Elian's Dragon

Elian did not allow his gaze to stray from the dragon egg.

The shell was almost translucent, a network of delicate, vein-like structures weaving across its surface. Its throbbing light cast a soft glow and revealed a faint outline of the baby curled up inside.

Elian’s heart matched its cadence as he started his incantations. His slender fingers, nimble from years of poring over potions, trembled as he sprinkled a fine dust of herbs over the egg.

A profound silence enveloped the chamber as the last words left his lips. The shell shuddered, and a network of cracks began to spider across its surface. Elian leaned forward, his eyes wide with wonder.

Screeeeeeee!

The egg burst into tiny pieces, and the dragon emerged. Its scales shimmered and shined like precious sapphires and rubies, even in the dim candlelight.

The dragon, no larger than a house cat, shook its delicate wings for the first time. Its eyes, orbs of molten gold, met Elian’s with a cleverness that belied its nascent state. Its screeches bore into his soul and minted an instantaneous bond.

Elian’s bliss melted as a long shadow fell over the newborn. He turned to see Master Varis, cloaked in a midnight blue robe, with an impassive face.

“You nearly lost this one. You are lucky I was here,” Varis said in his squeaky voice with a slight sigh. “Now, dust the library.”

The dragon reached out, its tiny claws trying to grasp Elian’s robe before he was too far away. He had no choice but to ignore its gesture.

The apprentice sulked through the stone corridors of the tower with a heavy heart. Even the flickering torches seemed to mock him despite his successful dragon hatching.

Elian loathed the library. It was thick with an old parchment smell - a musty, acrid aroma that clung to the scrolls and ancient tomes. The room cast an eerie, green light emitting from crystals embedded in the walls. Shelves carved from ancient wood reached up to the vaulted ceiling, their reaches obscured by the perpetual gloom.

He started dusting, but his mind wandered to the locked door of Master Varis’s private library. The temptation to try to break its enchantment threatened to burn him from within.

He felt more disgusted with every swipe of the goose feathers against the leather-bound books. He knew their contents all too well. Everything on the wall he serviced contained the names of hundreds of thousands of dragons. Each hatched only to become slaves or soldiers to kings, wizards, and dukes with mounds of gold to hoard.

Suddenly, the lock to the forbidden section shook, hissed, and popped. It folded from the violent vibrations and shattered into thousands of metal shards.

Elian’s heart pounded at the violent serendipity.

“Did I make that happen?” he asked himself with the slightest crack in his voice.

He could see the room beyond and a leather-bound grimoire on a golden stand in the center. Master Varis’ pride would not allow him to place a book with profound knowledge on anything less than a pedestal.

Potential consequences flashed before his mind’s eye. The last apprentice who dared to enter the private section never returned. The gargled screams that echoed through the tower still haunted him.

Screeeeeeee!

The infant dragon’s cry pierced his ears and his heart. Even the villagers miles away must have heard it.

The silence that followed was far worse. The only explanation was that Master Varis had started the spell to quench dragon fire.

“Not this time,” Elian said to himself as he strode toward the entrance to the private library. “Not this dragon.”

He did not hesitate at the threshold. The young apprentice ran headlong into the darkness and toward the center.

Elian winced at the thought of the tomes of arcane and dangerous knowledge flying past his peripheral vision. The grimoire on the stand would hold solutions, but he lusted for weeks to explore the other books.

Grooooowl!

A profound force pushed him from behind and tripped him into a roll. His ribs reported a sharp pain as the heavy and unyielding pedestal arrested his momentum.

Grooooowl!

Elian regrettably locked eyes with his attacker. A seven-foot-tall lycanthrope snarled back at him.

“Good boy?” he quipped.

The beast charged toward him on all fours. He scrambled to stand with intense pain by grabbing the top of the pedestal.

The first few words for a fireball spell left his mouth before a dark void enveloped him. It fell moments before the lycanthrope’s jaws snapped into his face.

***

Elian assumed he must have died, but he still had breath in his lungs and a heartbeat. The only things in the void were himself, the pedestal, and the book under his left hand.

The pain in his ribs had disappeared, but so had anything resembling life. The air around him felt chilling, indifferent, and stifling.

The grimoire started to glow, and its words leaped from the pages. The letters swirled and formed an ominous sonnet:

You have stumbled upon this chamber uninvited,

and our kind does not care for interlopers.

You may become affrighted,

but you can survive by channeling the potwallopers.

They managed to earn their suffrages

by boiling their pots in their fireplaces.

You can achieve similar patronages

if you are willing to accept dark embraces.

Your life will become crushed in this borough

should you refuse to participate.

Do not allow your brow to furrow

less you lose your chance to principate.

Now declare your passion

either for yourself or for your dragon.

The words dissolved along with part of the void, and a distant sun started to rise miles away. Elian could barely see a few feet ahead, but the unmistakable shadows of flying dragons danced in the sky.

Blinding light pierced his eyes as the pedestal burst into emerald-colored flames. He took a few steps backward and watched the magic consume itself and become a cauldron.

The water inside boiled with the same intensity as his mother’s when she cooked for Elian and his seven siblings. Unfortunately, the soothing sounds of her sing-song voice were nowhere to be found.

Hahahahahahahaha!

Elian had only heard Master Varis laugh one time during his apprenticeship. The same chill ran up his bones as it had when the wizard took joy in frying a rare dragon egg for breakfast last Christmas.

Screeeeeeee!

The dragon he hatched appeared, but fully grown and bound in chains. Despite the adult appearance, it cried like a newborn. The confusion in its gleaming eyes was palpable, and they begged for answers he did not have.

“Baby boy...” Elian started until the dragon shook its head in protest. “Sorry, baby girl.”

A few tense seconds passed before he realized what game he had to play. His mother had told him many years before about wizards trapped in nothingness. Their only hope for escape was to have a dragon wing potion to slip back into the sands of time.

“No!” he cried.

The dragon recoiled in fear at his angry protest.

“It’s alright,” he reassured her. “I’m not mad at you. I will find another way or die trying.”

She accepted his words and laid her head flat. The chains weighed her down so much that he worried they would sink her into the void.

“We all make this choice eventually,” Varis’ terrible and shrill voice proclaimed. “Progress at her expense or fade into nothingnesssssss.”

The hissing stabbed at his brainstem and stoked rage. Elian closed his eyes in response and focused his breath.

Whimpers from the dragon pulled him back into what served as his reality. The sun was a third of the way to its apex, and the void started turning into the fields where he grew up.

Elian checked the cauldron. The boiling had weakened.

“How long have I been here?” he asked himself.

He looked at the dragon and lost his breath when he realized she had aged at least ten years. The hues of her wings had faded like other beautiful beasts he cared for during his apprenticeship.

The sun blazed brighter, its distant roar growing louder by the second.

Elian suppressed another frustrated scream and took tentative steps toward the dragon.

“I won’t hurt you,” he assured her with an outstretched arm. She did not move. She trusted him implicitly and naively.

Elian knelt and placed his forehead on hers. He kept his eyes closed, but the terrible light grew brighter. The veins on the back of his eyelids appeared in their twisted form, and the boiling sounds had all but subsided behind him.

“I don’t know how to save us,” he cried.

Abrupt darkness overtook them. Elian opened his eyes, but even the gold of her corneas did not shine mere inches away.

Light returned in full blast and assaulted his eyes. He discovered that he no longer held a middle-aged beast as they recovered. Streaks of gray crossed her scales, and the gold in her eyes had lost all luster.

“Time has broken down for both of us, but at least we have each other.”

She lifted her head to meet his gaze, but the cruelty of the trap dampened their moment together.

Despite the expanding sun, the air remained frigid and unforgiving. Only the flicker of emotional warmth between them remained as everything became lost in a whiteout.

***

Varis could barely allow himself to continue watching the dragon egg.

The shell was thick, rough, and devoid of light. There was no way of knowing whether a baby could be inside.

Varis’ heart beat inconsistently and out of rhythm as he butchered the ancient vocabulary. His arthritic fingers, stiff from years of failing to create potions, dropped more herbs over the egg than he intended.

The roar of the torches on the walls increased as he fumbled the final words of the spell. Then, the top of the egg blew open, and he shielded his eyes from the flying shells.

Screeeeeeee!

The dragon’s head thrust through the opening with a fury he could not recognize. It flexed its obsidian scales that seemed to absorb the light around it.

It was a massive infant, nearly the size of a full-grown puma already. Its eyes, orbs of silver, stared through Varis with a banal evil that broke his spirit. Each screech grew deeper in tone and grated on his soul.

His despair deepened as a shallow shadow fell over the newborn. He turned to see Master Elian, cloaked in a crimson robe, with a beaming smile.

“You nearly lost this one. You are lucky I was here.” Elian said eagerly in his baritone voice. “Now, dust the library.”