay with us or write a story in our shared world, please check us out on the forums!