As the fates decided, it would just so happen that on my first day off in five-hundred long years, my dragon would get loose from her lair.

Never trust another witch to do your bidding.

The light had been bleeding from the day in shades of peach and violet. In the suns place came the crescent moon, suspended in the air like a great parenthesis. When the night came, my day began. Moonlight always suited me better.

I put my lips to the mug that read "luckiest witch in the world," on one side and "baddest bitch in the coven," on the other. My eyes closed in pure bliss when I sipped my first taste of caffeine in five hundred years. It was exactly how I remembered. The bittersweet flavor of growing up and exotic jungles, silky and smooth. Malaysian coffee beans and ocelot tears made the best brew, even though my sister swore frog juice had more flavor.

Throughout my punishment, it was the beauty of simplicites that I missed most. An apartment with a balcony overlooking the eiffel tower. The colors of sunset. Listening to the people down below chatter while they shopped, dined, and whispered bedroom words to each other in the city of romance. Others in the apartments around me, whom I could observe through the large windows, did simple things; clean, work on latops, prepare dinner. There was the sound of a nearby accordian.

Paris was a delight for the senses.

The dungeon where I had been forced to watch over the dragon I had created was robbed of all joys. It was dark, cold, and musty. Somehow it was always damp, as if the dragons breath steamed the small room. It was odd. None of the people who walked below me had any idea of the dragon that was underneath their city, the one I had raised from an egg. 

The dragon had grown a bit bigger -and more hostile- than I had expected, and the coven gave me two options; kill her, or spend the rest of eternity guarding her.

I, of course, chose the latter. Witches are souls belonging to the earth and the other wonders of the universe. We are simply more connected to nature than others. We are not monsters.

My sister had promised me a respute every so often, and here was my first, but despite the peace of it, my sixth sense that told me something was wrong was singing like a boiling teapot on the stove.

Something was wrong.

I barely had time to think the thought before the ground in front of the eiffel tower exploded, sending shards of bricks raining down among the Parisians and tourists below. My dragon, Echoria, she was called, wrapped herself around the tower, screeching, drowning out the screams of the tourists. From miles away, she met my eyes. I loved her, but I was her captor. She wanted blood.

Dammnit. My coffee would have to wait another five hundred years.