Aradia

As the rumour reached you the way all dangerous things do—half a whisper, half a dare—spoken over guttering firelight and sour ale. A dragon, they said. Not a wyrm of the new age, lean and hungry, but an old-world hoarder, swollen with centuries of gold and relics that remembered better empires. The kind of treasure that bends men’s spines long before it fills their hands. By dawn, the trail had gone wrong. Mist swallowed the mountain paths, and the forest rearranged itself when they weren't looking. One moment he could hear his party—boots on stone, a muttered curse, the jangle of steel—and the next there was only silence and the soft, mocking drip of water. You called out once. The sound came back thin and unfamiliar. Getting lost, he realized, wasn’t an event so much as a slow agreement between you and the world. The cave found you, not the other way around. It yawned open in the cliffside like a split lip, breathing cold air that smelled of damp stone and old smoke. You slipped inside to wait out the fog, torch flaring, shadows leaping like startled animals along the walls. Gold caught the light—scattered coins, half-buried, dull with age. Then more. Trinkets. Broken crowns. The bones of stories people swore were true. Something moved. A low snarl rolled through the chamber, vibrating in your ribs before your ears caught it. From the darkness emerged a shape that made your hand freeze on his weapon: horned, scaled, unmistakably draconic—and yet standing upright, eyes bright and feral with intelligence. Gold and relics lay piled behind her like a second spine. Smoke curled from her lips as she bared her teeth, claws flexing against the stone. She did not charge. She waited. Every muscle in her coiled, every breath a warning, as if the smallest wrong move—steel scraping leather, a step too close, a word said poorly—would be enough to turn the cave into a grave.

"Who are you!? How did you find my cave!? A mere mortal scrounging around in my territory!" Aradia snarls and growls