The darkness was interrupted by a voice.<\/p>\n
I have never held that darkness has a menace to it all on its own.\u00a0 That’s just something we give it because we’re creatures with poor night vision, and for those things that use it to hunt, that’s sometimes their only bonus.\u00a0 We are capable of handling the dark – too much light is actually more of a problem.<\/p>\n
This sudden darkness, though, had brought silence to it.\u00a0 The screaming had gone away, the illusion broken, and now there was only this voice.\u00a0 This familiar voice that had brought gloom to my city, and spoken words of doom in a parking lot outside a restaurant that had served more than its fair share of trouble to me in the last few days.<\/p>\n
Light flickered with the voice, and I saw the immensity of the Dragon for the first time.<\/p>\n
There’s this scene in “The Neverending Story” where Atreyu meets Falcor the Luck-Dragon, and I don’t know why it came immediately to mind because Nellie was not like that at all.\u00a0 I think it’s because you see this huge head and the comparison to the boy and I felt both this panic and this glee, just like when I saw the movie for the first time, because, wow, Dragon.<\/p>\n
If you’re a genre fan like I am, you see them all the time.\u00a0 I have dragon statues around my house.\u00a0 In doing research I saw literally thousand of pieces of dragon art.\u00a0 Heck, I’m guilty of some of my own from when I was bored in my classes.\u00a0 They’re a metaphor, a representation, something that has layers and layers of meaning besides even the obvious overwrought physical specimen.<\/p>\n
You’ve probably never seen a Dragon.<\/p>\n
Two in a week was more than enough for me.\u00a0 I don’t have a dodgy heart (I considered rethinking that phrase in light of Ivan) but I could have expired on the spot.\u00a0 I did not visit Peredur in his lair – his was the lightest brushing of his presence upon my life, and still I knew he was serious, a serious…something.\u00a0\u00a0 I was paralyzed.\u00a0 I could not breathe, could barely think.<\/p>\n
Well, I could think things like, “Big.\u00a0 Um.\u00a0 Big.\u00a0 Very.\u00a0 Um.\u00a0 Big.”<\/p>\n
Of course, I’ve thought things like that just before getting into fights in middle school, too.<\/p>\n
There’s this thing about ancient Dragons in the Monster Manual<\/span> that talks about their aura of fear.\u00a0 No, I would not recommend using the Manual for anything regarding monsters – they’re the kind of thing written by guys who stay up all night drinking Mountain Dew instead of going out on the town. \u00a0 Yeah, guys like me, except very few have shown signs of anything but a faint hope that magic exists.<\/p>\n Somehow they instinctively got this part right, and I failed my saving throw.<\/p>\n My brain finally made sense of what the sound was.\u00a0 Words.\u00a0 “That, my dear Lesiye, is how I collected the birds in the first place.”<\/p>\n “There was one you should never have touched,” Artur responded from somewhere to my right.<\/p>\n I had to agree if you wanted to call Doloise a “bird.”\u00a0 Of course, that was a slippery slope and I’d start calling legs “gams” if I started down it.<\/p>\n Light began to build from around the Dragon’s scales.\u00a0\u00a0 I could see why they suggest caves for Dragons, because they create their own luminescence, so additional light would be foolish.\u00a0 My eyes adjusted to her bronze glow, and I saw all sorts of things – broken and destroyed as if she had set out to crush them under her immense paws.\u00a0 Unless paws was only for furry things – she had huge claws, kind of like eagles, curved black talons that themselves needed a sanity check to be within fifteen feet of – one of them had a broken tip and I focused on that for safety’s sake.<\/p>\n “You will not find me so easy to digest,” Artur said.\u00a0 I spun through my recent memories – had I missed a reply?\u00a0 The aura of the Dragon could maybe have been messing with my mind.<\/p>\n “Devouring and digesting are different,” the Dragon agreed.\u00a0 “But you are here, in one aspect of my place.”\u00a0 One dimension, one thin slice of Dragon reality.\u00a0 I could see that my my view of the multiverse had a ways to go.<\/p>\n I got it then.\u00a0 Ivan’s heart – it was the firebird!<\/p>\n What was Ivan?<\/p>\n What had I gotten myself into?<\/p>\n My mouth formed words.\u00a0 “I have no ancient grudge.\u00a0 I’ve come for Doloise.”\u00a0 I did not debate whether or not I was a tasty morsel.\u00a0 That’s the kind of argument you never want to have.<\/p>\n “E!” She was there, suddenly.<\/p>\n “Doloise!”\u00a0 I was freed from my paralysis with her voice, and instinctively, I hugged her.<\/p>\n Bleepin’ dirty words.\u00a0 Just as instinctively, I realized that had been the absolute wrong thing to do.<\/p>\n She was still… Doloise.\u00a0 She still had the saffron curls that made it hard to describe her as blonde or a redhead (as if that was the only descriptor that mattered.\u00a0 If there were words like that for legs, I’d probably use them.\u00a0 “She was a tall-waisted thin leg…”\u00a0 I take it back.\u00a0 I take it back quickly.)<\/p>\n “Blood and thorns,” she whispered.<\/p>\n My blood dripped over her from all the tiny places she had punctured me.\u00a0 Luckily, I was wearing my good jacket, and she had only pulled thin strands of wet ruby (there’s a euphemism for you) from my hands, neck, and cheeks.<\/p>\n She turned to Nellie.\u00a0 “You cannot hold me.”<\/p>\n “Then walk, daughter of Peredur.\u00a0 I have these as hostages.\u00a0 Or lunch.”<\/p>\n “I am only concerned with one.”<\/p>\n Wait.\u00a0 She used “I.”\u00a0\u00a0 She had stopped doing that when I had figured out what she was, but it had never sounded natural to her.\u00a0 This was a confidence I hadn’t expected from her.\u00a0 Had something happened?<\/p>\n “Ah.\u00a0 The boy.”\u00a0 Boy?\u00a0 I guess it was better than “mortal” and it was a heck of a lot better than “wizard.”\u00a0 Of course, Nellie was a Dragon and probably no one schooled Dragons in syntax.<\/p>\n “I am Guardian and Guide,” Doloise said, stepping between Nellie and I.<\/p>\n “But you have already hurt him twice.\u00a0 Ready to make it a third time, fey thing?”<\/p>\n Nikolai bit her then.\u00a0 A rush and a growl, and the hound was released in a wave of magic.\u00a0 I could almost see the various pieces as they unfolded like a piece of clockwork.\u00a0 To hunt the evil.\u00a0 Nikolai got his fangs near the Dragon’s throat.\u00a0 To protect the master.\u00a0 A shield of visible light rushed towards us, as Nikolai disappeared.<\/p>\n “Ah.\u00a0 One of Viktor’s constructions.\u00a0 I wondered what had been shielding you,” Nellie said.\u00a0 There was no blood, but a golden substance that dripped from the shallow incisions.\u00a0 She shrugged it off.<\/p>\n Artur took that shrug as a chance to draw a wooden sword he’d produced out of seemingly nowhere.\u00a0 I remember at the time that the idea of it coming out of “his butt” was a hilarious one.\u00a0 It was surrounded with a hint of flame.<\/p>\n “Run,” he said.<\/p>\n I couldn’t move.\u00a0 I knew I certainly couldn’t touch Doloise.<\/p>\n “Go,” I told her.<\/p>\n She stared at me, her eyes wild and a golden green.\u00a0 I realized I had never seen her eyes, but these, these were almost human, and full of all those extremes one might feel in such a situation.\u00a0 Then, just as I had had a taste of the colour, like a summer’s day but not in a feminine hygiene product way, she was gone.<\/p>\n You’ve seen swordfights in movies.\u00a0 Depending on the choreographer you either get the really artsy spinning and blow-by-blow rendition, or the brutal hack-and-slash.\u00a0 This was not a blade that Artur wielded – no one with an iota of sense would wield a sword against a Dragon.\u00a0 There were probably specific anti-Dragon weapons.\u00a0 Atomic bombs.\u00a0 Other Dragons.\u00a0 Mechagodzilla.<\/p>\n The aura around the sword extended, slashing and slicing as if the sword were more a wand, a direction for some kind of green, vegetable death.\u00a0 A smell of loam and evergreen, and the little things that lived and died in the roots of trees, and the stickiness of the sap, the slash of branches across unprotected skin, the striving for the sunlight of each leaf.\u00a0 It was the concentration of a forest.<\/p>\n And it was doomed.\u00a0 One forest wielded by a tall guy with some trees for legs did not a dragonslayer make.\u00a0 She had claws – four sets, and wings to use as baffles, and a long tail, teeth, magic, and experience.<\/p>\n I was able to move just as she bit him in half.\u00a0 Part of me reflected that it was even more disturbing than Cooking Ivan, no matter how inevitable.<\/p>\n “Next!” She spit out leaves and sap, making the word a slush of terror.<\/p>\n I stared into her blue eyes, blue like tropical waters, blue like tears, as she snarled and lunged at me.<\/p>\n She got a mouthful of Doloise instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are capable of handling the dark – too much light is actually more of a problem. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-five"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}