Dragon Borne

When the last great worm happened across a ragged, tearful toddler just within the shadowed fringes of the deep, dark wood, it most naturally ate the wee thing on the spot. "Snapped her up like a grape," said the villagers, though not a one had seen it happen. The child's parents were notorious for reveling at the village pub until all hours and then sleeping late the following day. The child had grown accustomed in her few years to wandering farther and farther afield in search of berries for foraging and by the time her parents stirred that morning, the enormous shadow of the worm that fell over the girl had already come and long since gone.

Any observant passerby would have seen that the maw of the great beast scooped her up gently, so as not to hurt the child, and the long, scaled throat showed no sign of swallowing. It is a thing not so well known about dragons, that they carry their newly born young in their mouths. The residents of the nearby village tended not to ask questions about the worm's reproductive habits and instead just threw pitchforks or shepherd staffs, when they were handy, or hightailed it away from the woods, otherwise, screaming. The fields and the river were left to the village, but the trees belonged to the worm.

Had anyone been looking for the child that morning, had anyone been near enough to see, they might have observed the graceful, serpentine head, green and brown scales with occasional flashes of brilliant yellow, protruding eerily just below the canopy of the treeline, watching. Silently, it turned from the village, toward the depths of the wood, and the glint of a pair of great, glowing, amber-colored eyes passed through the deep shadows of the thickening trees. One might have observed, had they been bold enough to follow, how the dragon tumbled the little girl-child out onto a great bed of well-tended moss and nodding, star-like flowers, huffing a bit of warm, wet breath out over her as the girl squealed and giggled and jumped to her feet to pat the enormous nose.

What could not be missed, months later, when the villagers finally gathered enough courage to storm the dragon's humble keep, was how the great serpent's body coiled all around the child without ever coming close to crushing her. No one could say how they felled the monster, only that fire did not seem to slow it and more than one brave soul lost a limb to its vicious, incisive tail. One young hunter thought he'd managed to sink an arrow right in the back of the worm's great mouth, though no one would pry back the lips - much less the great white teeth - to prove it. What no one could find cause to forget was the despairing wail of grief that erupted from the girl when her human parents tore her away from the swiftly cooling body of her captor.

And yet, despite all that was seen, regardless of what some few had observed, not one managed to notice how the child's weeping eyes seemed to glow under particular shadows of the thinning trees as they hurriedly left the wood. Not even her mother caught the strange, new amber hue to the child's irises, or how her pupils had narrowed to little more than slits. None of the village can say now whether the moss and the star flowers and the great canopy of the ancient forest serve as silent sepulcher of a great, rotting heap of bones, or the uneasy den of a vengeful spirit. Since that dreadful day, none but the girl child have dared to enter. And since she walked out to the trees, none have seen her since.