The First Man
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In a cave high above the kingdoms of man, the last dragon awaits a boy’s awakening. Smells surround her: sulfur, humid tears, gas from a horse flank decomposing in her belly. She searches the sky beyond the ledge, wishing to see the twinkling departed souls of her kind, but of course it is daylight and the sun masks even the brightest dragon flame. Men see no more than this, she thinks sadly. Their world is the sun and moon and trampled earth, a place to conquer. Breath rumbles down her throat to return as smoke and a rain of fine ash.
Where am I? The voice is weak and so very young. Her throat clenches. Overlapping scales rasp the sword jammed between them at the base of her neck. She feels pain. He did this to himself, she thinks.
Why am I here? Why is it dark?
“You are inside my mind,” she says. “Inside me.” She swings her head around and focuses on the remains. The boy’s hair, once long and golden, is a forest of dark stubble against crisped black flesh. Fluids glisten. Teeth show a defiant smile through shredded lips. Near an outstretched arm, embers peek from the charred-wood crevices of a torch. His jerkin is mostly ash.
That’s not me! It feels as if the sword has leaped forward and pierced her heart. More smells: burning flesh, fresh dung, a pool of urine. She never liked to kill.
You want to confuse me so I can’t push the sword. You want me to think--
“Go,” she whispers, and some hidden part of her mind closes down. He will be terrified, alone, but she cannot bear more. If she were to squeeze harder, the boy would pop out of her like the bones of a digested meal. But she cannot do that. He would do it easily enough had their roles been reversed, but he is man, and men are not dragons. They do not see beyond themselves.
She closes her eyes and imagines the night sky. Where will her flame fit into that tapestry?
#
One Day
She crawls onto the broad shelf opening of her cave, a sheer precipice that falls away some thousand meters. At one edge, water trickles over, forming a gentle spray that evaporates before it ever hits the ground. When she first inhabited the cave, this stream was more significant. The waterfall was real and she sometimes watched rainbows fringe its sparkling spray.
Now, to look down is to see man’s domain, the sprawl of his houses and agriculture stretching nearly to the base of her mountain. She seldom looks down.
You’re dead, beast! the boy screams.
She watches birds feed their young in flat nests tucked into rocks beside the cavern. The young ones seem so scruffy, their eyes and beaks too large for tiny heads. Their cries are far louder than would seem possible. The parents do not seem to mind.
She eases open the connection. --no ordinary sword but a heart-seeker, forged of two metals to make it both strong and resilient, crafted with barbs to prevent it being pulled out. Each time you bump it, every time you flex muscles, it will dig deeper--
Surely the tirade will end sometime. Far below, a line of men parades a winding dirt road through fields of brown and black. Sporadic armor blinks in the morning sunlight. Does their warfare never end? Do they never give up their anger? Smoke lifts from a hundred smoldering huts, their latest petty conquest. In her mind, each hut becomes the carcass of a dragon.
And you’ll die. She feels a subtle shifting.
“It is unfortunate,” she says, “that you shall die with me.” One so young should not have to die.
I’m not afraid to die, the boy says. I’m not a coward, just like my father wasn’t. I don’t care what Lord Samler says. He was not a traitor or a coward. He would never have deserted in battle. The boy’s presence refocuses. Death is nothing to a brave man.
“Light is nothing to the blind,” she says. “But it is everything to those who see.”
The boy’s movements slow, then cease. He does not speak. Perhaps she has been cruel. Another guilt to pile upon the pyre that was once her heart.
#
One Week
Hunger growls through the dragon’s belly and reverberates through her hollow bones. Today, she will feed. With a massive shove from her haunches, she jumps into the sky. Her wound screams an agony so great she plummets a hundred meters before coming to her senses. It is all she can do to catch an updraft and break her fall. The pain recedes to a constant throb. She has tried pulling the thing out, but her short arms are clumsy and the blade wedged too tightly.
What are you doing? the boy says.
“I must hunt.”
Warmth flows from the back of her brain to the front.
Why bother? You’ll be dead soon and everyone will know that I have slain you.
The dragon focuses on a small stone spire to the east. Blue and green banners wave gaily above the highest tower.
That’s where I live. A small shudder. Lived. My father was captain of the guard until Lord Samler imprisoned him. The grief intensifies beyond bearing.
She alters course for the battered castle and lets herself sink lower. The moat is clotted with green-blue scum and the drawbridge hangs crooked. Between the moat and the pock-marked wall, a group of boys play with wooden swords, and several young girls watch.
If you have the power to trap me, you must have the power to release me.
She feels his longing and wishes that she’d been awake when he came to slay her—she might have been able to scare him away. Instead, he sneaked up while she slept, rammed the blade into her chest, and she’d breathed by reflex.
I am a Sharpstone. Alvin Sharpstone. My family have been warriors for a dozen generations. We are not meant to be prisoners, not to dragons…nor to men.
“Names are man-things,” the dragon says. “I shall never use them.”
The boy’s presence wavers. She has hurt him.
She catches sight of a dust cloud and sets course to follow. At the fringes, men on horseback raise whips. Whistles pierce the air like distant birdcalls.
She feels the boy watching through her eyes, breathing inside her mind.
The dust thins, revealing a solid stream of horseflesh, brown and red and black and white, flowing toward a gap in the canyon wall. Men often stampede wild horses into traps when they’ve killed too many of their own at war. No matter that many more will die in the stampede. There will be plenty remaining. It is a short-sighted outlook that annoys the dragon. She scans the back of the stampede.
A gray mare has fallen. Her whinnies echo and the dragon flinches. The mare’s leg is shattered. The men on horseback do not bother with her.
The dragon lands. With a quick thrust, she severs arteries in the mare’s neck and tears the head apart from the body. She settles back to feed.
Shocked dismay emanates from the boy. You’re nothing but a carrion crow.
“I could land in one of your cities,” she says. “I could burn the buildings and kill great numbers of your people. I could feast on the tender meat of your women and children.”
That’s not--
“But would this quench my hunger any better than a horse who goes willingly? Would it make my belly more full?”
No, but--
“But what? I have fed and I have ended misery. Not every act of life need be a contest.”
#
One Month
The dragon’s slumber is disrupted by a rustling far down in the belly of the mountain. Her eyes open onto bright light. The boy in her head is already awake.
What is that sound?
“Bats,” she says.
Somebody is coming to kill you. And then I’ll be free.
“Free to do what? Do you know what exists after this life for you? Dragons take flight beyond the world but where would you go?” His death would likely be as black and blank as his perception of the night sky.
Mother used to tell me that I would go to heaven to be with Father. My father was a great warrior and he loved me. You wouldn’t know about love.
She remembers her mother stroking her scales, regurgitating meat, teaching her the things she would need to know in the world. Except man. Man had barely organized his tribes, and her mother could not have known what waited.
A scuffling echo sounds and the dragon tenses. She stares at the narrow opening at the corner of her cavern, where two large stones lean together to form a triangle.
You’re about to die. The boy laughs coldly.
“‘s me, lord dragon,” a reedy voice calls. Birds take flight in a sudden rush.
“Enter, Gred,” the dragon says.
The man who comes into the cavern is nearly bald. He squints constantly and his mouth is a thin, pink line between scraggly gray whiskers. His clothes are finely tailored, but soiled and torn.
What is this?
“I have come to tidy up,” Gred says. A threadbare bag appears in either hand. His beady eyes settle on her chest and she shifts away from him. He lays open the bags and extracts sheer kerchiefs.
She flicks loose scales from her forearm and flank with one claw. Their iridescence sends flashes of light spinning across the stone ceiling and the craggy cavern walls. Gred watches greedily.
He’s one of Samler’s henchmen. How can you let him have the run of your den?
Gred scurries around, grabbing up a dozen scales, shrouding each in a separate cloth. He nods at the sword hilt. “I might be able to help you, Lord dragon.”
A taste worse than old soot fills her mouth. She doesn’t trust his offer, not only because he is man, but because he is Gred. The only reason he comes here is for his own profit. Her sudden death would profit him greatly.
“You might also die,” she says, belching smoke.
“Yes, lord dragon.” Gred slings the bundled scales over one shoulder and hurries away. He trips and goes sprawling into the outer corridor. Curses fill the air and the dragon laughs softly. She feels the boy laughing too and, for just a moment, loneliness lifts from her like rainfall evaporating in a shaft of sunlight.
#
One Year
Dragon? The boy’s voice increases in volume. Dragon.
She opens one eye.
Someone approaches. I heard the bats.
“I am weary,” the dragon says. Her chest aches all the time now. She can barely see the shaft of the sword and sometimes there is blood in her saliva. “It must be Gred.” She closes her eye.
No, the boy persists. Gred comes always in the morning. It’s night now. Look at the sky.
And she does gaze through the maw of the cavern, not because the boy has asked but because there are memories there. She recalls a springtime when every dragon within calling joined her for a night flight. In her mind she soars higher than ever, so high the lack of oxygen brings giddiness and her fire-breath won’t stay ignited beyond her lips. Dragon-flame lights the dark skies below her, thousands of fiery emissions, too many to count.
Someone is coming to kill you.
She’d rather sleep than be angry. She grunts and lays her head upon the floor. Moonlight touches the shelf where it extends beyond the cavern opening, but the moon is too high to see and the rest of the sky is a uniform black. Too tired to impose her own will, she sees the night through the boy’s empty perspective.
“Why does man not see our flame?” she asks. Perhaps--doubt trickles through her deepest thoughts--because it is not really there.
Footsteps echo. Stones roll, metal clanks, a sword is unsheathed. Some man curses under his breath and the dragon closes her eyes. The darkness behind her eyes is no different from the sky.
You’ve got to wake up, the boy says. They’ll kill us both. She notices his slight emphasis on “both” and forces her eyes to open. Leave it to the boy to bring duty into the equation. Men are tireless survivors.
A deep breath to get things started. Liquid from the organ beside her liver drips into her air stream and vaporizes. Bone chips and powder from her crop join the mix and she works the bellows that are her lungs. Flame erupts from her mouth and nostrils, a billowing heat that fans her paws and brings a warm orange glow through her eyelids. In this moment she imagines her freedom from responsibility, her domination of world and man.
Beyond the archway where shreds of moss flicker, someone says, “Crap. My leggings are aflame.” There is a pounding, the noise of feet and armor shifting.
Why aren’t they running? the boy says.
“I shall give them another chance.” She is fully awake now. Rising to the task at hand. Of course, she will not let these men kill her. Her eyes adjust to darkness. They must have their lanterns covered.
More mumbling. A rapid shuffling sound. A wooden keg bounces off one of the tilted rocks, hits the floor with a thwack and falls upon its side, leaking powder. She hears a snicker.
The dragon breathes in. Liquid drips.
Wait! Her neck swivels without her will, then against her will. What is happening? she thinks frantically.
Blackpowder. The boy seems frightened. It will explode if you breathe now.
He has taken control. Her neck stretches to its limit. Her jaws open. Her teeth clamp around the wooden barrel and powder leeches into her saliva, a very bitter taste.
Her body twists and flings the keg through the cliff-opening. Still dribbling powder, it reaches the apex of its arch and begins to fall.
The boy releases her and she breathes a concentrated flame. An explosion more grand than anything she has ever heard fills the sky. Her earflaps clamp tight and, still, the noise invades her with the force of a tidal wave. Heat buffets her body. The sky is alive with streaking lights. Like dragons; the sky is filled with dragons.
“I must go to my kind,” she says, longing to be rid of the pain and empty tribulations of life.
Something shifts inside her. They’re beautiful, the boy whispers.
Is it possible he has experienced her vision? She feels a sudden fondness that dulls the ache in her chest.
“It’s still alive,” a man says, incredulity saturating his voice. At the entryway, a mustached face appears, wrinkled with frown.
“I told you this wouldn’t work,” another voice says. The face pulls away and echoing footsteps recede.
#Five Years So, dragons have kingdoms too? The voice has deepened and focused. Right now it is an itch inside her brain that she wishes she could summon the strength to expel. More and more often his voice is all that brings her back from unfocused dreaming.
Like men, he says. Kingdoms just like men.
He is a man now, she reminds herself. But she cannot bring herself to think of him as other than a boy.
“Not kingdoms,” she says. “Not like men. Nothing like men.” The world comes into clear focus. It is morning and the sky beyond her cavern is a radiant blue.
What would you call it then?
“Territories. Each dragon occupies territory by mutual consent. An area large enough to sustain but small enough to maximize population without stressing resources.” It seems to her they have already had this conversation.
And how did you keep from overfilling your territory? When a kingdom gets too many people, it must expand.
“War,” you mean. The dragon takes a deep breath. A lancing pain accompanies this, but she is able to ignore it. Pain has succumbed to a constant drowsiness. And hunger. She can no longer fly to obtain food.
But if dragons live forever--
“When we choose to go, or one of our kind is taken, we allow a fertile egg to develop.” It was man that ruined the balance, man that killed indiscriminately, taking young—especially the young—until it seemed impossible, even sadistic, to try to maintain their population.
“Don’t you go choosing to die on me,” the boy says. “I do not choose to die.”
You chose to die the instant you pushed that sword into me, the dragon thinks. She is grumpy this morning but manages to hold the thought below vocalization threshold.
A scraping noise sounds between the slanted stones and the boy’s alertness flashes forward like light. She has heard no bats, but it is difficult to hear anything of late. Sometimes she is only able to focus on the ebb and flow of blood past her eardrums.
“‘s me, lord dragon,” Gred says. He enters with a flourish, opens his carrybag and lays out silken cloths. “Come to tidy your den.”
The dragon grunts a puff of smoke. She feels one eye open, but cannot bring herself to focus. The smudge that must be Gred moves nearer to claim shed scales.
You should be rid of him, the boy says.
The dragon opens her other eye and stares at the bone-thin man wearing once colorful raiment dulled by age and wear. Gred is convenient to her. His greed causes him to divert most men who seek her lair.
He stumbles against the sword and an intense agony shoots down her spine.
No! Her neck swings up and around and Gred goes flying. He lands beyond his silk kerchiefs and skids into the rock wall.
He staggers to his feet. “My apologies, Lord Dragon.” His eyes belie that notion. He knows it is only a matter of time before he will reap his weight in scales. She hopes that he will not take her head for his trophy room as men are wont to do.
“Go!” The boy says with her voice.
Gred scurries, forgetting even his precious cargo.
I don’t trust him, the boy says. You are in danger.
“Maybe it is for the best.” Her quivering neck gives out and her head thumps down, bringing lights to the darkness behind her eyes. What if those lights are not the souls of her kind? Where will she go then? Will that final darkness be comforting like the darkness of sleep? She longs to know.
#
Gred returns with a man dressed like nobility, a flowing red robe and golden sash. His beard is immaculately trimmed and his expression denotes exhilaration. It is night and the sky is clear. Gred holds a device that isn’t a torch, but some sort of box bearing a steady flame. The brass bulge at its base reminds the dragon of a full belly, something she has not felt for a considerable time.
Lord Samler, the boy growls. The pretender to the throne who killed my father.
“You see?” Gred says.
“Yes, yes.” Lord Samler says. He halts only long enough to survey the cavern.
“See how its ribs protrude, how the scales gape outward?”
Breathe, the boy says. If ever you could summon extra strength, do it now. He has come to finish you.
She begins the process, though it is difficult. A deep breath to get things started. Liquid fuel vaporizes and she works her lungs. But she cannot bring herself to exhale. Something about this Lord says that he will not be deterred by showy flame and she does not have the strength, nor the will, to kill him.
“At last we meet,” Lord Samler says. “For years I have waited for this moment.”
The dragon lets her flaming belch die.
Breathe! The boy tries to initiate the process, but it is too complex a thing for that. All that he manages is a tiny burst of soot.
Lord Samler laughs. He gazes upon the cloth bundles set near the cavern wall, the scales Gred left behind.
“You have been quite the cottage industry,” he says. “I’ve cloaked more men in armor by barter of your scales than you might imagine.”
The dragon thinks of sunlight glinting from armor and her thoughts drift to twinkling lights. Soon, she thinks. But that is not fair to the boy.
Lord Samler draws a sword. “All good things must end. There comes a time for greater commerce.”
The sword slides from its sheath, resplendent with reflected light.
“Witness Gred.” He raises the sword blade to eye level and sights the base of the dragon’s throat along its edge. “I, Lord Samler, am about to single-handedly slay an adult dragon.”
Breathe! the boy pleads. Reason with him. Do something! You’re the last of the dragons. The last. If he kills you…
That staggers her. She breathes deep, feels the tinder inside her growing warmer. It will not be enough, but at least she can try.
Yes, the boy says. Kill him before he kills you.
The words are like cold water and she clenches her throat in mid-breath. The sword pierces her and moves unerringly toward her heart. The pains of old and new wounds intermingle.
“I will not kill,” she says. “Not again.”
It’s the only way, the boy says.
There may be another, she thinks. The boy has learned to live without a body. Perhaps he can survive without her. She forces his consciousness inward, herding it into a small place within her brain. Her eyes focus on Lord Samler, now leaning into the blade. A last violent shove and it pierces her heart, unleashing yet another flood of pain and light.
“You must leave me,” she says, the ache of those words rivaling anything the swords can manage.
No! Let me help you.
“You have the strength to live without me.” He struggles against her, but she will not let go. What she lacks in stamina she makes up in focus. This is his only chance. Like a bird forcing its young out of the nest, she presses insistently against his will.
“Bear witness Gred. Spread this tale far and wide. I, Samler the dragon-slayer, shall be king. No one will doubt my courage after this. And you shall have a comfortable place at court.”
Her eyelids slide shut. The sword twists, a niggling reminder that death is not pleasant. She squeezes harder and the boy’s presence seems to shoot forth like a burst of clean blue flame.
“Gah!” Lord Samler says as though strangling on his tongue. “Gred!”
The dragon’s heart beats more rapidly. Dizziness twists her senses.
“Lord?”
“Gred, I’m…What?” Silence falls and the dragon’s heart rate starts a steady decline.
“Gred,” Lord Samler says more forcefully. There is a subtle difference to the voice that rouses the dragon. She forces one eyelid open.
“Are you all right, Lord?” Gred seems poised between approaching and fleeing.
“Take your trinkets and spread word of what you have seen.”
“Don’t you want me to help with the head?”
“I will claim my own trophy!”
Gred slinks away.
Lord Samler sinks to a kneeling position and rubs his reddened face. Sweat stands out on his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” he says again and again. He reaches for the blade.
“Leave it,” she says.
“But I--”
“The world belongs to man. I have been a dreaming dragon, imagining a journey into the sky, nothing more. Everything is darkness.”
He looks away. When he turns back, there is grim determination in his countenance. He lifts her jaw in looped arms and struggles to push her head toward the cavern opening. The sky.
“They are real,” he says quietly. “The dragons are real. I see them.” He grunts with effort. “And Samler shall be King. I will make sure of it.” She feels the quivering strain of his arms and back. Her head shifts, angling closer to the cavern opening.
“I shall decree that all men see them. And when they have learned to see the lights, I shall decree that they name them—for it is man’s way of connecting to things, to give them a name.”
The dragon’s heart thuds; she feels heaviness in her chest and belly.
“I shall further decree that we someday go there. Into the sky, beyond the moon. And once there, that we prostrate ourselves and beg forgiveness. Not only for what we have done to your kind, but for what greed and lust have done to our own.”
He slaps her face repeatedly until her attention returns.
“Look!” he says, removing the ornate robe and pants and shirt. “The sky awaits. I’ll build a bonfire to light your way.” He drapes clothing over her and lights it with his lamp. “There will be no trophies this night.” Searing heat erupts across her haunch and tail. Tears glisten in his eyes.
The world is flame, the sky alive with flame.
“To my kind,” the boy says, “I’ll be known as Samler, Dragon-slayer. To you, I remain Alvin Sharpstone.”
Smells surround her: Death and life, the damp-sweet smell of charring bone. A memory of screaming birds echoes and she takes wing amid soot and sparks.
“Alvin Sharpstone,” she whispers. Heated air buffets her upward; the vacuum of the sky draws her upward. “I shall remember.”
A glowing ember marks the cave mouth that was her home. Flame dying or being born? she wonders. Heart swelling with new hope, she sets course for that vast tapestry of light beyond the moon.
Where am I? The voice is weak and so very young. Her throat clenches. Overlapping scales rasp the sword jammed between them at the base of her neck. She feels pain. He did this to himself, she thinks.
Why am I here? Why is it dark?
“You are inside my mind,” she says. “Inside me.” She swings her head around and focuses on the remains. The boy’s hair, once long and golden, is a forest of dark stubble against crisped black flesh. Fluids glisten. Teeth show a defiant smile through shredded lips. Near an outstretched arm, embers peek from the charred-wood crevices of a torch. His jerkin is mostly ash.
That’s not me! It feels as if the sword has leaped forward and pierced her heart. More smells: burning flesh, fresh dung, a pool of urine. She never liked to kill.
You want to confuse me so I can’t push the sword. You want me to think--
“Go,” she whispers, and some hidden part of her mind closes down. He will be terrified, alone, but she cannot bear more. If she were to squeeze harder, the boy would pop out of her like the bones of a digested meal. But she cannot do that. He would do it easily enough had their roles been reversed, but he is man, and men are not dragons. They do not see beyond themselves.
She closes her eyes and imagines the night sky. Where will her flame fit into that tapestry?
#
One Day
She crawls onto the broad shelf opening of her cave, a sheer precipice that falls away some thousand meters. At one edge, water trickles over, forming a gentle spray that evaporates before it ever hits the ground. When she first inhabited the cave, this stream was more significant. The waterfall was real and she sometimes watched rainbows fringe its sparkling spray.
Now, to look down is to see man’s domain, the sprawl of his houses and agriculture stretching nearly to the base of her mountain. She seldom looks down.
You’re dead, beast! the boy screams.
She watches birds feed their young in flat nests tucked into rocks beside the cavern. The young ones seem so scruffy, their eyes and beaks too large for tiny heads. Their cries are far louder than would seem possible. The parents do not seem to mind.
She eases open the connection. --no ordinary sword but a heart-seeker, forged of two metals to make it both strong and resilient, crafted with barbs to prevent it being pulled out. Each time you bump it, every time you flex muscles, it will dig deeper--
Surely the tirade will end sometime. Far below, a line of men parades a winding dirt road through fields of brown and black. Sporadic armor blinks in the morning sunlight. Does their warfare never end? Do they never give up their anger? Smoke lifts from a hundred smoldering huts, their latest petty conquest. In her mind, each hut becomes the carcass of a dragon.
And you’ll die. She feels a subtle shifting.
“It is unfortunate,” she says, “that you shall die with me.” One so young should not have to die.
I’m not afraid to die, the boy says. I’m not a coward, just like my father wasn’t. I don’t care what Lord Samler says. He was not a traitor or a coward. He would never have deserted in battle. The boy’s presence refocuses. Death is nothing to a brave man.
“Light is nothing to the blind,” she says. “But it is everything to those who see.”
The boy’s movements slow, then cease. He does not speak. Perhaps she has been cruel. Another guilt to pile upon the pyre that was once her heart.
#
One Week
Hunger growls through the dragon’s belly and reverberates through her hollow bones. Today, she will feed. With a massive shove from her haunches, she jumps into the sky. Her wound screams an agony so great she plummets a hundred meters before coming to her senses. It is all she can do to catch an updraft and break her fall. The pain recedes to a constant throb. She has tried pulling the thing out, but her short arms are clumsy and the blade wedged too tightly.
What are you doing? the boy says.
“I must hunt.”
Warmth flows from the back of her brain to the front.
Why bother? You’ll be dead soon and everyone will know that I have slain you.
The dragon focuses on a small stone spire to the east. Blue and green banners wave gaily above the highest tower.
That’s where I live. A small shudder. Lived. My father was captain of the guard until Lord Samler imprisoned him. The grief intensifies beyond bearing.
She alters course for the battered castle and lets herself sink lower. The moat is clotted with green-blue scum and the drawbridge hangs crooked. Between the moat and the pock-marked wall, a group of boys play with wooden swords, and several young girls watch.
If you have the power to trap me, you must have the power to release me.
She feels his longing and wishes that she’d been awake when he came to slay her—she might have been able to scare him away. Instead, he sneaked up while she slept, rammed the blade into her chest, and she’d breathed by reflex.
I am a Sharpstone. Alvin Sharpstone. My family have been warriors for a dozen generations. We are not meant to be prisoners, not to dragons…nor to men.
“Names are man-things,” the dragon says. “I shall never use them.”
The boy’s presence wavers. She has hurt him.
She catches sight of a dust cloud and sets course to follow. At the fringes, men on horseback raise whips. Whistles pierce the air like distant birdcalls.
She feels the boy watching through her eyes, breathing inside her mind.
The dust thins, revealing a solid stream of horseflesh, brown and red and black and white, flowing toward a gap in the canyon wall. Men often stampede wild horses into traps when they’ve killed too many of their own at war. No matter that many more will die in the stampede. There will be plenty remaining. It is a short-sighted outlook that annoys the dragon. She scans the back of the stampede.
A gray mare has fallen. Her whinnies echo and the dragon flinches. The mare’s leg is shattered. The men on horseback do not bother with her.
The dragon lands. With a quick thrust, she severs arteries in the mare’s neck and tears the head apart from the body. She settles back to feed.
Shocked dismay emanates from the boy. You’re nothing but a carrion crow.
“I could land in one of your cities,” she says. “I could burn the buildings and kill great numbers of your people. I could feast on the tender meat of your women and children.”
That’s not--
“But would this quench my hunger any better than a horse who goes willingly? Would it make my belly more full?”
No, but--
“But what? I have fed and I have ended misery. Not every act of life need be a contest.”
#
One Month
The dragon’s slumber is disrupted by a rustling far down in the belly of the mountain. Her eyes open onto bright light. The boy in her head is already awake.
What is that sound?
“Bats,” she says.
Somebody is coming to kill you. And then I’ll be free.
“Free to do what? Do you know what exists after this life for you? Dragons take flight beyond the world but where would you go?” His death would likely be as black and blank as his perception of the night sky.
Mother used to tell me that I would go to heaven to be with Father. My father was a great warrior and he loved me. You wouldn’t know about love.
She remembers her mother stroking her scales, regurgitating meat, teaching her the things she would need to know in the world. Except man. Man had barely organized his tribes, and her mother could not have known what waited.
A scuffling echo sounds and the dragon tenses. She stares at the narrow opening at the corner of her cavern, where two large stones lean together to form a triangle.
You’re about to die. The boy laughs coldly.
“‘s me, lord dragon,” a reedy voice calls. Birds take flight in a sudden rush.
“Enter, Gred,” the dragon says.
The man who comes into the cavern is nearly bald. He squints constantly and his mouth is a thin, pink line between scraggly gray whiskers. His clothes are finely tailored, but soiled and torn.
What is this?
“I have come to tidy up,” Gred says. A threadbare bag appears in either hand. His beady eyes settle on her chest and she shifts away from him. He lays open the bags and extracts sheer kerchiefs.
She flicks loose scales from her forearm and flank with one claw. Their iridescence sends flashes of light spinning across the stone ceiling and the craggy cavern walls. Gred watches greedily.
He’s one of Samler’s henchmen. How can you let him have the run of your den?
Gred scurries around, grabbing up a dozen scales, shrouding each in a separate cloth. He nods at the sword hilt. “I might be able to help you, Lord dragon.”
A taste worse than old soot fills her mouth. She doesn’t trust his offer, not only because he is man, but because he is Gred. The only reason he comes here is for his own profit. Her sudden death would profit him greatly.
“You might also die,” she says, belching smoke.
“Yes, lord dragon.” Gred slings the bundled scales over one shoulder and hurries away. He trips and goes sprawling into the outer corridor. Curses fill the air and the dragon laughs softly. She feels the boy laughing too and, for just a moment, loneliness lifts from her like rainfall evaporating in a shaft of sunlight.
#
One Year
Dragon? The boy’s voice increases in volume. Dragon.
She opens one eye.
Someone approaches. I heard the bats.
“I am weary,” the dragon says. Her chest aches all the time now. She can barely see the shaft of the sword and sometimes there is blood in her saliva. “It must be Gred.” She closes her eye.
No, the boy persists. Gred comes always in the morning. It’s night now. Look at the sky.
And she does gaze through the maw of the cavern, not because the boy has asked but because there are memories there. She recalls a springtime when every dragon within calling joined her for a night flight. In her mind she soars higher than ever, so high the lack of oxygen brings giddiness and her fire-breath won’t stay ignited beyond her lips. Dragon-flame lights the dark skies below her, thousands of fiery emissions, too many to count.
Someone is coming to kill you.
She’d rather sleep than be angry. She grunts and lays her head upon the floor. Moonlight touches the shelf where it extends beyond the cavern opening, but the moon is too high to see and the rest of the sky is a uniform black. Too tired to impose her own will, she sees the night through the boy’s empty perspective.
“Why does man not see our flame?” she asks. Perhaps--doubt trickles through her deepest thoughts--because it is not really there.
Footsteps echo. Stones roll, metal clanks, a sword is unsheathed. Some man curses under his breath and the dragon closes her eyes. The darkness behind her eyes is no different from the sky.
You’ve got to wake up, the boy says. They’ll kill us both. She notices his slight emphasis on “both” and forces her eyes to open. Leave it to the boy to bring duty into the equation. Men are tireless survivors.
A deep breath to get things started. Liquid from the organ beside her liver drips into her air stream and vaporizes. Bone chips and powder from her crop join the mix and she works the bellows that are her lungs. Flame erupts from her mouth and nostrils, a billowing heat that fans her paws and brings a warm orange glow through her eyelids. In this moment she imagines her freedom from responsibility, her domination of world and man.
Beyond the archway where shreds of moss flicker, someone says, “Crap. My leggings are aflame.” There is a pounding, the noise of feet and armor shifting.
Why aren’t they running? the boy says.
“I shall give them another chance.” She is fully awake now. Rising to the task at hand. Of course, she will not let these men kill her. Her eyes adjust to darkness. They must have their lanterns covered.
More mumbling. A rapid shuffling sound. A wooden keg bounces off one of the tilted rocks, hits the floor with a thwack and falls upon its side, leaking powder. She hears a snicker.
The dragon breathes in. Liquid drips.
Wait! Her neck swivels without her will, then against her will. What is happening? she thinks frantically.
Blackpowder. The boy seems frightened. It will explode if you breathe now.
He has taken control. Her neck stretches to its limit. Her jaws open. Her teeth clamp around the wooden barrel and powder leeches into her saliva, a very bitter taste.
Her body twists and flings the keg through the cliff-opening. Still dribbling powder, it reaches the apex of its arch and begins to fall.
The boy releases her and she breathes a concentrated flame. An explosion more grand than anything she has ever heard fills the sky. Her earflaps clamp tight and, still, the noise invades her with the force of a tidal wave. Heat buffets her body. The sky is alive with streaking lights. Like dragons; the sky is filled with dragons.
“I must go to my kind,” she says, longing to be rid of the pain and empty tribulations of life.
Something shifts inside her. They’re beautiful, the boy whispers.
Is it possible he has experienced her vision? She feels a sudden fondness that dulls the ache in her chest.
“It’s still alive,” a man says, incredulity saturating his voice. At the entryway, a mustached face appears, wrinkled with frown.
“I told you this wouldn’t work,” another voice says. The face pulls away and echoing footsteps recede.
#Five Years So, dragons have kingdoms too? The voice has deepened and focused. Right now it is an itch inside her brain that she wishes she could summon the strength to expel. More and more often his voice is all that brings her back from unfocused dreaming.
Like men, he says. Kingdoms just like men.
He is a man now, she reminds herself. But she cannot bring herself to think of him as other than a boy.
“Not kingdoms,” she says. “Not like men. Nothing like men.” The world comes into clear focus. It is morning and the sky beyond her cavern is a radiant blue.
What would you call it then?
“Territories. Each dragon occupies territory by mutual consent. An area large enough to sustain but small enough to maximize population without stressing resources.” It seems to her they have already had this conversation.
And how did you keep from overfilling your territory? When a kingdom gets too many people, it must expand.
“War,” you mean. The dragon takes a deep breath. A lancing pain accompanies this, but she is able to ignore it. Pain has succumbed to a constant drowsiness. And hunger. She can no longer fly to obtain food.
But if dragons live forever--
“When we choose to go, or one of our kind is taken, we allow a fertile egg to develop.” It was man that ruined the balance, man that killed indiscriminately, taking young—especially the young—until it seemed impossible, even sadistic, to try to maintain their population.
“Don’t you go choosing to die on me,” the boy says. “I do not choose to die.”
You chose to die the instant you pushed that sword into me, the dragon thinks. She is grumpy this morning but manages to hold the thought below vocalization threshold.
A scraping noise sounds between the slanted stones and the boy’s alertness flashes forward like light. She has heard no bats, but it is difficult to hear anything of late. Sometimes she is only able to focus on the ebb and flow of blood past her eardrums.
“‘s me, lord dragon,” Gred says. He enters with a flourish, opens his carrybag and lays out silken cloths. “Come to tidy your den.”
The dragon grunts a puff of smoke. She feels one eye open, but cannot bring herself to focus. The smudge that must be Gred moves nearer to claim shed scales.
You should be rid of him, the boy says.
The dragon opens her other eye and stares at the bone-thin man wearing once colorful raiment dulled by age and wear. Gred is convenient to her. His greed causes him to divert most men who seek her lair.
He stumbles against the sword and an intense agony shoots down her spine.
No! Her neck swings up and around and Gred goes flying. He lands beyond his silk kerchiefs and skids into the rock wall.
He staggers to his feet. “My apologies, Lord Dragon.” His eyes belie that notion. He knows it is only a matter of time before he will reap his weight in scales. She hopes that he will not take her head for his trophy room as men are wont to do.
“Go!” The boy says with her voice.
Gred scurries, forgetting even his precious cargo.
I don’t trust him, the boy says. You are in danger.
“Maybe it is for the best.” Her quivering neck gives out and her head thumps down, bringing lights to the darkness behind her eyes. What if those lights are not the souls of her kind? Where will she go then? Will that final darkness be comforting like the darkness of sleep? She longs to know.
#
Gred returns with a man dressed like nobility, a flowing red robe and golden sash. His beard is immaculately trimmed and his expression denotes exhilaration. It is night and the sky is clear. Gred holds a device that isn’t a torch, but some sort of box bearing a steady flame. The brass bulge at its base reminds the dragon of a full belly, something she has not felt for a considerable time.
Lord Samler, the boy growls. The pretender to the throne who killed my father.
“You see?” Gred says.
“Yes, yes.” Lord Samler says. He halts only long enough to survey the cavern.
“See how its ribs protrude, how the scales gape outward?”
Breathe, the boy says. If ever you could summon extra strength, do it now. He has come to finish you.
She begins the process, though it is difficult. A deep breath to get things started. Liquid fuel vaporizes and she works her lungs. But she cannot bring herself to exhale. Something about this Lord says that he will not be deterred by showy flame and she does not have the strength, nor the will, to kill him.
“At last we meet,” Lord Samler says. “For years I have waited for this moment.”
The dragon lets her flaming belch die.
Breathe! The boy tries to initiate the process, but it is too complex a thing for that. All that he manages is a tiny burst of soot.
Lord Samler laughs. He gazes upon the cloth bundles set near the cavern wall, the scales Gred left behind.
“You have been quite the cottage industry,” he says. “I’ve cloaked more men in armor by barter of your scales than you might imagine.”
The dragon thinks of sunlight glinting from armor and her thoughts drift to twinkling lights. Soon, she thinks. But that is not fair to the boy.
Lord Samler draws a sword. “All good things must end. There comes a time for greater commerce.”
The sword slides from its sheath, resplendent with reflected light.
“Witness Gred.” He raises the sword blade to eye level and sights the base of the dragon’s throat along its edge. “I, Lord Samler, am about to single-handedly slay an adult dragon.”
Breathe! the boy pleads. Reason with him. Do something! You’re the last of the dragons. The last. If he kills you…
That staggers her. She breathes deep, feels the tinder inside her growing warmer. It will not be enough, but at least she can try.
Yes, the boy says. Kill him before he kills you.
The words are like cold water and she clenches her throat in mid-breath. The sword pierces her and moves unerringly toward her heart. The pains of old and new wounds intermingle.
“I will not kill,” she says. “Not again.”
It’s the only way, the boy says.
There may be another, she thinks. The boy has learned to live without a body. Perhaps he can survive without her. She forces his consciousness inward, herding it into a small place within her brain. Her eyes focus on Lord Samler, now leaning into the blade. A last violent shove and it pierces her heart, unleashing yet another flood of pain and light.
“You must leave me,” she says, the ache of those words rivaling anything the swords can manage.
No! Let me help you.
“You have the strength to live without me.” He struggles against her, but she will not let go. What she lacks in stamina she makes up in focus. This is his only chance. Like a bird forcing its young out of the nest, she presses insistently against his will.
“Bear witness Gred. Spread this tale far and wide. I, Samler the dragon-slayer, shall be king. No one will doubt my courage after this. And you shall have a comfortable place at court.”
Her eyelids slide shut. The sword twists, a niggling reminder that death is not pleasant. She squeezes harder and the boy’s presence seems to shoot forth like a burst of clean blue flame.
“Gah!” Lord Samler says as though strangling on his tongue. “Gred!”
The dragon’s heart beats more rapidly. Dizziness twists her senses.
“Lord?”
“Gred, I’m…What?” Silence falls and the dragon’s heart rate starts a steady decline.
“Gred,” Lord Samler says more forcefully. There is a subtle difference to the voice that rouses the dragon. She forces one eyelid open.
“Are you all right, Lord?” Gred seems poised between approaching and fleeing.
“Take your trinkets and spread word of what you have seen.”
“Don’t you want me to help with the head?”
“I will claim my own trophy!”
Gred slinks away.
Lord Samler sinks to a kneeling position and rubs his reddened face. Sweat stands out on his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” he says again and again. He reaches for the blade.
“Leave it,” she says.
“But I--”
“The world belongs to man. I have been a dreaming dragon, imagining a journey into the sky, nothing more. Everything is darkness.”
He looks away. When he turns back, there is grim determination in his countenance. He lifts her jaw in looped arms and struggles to push her head toward the cavern opening. The sky.
“They are real,” he says quietly. “The dragons are real. I see them.” He grunts with effort. “And Samler shall be King. I will make sure of it.” She feels the quivering strain of his arms and back. Her head shifts, angling closer to the cavern opening.
“I shall decree that all men see them. And when they have learned to see the lights, I shall decree that they name them—for it is man’s way of connecting to things, to give them a name.”
The dragon’s heart thuds; she feels heaviness in her chest and belly.
“I shall further decree that we someday go there. Into the sky, beyond the moon. And once there, that we prostrate ourselves and beg forgiveness. Not only for what we have done to your kind, but for what greed and lust have done to our own.”
He slaps her face repeatedly until her attention returns.
“Look!” he says, removing the ornate robe and pants and shirt. “The sky awaits. I’ll build a bonfire to light your way.” He drapes clothing over her and lights it with his lamp. “There will be no trophies this night.” Searing heat erupts across her haunch and tail. Tears glisten in his eyes.
The world is flame, the sky alive with flame.
“To my kind,” the boy says, “I’ll be known as Samler, Dragon-slayer. To you, I remain Alvin Sharpstone.”
Smells surround her: Death and life, the damp-sweet smell of charring bone. A memory of screaming birds echoes and she takes wing amid soot and sparks.
“Alvin Sharpstone,” she whispers. Heated air buffets her upward; the vacuum of the sky draws her upward. “I shall remember.”
A glowing ember marks the cave mouth that was her home. Flame dying or being born? she wonders. Heart swelling with new hope, she sets course for that vast tapestry of light beyond the moon.