phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

“With Regard to Dragons”
by Johne Cook

It was a clear day in early summer and by the look of it, the farmer had been traveling for some time. He seemed genuinely happy, relieved, in fact, to pick up his passenger at the stark crossroads, no questions asked, despite finding him dressed from head-to-toe in black leather, including leather gauntlets and boots.

“I’m Plowman Emos Het,” said the farmer by way of introduction, “of the Frenk district on the edge of the great plains, known for fresh eggs, plump mushrooms, juicy fruits, and crisp vegetables, on my way to the big market in Kenatos proper”.

The stranger looked dry and cool despite his black leather regalia. His passenger climbed up on the buckboard and put down a black leather helmet, complete with what appeared to be goggles. “Gresh”, he said.

Gresh noted that the farmer had a practiced sheen of sweat on his brow in the mid-day sun. This was a man unafraid of work or looking foolish in front of a stranger. It could be interesting to see what would shake this man of the earth.

Plowman Het got the horses going forward and launched into the usual conversations about whatever family and community he found himself tethered to, but that was merely the price you pay for the really good gossip. After an hour, he eventually got around to a topic that Gresh was especially interested in.

“Out on the edge of nowhere, even legitimate news becomes suspect and genuinely odd events or creatures take on a life of their own. In short, it becomes something of a trick to separate the fact from the fiction” said the farmer.

“Not that any of that bothers me. Gives me something to think about on these long trips. For instance, some people talk about the laughing dogs that run in packs of three out on the Dervish plains. Or consider the two-headed bears of Alkire (especially interesting because one head eats the fish and another the meat – one wonders what they’d do with a captured chicken). And don’t forget the stories about the cat-men of the Fyundalar, them who appear as men by day but transform at night – if the light is right, you can see their yellow cat eyes peering out at you from the black.” Emos Het shivered and noticed Gresh grin privately to himself.

With the practiced ease of one long-used to starting discussion with strangers, the farmer easily bridged any gaps in conversation as they bumped along. At one such occasion, he got down to it.

“Have you heard the one about the fire-breathing dragons?”

Gresh glanced over at him, thought about it, and then shook his head once, absently. If his true interest was suddenly pricked, he successfully kept it to himself.

That was all the excuse the good plowman needed to launch into a recital of dragon-tales that lasted through the afternoon as they watched the trees grow up out of the horizon and turn into the Roanoak Wood. No matter how hard he tried, he never could get his passenger to laugh, although he kept trying, determined to succeed by the end of the day if it killed him.

By the time they reached the woods, the lengthening shadows of the tall trees reached toward them with intangible fingers. Gresh noticed the farmer’s eyes start to dart about. Knowing something of what was to come, Gresh took this opportunity to don a plain brown cloak. It was comical to note that even gathering dread wasn’t putting a dent in the constant stream of stories coming from his host.

The plowman was relating stories about the greatest fire-breathing dragon of them all when he stopped, cold.

Eight dark mages appeared in the clearing on on equeres, the magic steeds bred to be attuned to their black arts. The archmage pulled up last. They all surrounded the cart without saying a word.

Gresh leaned back on a bag of grain with his hands clasped behind his head, watching. From the farmer’s expression, Gresh noted that the mages must have appeared to have melted out of the forest on their fearsome mounts.

Gresh knew better, of course, having some experience with such things.

There was no discussion. After a long moment broken only by the sound of creaking leather from saddles all around, four of the mages rose as one to stand on their saddles. Their mounts didn’t move a muscle, a credit to their training. Or their creation.

The farmer’s expression was grim, and he was, finally, silent.

Standing on the backs of their steeds, the four mages levitated slowly as a group into the air until their dark cowls were floating some thirty feet above the group, one at each of the primary compass points. They held long staffs over their heads that somehow suggested unspeakable power.

The ground-bound mages moved next, assuming positions in the gaps between the cardinal positions.

There is a trick of time where its steady advancement suddenly stalls, and that happens now.

The breeze falls away as if crippled, and the trees themselves go rigid. The silence in the clearing is a weapon, and it spreads, flooding the forest with dread.

The plowman, attuned to nature by virtue of his vocation, feels the threat as a knife pressed to his throat. He fights the rising urge to swallow.

Gresh stretches in the front of the buckboard and his leather suit creaks loudly, insolently.

Gresh hops down onto the ground and starts to pace. “Plowman Het,” Gresh says, firmly, “with all due respect, you’ve got it all wrong. I expected better from you. If you’re going to tell a story, at the very least, do justice to the monsters.”

The mages are hooded but one gets the sense that their focus has turned to Gresh, whose voice escalates. “Your ‘dragons’ are preposterous. A bulging belly? Tiny appendages in front? Bare, skinny tail? I expect these grand, mythic creatures and what do you give me, flying rats?”

He’s thundering now, and gesturing wildly as he stalks in a circle in front of the mages. He has physically separated himself from the farmer and his wagon team. Gresh thinks the effect is not lost on the farmer although its significance is not yet apparent.

“With regard to dragons, if you’re going to tell their story, get it right”, Gresh roars. “The dragon is sleek. It is a magnificent animal that has two sets of very practical set of clawed legs. The dragon is indeed green, but green like a tree and not green like a barn door. His coat is not covered by leather, but by feathered scales. His eyes are in front, and are deepest orange. His neck is serpentine, and his lines are smooth. His tail is practical, folded like a fan that is able to contract and spread in-flight. The dragon is not some dinosaur with wings, the dragon is an elegant, nimble beast, light in the air, and as lethal as they come.”

“One more thing,” he says, slowly removing his leather gloves. “The idea that dragons spew forth great gouts of flame is insulting”. Gresh stops and sheds his cloak with a practiced flourish. He looks right at the farmer: “That’s my job,” he says calmly, his eyes ablaze, and a very large shadow passes over the clearing with the kind of whoosh that you feel in your inner ear.

There is a shriek from above and the stillness snaps in the violence of the moment. The mages hovering at South and East, respectively, are snagged out of mid-air, thunk, thunk. Gresh snaps out his arms and gestures in the direction of the mages on the ground at the other ordinals. They burst into flame in unison.

The farmer’s team screams in terror and surges forward. The buckboard jerks and he falls on his side out of the wagon. He hits the ground hard, but it’s hard to say what stuns him more, the force of the fall, or the sudden realization that Gresh is a firebrand, and this airborne terror is a dragon, a real dragon, Gresh’s dragon.

The dragon reaches the zenith of its bank and releases its prey.

Gresh sees the plummeting figures out of the corner of his eye with his peripheral vision, and gestures at them with two fingers. The mages ignite in the distance, lighting up the twilight sky. He turns back to the action as his dragon snatches the two remaining floating mages out of the sky.

Gresh spins in place and lights them up, too. There are, finally, screams.

The archmage remains alone, but is not without resources of his own. He launches himself into the air and flexes his fingers out like claws. He slams his fingertips together, creating a rotating ball of energy. He firmly draws his fingers straight sideways away from each other. He creates an expanding ball of energy that grows and surrounds him in mid-air.
The dragon swoops in low over the treetops and slams into the ball. It shrieks, and is repelled. It beats its great wings to escape the ball and wheels off, trailing an indignant air and the smell of burnt…feathers?

The archmage draws a rod from his belt and turns to face Gresh. He flourishes the tip of the rod in quick concentric circles and then jabs it toward Gresh.

A brilliant beam streaks forth and strikes the firebrand. He is catapulted back across the clearing into the solid trunk of a tree. He slams the tree, hard. The tree trunk is suddenly engulfed in flames.

Emos Het realizes that the orange fire is, itself, a form of energy, and it clings to the enraged firebrand, shielding him from the heat and flame.

Gresh stalks outside the mayhem and stands
there, trailing smoke and a very bad attitude.

The archmage fires off another beam, but Gresh is ready. He rolls to the left and launches his own attack from the ground. The fireball hits the mage’s energy shield with a wet splat, but it doesn’t stop there. Sizzling and spitting like water in boiling oil, it burns its way through and quickly drops the shield.

Gresh rises to a knee and gets off a shot from his hip. He hits the mage in the forehead. The archmage drops to the ground like a stone. Little energy trailers continue to dance along the length of the mage’s rod still grasped in his hand.

And then, just like that, it’s over. The air is thick with smoke and a macabre firepit smell, the silence shattered by roar and screaming.

The equere are running away, but they’re going in the wrong direction–they’re running en masse toward the grasslands.

The dragon turns and follows, toying with them as they go over a rise and are obscured from view.

Boots scuff the ground next to Emos Het and the farmer looks up to see someone standing over him. It is dark enough that all he sees is a silhouette and flames dancing where eyes should be.

The shadow takes a great breath and then draws leather gloves out of its belt. He puts them back on, then steps forward and the setting sun illuminates his face. If seeing the dancing flames in his eyes was frightening in the dark, seeing them in the waning light of day is even more unsettling.

With that, time–and the firebrand himself–revert back to normal. Gresh stood there revealed in as human a form as he would reveal.

“You know less – and more – than you think you do,” he said without preamble. He walked around the clearing picking up various items from the fallen mages. “The stories of dragons as meat-eaters are true,” Gresh said quietly over his shoulder, “as are tales of a division between the dark mages and a certain faction of the firebrands”.

Farmer Het looked around at the fallen mages, then looked to the West at the cloud of dust kicked up by the fleeing equere and the great, flapping form above them.

Gresh bent and got the mage up over his shoulder. “Gareth needed to feed and I needed to find some rogue mages who were exceeding their reach. I followed you for awhile from the air. The mages have been terrorizing shipping going through the Roanoak Wood and I would not allow that. I used you and your team as bait, hope you don’t mind,” he said, his flat, frank delivery making it clear that he considered this a rhetorical statement.

The farmer snorted to himself, amused at Gresh’s audacity.

“I’m taking this one back to placate the leadership,” he said, looking at Het, and then he gestured ahead of them. “You’d better find your team before they run too far,” and the plowman nodded, his head spinning. Thinking that he wouldn’t accomplish this from the ground, Het stiffly rose and dusted himself off. He no sooner finished this when he sensed something BIG swooping in and nearly fell back to the verdurous grass again.

The dragon Gareth reared up as he reached the clearing and beat his wings fiercely to bring himself up, then he dropped lightly down on his claws and folded his wings behind him. Gresh strode forward and Het noticed a natural indentation just back of the dragon’s neck. Gresh made to mount the dragon and then looked back to Het. He reached out his hand.

The farmer reached his hand up to grasp Gresh’s, but the Firebrand pulled back his hand and pointed by the farmer and then reached his hand out again.

Farmer Het noticed the Firebrand’s helmet on the ground by him and flushed. He grasped it and handed it up. Gresh took it and threw his head back to put it on, then made again to mount. He stopped short again, cocked his head, turned, and stretched out his hand again.

Plowman Emos Het regarded him from the ground with a frank gaze and then grasped his hand. “Thank you,” said the farmer.

Gresh turned and threw the unconscious body of the archmage up over the front of the notch and then mounted with a sudden practiced leap and was seated on the dragon. He remained there for a moment as he situated the mage’s orientation on the dragon and buckled up his collar.

Gresh turned to the farmer one final time. “You will have a safe journey from here on out, Plowman Het,” he said, and it was a much an order as a statement, but it encouraged the farmer just the same.

Standing in the clearing, the farmer noticed the return of the normal sounds of the forest with a stark sense of relief. The simplicity of the forest’s normal night-sounds was actually kind of nice, he decided, but it wasn’t long until his nature got the best of him and he cleared his throat and turned back to Gresh.

“Oh, one last thing,” he said, and Gresh looked back down upon him.

“Have you heard the one about the wyvern?”, Het said brightly, regarding the firebrand upon his dragon.

Gareth shifted and rustled his great, green wings and Gresh stared at him–for what seemed a long time but was likely just a moment–then he gave for a barking laugh that filled the quiet clearing. Gresh nudged the dragon once with his knee, very gently, and the dragon reared up on its legs and launched itself into the air, the dragon’s rider leaning into the convulsive launch. With that, Gresh and his impossible dragon beat themselves up into the sky and away, trailing horseblood and a sharp, barking laughter.

With a strangely light heart, Emos Het turned and strode off to find his horses, content that he had his life and a new story to tell.