The Namesake

Deep in the crags of the High Mountains (yes, reader, the mapmaker who’d first drawn them had been grossly underpaid), a cavern the size of a city was hidden. For half a century now, its occupants had continued deepening the magic that kept it secret, and that kept them secret, from the prying eyes of the outside world.

Unfortunately, their spells had gotten a touch too effective.

The dragon stood, teeth chattering, peering through a fresh bout of snowfall at his map. He hadn’t needed assistance to navigate back to his own home in years, but the other members of his den had insisted that additional security was becoming more necessary by the day. Hence, the navigation-scrambling spell that now hung low over this part of the mountain range, leaving one very weather-beaten dragon frowning through the snow.

A rustle in the brush to his left made him start, but it was only the child.

The dragon was not overly fond of children, and was even less fond of this one’s particularly creepy habit of staring, silently, at the back of his head. He cleared his throat, but the child was unmoving from his post in the brush. It stared at him quizzically, eyeing the tall boots and starched hood he wore. Even at the age of—what, four? Perhaps five?—the child had no doubt been raised with a different idea of what a ‘dragon’ might look like.

Too bad, thought this particular dragon, shrugging the snowfall off his shoulders. You can’t please everyone.

Today was his fourth day having sole custody of a tiny human. He hadn’t the first idea how to treat one, other than to proffer food and drink and back away slowly. So far, this had proved only moderately effective.

He needed to get it to the den. There were nursemaids there who could help him contend with the consequences of his actions.

I’ll need to add kidnapping to my list of acquired skills, thought the dragon, peering warily at his newfound ward. He tried not to dwell for too long on the problematic nature of the tasks the den required of him.

How had the great dragons of old been reduced to this?

— * —

He had nearly missed the village entirely on his first pass four days ago, so nestled was it amid the Roving Foothills. From above, the copse of redwood trees that encircled the place looked like a dark, crooked crown. Even the smoke rising from scattered chimneys was obscured by the lingering fog.

Spooky. Isolated. A poor place to spend a holiday. But the dragon was tired from his hunt and growing damp in the damned fog, and even a gloomy little village like this one was bound to have a pub.

The stories you’ve read before tell it the wrong way, readers: if there is one thing that dragons covet, it is not gold, but strong, dark beer.

For a village so hidden from the outside world, the walls surrounding it were formidable. Six feet thick, and made of stone. This was a good sign, thought the dragon, for walls like this were not built merely to keep out unwanted guests. They were blackened with pitch, a fireproofing attempt meant to strengthen stone and mortar. Downward-facing spikes protruded from the apex, crafted to prevent climbers much larger than a man.

A beast of his kind had not been seen here in decades, the dragon knew. But the memories of the people that dwelt here were fresh.

The dragon’s lips curved upward. And he strolled, unhindered, through the open gates. A single guard pointed the way to the pub, a warning horn hanging limp and rusting at his side.

The dragon found the beer at this particular pub to be adequate at best. It was neither strong nor dark, its froth limpid and too warm. He ordered another

“It’s been months since the last stranger passed through these parts,” the barkeep told him as he topped him up.

“Not many travelers this far north?”

“Nay,” the barkeep agreed. “You’re the first in a month.”

The dragon licked lukewarm froth from his upper lip. “And dragons?”

The barkeep laughed. “Don’t be daft. Them’s extinct!”

“Really,” said the dragon.

A nod. “Drove the last one off fifty years back, so they say. Never saw it, myself. But there ain’t no more, not here, not anywhere.”

The dragon traced a finger around the rim of his tankard. “Anyone left in town who did see him? It,” he corrected.

“Old Arold swears he did,” the barkeep replied, an unsettled look perching on his brow. He nodded toward the man a few seats down from the dragon, who did not look up at the sound of his name. He had the hunched shoulders and grisled beard of someone who might be called “Old Arold,” but the other patrons seemed to give him a wide berth.

The dragon drained his beer, tilting his next words in the direction of the old man. “There are some folk that say dragons are a myth entirely. A trick, conjured by magicians who could bend light and matter. Hardly the monsters they sing songs about…”

“Those folk are wrong,” grumbled Old Arold, proving easier to bait than the dragon had thought. He cocked an eyebrow, lifting his beer in the universal gesture of, ‘please, elaborate.’

“I seen more than one in my day,” Arold grumbled (the dragon was beginning to feel a touch guilty about the “old” bit). “Length of twelve horses, scales like the sea.”

The dragon began making mental notes. “Here? Did they attack the town?”

Arold shook his head. “The wall…” he began, then trailed off with a shake of his head. “They never used fire, never wrought destruction. Come to think of it,” je added, scratching his chin, “I never saw one fly. Just drakes, they were, all legs and no wings.”

Ah, thought the dragon, gesturing the barkeep for another refill. That explains the spikes.

The legends concerning dragons and their habits were disparate, changing from region to region just as religions or fables might. In one village, dragons might be blamed for missing gold or jewels (again, readers, a misconception that failed to take beer into account). In another, they were the reason for bad weather, or failed crops. Missing livestock was another classic.

“The children,” said Arold suddenly, and the dragon felt an icy stone drop into the pit of his stomach. “That’s what they were after. Anytime a dragon came to these parts, a child would go missing. If they wandered past the walls…” Arold shook his head, drawing an ominous line across his throat.

The dragon coughed. “Well. Surely one or two of the children lived to tell the tale…”

“Never saw them again,” Arold drove ahead, ordering a subsequent beer of his own. “Dragons took them…whether to eat or hoard away or maim, they never left so much as the bones.”

Such talk of bones and viscera made the dragon uncomfortable, an irony that was not lost on him. He sat for a long while, allowing Arold to regale him with other stories of the village and its past woes, but the key takeaways were these: the people of this village, who had all but forgotten the existence of dragons, had only Arold’s word to go on…and upon Arold’s word, dragons were wingless, did not breathe fire, and had a penchant for pilfering children who wandered beyond the town’s considerable walls.

The dragon could work within these parameters.

Days later, the town was abuzz with the news. A massive dragon, wingless and glittering blue-green, had been spotted on the crest of the far hill. No damage had been done to the town, or its fortified walls, or the livestock or crops therein. But the town was short one small child, no more than five years of age, who had disappeared from the orphan’s house near the village gate. He’d had a penchant for exploring, the nursemaid said, and had wandered beyond the walls before…the gate guard had fallen asleep in the middle of that day, only to be awoken by a vicious roar. Old Arold shook his head and retold his tales at the pub that night, and more than a few former disbelievers were speaking of dragons as a real threat before the night was out.

— * —

And now, here the dragon was—stuck in the High Mountains, boots soaked through with snowfall, wind whipping the warmth from his bones, with a blasted toddler winding around his legs. Perfect.

He wondered who would miss this child. Or worse, whether anyone would, beyond the circulation of a story to frighten and entertain.

The dragon shut his eyes, willing his sense of direction to pierce the magical haze protecting the den, and scooped the child up beneath its arms. It made a small sound of protest, but then they were airborne, and the dragon could not tell whether its silence came from terror or wonder.

Don’t be too surprised, readers. Most beings of magic were capable of flight, whether they looked like the dragons you might see drawings of in books, or whether they wore boots and scowls.

After a few unsuccessful efforts, the dragon’s force of will finally deposited him, and his cargo, at the entrance to the cavern. He clambered up, pausing to extend a hand toward the child for comfort. The child did take his hand, but did not look nearly as unsettled as the dragon had expected, given that it had just been snatched from its home and flown into the mountains to a dragons’ den.

The child maintained this narrow-eyed composure during the walk through the foyer, the dining commons, the group bedchambers, and finally to the inner sanctum, each of which was full of other dragon-named humanoids with curious stares of their own.

The inner sanctum was where the eldest members of the den gathered to make decisions, but it was also simply where they gathered to shoot the breeze. It was impossible to tell which one they were in the middle of at this moment, but conversation ceased as every had turned toward the dragon and his unannounced child.

“Epimetheus,” growled the dragon’s least favorite elder, voice snagging on the contours of his name.

“M’lady,” he replied.

The elder dragon nodded toward the child, who had already released Epimetheus’s hand and was tottering off toward a stained-glass window, one of the many such physics-defying features of the den.

“The price of belief?” asked the elder.

Epimetheus nodded. “A secluded village in the foothills, m’lady. Their legends were…very specific.” He threw another glance at the child, who was now curled in the windowsill staring out at the snow.

Would he miss the little thing, when the nursemaids came to whisk it away while Epimetheus was sent out, once again, to spin an illusion for the next unsuspecting town?

“The price of belief,” repeated the elder, and this time other voices in the room joined hers. “Our bearing of the dragon’s namesake is the most sacred charge of our lives, Epimetheus. You know that the true dragons of lore will rise again…that they must rise again, to cull the human tide.”

Epimetheus shuddered. “Yes, m’lady.”

“And you know what becomes possible when the masses believe...” she prompted.

The child turned to look at him then, and Epimetheus could not tell if it was compassion or mischief he saw on its cherubic, creepy face. The one thing he could tell, readers, is that against all odds, he liked this absurd little creature. He was not sure what to do with this realization, but could feel a shaky smile prick the corners of his lips.

He heard the words leave his own lips without taking his eyes from the child’s:

“The impossible.”