The Dragon's Hoard

Akiva awoke from her nap to the sound of a child crying.

Or, more accurately, screaming. She uncoiled her scaled body from within her nest with a brief shake and a groan, rising to go see what the matter could possibly be and why nobody had yet put a stop to this noisy nonsense. Humans were such a nuisance- and what is this one doing all the way out here in the forest? Her den was at least 4 miles away from the nearest village and was away from the main road. Sure, people passed by occasionally to hunt or explore, but they usually did not bring their hatchlings with them. She contemplated all this while moving through the darkness of her den with the attitude of a grumpy old dragon who had been woken prematurely from her nap- which is, of course, precisely what she was.

She blinked as her dragon eyes quickly adjusted to the brightness of midday outside her cave, then peered through the branches that hid its entrance, looking for the source of the loud noise. Even with her enhanced vision, she could only just make out the outline of the toddler seated a few yards away through the trees, sobbing like somebody had pulled on his tail. Raising her head slightly, she breathed in deeply through her nose to determine if there were other humans hiding out nearby. The scent was faint enough that she suspected he might be alone- she assumed this hatchling was male, based on the shorter haircut that seemed to be favored by human males- but it was hard to tell through the overwhelming stench of waste. No wonder the thing was upset!

Akiva sat back on her haunches, considering how to act on this new discovery. She could always just go back inside her cave and wait for it to stop or go away, but if the hatchling’s guardians weren’t around to take it away it was likely to continue screaming. Her patience was already quickly running out, which meant that was not an option. Frustrated, she opted to try and scare the hatchling into silence. It’s not like he could cry any harder, so what was the harm in trying?

As it turned out, he could cry harder. Akiva dragged her scaly body through the gap in the bushes towards the hatchling only for the already-painfully-loud crying to increase in volume to a high-pitched, ear-piercing scream she wasn’t aware humans could make. At this, she laid down in front of the tiny human, covering her ears with her oversized paws, and beginning to growl. She couldn’t take much more of this. The crying was so loud that she almost missed the sound of the branch cracking behind her- but nothing could stop the senses of a dragon.

She rose and whipped her head around, flames crackling in her throat, ready to roast the approaching threat. Except... she didn’t. Standing before her, shaking like a leaf and gripping a spindly little branch over his shoulder like a spear, was another human male. This one was much bigger than the hatchling but still far from fully grown. His wide eyes and sweaty palms told her he was terrified, yet his stance and grip on his stick told a different story. For some unknown reason, this boy was determined to fight her despite his fear. She let out a sigh of exasperation and accidentally singed the top of his hair in the process. He flinched but held his ground. What on earth was he doing? Surely he knew he couldn’t fight a dragon like this. She couldn’t understand what he thought he could accomplish, let alone why he was trying in the first place. It wasn’t until she looked back at the smaller human and started to see the similarities between the two- same dust-colored hair, bright blue eyes, and eyebrows that flicked up in the corners- that she realized these boys must be nestmates. They had to be kin. Of course, it also helped that the older one stuttered out a timid, “Leave my brother alone!” as she looked back at the toddler.

Finally, something that made sense. He was trying to protect the hatchling. Though that answered a few of her questions, more continued to plague her- the most important of which was what these little humans were doing in the forest so far away from the village without their guardians? Now that she was more awake, she was more aware of her surroundings and certain that no other humans lurked nearby. She couldn’t be sure what these boys were up to, but first she needed to focus on communicating to them that she meant no harm.

Akiva’s mind flashed back to her days as a hatchling herself, hundreds of years ago, to when she still slept in her mother’s nest. Her mother loved humans and worked as a liaison between them and her thunder at the time, which allowed Akiva to get used to being around them herself. She never shared the same love her mother did, but she could tolerate them and knew of their ways. She even understood a few of their languages, though it was difficult for dragons to speak to them at all. Most of the time, when dragons and humans communicated with each other, it was a lot like the game humans called “charades”. This was going to be difficult.

At least, that’s what she assumed, until her attention returned to the smaller boy. She realized he had stopped crying, though still sniffled, and instead had become enraptured by the millions of tiny dots of sunlight scattered about by her brilliant earth-colored scales. Each one looked like a miniature rainbow that held all the beauty of autumn and moved as she did. The boy, it seemed, was trying to catch them. His older brother still stood at the ready, watching carefully in case Akiva dared make the wrong move. What she did not expect was that the hatchling quickly caught on to the source of the refractions and deemed her a more worthy object of his attention- one that no longer deserved his fear but instead needed further investigation. With his fingers. On her leg.

Not many humans knew this because few of them would dare to find out, but dragons were extremely ticklish. She tried to contain herself and her dignity for as long as possible, but Akiva quickly ended up a frazzled scaly heap on the forest floor, twitching restlessly, with a tattered wheezing sound like an asthmatic roar escaping her lips. There is nothing quite as ridiculous as the sight of a dragon being tickled, especially by a toddler, and this new discovery was all it took for the older boy to drop his guard and end up on the ground himself, laughing hysterically. That was one thing Akiva did like about humans- the sound of their laughter.

The three of them ended up laying there for the better part of the afternoon, each still a little nervous around each other, feeling each other out. As the day progressed, the older boy grew more and more comfortable as well as much more talkative. He seemed to have decided that since his baby brother could take down the dragon, and she hadn’t decided to eat them yet, their chances of survival might be better than he had originally thought.

“...and I thought you were going to eat us!” the boy was saying. He had already introduced himself as Cayson, and his baby brother as Oslac. He gave her a sidelong glance, as though he just remembered he had been speaking to a dragon without stopping to breathe for the last 30 minutes. “You aren’t going to eat us, are you?”

Akiva laid her head down on her strong forelegs in a submissive posture and looked him in the eye with two slow blinks to confirm that she wasn’t planning on it. Cayson seemed to understand and continued talking, never letting up. It was almost as though he had never had anyone to talk to before- or at least, no one who had let him go on this long without stopping him. Oslac had long since been cleaned up with water from a nearby stream and was snoozing happily in a patch of soft grass at the end of her tail. Just then, Cayson’s stomach growled loudly, and he looked down, frowning at it.

“I guess I am pretty hungry. I’ve been out here since before sunrise, when mother and father sent me away with Ozzy...” Cayson drifted off. Akiva was confused- what did he mean, sent them away? These children were far too young to leave the nest! But Cayson wasn’t done after all. “They wanted to get rid of him, you see,” Cayson said, gesturing to the sleeping Oslac. “Said he was too much work and they didn’t want him to begin with. I was supposed to bring him out here to the forest and leave him for someone else to find, but...” His eyes began to well up. “I couldn’t just leave him! What if something happened to him? So, I decided to stay and watch and see if someone nice did find him. Mother and Father only keep me around to clean up after them, won’t even send me to school with the rest of the kids anymore. It’s not like they’ll miss me. At least until I’m not around to make their supper anyway.” Cayson wiped his nose and looked back at her, his look of brave determination returning. “I’m not going back. Do you have anything to eat?”

Akiva, feeling sorry for the boys, pulled down the rest of the deer carcass she had stashed in a nearby tree to let him eat his fill. She could always catch another one. To her surprise though, Cayson reacted in dismay and disgust. It was only then that she remembered humans preferred their prey cooked and scorched the thing with her fire breath. It turned out a little blacker in color than she had intended, but when she tore it open with her claws it looked about right.

As Cayson hesitantly started eating and shared a few bites with Oslac, Akiva thought deeply about her new predicament. She would have felt awful if her mother had kicked her from the nest too young, and humans were far more fragile than she was as a hatchling. She couldn’t send them home. She supposed, for now, she would just have to keep them.

That night, when the sun had disappeared behind the tops of the mountains, she pulled them close inside her den and into her warm, soft nest, completely exhausted from the day’s events. Cayson was helping to put Oslac to sleep when the toddler started crying again, repeating the same muffled syllable through his sobs: “Bun”.

Cayson looked stricken. “You don’t need your Bun. You can sleep with me and the dragon!” he protested. This only caused Oslac to cry harder. Cayson looked over at Akiva, who was growing more irritable by the minute. “He has this stuffed bunny toy he always sleeps with, but I didn’t think to bring it with me this morning. Mother tried throwing it out once and he cried all night long before she gave up and brought it back. He won’t fall asleep without it,” he spluttered, clearly panicking. With that, she dragged the boys back out of her small cave.

As the boys were too heavy for her to carry both at once while flying, she plucked them both off their feet, using her long neck to set them gently on her back, and started walking in the direction of the village instead. If she paced herself well, they could reach the village on foot and make it back in time with a few hours to spare before sunrise and still get some sleep. The night air was a little chilly, helping her stay awake. Somewhat to her dismay, it also kept Cayson awake, who was never at a loss for words. She had hoped he might fall asleep on her back and give her a little bit of peace.

“Hey, how come you’re so small? I thought dragons were supposed to be bigger. I learned all about them in school before Mother started making me stay home to take care of Oslac.” She closed her eyes, reminding herself that he was just curious. Still, she wished she could ask him to be quiet for a few minutes. “Is it because you don’t have a hoard? I didn’t see one in that cave,” Cayson hypothesized. “My teacher said that the biggest dragons have hoards that could fill a whole mountain!”

He was right. Hoards were something of a touchy subject for her, and she bristled a little at the mention of them, baring her teeth and wrinkling her nose. Cayson seemed to notice, whispered a quiet “sorry”, and regained the silence he had only held when she first found him in the forest earlier that day. Relaxing a little, she slowly twisted her head around to lick his forehead with her forked tongue, letting him know she forgave him of his misstep. Cayson smiled and settled down to fall asleep with his back hunched over the toddler seated in front of him while he rode his new favorite dragon.

She both welcomed the peaceful silence and resented it, as it now gave her a little too much time to think on her life choices. Traditionally, a dragon would choose something specific to hoard as he or she grew into adulthood, giving them the ability to grow beyond the natural size of a fully-grown dragon, proportional to the size of the hoard they kept. Of course, it would only work if the item they chose to collect truly made them happy, but most dragons found their hoard quickly and left the nest of their parents. Akiva struggled with this. She was told many times by her thunder that she was being too picky or too pessimistic and she needed to just choose something and settle down. Eventually, even her own mother had given up on her, forced her to leave the nest and told her to go find what she was looking for- just wanting to get rid of me, Akiva thought bitterly. Since then, nearly two centuries later, she had wandered the earth moving from cave to cave until she had stopped at her current one, never finding anything she liked well enough to dedicate her life to hoarding. She spent most of her days now taking naps, catching prey, and generally avoiding the world, and that is what she intended to return to once she figured out what to do with these children.

A couple hours later, Akiva reached the outskirts of the village and woke Cayson to show her the way. His parents lived in a decent-sized cottage on the east side of the village, opposite the forest and mountains. As they crept through the sleeping village, they passed through an area on the west side filled with people sleeping outside on the ground, huddled in small groups, looking like they had nowhere else to go. Akiva quietly relit a few of their dying campfires, hoping to keep them a little warmer than they would have been otherwise. Just as she reached the end of the groups, she heard whispering behind her. Cayson had climbed off her back and was talking to a young girl in a tattered dress and leggings huddled in a corner. Akiva watched them, and after a moment, the pair tiptoed back over to her through the darkness.

“This is my friend Dalia. She’s coming with us!” Cayson announced proudly, in the loudest whisper Akiva had ever heard. He turned to the girl and gestured to Akiva. “I TOLD you I had a dragon!”

Dalia shook her head in disbelief. “I can see that. What I’m still wrapping my head around is you finally deciding to run away from your parents.” She gave him a blank look. “I thought it was bad enough that my parents died when I was little, but the way yours treat you...” She drifted off, then continued, “I’d have left ages ago.”

Cayson shrugged. “You know I couldn’t leave Ozzy. Let’s go get his bunny.” With that, the four of them continued into the darkness in search of a very important stuffed rabbit for one well-loved little human boy.

It was about an hour before sunrise when Akiva and her three children returned to her den to finally get some rest after a long night of travelling. Akiva was so tired that she almost crawled straight into her nest but stopped at the mouth of her cave. This wasn’t going to work. The night before, when they had tried going to bed for the first time, the cave was snug enough for three of them, even though Oslac was still so little. Now that Dalia had joined them, there was no way everyone would be able to fit inside. In an exhausted moan of defeat, she went inside without them and pulled out all the soft mosses, leaves, and other materials she had used to make her nest and reconstructed it outside among the bushes. The night was still cool, but at least they had each other to keep them warm. They all snuggled up together and fell right to sleep.

They were not asleep for long before Akiva was woken to more screaming. With all the ferocity of a dragon who had run out of energy to be patient and just needed to be left alone, she leapt into the air with a roar and roasted the nearest tree. Flapping her wings to keep her above the ground where she could see everything, she took in the scene with a mixture of anger and horror. Wolves were dragging away her children from her nest, one wolf pulling on each child’s clothing, two working together on Cayson. He fought with his signature determination, but still could not win. She cursed herself for allowing this to happen, for thinking even for a second they could all sleep outside, unprotected by the walls of a cave. She should have taken all of them to a new one immediately instead of taking a nap outside first. She dove down and clamped her strong jaws down on one of the wolves’ legs, throwing it off Dalia’s back. Dalia screamed and ran towards the cave, but two more crept out from the entrance, fangs bared. Akiva lashed her tail, knocking back three wolves that were advancing towards Cayson. She fought them all off as best she could, but there were too many of them, and she was too tired to keep up. By the time she reached the end of her battle, a dozen bloodied wolves were scattered around the clearing, and she realized Oslac was missing. The more she thought about it, the more furious she became. Those wolves were far too organized to be a regular pack. They were intelligent and well trained- the wolves of a slave trader. They had her baby.

She found Dalia hunched over Cayson inside the cave. She could only fit her head inside to see them with the two of them in there, but she could see that Cayson had tried to fight them off and lost. He had a nasty-looking bite mark across his upper arm and Dalia was doing her best to care for the wound with a piece of fabric from her dress, her dirty blonde hair sticking to her tear-streaked face. From what Akiva could tell, he would be okay, but it would certainly leave a scar. The boy looked up as Akiva entered, and with pleading eyes, whimpered, “Ozzy?”

Akiva averted her gaze. She knew she had lost him, and she had to get him back. She waited patiently outside the small cave while Dalia took care of Cayson, then guided them both back out. She had determined that she was going to track down the slave trader who set those wolves on their camp and rescue Oslac.

Akiva walked through the paths of the mountains as quickly as she could, following the scent of wolves, with Cayson riding on her back and Dalia walking next to her. Dalia was much quieter and more solemn than Cayson, and since he slept until nearly midday, Akiva could hear the hustle and bustle of the forest and kept her ears alert for any stray noises that would indicate danger. They traveled miles and miles before they came to the edge of a cliff overlooking a large valley. It was ringed with pine trees and aspens that came down from the mountains before giving way to fields of grasses and wildflowers. In the lowest part of the valley was a lake with beaches of sand and wet clay as well as a narrow bridge leading out to a small island topped with a crumbling stone castle. Hanging from one of the battlements was a banner emblazoned with a golden dragon fang trapped in the clutches of a knotted rope. Akiva knew within an instant that this is what they had been searching for and instinctively started to growl, accidentally startling the kids.

As they began their descent along the path down the cliffs, Akiva came up with a plan. She could see an alcove half hidden in the base of the outer castle wall where she would hide the children before going in to find Oslac. She couldn’t put them in any further danger of the wolves or their owners. They crossed through the edge of the forest, across the fields, waded out to the old wooden bridge, and finally arrived at the bottom of the once-grand staircase leading up to a pair of heavy wooden doors, half rotted away. At this point, she shuffled the two children over to the alcove she had spotted earlier and made them stay put by growling at them and showing her fangs when they tried protesting. Finally, with a quick lick to each of their foreheads to show them she would be back soon, she lifted her wings and entered the ancient castle from above.

The moment she landed inside the expansive inner chamber through a hole in the roof she was greeted by not only half a dozen of the remaining snarling wolves but also about fifteen of the slave-trader’s little helpers, all dressed in black. The wolves might take a moment to subdue, but she knew even with their swords and spears these humans were no match for her strength. As fueled by rage as she was, she made quicker work of the wolves than she expected and was able to all but ignore the spears bouncing off her hard scales. Rounding on the humans who would be so bold as to take her children, she snapped her jaws at them, relieving the first man of one of his arms and the next of his head. She swung her razor-sharp tail around, breaking spears in half and throwing swords far beyond their reach. They may have been wise in choosing a defensible location like the castle, but there was no stopping a dragon.

She was making excellent progress, but one of the men, a newcomer wearing black clothes like the rest but with the addition of dark metal armor over it and the same golden fang from the banner outside painted on the breastplate, suddenly flung a small black ball through the air in her direction as the others quickly pulled masks over their heads. All at once her eyes, ears, nose, and then lungs were filled with such a thick black smoke that she could no longer tell where she was or what was happening. She felt bruises forming under her scales as a few heavy hits came along her side, then a large welt on her cheek, and finally the sharp sting of a blade directly into her fleshy, unprotected armpit brought her to the ground. As the smoke began to clear, she coughed a few times to clear her lungs, lying weakly on the ground. She could now hear the guards laughing at her, preparing to finish her off, and she closed her eyes. She had failed.

Just then, a new sound entered her ears. A faint yelling, growing louder by the minute, was coming from the other side of the rotting exterior doors just before they came crashing to the stone floor. She opened her eyes to see Dalia and Cayson running towards her, a noble battle cry parting their innocent lips. No, Akiva thought, confused. They’re going to get hurt! Why couldn’t they have stayed outside? But as they ran closer, her mind and eyesight cleared a little more and she realized they weren’t alone. Dozens and dozens of children poured through the doorway, echoing the same battle cry as that of their fearless leaders, picking up rocks and pieces of wood to throw at their imprisoners. One taller boy even pried a piece of metal out of the fallen door and prepared to use it as a sword. Akiva twisted her head from her position on the floor to look back at the black-clad men just to see them all raise their weapons again.

A new, more powerful anger rose within Akiva. Not again. She was not going to let them hurt even one of these children. “THEY’RE MINE!” she bellowed in the best imitation of a human voice she could muster. Her forked dragon tongue did not make it easy, but she was not going to be misunderstood. This was her hoard. These were her kids. No one would be able to take them away from her.

She stood up and watched the men’s faces, now alike in expressions of complete shock and terror, grow smaller and smaller before her. No, that wasn’t right. She was getting bigger. She realized with a start that now, instead of standing a couple feet taller than these men at her full height, she now towered above them at a height three or four times theirs. A small dragon smile crept across her lips. This was going to be easy.

Akiva picked up each one of the guards with her teeth and tossed them back through the hole in the ceiling through which she had entered and with one final snap and a swallow, ate their armored leader whole. Her stomach acid would be more than enough to dissolve his metallic outer shell. She beamed down happily at her new hoard, now safe and sound. The children cheered. There were so many of them! She bent her neck down to look into the eyes of Cayson, who was now holding a giggling Oslac. The toddler was amazed at the beams of light cast by her scales now, so much so that he didn’t seem to mind that he needed another diaper change. Cayson told her all about how they had found a secret entrance to the dungeon from the alcove where Akiva had left them before going inside, sneaking out all the imprisoned children at once and recruiting them to her aid. She couldn’t be prouder.

The castle was much bigger than it had originally looked from the outside, and Akiva made it her new home. Now freed from their imprisonment and no longer fated to live out their lives as slaves, many of the kidnapped children went home to their families. Akiva was happy to let them. However, most of the children who had been locked in the dungeons were ones who had been lost or abandoned before getting captured by the slave traders and had nowhere else to go. Instead, they formed a thunder of their own. Occasionally the older children would travel to nearby villages and bring back more forgotten kids to join Akiva’s hoard. They all took care of each other, and she protected them for centuries to come. Even as many grew up and left, she would always be there to welcome newcomers and listen to any child prattle on about his or her interests. They loved her, and she loved them in return. She had found her hoard.