A Waking of Monsters

Malorea opens her eyes for the first time in a hundred years to a tugging at the corner of her senses, like an insect stuck in a spider’s far-flung web, sending tremors back to alert the predator: prey.

She is not a spider of course, but she too has a network of silken threads, in the form of ley lines running deep into the earth, present since the beginning of time. Her golden eyes snap open, adjusting to the velvet dark around her. She waits, sending out answering queries through the earth and the bedrock, the gnarled roots of the trees between herself and the disturbance.

Malorea is annoyed. It’s been a long time since she’s had a sleep longer than a century, and lately sleeping is all she wants to do. There’s nothing for us in the world anymore, she remembers Obsidius telling her the last time they met, spinning a blanket of stars over the increasingly polluted night sky. She’d wanted to argue with him then, but now she knows he was right. Lucky, she supposes, he isn’t here to gloat. Shortly after that night of flight, Obsidius curled up tight in his earthen cradle, barren of the gold deposits that had once striped its walls, and went to sleep for good.

He was not alone.

She estimates she is one of the last of her kind left now, a revelation that makes her feel strange. Dragons have never really been social creatures, but now when she reaches out, tugging at the psychic network that connects them all, she gets only silence. Robbed of gold to keep warm and sentient, they’ve all forgotten their own names, falling into a slumber that will eventually turn them to stone.

Malorea gets to her feet; whatever has disturbed her slumber is close. She flexes her muscular tail, spreading her wings slowly to about half their capacity. Around her, the mounds of treasure in the ancient ruins she calls home shift, golden coins, plates and chalices, jewelry of a civilization long dead clatter and chime like a metallic tide crashing in.

She is used to being disturbed. Though she used to live far enough from any towns, they continue to crop up in the once beautiful land around her, pressing closer and closer to her lair. Every few decades to a hundred years, one of the humans will come close enough to wake her, striding forward in awkward silvery armor, carried forth by dreams of valor and the urgings of his brethren. She is a legend to them, a thing to be conquered as all things are to their dirty, grasping kind.

Malorea doesn’t hate humans; they don’t seem intelligent enough to commit that kind of energy to. Even when they are the sole reason her kind is dying out, due to their relentless mining of the earth for resources that, as far as she can tell, they do not need for survival, she does not hate them. That said, when one comes within range of her lair, she dispatches him quickly before he can get to her, leaving a trail for the others to follow like noxious ants.

Malorea moves through the tunnel to aboveground and launches herself into the sky with one powerful sweep of her wings. Looking down, she sees the ruins she calls home laid out like an arcane game someone left out long ago, intending to finish.

The intruder is still moving, poking at the threads of her sensory web. But there’s something different about this one. It’s slow, as if whatever is in the woods below is either wounded or lost, traveling in circles instead of coming closer. She considers it might be a deer, but animals usually don’t intrude into her forest; they have better sense than humans. Her curiosity aroused, Malorea spins circles of her own in the air above the trees, honing in on the strange, halting movements.

There.

Malorea tucks in her wings and dives, taking a few branches with her on her descent to the forest floor.

A note on dragons: When they don’t want to be seen, they won’t be seen. All her hapless victim will sense about now is a sudden crashing, as of some large animal, and then silence, as she lands within feet of them, the golden brown of her body melting seamlessly into the landscape around her. Her scales change tint to camouflage her with the trees, dull metallic greens and browns. Hidden in this manner, she observes.

Her prey is not what she expected. It’s a human caught in the crosshairs of her gaze, true, but this one is not the kind she is used to. It does not wear armor and walk with dumb purpose; it does not bring with it a horse that will pull at its reins until, halfway through the forest it finally breaks away and runs back to the town, away from its foolhardy owner and his certain death. There is no sword here, no intricate helm or banner.

It’s a child, and a female child at that, far too young to have wandered into the forest on her own. As Malorea watches, the little girl’s wide eyes scan the trees, looking for the source of the sound she’s heard. Her face is red, as though she’s been crying, but the tears seem to have long dried, and now there’s just a kind of weariness to her, a resignation. One of her arms is shriveled, lying uselessly against her chest. Perhaps due to this handicap, it appears hard for her to keep her balance as she turns around and around, searching for the large animal about to eat her.

The kid is very young, maybe three or four mortal years, and it doesn’t take much to deduce what’s happened. Dragons haven’t cordially existed with humans for centuries, but she knows enough of their kind and their customs to know what’s happened here. This child is a cripple, and a female, and these are two strikes against her. In the dragon world, females like Malorea herself are larger and stronger than males, but in the human world the reverse is true. As far as she can tell, human females are valued for two things only: looks and breedability. Already this child has failed on one count.

It is not the first time she’s seen humans engage in this practice. Plenty of other animals do it too; removing the undesirable from their ranks and leaving them to die. It is typically done when the child is newborn- this girl is old enough to know she’s been left. Malorea wonders if it’s a kind of punishment. You try to apply logic where there is none, Obsidius’s voice reminds her. There is no logic with these creatures.

Malorea moves, snaking closer to the girl, who falls back, startled by the sound.

“Hello?” she calls out.

“Hello,” Malorea answers, and she lets herself be seen.

--

The little girl gasps, backing up so fast she falls flat on her back, and Malorea raises a clawed foot, placing it down over her body like a cage. Images flash through her mind, the way they always do upon contact. A screaming child pulled red and glistening from the womb, the disgust upon the preacher’s face. A freak of nature. The same child playing under the table with a wooden train, a cat curled up on the floor nearby. A knock on the door. Her mother’s frightened face, her hands gripping her daughter’s shoulders as she pushes her towards the strange men. A word: abomination. Merciless hands grabbing her, and then-

The girl is older now, a young woman, standing in the street. Her back against the wall, her one good hand clutching a razor-sharp knife, she threatens the dark shadows of her fellow urchins. One of them, a boy with a scruffy wisp of a beard, lunges at her, pushing her up against the wall. Then she is kneeling, his body lifeless beside her. She studies the blood on her hand like a map, telling her where next to go.

Nights spent curled up in alleyways, sleeping with one eye open, days picking pockets and fighting to survive. She saves her coin not only for bread: when she arrives at the blacksmith’s she runs one finger along the blade of his latest creation. It draws a thin red line up from her skin that runs down to her wrist. She smiles. “This one,” she tells him.

Sweat, fighting, parrying and thrusting. Her single arm is toned and tanned by the sun, rough to the touch. Her nights are now spent in an alleyway of her own; her would-be opponents know to stay away. Alone, she dreams of razor-sharp claws and the heat of scorching breath, of wingbeats on the air, of being borne aloft, all the people and dogs and houses becoming small below, even the castle insignificant at such heights.

Flash forward still to a balmy summer’s day. The feeling of hunger is tight in the girl’s stomach as she watches the parade of would-be champions pave its way to the castle doors. It gnaws at her, more than a physical pang, as she slips silently through the gates after them, unnoticed.

And then she stands before the king covered in the blood of her rivals, body sore and nearly broken. The applause of the crowd echoes in her ears and the thinly veiled anger burns in his words as he addresses her.

“Normally the sentence for your transgressions would be death. But since you appear to be a fan favorite- " Here the crowd gets louder again- “You will be issued the challenge you so desperately want to prove yourself with. You will go forth and slay the dragon of the hills. If you succeed, you will be knighted and lauded as champion. If you fail, you will be executed for public viewing in the town square.”

The girl steels herself, dropping to her knees. Under her helmet, she has shorn her hair to the scalp, and it itches with sweat. She has hidden her withered arm under the cloak that’s been thrown over her shoulders upon victory. It is clear he does not recognize her: not as a woman, and not as the child he decreed as cursed and had tossed into the woods for the wolves to devour on her third birthday. But he will know. She will follow her distant memory to that place she visits constantly in her dreams, and when she comes back victorious, holding the bloody heart scale of the dragon like a shield, she will close the gap between them. She will climb the stairs to his throne to claim her prize: in one fluid, practiced movement she will raise her sword, covered in the blood of the beast, and she will run it through the true monster’s heart.

--

Malorea regards the girl beneath her foot. Never in her long life has she received images that appear not to be from a person’s past, but from their future. Sometime in the last few seconds, the child’s eyes have gone from wide and terrified to flat and impassive: a challenge. Her heart flutters against the dragon’s claw, the rapid beat betraying her fear. What must it be like to want to live so badly?

“I want to go back,” the child says, her small voice unwavering. “Take me back.” She does not say home.

Malorea, who has eaten every single person to dare enter her territory, roasting them beforehand and spitting out the charred bones, finds herself at a loss. There is a feeling stirring throughout her body, set alight somehow by her psychic visions. It isn’t hunger. It isn’t irritation. It’s something she hasn’t felt in ages, not since she used to ride the wind for days on end with Obsidius and the rest of her extended family, not since the last dragon egg she ever witnessed hatching, centuries ago now, the steam rising from the cracks, heralding new life.

This feeling crouched in her chest just behind the most tender flesh beneath her heart scale, it is curiosity on fire. Excitement.

“What is your name?” the dragon asks; it is the only time she’s ever requested this information from a human. It is the only time she’s ever felt the need to know.

The child looks up at her. If she is confused, she doesn’t show it.

“Mari,” she says.

“Mari,” Malorea growls, the steam from her breath nearly singeing the girl’s hair. Branches snap and crash to the forest floor as her wings spread. “You are going to want to hold on very tightly now.”