A Dragons Heart

I woke up to the sound of my alarm, and despite it only being 7 am, I was already feeling fed up. Nevertheless, I managed to pull myself out of bed and prepare myself for another school day.

After I changed my clothes, I walked out of my room and down the hall to the kitchen, where my parents were already awake and had prepared me breakfast as they always do.

I sat down and looked at the breakfast before me; my Mother always made breakfast, and she gave me a small portion since she never liked to give me too much food before I left for school.

After a while, I left the house to head to school. As I walked, I saw some brown-haired guy walking just ahead. It took me a moment to realise it was my friend James. Because I was wearing shoes that made a lot of noise, he heard me walking behind him and turned around. When he saw me, he immediately had a giant smile on his face, "Zander! Why didn't you say you were behind me sooner!"

I smiled, "Sorry, I didn't realise it was you."

"Oh, well, now we can walk together!"

"Sure..."

Even though I found him annoying sometimes, he was my best friend. He helped me forget about my hard time at school with our conversations. While we were walking to school, I could see storm clouds forming in the far distance, ‘I guess it’s probably going to rain later.’ After a while, we arrived at school and headed to our first class.

I never really paid attention during most of my classes. They were all too simple for me; I instantly understood everything the teachers tried to teach me, or I had already learned it in my own time.

Despite my higher-than-average intelligence, they kept me in regular classes, which I found dull and boring with how simple they were. Most of the time, I fell asleep during class, and because I always got perfect scores, my teachers let me get away with it.

Throughout the whole day, I was falling in and out of consciousness from boredom, or I let myself get lost in thought. During the last class of the day, I was completely caught up in my thoughts, so I was startled when I heard the bell ring, signalling the end of the class.

As I went to get up from my desk, James rushed over to me, "Hey, Zander, do you wanna walk back with me?"

I smiled at him as I threw my bag over my shoulder, "Of course. Don't I always walk back with you anyway?"

As we walked out of the school, I looked up and noticed the storm clouds I saw earlier were now over us and looked like they might start to pour down any minute. As we made our way down the street, James was talking to me about a game, but I was zoned out and didn't hear.

I was lost in my own thoughts until he looked at me with a delighted expression on his face, "That's why I think the sequel is going to be WAY better than the first! It's going to be so awesome when it comes out!"

I smiled nervously, "Yeah, it sounds great...! But you do remember that I don't play games, right? I prefer to read a book, honestly."

James looked slightly offended by what I said, "Come on! I try to get you into these things all the time, but you only ever care about books! And I only talk about the best games that are coming out, especially this one! You need to be more excited about this, so I won't stop until you admit you want to play it, too!"

"Alright, you win; I'll visit you at some point when the game's out, and we can play it together, okay? Happy now?"

He gave me a large smile, "Of course I'm happy now!"

As we continued to walk, James walked ahead of me while I was distracted by a message on my phone. I read the message, and it was from my Mother telling me they wouldn’t be home and to let myself in.

While I was distracted reading and replying to the message, I found myself losing my footing. When I looked down, I was falling into an open manhole. As I saw the ground rushing towards me, everything went black in an instant.