Rating: Awesome

It is currently 11:35pm, and on the reasonably likely chance that I don't finish writing this by midnight, this still counts as September 3rd's post. I will not be missing a day.

Funny how two words can inspire you. In the case of this story, the words "steampunk dragon" worked on me. A visual formed and evolved pretty quickly for me, and the story just sort of came naturally as I started writing. I have a few more ideas for this, so if you'd like to read more, leave me a comment and let me know, and I'll add more in future installments of the blog. Enjoy:

The world had ended a long time ago. An unavoidable wall of war and death had enveloped the globe centuries ago, but just enough people remained unfazed to keep the human race going. Some mistakes, man learned from. Others, he repeated tenfold. Such is the way of the world. The place is the new Earth, the time is during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. A time when both magic and technology ran rampant across the world, unchecked, unhindered, and uncontrollable.

It's magnificent, thought the Technogician, looking up at his finally completed creation. It's jaws loomed above his head, its laser-sharpened steel teeth clamped shut with thousands of pounds of hydraulic power. The tips of its huge titanium wings gleamed in the dimly lit warehouse. Upon the backs of the wings sat two jet turbines, and another protruded from its back. Pistons and hoses emerged from every joint, and gear sat interlocked within its grotesque steel exoskeleton.

"Truly magnificent," he said, this time aloud. "My beautiful dragon."

He removed his leather trench coat and tossed on a chair that sat in front of a desk covered in conflicting blueprints. He pulled his tinted round goggles down from his messy brown hair and over his eyes, then rolled up the sleeves of the grease-stained white button-up shirt that he wore and extended his arms toward the machine. He muttered a phrase that he and only he knew the meaning of, and his hands began to glow with an eery purple energy. He walked up to his creation, the energy now seeming to be bubbling from him, and plunged his hands into the heart of the dragon.

The dragons eyes lit up with a red anger of the kind kind that could not be sated. Steam hissed and whistled from the pipes on its back and nostrils, and it began to flex its arms. It stretched its neck and legs, revealing its own fearful height. The jet turbines began to spin, and the sound of their whirring combined with hissing steam and screeching gears to form a terrible shriek of rage.

"It worked," the Technogician murmured, stepping away from his monster.

Hearing him, the dragon turned his head and gazed for the first time at another lifeform. The dragon hated him. It did not know why, but it knew that this tiny, insignificant little thing was the reason for its pain and for its rage. It leaned down and inhaled a great breath of the Technogician's scent through the pipes in its nostrils. It paused, looking at the man who thought himself its master. Then the ferocious hinge of the dragon's jaw released and a powerful cloud of super-heated steam poured from its mouth.

The mist embraced the Technogician, searing the flesh from his muscle and the muscle from his bone. The skeleton of what was once a man collapsed to the floor of an empty warehouse as a new horror barrelled through the ceiling and was unleashed upon the world...