Dragon Doctor

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Sightings occurred perhaps once every four or five years, and they were always unconfirmed—rumors, whispers, drunkards’ boasts. However, two years ago, a gale slashed through the rent of Mt. Anaximander that shook even the soundest structures to their cores. It had rolled over the Great Cataclysm without warning, hot and full of churning ocean water like an expanding balloon ready to burst, and when it started, the rain was loud enough to drown out one’s voice entirely. The people of Constinalta scurried towards whatever shelters they could find. All night the rain came, and in the morning when the skies cleared, a very different town greeted the people, and far to the east, on the outskirts of the Gryndyn Forest near a line of stately oak trees abutting the shores of Lake Arbogast, a sheep rancher discovered the battered bodies of eight barely breathing, half-dead dragons.

Alaric remembers that morning well. He had emerged from his burrow, apprehensive, to survey the damage and was met with a panoply of pandemonium. Mountain boulders strewn about as if scattered by a young mage in a game of draughts, lakes and rivers where there had been fields and farms, towers and shops and spires twisted and deformed to the point of unrecognition, and everywhere the debris and chaos of so many human lives—carriages, livestock, bricks, straw, stone, blood. He remembered approaching his house, thinking it had been spared the fate of the others, but as he got closer, he realized that its western façade had been demolished, and everywhere the wreckage of his cozy life was embedded into the soggy earth. This had been no ordinary storm, he thought, as a wave of grief passed over him.

Now inside his damaged home, Alaric had been busy trying to sort through the detritus and process his loss when there came a knock at his front door. Cautiously he opened the heavy-framed brass and wood door to discover a small delegation with Fortino, the town elder, at its center. Alaric and Fortino had history. Bad history. Fortino had appeared on Alaric’s doorstep many times before, only this time, something was different; there was something new and beseeching in the elder’s eyes: desperation. Then he saw it, held close in Fortino’s arms, and that is when Alaric knew his life was about to change.

Alaric was widely known throughout the Valley as the greatest veterinarian to practice magical medicine since before The Cataclysm 200 years prior. He treated gargoyles, selkies, centaurs, griffins, goblins, chimeras, fairies, werewolves, vampires, banshees, sirens, and mermaids. He was the first to perform a horn transplant on a fire sprite, the first to remove a brain tumor from a manticore, and the first to separate conjoined unicorn twins. And yes, he saw dogs, cats, birds, lizards, snakes, chickens, cows, and sheep as well.

But he had never treated a dragon. In fact, he didn’t believe they existed. At the tavern, young men would brandish talons and teeth and scales, claiming they had been violently extricated from a treasure-guarding dragon, but everyone knew these boasts and trinkets for what they were, fraudulent nonsense. And yet everything changed that morning when Fortino stepped forward from the center of the disheveled throng and handed him a bleeding, shuddering, cold, pale, baby dragon. “Help him,” Fortino said.

He started by placing a catheter in its front leg and bolusing 6 pints of Girogy’s Golden Solution. Next, he ordered the men to light a fire and then, once warm, he removed some smoldering coals with a pair of tongs and applied them directly to the creature’s skin. Soon, the baby dragon’s mentation improved, but it also began breathing faster, groaning in pain with each breath. On its left thorax, Alaric noticed paradoxical motion with each breath. This looked like a rib fracture. Touching it briefly, the dragon hissed and snapped, avoiding Alaric’s hand by mere inches. A gasp emerged from the townspeople, and for a second, the room was still. But there was no time for fear. Alaric directed some townspeople to prop the dragon onto its chest while he scoured his study for a column of pure air. The dragon was now gasping and sputtering something amber-colored and shiny—dragon blood. On a shelf, he spotted three cannisters, and frantically he pried the first one open and held it to the dragon’s nose until its respiratory rate declined and its effort improved. Next, he pushed a solution of heronium, his most potent analgesic, extrapolating the dose from what he used in his sand drakes. Slowly, the young dragon settled onto its sternum and his breathing, raspy and painful, became even slower. After a few minutes, Alaric gave additional sedation and then applied a body wrap over its rib cage with tight-fitting goat hide and moved the baby dragon to lay beside the fire.

Able to admire it for the first time, Alaric could see that the baby dragon was exquisite. Scales like indigo-stained glass, eyes like that of a crocodile, only bright orange with small glints of metallic green and blue. It was probably 7-feet-long in total length, with a tail that terminated in twin menacing spikes. “Not bad for a half-man,” Fortino said from where he stood in the corner of the room, arms crossed in begrudging admiration. “But there are seven others near Arbogast’s Lake. You’ll need to bring your biggest instruments.”

And that is how Alaric became the Valley’s, and possibly the world’s, first dragon veterinarian. They flew to his hospital in droves—wings broken, tails severed, teeth shattered, eyes perforated, claws avulsed, scales lacerated. In any given night, he might treat 30 dragons. Always, their arrival was preceded by a fantastic roar. There is nothing like a dragon roar. Strangely human, animal, and natural all rolled into one—like a scream imposed upon a howl pressed over a clap of thunder. Next came the beating of great wings and a shadow’s fall over the clinic. At first, Alaric saw them at his house, like all his other patients. Sometimes, the beasts were too large to treat inside, so Alaric had special canvas tents designed that he could throw above and over the dragon along with retractable ladders that could take him up to even the largest dragon’s brow.

As more dragons came, his operation expanded. A clinic was built beside his house and approximately 20 people now worked for him there. Working with a team was new for Alaric, and at first, he found it difficult to trust his nurses and assistants. Two years ago, he had almost been run out of town by a column that included some of these very same people. But the work always took precedence, and there was more work than he could have ever imagined, and the dragons paid well, and they paid in gold.

While he did not know how knowledge of his services was disseminated, dragons were intelligent, perhaps more so than humans, so he figured they possessed some form of language or chemical signaling to convey news of his hospital. He was learning a lot about dragons. Some were kind, some were sweet, some were stubborn, some were crafty, some were dishonest, and some were greedy. It was not uncommon to find two patients arguing and fighting in the receiving bay outside the clinic, and it was just as common to find one dragon assisting with and carrying another as close to the doors of the intensive care unit as possible. Occasionally, a dragon would refuse to pay for services rendered. The last time that happened, another dragon stepped forth and bit the parsimonious dragon so hard that its jaw cracked in three places. Mandible shattered and dangling in the wind, the stingy dragon was rushed to the operating room and repaired with melted down silver cerclage wire while a couple of burly dragons ransacked his satchel for enough gold to pay, plus a little extra, grasping the coins with their mouths and gently piling them near one of Alaric’s terrified assistants.

Rewarding but exhausting, his new work often forced Alaric to work long into the night, and tonight was one such night. It was just Alaric and his chief nurse, a young man of 19-years-old named Tolsano. A farmer’s son, Tolsano had spent his entire life around animals, and he had been part of that delegation with the baby dragon two years ago. Now, it was just the two of them scrubbing down a table that had been used to support a dragon forelimb for an abscess lancing procedure just a few minutes ago. Tolsano was medium build with olive skin, green eyes, and one dimple. A quiet kid, he and Alaric rarely spoke about anything but dragon medicine, a subject they were learning about together, but tonight, he seemed more pensive than usual.

“Alaric,” he started, “why do they call you a half-man?”

Alaric continued scrubbing, but he could feel Tolsano’s shy gaze and could even sense his fear of reprisal should he have offended Alaric. But Alaric had grown accustomed to the question, for it was one he had been asked many times. “My mother was a human, and my father was…something else,” he said.

Tolsano bit his lip and furrowed his brow, “Is that why you…well, you know…”

“Yes, it’s why I look this way.” They went back to scrubbing and when done, Alaric had Tolsano sweep the halls, the isolation ward, the receiving bay, the storeroom, then wrap the surgical packs, log the medications they had used over the course of the day, and then lock up the clinic. Alaric stuck around to write his notes. Looking up, he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror that had been a gift from one of his patients; Alaric had guessed the dragon had blown the glass himself, given its rough-hewn appearance and scorch marks along the edges. Staring back at him was exactly what they called him, a half-man: at first glance he had perfectly human features—nose, skin, eyes, mouth—all normal, but upon further inspection, the inhuman part of his nature emerged; his eyes were ever so slanted, his nose was ever so pointed, his jaw was ever so sharp, his skin was ever so pale, and he stood a full one-and-a-half feet taller than anyone else in the town. And of course, from head to toe he was covered in strange markings. They stood raised against his skin in intricate patterns, lines, blocks, and circles. Alaric had given up deciphering them long ago. No trace of a language containing the characters could be found. Alaric had tried. Their secrets died with his mother, who on her death bed had refused to tell Alaric where they came from or what they meant.

As he finished his records, Alaric found himself reflecting. This was the first time since he had come to Constinalta that he felt a modicum of peace. No more angry mobs, no more accusations of being a demon, no more bombs lobbed at his house, no more visits from Fortino in the middle of the night clutching a plebiscite that ordered him to move further from town or charge less for his services or to always keep at least two adult males present when engaging with women or children in one of his patient examination rooms. It had been the same in other parts of the Valley—Constinalta was not unique. He had been, kicked, burned, beaten, and slandered from the time he left the Academy until he became a dragon doctor.

While they would never admit it, Alaric knew the town was grateful for what he had done; the practice had brought a degree of prosperity to the town. Tourism had flooded in from all over the Valley. Grandstands had to be erected near the landing bay for when sick dragons came to be treated. Carts, tents, puppet shows, shops, inns, pubs, and restaurants dotted the area. Constinalta had grown by 30% since the storm, and Alaric thought a lot of it had to do with the thriving dragon industry his clinic had helped create. Still, this didn’t mean he was exempt from all persecution. He still had to walk into town for his mail because the delivery man would not come to his house, and he never got seated at restaurants, even the one that had sprung up fifty feet from his hospital, where his staff gathered nightly for drinks, stories, and desert.

Medical bag in hand, he snuffed out his candle and turned down all the lamps one-by-one until the hospital was completely dark, then went out into the night. Beautiful it was—the stars unwavering, brilliant but soft—silvery, still—self-contained light against the encroaching dark. He decided to take a stroll and clear his head.

Where did the dragons come from? He wondered to himself. From the ocean? One of the islands? The stars?

He stopped at a small pond to admire the water. Dragons seemed to be averse to water. He had learned this the hard way when trying to debride a wound. When he lavaged with sterilized water, the wound began to smoke and the dragon howled, spraying fowl breath and plumes of fire as it flailed in pain. But after some experiments in tonicity, he had devised a solution that he could use safely.

The night air had been still, but now grew disturbed. The pond’s surface, which had been a perfect mirror, now reflected glints of starlight from its ripples. The trees were swaying, their boughs dipping and diving in a slow dance as the wind threaded itself between their leaves.

Then the beating of great wings. Alaric looked to the sky and saw the outline of a dragon against the stars, growing larger and looming lower. It was landing, and it was landing right before him.

Fear gripped him by the throat. This was not how late-night emergencies were supposed to work; Dragons were to report to the clinic, ring the bell to alert the overnight nurse in the gatehouse, and then wait for Alaric to arrive. The dragon landed with a great mushroom cloud of dirt and a thud that shook the ground. Alaric was forced to cough and turn aside until the dust settled.

This dragon was larger than most, with deep blue scales faintly visible against the night sky, glowing orange eyes, and onyx claws. Alaric guessed it weighed about 15 tons. He could smell the beast—caustic and strong. It moved with the fluid grace of all dragons as it crawled towards him, neck outstretched, head held fixed at the level of his own.

It stopped only a few paces away, and Alaric could feel the molten air from its twin nostrils. Its head was held cocked to one side inquisitively as if asking a question.

“Are you hurt?” Alaric stammered. He looked around for any of his support staff. He was alone. The dragon gestured towards the clinic and then began walking slowly towards it with a slow, proud gait, enormous clods of dirt falling to the ground from the bottom of its paws, no trace of a limp or injury of any kind. Something didn’t feel right. Part of him wanted to run towards the town. However, he knew that he would not receive a warm welcome appearing in the town square at night, alone.

The creature stopped suddenly and turned its head around backwards. It was waiting. It beckoned with a curt snort.

Inside the clinic, the dragon sat on its haunches and waited patiently for Alaric to turn on the lamps. Once lit, he could see the dragon much more clearly. This dragon was a juvenile female, probably around 25-years-old, judging by the length of its canines and the grooves of its claws. It appeared to be in good health.

“So, what brings you in tonight? Our shift for non-critical emergencies has ended, so if it’s anything that can wait until morning, I’d love for us to resume tomorrow. You can stay here in the clinic for the night if you wish.”

“Good evening, Dr. Alaric. I am Sylunesta.”

“You SPEAK?” Alaric gasped in disbelief. He had not seen the creature’s mouth move.

“Yes, to some,” she said, “What you’re hearing is in your mind. I’m in your thoughts, projecting my own onto yours. To explain how this is possible would require a very long time, and I am in a hurry. We all are.”

She lifted her right wing to reveal a patch of discolored skin. Alaric donned a pair of gloves and drew nearer. He gently probed the skin with an instrument, and Sylunesta let out a hiss.

“Sorry,” he said distractedly, eyes fixated on the lesion. “I’ve never seen anything like this—it’s like a fungus, but it seems rooted to the deeper layers of your tissues like a tumor. It’s painful, but the skin is not inflamed around it…”

“We need you to study it,” she said, the words echoing in his mind. “This pestilence has killed thousands of dragons, and it is moving faster than before. Some dragons withstand it for a time. Others fall prey quickly. We find them dead, twisted and broken near the water. Please take a sample. If it is a different dragon who returns for you, that means I have perished.”

Alaric collected a swab from the lesion, ensconced it in three different test media, and then placed the samples in an incubator that he moved to a locked cupboard beneath his office desk. When he returned from his office, the dragon was gone, and a pile of gold sat in its place. What a pile it was! Alaric fingered the coins and estimated there was enough there to build two additional hospitals. The sound of beating wings filled the room, and he rushed to the window just in time to see the dragon silhouetted against the moon before vanishing into the blue-black sky.