Cerulean Blue

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Snuggleuppels was the first to come down out of the hills and make it his home. They should have known, those foolish humans, that a beast so large, so intelligent and wily and inquisitive, wouldn’t be suitable as a pet. It didn’t matter that dragons looked like something out of a fairy tale, that their scales were the colors of jewels, that every single one created in Chimera BioLab’s state-of-the-art facilities would fill an innate longing for magic in a world of science.

It was nearly fifty miles beyond the Valley, beyond the hills, to the nearest city with a Chimera BioLab facility capable of formulating the DNA strands necessary to clone dragons. Fifty miles as the crow flies. Or as the dragon flies, although, to be perfectly accurate, they didn't yet. Fly, that is. Fifty miles to the penthouses and mansions and Olympic-sized swimming pools, to the homes of those rich enough to afford to buy an adorable jewel-toned reptile just the right size to fit in a designer handbag or wear around one’s neck like a priceless necklace.

They should have known that—like the Vietnamese potbelly pig—dragons wouldn’t stay adorable baby reptiles for long. Babies, after all, grow up. Chimera's genetically-engineered dragons weren't next-gen handbag dogs. Not even close.

Snuggleuppels was a Cerulean Blue, the rarest type of chimera dragon. Unlike the Crimson Flowers and Emperor’s Golds, both Chinese-genus types, Cerulean Blues were of the Indo-European genus. Indo-Euros grew slower, reaching maturity in three years instead of one-and-a-half. But at full size, they were as big as an eighteen-wheeler. Chinese dragons only grew to be as big as a large horse.

Unfortunately, no one realized just how big an Indo-Euro could get, not in the beginning.

Snuggleuppels’ girl had squealed with delight when she opened the big cardboard box her doting parents presented her with on Christmas morning two years ago and lifted him out. Holding the squirming reptilian body with the spade tail in front of her, she’d kissed him right on the nose. Just four weeks old, he was the size of a house cat. His girl insisted Snuggleuppels be allowed to sit on a chair beside her for Christmas dinner, where she fed him bits of luscious turkey and spoonfuls of mashed potatoes and the crust from her apple pie while twinkling lights cast a cheery glow over the perfect-family portrait. And that night—and for many, many nights afterward—Snuggleuppels slept with his tail wrapped around her neck, sharing her pillow.

Until he grew too big to sleep on her pillow and her parents ordered a specially-made dragon bed of the rarest silk to put on the floor for him beside her own.

Until he grew too big to fit through her bedroom door and her father ordered a memory-foam mattress to put on the floor of the garage for him.

Until even that was too small and Snuggleuppels had to sleep in the backyard. And the family’s food bill had quadrupled. And the neighbors in their gated community started complaining that their small pets were disappearing.

His girl cried when her father rented a big box truck and ordered the family chauffeur to load Snuggleuppels in the back and drive him off to the hills, opening the door and pushing him out with a broom before driving away and leaving the genetically-engineered dragon on the side of the country road. The Cerulean Blue sat there, abandoned and alone, for two days, only straying far enough to catch squirrels and rabbits to eat, until he finally realized that the truck wasn’t coming back.

That was the start of his life as a feral dragon.

On the morning in question, the morning where this story starts, Snuggleuppels stepped out of his cave at the base of the hills in the remotest part of the Valley and sniffed the air. It was early September, and the trees were ablaze with colorful leaves, fiery red and golden yellow, a slap in the face for a dragon not yet grown into his fire. The autumn leaves taunted him, falling to the ground in deep drifts. His tail extended nearly eleven feet behind him, swishing noisily through the crackling leaves as he headed for the small stream nearby.

Now, while Snuggleuppels had been grown in a lab, like all of the other (still quite rare) dragons in the United States, his DNA was a meticulously-researched combination blended from fossilized dinosaur bones, endangered avian species, and currently-extant reptiles. And while human folklore was full of tales about the mythical dragons of many cultures, far, far back in time there had been real dragons. The modern-day cloned dragons had many of their genetic precursors’ most famous traits, including the ability to breathe fire. But no one knew that yet.

This was the first-gen, after all.

So, while Snuggleuppels didn’t know he should be able to breathe fire, something deep in his chemically-engineered cells told him he should be able to breathe fire. And the fact that he couldn’t was an itch that he couldn’t scratch.

A very painful and irksome itch.

As he stomped through the fallen autumn leaves, tail swishing noisily from side to side, Snuggleuppels sniffed the crisp air through dinner-plate-sized nostrils. He smelled a nest of squirrels nesting a couple of miles away in a large oak tree. He smelled a coyote tracking a pair of rabbits down in the bottom of the Valley, close to where the nearest farms spread away from the river. He smelled the sweet, juicy apples weighing down the espaliered trees in an orchard that hugged the base of the hills.

And he smelled—

His nose lifted in the air, and he inhaled deeply. Once. Then again. Could it be—

His heavy footsteps became furtive, and he stepped lightly, his wings lifted high above his ever-broadening shoulders, so they brushed against the branches of the blazing maple trees. The pungent scent of leaf-mold in the stream nearly overwhelmed the other scent he tracked, but as he came out on the granite headland overlooking the water, he found it again, that redolent fragrance he remembered from his infancy.

A thin spiral of whitish smoke wafted up from the streambank.

A faint crackling of hot metal, pinging in the fire.

A hint of Citrus Dream, or was it White Hibiscus…

Snuggleuppels galloped down from the headland, his growing body swaying from side to side as he ran. He crashed through the rank of trees beside the stream, and there it was—

A frying pan filled with sizzling pancakes, and another with tofu sausages, lightly browned and ready to eat.

And as he inhaled so deeply that he thought his lungs would burst with the fragrance of store-bought food, he heard another sound he thought he’d never hear again. He turned his head and there she was, on the bank of the stream, zipping up her sweatshirt against the morning chill. She stopped short when she saw him, tilting her head to one side and surveying him from nose to tail.

“Snuggleuppels, how you’ve grown!”

His princess had finally come to find him.

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Author's Note: I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to my next entry: