The Reckoning

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday dear Violet

Happy birthday to youuuuuu!

Violet stared blankly at the white cake in front of her. Nineteen candles flickered festively. She barely heard the singing behind her.

"Make a wish," Josh leaned into her, kissing her cheek, "Happy birthday, beautiful, I love you."

She snapped out of her daze, smiled, closed her eyes and made a wish, blowing all 19 candles out in a single huff. It was all for show. She knew her wish wouldn’t come true.

“I love you too,” she reached out and took Josh’s hand.

This past year had been the best of Violet’s life. For the first time, she felt settled, she felt like she belonged. She had a job she loved, an apartment of her own, a small, but wonderful circle of friends and she had Josh.

He was the best boyfriend ever. He had fallen in love with Violet almost at first sight. He didn’t care that her eyes were too big and round. He didn’t care that her teeth were a little too pointy. He didn’t care that she often seemed like a fish out of water in social situations. He just loved her for her, or at least as much of her as she’d been able to share with him .

And she loved him. He was tall, with sandy hair and hazel eyes. His smile could light up even the darkest of rooms and he was whip-smart with a sharp, biting wit and a macabre sense of humour. Not everybody got him, but Violet did. T hey were almost a perfect couple, perfectly in sync, yet cognisant and respectful, even appreciative of each other's differences.

Tears began to well up behind her eyes. How could she leave everything she’d built over the past year? How could she leave Josh? It didn’t seem fair. But fair or not, she had to make a choice and she had to make it tonight.

She thought back to her childhood, to her adoptive parents and how they came to take her in. She’d heard her father tell the story so many times that she almost felt the tale as a memory of her own.

It was a little over 17 years ago. Reued was hunting for berries and edible ferns in the Orphic Weald, a large, dense wooded area in Conjure Enchantia, the 3rd largest of 7 realms in the Mageria world.

He was about 4 hours into his work when he stopped to rest by a stream and heard a strange noise, a gurgling, cooing sort of sound, followed by a soft shuffling of grass and leaves. He looked down and saw a tiny creature.

It was the funniest looking thing he’d ever seen. So small, only about 2 and ½ feet, with pinkish-white smooth skin, a round head with a dark down-like covering and two huge eyes that were so dark blue they were almost purple. Wh atever it was appeared to be female.

The little thing reached for him. She was alone and looked like she’d been that way for a while. Her frock was tattered and caked with dirt and her face was streaked with a mix of tears and sand.

He scooped her up and examined her. He held her to the sunlight, trying to get a sense of what kind of beast she might be. She was friendly enough. She patted his huge snout and giggled. He sniffed her, she didn’t smell like food.

He wasn’t sure what she was or how she happened into the Weald, but he was sure he couldn’t leave her there. The little thing might not be food to him, but there were other dragons in the realm that did hunt and eat small game and she was about the smallest creature he’d ever seen.

He carried her in his basket as he continued to pick berries, placing her tiny body on top of the crop when it was full. She babbled and smiled the entire time, sometimes biting into the smaller berries. Whatever this little thing was, it sure could eat!

Reued took her and the berries home to his cave and placed the basket in front of his wife, Winnfida. She wrinkled her greenish-brown nose at the sight of the tiny being.

“This isn’t a berry or a fern,” she said flatly, her amber eyes narrowed into a mix of annoyance and curiosity. It wasn’t the first time Reued brought something home he shouldn’t have.

“I know what it isn’t,” he grinned, “What I want to know is what it is.”

Winnfida snatched the young thing from the basket roughly with one claw. She sniffed it in almost the same manner as her husband had hours before. She turned it over, and around, poked it, touched the raven-coloured down on its head and opened its mouth to examine its teeth. She shook her head and grimaced audibly.

She walked over to the cave’s opening and held it up to the waning sunlight. She noticed a slight greenish tinge to the beast, almost undetectable under the pale, almost porcelain-like skin, but impossible not to notice once you knew it was there.

“I’m not sure what it is,” she mumbled, “I think we’d better consult The Eternal One.”

“Can we keep it?” Reued asked, his voice almost pleading, “It’s awfully cute!”

“We can’t keep it if we don’t know what it is,” his wife rolled her eyes and headed out, “Come on, we’re losing light!”

He followed her and they made the trek to present the small creature to the Eternal One for inspection and advice.

Winnfida stuck out her claw holding the unidentified small beast up toward the Eternal One’s huge dark eye. The huge Cyclops took it from her and looked it over. He poked it, sniffed it and dangled it by its feet.

He placed it back in the female dragon’s grasp and stomped away momentarily, returning with a large leather-bound book. He flipped through it furiously, shaking his head in disbelief.

“What is it?” Reued asked concerned by the elderly cyclops’s demeanour.

“I’ve lived a thousand lives, each one a thousand years,” the ancient one-eyed oracle muttered, “ and I never…”

Terror began to fill Reued’s soul. What had he brought into their lives? He didn't like the sound of The Eternal One's mutterings.

Winnfida shoved the tiny beast to her husband angrily, “You see!” she raised her voice, “You see what you’ve done, bringing strange things home, you see!”

I t wasn't the first time Reued brought a lost creature home. He was just about the most sensitive dragon in the realm. He could never bear to see another creature suffering. She both loved and hated his generous nature.

“Silence!” The Eternal One stood tall, tapping at a page in his book. He towered over the two dragons, “Here, it’s here…”

“What?” the male dragon whined, “What’s here?”

He shoved the book toward the couple. “What you got there is a juvenile Dragumani. It’s a human–dragon mix. When they’re young they’re called Dragumanlets. In all my lives I’ve only ever heard tell of three. Only ever seen one.”

Winnfida stood, dumbfounded at first, then finding her voice asked, “Human – dragon mix? How can that be?”

The one-eyed sage closed the book, “Sometimes, very rarely, humans get themselves trapped here in the realm, either through a dream state that’s gone wrong or by messing around with various concurring tricks that they have no understanding of and no right to be fooling with.”

She nodded. She'd heard of such things but discounted them as legends.

He continued, “In those instances, dragons have been known to mate with them and produce offspring.” He took the child from Reued and held her up again, “Like I said, it’s only happened three times before that I know of.”

Winnfida piped up, “She don’t look no more like a dragon than I do a human!”

Reued shot his wife a sharp look. It wasn’t wise to challenge the Eternal One in such a harsh and direct manner.

The cyclops nodded, unaffected. “I suspect the young thing favours her mother. Did I mention she’s female?”

Reued nodded, “I thought so, I thought she was a girl when I first found her.”

The cyclops continued, “Yes, she is. From what I can tell, her mother was the human, her father the dragon. Genetics between the two can be very complicated. But she’s got dragon in her, the eyes, and that greenish undertone, you probably didn’t notice that, but humans don’t have that from what I’ve studied. Her toes are also showing some signs of webbing.”

Winnfida pointed her claw at her husband and stood a little taller than her usual 11 feet, “I did notice, I said the exact same thing to my husband, I told him, she’s got some sort of green colouring underneath…”

“So…,” Reued began tentatively, needing to know, but afraid of the answer, “What should we do with her?” H e had already fallen in love with the adorable little Dragumanlet.

The Eternal One rubbed his eye and sighed heavily. “You have two choices. You may destroy the creature, or you may raise her as your own and take responsibility for training her in the ways of the dragon.”

“How do we go about destroying it?” Winnfida asked.

“No!” Reued bellowed, his voice shaking the walls of the cavern, “We shall raise her.” He turned to his wife, “How can we destroy something that’s part of us, that’s part dragon?”

The cyclops interjected, “Do know, that should you choose to raise this Dragumanlet as your own, it will be a journey fraught with difficulties.”

Winnfida smirked, shooting Reued a smug sidelong glance.

“Is not raising any young fraught with difficulty?” the male dragon asked.

The old oracle clasped his large claws together, “Yes, indeed, it is. The difficulties you will face will be no more or less severe, but they will be different.”

Winnfida looked him in the eye and asked definitively, “What do you advise?” She was certain she knew the answer.

“I cannot tell you what to do,” he began, “But, given the pledge we all recite to the realm not to do harm to our own kind, and the fact that the child is indeed, half dragon, I would say you must keep her.”

Reued beamed, bowing his head reverently, “Thy will be done, Oh Eternal One!” He bounced with excitement as he gazed at the child, “She shall be known as Violet as a tribute to her eyes.”

The cyclops nodded, pleased. Winnfida lowered her head, defeated, and now resigned to her fate of mothering a Dragumani.

Growing up wasn’t easy for Violet. She enjoyed a great deal of love at home. Her father adored her. Even Winnfida learned to love her. But she wasn’t like the other kids. She wasn’t a young dragon, not completely.

She excelled at her studies and had an engaging, albeit strong personality. But she just didn’t fit in. She looked more human than dragon. She was less than half the size of everyone else. She couldn’t breathe fire like the girls in the Scorchers Club. And she couldn’t fly like many of her classmates. But she could spit hot acid in as true and straight a line as anyone.

She had few if any real friends. Most of the young dragons, cyclopes, and other creatures that came around did so more out of curiosity than any affection or caring for her. She was more sideshow than sidekick.

It was a lonely existence and Violet spent most of her time studying, practicing acid spitting and reading fairy tales about humans. She dreamed often about what it must be like to be a human. She wondered if she’d be accepted by them, if she had gone to a human school in the Earthly realm, would things have been different?

Or would humans be exactly the same? Would she have lived a life just like the one she had been living, set apart, with nobody to look to, nobody to pinpoint as a reference, nobody that made anything about her make sense? Would it be just the same life in a vacuum in a different place?

On the day of her 18th birthday, the day the last leaf fell from the Wisdom Tree, The Eternal One appeared before her, Reued and Winnfida.

“It is time to let the child go,” he began. “At midnight tonight, Violet must leave this realm for Earth to spend one of their years living among the humans.”

Violet’s eyes grew wide as fear and panic filled her, “What? Nobody said anything about me leaving!” She turned to her mother, then her father.

Reued lowered his head, and placed a warm claw on her shoulder, “I was afraid this day would come,” a tear streamed down his large face, “I didn’t want to face it…”

The cyclops continued, “Upon the year’s end, on your 19th birthday, at exactly midnight, I will appear again before you and you will be called upon to choose the world in which you wish to live. The choice will be permanent.”

Violet stood, defiant, glaring up at The Eternal One, “I’m going nowhere. I’m choosing nothing. You can’t make me.”

Reued knelt. He turned her from the cyclops to look her in the eye. “Honey,” he began softly, “He can make you. But let’s not make this a sad thing. Look at it as an opportunity. Look at it as a chance to discover all those things you read in your books. Look at it as a chance to discover yourself, the part of yourself we can’t give you.”

Violet sobbed. She was terrified but also confused. She didn’t want to leave her home for a new world. Yet she did feel a tinge of excitement at the prospect of living among her human kin and learning their ways. The curiosity, the emptiness from not knowing was something she'd lived with for so long. She had to know. She nodded silently.

And at midnight, The Eternal One returned and transported her to her new home in the earthly realm. Her name was to be Violet Dragumani, Humans apparently had both first and last names. She was to live in a small university town in eastern Canada where she worked in a bookstore during the day and took classes most evenings. And she had an apartment to live in all by herself.

The old sage left her a thick book with all manner of information about life as a human from how to operate electrical appliances to how to shop. It even contained a list of things young humans her age generally liked. Much of the information was already known to her through her extensive reading, but much of it came as a surprise, like television. She couldn’t understand why anyone would spend hours on end staring at a screen with people in it doing what seemed to her to be stupid things.

The first little while on Earth, Violet felt as strange as she had in Conjure Enchantia. She felt everyone was staring at her, sizing her up, making note of all the ways she was different.

On a positive note, she enjoyed her classes and her job at the bookstore was easy and pleasant. During breaks, she began following others to go get something called coffee. Humans really liked the hot liquid.

At first, she hated it. It tasted like mud mixed with hot water. But after about a week, she found she couldn’t get through a day without it. As long as she put milk and sugar in it, it was pretty tasty, maybe even better than the fern tea she grew up with.

She also found that every time she went to get some of the hot beverage, the same humans, people, they called themselves, talked to her. They asked her questions and invited her to sit at one of the tables provided in the coffee drinking area with them.

Soon she was invited on outings to movies and to the mall and to parties. It was always with the same humans. They seemed genuinely interested in her. They laughed when she said something stupid, but not in a mean way, it was more sympathetic, like they wanted desperately to show her their ways.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” That was something she was asked often. She always said no and somehow, they filled in their own blanks and were content with whatever conclusions they reached.

The dynamic between young humans and young dragons wasn’t that different as it turned out. The activities and locations were, but there were in crowds and outsiders. There were people who looked different from each other but still looked the same in that human kind of way. And there were different levels of different abilities. But none of them could spit acid. Of course, she already knew that. And she never talked about it. Humans, as she discovered, got freaked out pretty easily.

One day, while sipping her coffee, one of the group, Josh said, “You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.” He gazed at her with such admiration.

Violet giggled nervously. She liked Josh. He asked her for a date. She agreed and they soon became inseparable.

How was she supposed to give up the life she built? Why was she even considering it?

As the birthday festivities wound down around her, she lapsed in and out of her troubled thoughts just long enough to give the impression of having a good time.

Her friends began leaving until only Josh was left. It was almost 11 pm. He kissed her softly, the door open behind him, “Happy birthday, baby, I love you, see ya tomorrow.”

Violet nodded, choking back her tears, knowing he wouldn’t see her the next day at all.

She closed the door behind her boyfriend and allowed the tears to flow freely. She had just an hour to make her choice and still no idea what she would do. Whichever choice she contemplated felt like cutting off a piece of herself.

She sighed. She thought about her life on Earth. She thought about her friends, her job, her classes and of course, she thought of Josh. They had discussed moving in together for the upcoming school year.

She thought about how well he knew her. And how well he didn’t know her. No one knew about her lineage. To them, Dragumani was just her last name, not her species.

She thought about her parents and her cave. She thought about the fun-filled days picking berries in the Orphic Weald with her father and the times she spent making teas and jellies with her mother. There was a familiarity there that didn’t exist in the earthly realm.

She reached for a piece of paper and a pen and began to write:

Dearest Josh,

It breaks my heart to do this. I don’t want to leave you. I love you so much. I love our life together. I want more than anything to stay here with you, but I can’t. I have to go home where I belong…

A fat tear fell on the page. She stopped and ripped the paper from the coils. She started again:

Dearest Josh,

I have something I must tell you. It’s difficult to explain. I’m not sure where to begin. But I love you and trust you. I have decided to stay here, with you, to build a life with you. However, in order to do that, I must be honest with you.

There’s something you don’t know about me…

That was no good either. She ripped that page from the notebook and tossed it on the floor. How could she seriously contemplate telling him she’s half-dragon? This wasn’t some fantasy story; this was her life!

Anger replaced her sadness, and she was no closer to making a decision when midnight struck and The Eternal One appeared before her.

“It is time, young Violet,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion.

Something in his flat tone irritated her. It was as if he had no regard for how difficult this was, how confusing. It was as if he didn’t care.

“I need more time,” she spat.

“There is no more time, choose now.” He commanded.

“No!” she looked up at him, eyes blazing defiantly.

“You have been warned, child,” the cyclops said sternly, “No more games, choose.” His voice seemed to weaken slightly.

Violet noticed the slight shakiness and grinned.

“I will not choose,” she repeated, standing firm

The old oracle appeared to shrink noticeably. “Choose now!” he commanded, his voice starting to sound more like he was pleading not ordering.”

“I will not choose,” Violet said it again, gaining strength as quickly as the cyclops seemed to lose it. “I am a Dragumani. I am a dragon. I am human. I am both!”

“Chooose….” His voice now small.

The defiant young girl continued, “I belong to the Earthy Realm and to that of Conjure Enchantia. Both are my birthright and I renounce neither.”

“Choooo…” a tiny squeak from a large puddle where The Eternal One once was.

Violet placed her feet squarely in the puddle, a definitive act of disdain. “I claim my birthright as a citizen of Earth and a citizen of Conjure Enchantia. I claim my heritage as a human and a dragon. I choose none and I choose both. I choose me!” Then for good measure, she added, “Maybe I’ll even marry Josh and have a baby with him, a Dragumani of The Second Order…”

And, nothing. She waited, slightly nervous. Nothing. The puddle vanished. So much for The Eternal One’s eternity.

She ran to the bathroom and spit acid into the toilet. That still worked, straight, strong and true. Her powers were intact.

She inhaled and concentrated deeply. She felt her body shift. She opened her eyes and there she was, back at the cave with her parents.

Reued grabbed her with both claws, “Violet, you shouldn’t be here! There’s been a huge shaking of the realm. The balance of power has shifted. They say The Eternal One has been destroyed!” He was ecstatic to see his precious girl, but this was not the time.

Winnfida was crouching, almost cowering, in the corner.

Violet pulled from her father’s embrace and went to her mother. She placed her hand on her face and said, “Everything’s fine. I destroyed the silly old thing.”

Silence.

She continued, “When the time came to choose life here or life as a human, I refused. I am both. I claim both. He disintegrated as I claimed my birthright and my power.”

Winnfida came to her feet slowly, staring at her daughter in disbelief, “You?”

She nodded.

“Well, now what?”

Violet smiled, “Now nothing. Now, I go back to Earth and live my life, but I’ll visit as often as I can.”

Reued looked at her quizzically, “You can do that?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

He smiled, “Can you stay a while?”

“Not this time, Daddy,” she replied, “I have to get back, but I'll be back for the next big feast."

He nodded and gave his baby girl one last hug.

And with that, she transported herself to her apartment. She looked around. Both pieces of crumpled paper were gone as were any traces of the cyclops. She smiled and wondered to herself, “How on earth do I explain all this to Josh?” Maybe she should have kept that piece of paper.