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Flowers for the King

A Gift Given and A Gift Returned

By Hillora LangPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 15 min read
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Flowers for the King
Photo by Tania Mirón on Unsplash

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. When the patterns of the wind, the currents of the air wafting out of the valley rode in their accustomed patterns, the fragrances of the lower elevations flowed down the broad sluggish river to the Southlands. No Highland dragons caught the scent of flocks of wooly sheep grazing in the fields or milk cows suckling their newborn calves or flowers blooming in the fields. Not when the world behaved as it ought.

The world, however—air and earth and water—behaved badly that year.

The patterns shifted. Temperatures rose when they should have fallen, tricking the sap into rising too soon. When it should have been thawing, the temperature dropped without warning. Summer rain fell in the winter as freezing bullets that slashed through the unfurling leaves on the trees. Unreliable spring came and left, and came and left again.

And the summer rains that in years past watered the fast-growing flowers in Jeanette Moreau's fields, the roses and camellias and peonies and larkspur that every florist and event planner in the city relied on, well, those summer rains never came. Day after day passed with blistering heat that baked the fields and farms and stunted Jeanette’s crops.

Jeanette was still a young woman, just twenty-eight years old. She’d never married, preferring to devote herself to nurturing her roses instead of nurturing a husband and children. That scorching summer, through rainless day after dewless night, she looked out her kitchen window at the bleached-out sky, empty of clouds, and her chest tightened a little more. It would have been easier to turn her fate over to someone else. But that had never been her way.

Her flower farm was a small one, relatively speaking. Fifteen-and-a-half acres under cultivation, the long rows of delphiniums and baby’s breath and ranunculus and gladiolus stretching off into the distance under the blazing sun. Fifteen-and-a-half acres withering away after weeks of no rain. Her yields were half what they should have been. And still, she had it relatively easy.

Photo by Bonnie Kittle on Unsplash

The neighboring farms were far larger. Hundreds of acres of soybeans and hard wheat and feed corn. Hundreds of head of cows and sheep and goats. The valley was the source of much of the produce—grain and milk and cheese and wool—for those living in the city. And the entire valley was parched and desiccated, drying up and blowing away.

But…the river. The river was their only hope.

Jeanette’s farm was farthest away from the sloping banks of the broad river. She drove miles every day in her old farm truck with two 275-gallon caged water tanks in the bed to wait, engine idling, in the line of other farmers on the dirt track that ran along the riverbank. Every day the water level seemed to drop a little more, and one by one Jeanette and the other farmers had to back their trucks a little farther down the graveled bank, to pump water out of the river to water their fields and livestock.

And every day Jeanette’s heart ached a little more as she watched her dreams blow away, into the hills surrounding the valley, nothing more than dust on the wind.

***

As many know, dragons are supernatural creatures. They possess the power to mold the forces of the earth to their will. The elementals reflect the will of the dragons, and their moods.

Mothers in the valley would tell their children when a fierce thunderstorm shook the houses, “That’s the dragons in the hills, fighting each other.” Or when winter blasts froze the farms and fields, “The dragons are sleeping too deeply, and their fires have gone out.” Or when spring’s sweet breezes thawed the frost from deep in the ground, “The dragons are waking, ready to hunt the deer on the mountainside.”

By Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

And for the most part, the mothers were perfectly correct.

This year, however, there was no way for them to know that the King of the Dragons was getting too old to rule his kingdom properly. He had gotten neglectful, and forgetful, and just wanted to keep sleeping when winter should have ended. Eventually, the earth woke herself up, but she was all out of sorts. Without the guidance of the King of the Dragons, all of the other dragons grew lazy. And the entire region fell to shambles.

As everyone knows, however, when the elderly are losing their perspective, when they revert back to childhood days, there still arise moments of lucidity now and then. Moments when they are their normal selves, and their lives are their own again, for a few minutes or an hour or two. And so it was with the King of the Dragons.

One morning he awoke in his cavern deep in the hills, dragging his old bones into the blazing summer sun. He lifted his snout to the freshening breeze, rising up from the valley. The scents of young lambs playing in the fields and corn rising out of the earth filled his senses, and another scent he hadn’t smelled since he was a newly-risen sire of a clutch of royal eggs, acclaimed king by right of his superior fighting skills. His long-ago coronation day, when dragons celebrated and humans paid homage to his might. The scent of freshly-blooming flowers combined in a fragrant bouquet of scents carried him back to his youth.

Photo by Ksenia Kudelkina on Unsplash

But breezes are changeable, and soon the scents of daffodil and rose and narcissus wafted away. The King of the Dragons was bereft, alone in his dotage, his children and mate gone away. But those fragrances…

If he could just wallow in those fragrances one more time!

With a huge effort of will, the King of the Dragons lumbered down from the lip of his cavern and spread his wings as wide as they would go. Scarred by past battles, scales darkened by the passing of centuries, those wings were no longer as magnificent as they had once been. Even so, the muscles beneath the scaled flesh were strong. In a great whoosh of power, he sprang into the air to hunt.

***

The King of the Dragons followed the changeable breeze laden with the scent of roses out from his lair and over the hills. Ahead he saw the valley laid out before him, a strange ribbon of gray winding between the slopes of the foothills. Tiny wagons raced along the ribbon, faster than any wagon he remembered seeing. And no horses or oxen pulled the wagons.

Strange and stranger.

For the King of Dragons was very old, indeed. He’d been sleeping for many years, deep in his cavern. Was it any wonder the world had gotten off-balance, neglected as it was? The people who lived in his valley had all but forgotten he existed. The King of the Dragons was a fairytale now, even the mothers who told stories to their children unbelieving. Tales of the dragons fighting, well, that was just the story their mamas had told them, and their mamas’ mamas before them. They didn’t really believe…

Until the King of the Dragons, in search of the scents which had drawn him from his cavern door, swooped overhead.

Photo by Tomasz Tomal on Unsplash

His broad, scarred wings carried him over the highway which unrolled from the city, drivers pulling over or stopping dead in the center of the macadam to stare at what they thought was a resurrected dinosaur. They weren't far off the mark.

His powerful upstrokes lifted him above the riverbanks where the farmers in their trucks lined up, waiting their turn to pump water into their tanks to take back to their fields and livestock.

His long glide took him to the farthest edge of the valley, to Jeanette Moreau’s farm, where she stood with her chest tight with loss as she stood looking out the kitchen window at her withering flower-fields, his shadow greater than any eagle as he swooped low. Banked around again, powerful wings flapping to slow his descent. And landed smack! in the center of her rare Neptune roses, crushing the lavender-colored blossoms to the ground.

Jeanette stood in shock for a long moment before she shook off her inertia and raced for the open back door. The screen slammed back into the kitchen wall as she leapt from the back porch onto the ground. Her work boots pounded the dry earth, sending up puffs of dust with each stride.

It wasn’t far to the rose beds. Jeanette liked to keep them close to the old farmhouse, so that she could smell their fragrance through her windows. She'd just never imagined that one day—

“What are you doing!?!” she screeched at the monstrosity sitting in the midst of her ruined Neptune roses. “Those are my best—”

Neptune Roses

Her feet slowed as she realized exactly what it was that had landed on her farm. Dragons had never been what one would call plentiful in the valley. In centuries past, when people still believed in them, the dragons had kept to the hills where they belonged. And now—in the year 2036—there was one here, in the valley. Alive and…

This was completely unexpected.

The bemused King of the Dragons had flown a very long way for a dragon of his advanced age. He shook his head as if to clear his mind, peering around at the screeching little human who was running toward him across the dry ground. He wasn’t worried, of course. Humans were of little concern to him. More of a bother than a threat, they were, as puny as their soft carcasses were.

He raised his snout, sniffing the air. Ahh! That was what he'd longed for. The fragrance of flowers in bloom. The perfume of the roses he’d landed upon. But his flight had been long, and he was old. Very, very old.

The King of the Dragons, well past his prime, dropped onto his belly in the ruined rose bed, curled his tail over his head, and went to sleep in the sun with a broken spray of Neptune roses hanging over his left shoulder.

***

“But my roses!” Jeanette fought to keep her voice down. These older farmers crowding inside her fences to stare at the monstrosity which had landed uninvited on her flower bed didn’t seem phased in the least. Just curious.

Perhaps it was genetic memory.

The other farmers in the valley—wheat farmers and sheep farmers and soybean farmers and Christmas tree farmers—had been there for generations. They’d all looked askance at the young woman who had simply moved in willy-nilly and started a flower farm when she’d arrived six years ago. Flowers! What a waste of good farmland! Those old-time farmers had lived all their lives in the valley, as did their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. All the way back to when dragons were fairly common, and regularly-scheduled offerings were left for the monstrous beasts, to placate them and keep them from raiding the farms. Expecting dragons to come visiting was in their blood, even if it hadn’t happened in many centuries. After all, hadn’t their mothers told them that dragons were fighting in the sky when a thunderstorm shook their roofs? They’d grown up knowing about dragons, even if they’d never seen one.

Genetic memory.

“Looks kind of beat up, this dragon,” the man who ran the dairy farm across the highway said, looking closely at the sleeping monster. From a distance, of course.

“Been through the wars,” one of the women who raised spring lambs chuckled. “But still standing, he is!”

“Still lying down,” her wife corrected. And they slapped each other on the backs at the joke.

King Dragon Scales

This was no joke, Jeanette thought. It was her Neptune roses

“Whatcha gonna do?” the summer intern from the local agricultural extension office asked. He was fresh out of college, and still wary of the many large bulls he encountered during his visits to the farms. He would be of no use whatsoever in this situation.

Jeanette looked around at the ever-growing crowd of men and women from throughout the valley, all come to gawk at her dilemma. Her dilemma? It was everyone’s dilemma!

“The question is,” one of the oldest of the farmers, a man bent nearly double with arthritis and leaning on a cane, said, “why did this beast come down out of the hills? And why now? Well, I been thinking on it—”

Everyone focused their attention on the old farmer, even Jeanette, although she did keep sneaking looks back at the dragon snoring in her Neptune roses, tiny whisps of smoke rising from his enormous nostrils with each noisy exhalation. The old man took his time. Gathering his thoughts? Or trying to remember why he was even there?

Finally, he spoke again. “Seems I recall a tale my old grandmammy used to tell, ‘bout the coronation of the King of the Dragons. Way back in the before times, when there were plenty of dragons around, there used to be a big celebration when a new King was coronated. Folks would bring cows and sheep and pigs and goats to the fallow fields on the western edge of the valley, and wagons all filled up with flowers to decorate the fences and hang garlands 'round the livestock. Then all the dragons would come a’feastin’ and carousin’ and raisin’ Cain. And when they was done coronatin’ the new king, they went back to their hills and everything went on like normal.” Here he stopped and looked around at his neighbors from all over the valley, catching each of their eyes in turn, and finally ending up looking straight at Jeanette. “Mebbe that’s why the weather’s turned so iffy-piffy. No sacrifices lately.”

Jeanette stepped back, hands raised to ward off the very thought—

“Now, I’m not going to be eaten by any dragon,” she said quickly. “If it wants a sacrifice, then we give it a cow or something. Not—”

And in the midst of Jeanette’s protest the dragon gave a rumbling snort and woke himself up. All of the people in Jeanette’s yard—Jeanette included—crushed themselves back against the fence as the King of the Dragons raised his head and peered around bleary-eyed. He heaved himself awkwardly to his feet and turned in a circle, still searching. Then he set off across the rows of delphiniums and coreopsis and eglantine, straight towards Jeanette’s farm truck, still loaded with full cage tanks of river water meant to water her parched fields.

Jeanette's Farm Truck

The dragon reared up on his hind legs and examined the tanks, running his front claws over the opaque plastic tanks, searching for an opening.

He was thirsty!

Those tanks cost money, Jeanette thought, the stress of this highly unusual situation overcoming her common sense. Her farm was already on the edge. She couldn’t afford to replace those tanks if a dragon ripped them open. So, with no thought for anything else, she set off across the field after the dragon, snatching up the big water hose she would hook up to her irrigation system when it was time to water her flowers. She opened the valve on the hose and held it out as far away from her as she could and called out—

“Here, dragon! Come get a drinky!”

The elderly dragon twisted around to face Jeanette, blinking rapidly. His snout lifted in the air—

And he waddled towards her, his battered wings tucked close to his body.

***

No, the King of the Dragons didn’t eat Jeanette, a fact which some of her neighbors found a mite disappointing (a bit disturbing to know how bloodthirsty folks living right down the way from you could be!). He drank both of those water tanks dry, then lay down and went to sleep again.

When he woke up, well, the elderly often have a bit of trouble “holding their water,” and the King of the Dragons had a nice, long pee, right in the middle of Jeanette’s flower fields. That dragon piss ran down the furrows and spread out to water the entire farm. So, Jeanette had one less chore to do that day.

The thing was, dragon piss is full of minerals and magic (and some other less savory stuff that shall remain unnoted in this account), and within just days, the on-the-edge, slightly-wilty, struggling-to-survive-the-drought flowers on Jeanette’s farm had perked right up. In fact, they looked better than they had any right to.

When the people of the valley saw the magical effect that dragon piss had on Jeanette’s farm, all of the other farmers started hauling their water there from the river where they filled their tanks, so that the King of the Dragons would turn it into magical dragon piss. They rigged up a containment system to catch it when he peed and pumped it into their water tanks to take home and water their own fields, which gave yields like no one in the valley had ever seen.

Well, not since the days when dragons roamed freely.

And considering the gift they were getting from the King of the Dragons—who’d decided it was easier to curl up in Jeanette’s Neptune roses than to fly back to his cavern in the hills—those farmers were happy to provide a cow or sheep or goat every now and then to feed the dragon. It seemed a fair trade in the end.

And everyone in the valley lived happily ever after, including Jeanette, who wasn't sacrificed despite being an unmarried woman. And so did the elderly, incontinent King of the Dragons.

Who peed happily ever after. As dragons do.

***

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished, like a dragon treasures a cavern filled with gold. And books.

I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to another of my entries, about a gardener of a different sort:

Fantasy
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About the Creator

Hillora Lang

Hillora Lang feared running out of stuff to read, so she began writing just in case...

While her major loves are fantasy and history, Hillora will write just about anything, if inspiration strikes. If it doesn't strike, she'll nap, instead.

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  • Catherine2 years ago

    😂 too funny! Magical 🐉🐉

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