Preface

*"The official record exists to protect the truth from those unqualified to understand it."* — Authority Records Management Directive, 89 ANW

**ARCHIVE FRAGMENT RC2-0187**

**Classification: Redacted**

**Date: 216 Years Post-Fall**

 

The official record states that the Fall began at 0847 hours on October 12th. Missiles launched. Cities burned. Civilization ended in fire and ash.

 

The official record is incomplete.

 

What the Authority chooses not to document:

 

At 0849 hours, seismic monitors across four continents registered identical anomalies. Not earthquakes. Not nuclear detonations. Something waking up.

 

At 0850 hours, the first dragon tore through the ruins of what used to be Denver.

 

The bombs didn't create the dragons. The dragons were already there, sleeping beneath the places humans built their cities, their monuments, their weapons. The radiation didn't birth them. It called to them. Sang them awake like a bell ringing through bedrock.

 

By nightfall, twelve dragons had been confirmed. By the end of the first week, thirty-seven. Current count: sixty-two, though the number shifts. They die. They disappear. New ones surface from places we thought we'd mapped.

 

The Authority will tell you the dragons are animals. Apex predators. Dangerous but manageable with the right firepower and strategy.

 

The Authority will tell you magic is a radiation-induced mutation. A contamination vector. A disease to be contained.

 

The Authority will tell you the Regional Commands exist to protect humanity's remnants from external threats.

 

The truth has teeth.

 

Magic existed before the Fall. Hidden. Whispered about. Denied by every government that ever put pen to paper. The bombs didn't create it any more than they created the dragons. They simply tore open the world enough that magic bled through the cracks.

 

And the Authority? They don't protect us from the dragons.

 

They protect their power. Their control. Their monopoly on violence.

 

They hunt magic users because magic is the one thing they can't regulate, can't tax, can't conscript. Because a woman who can call fire with her bare hands doesn't need their permission to survive. Because people who remember the old ways, the wild ways, are harder to govern.

 

They call it public safety. Quarantine protocols. Necessary measures.

 

They build their holding facilities in places the maps don't show. They staff them with soldiers who've learned not to ask questions. They tell us it's temporary. Rehabilitation. That the magic users will be integrated back into society once they're "stabilized."

 

No one ever comes back.

 

The dragons kill hundreds every year. Burn settlements. Destroy supply lines. The Authority's answer is more soldiers, more guns, more fortified walls.

 

But the walls aren't keeping the dragons out.

 

They're keeping us in.

 

This fragment will be destroyed. The officer who wrote it will disappear into the records as a casualty of dragon activity. The truth will be buried under another layer of official doctrine and sanitized history.

 

But the truth doesn't need records to survive.

 

It lives in the scars on the land. In the stories told in the Barrens settlements the Authority pretends don't exist. In every magic user who learns to hide what they are because discovery means a cage or a bullet.

 

The Fall didn't end 216 years ago.

 

It's still happening.

 

And the dragons?

 

They're watching.

 

*Fragment ends. Source unknown. Filed under RC2 anomalous documents. Recommended action: incineration.*