Eye Of The Dragon

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

When Alexis had first heard of dragons, it was from the mouth of a dying man. Living high and alone in the mountains ringing the Rikward valley, he was too secluded, too ill to make the journey down to Aenescumb, the town, and closest doctor, down below.

He had been on his way into the valley when he’d met the man, having found him collapsed on his floor wrapped in shoddy bandages. Having studied medicine in his travels, Alexis brought him some consciousness, but that man’s wounds had been infected in a rather peculiar way. They bubbled and bled, refusing to scab, enormous bite marks around the abdomen that had they been bigger would have seen the man in two. His blood, which fountained from him incessantly, ran a sickly greenish brown color, and had an awful, chemical odor.

He’d been delirious, of course, the painkillers Alexis had given him wiping him of any real rational thought he had left. As he sat by the man’s bedside to see him off, as there was nothing more he could do, he babbled and muttered about what had given him such a wound.

He described it as large, not unlike a mountain lion, pale yellow-green in color. It’s flesh was bloated, as though its meat didn’t quite fit its scales, and where the skin had split due to it, it leaked a viscous fluid, which pooled in its clumsy, pigeon-toed footprints and killed the grass. The tail had been absurdly long and dotted with growths, which popped and spat the fluid in the air, and smeared it into the trees.

He described the head in the most detail, as according to him it was the part he had been most familiar with. Lizard-like, he’d said, almost over and over, with a big, single eye on its scaly face. He said he’d met it deep in the forest, and that he’d buried a hatchet almost clean through its neck before it whipped around, wailing like a cat, and bit him once, twice, three times before he forced the blade through what must’ve been something vital and it collapsed.

The eye he kept coming back to. He mentioned it so often it made it hard to follow his tale. Gold, he’d say, then shake his head and say glowing, iridescent green, and then silver, and then repeat the process until he wandered back into the story. He said when it looked at him, where it had turned with its teeth buried in his chest, he felt like it really, really looked at him. Like it saw him, he said, meaninglessly. He emphasized it, that it saw him, and seemed frustrated at how he was failing to make sense.

It had been a dragon, he said, genuine and true. That he’d been told of them by people in the same situation as him. That he hadn’t believed they were real until he saw it. Until he looked it in the eye.

He had eventually sputtered into gibberish, and then fell asleep, as though simply nodding off. Rattled, Alexis had buried the man in the backyard, under a fruiting apple tree, and spent the night in his house, feeling distinctly haunted.

Alexis had met quite a few people, from then on, that mentioned the creatures. His path twisted, circuitous, down the slope of the mountain, growing ever more populated the closer he got to flat ground. The little spots of community he came across gossiped about them mostly, where other travelers had told stories and they had steadily become legend. They would mutter behind their hands about strange footprints in the woods, and how a person had been pulled out of their house and into the woods to the east, isn’t that scary? Hearsay and rationalizations floated past him in equal measure.

Aenescumb sat in the middle of the valley, overlooking a large lake. What had brought him here laid inside, past the homey, vine-covered brick houses, the covered markets full of chattering people, and the occasional breaks in architecture that made perfect framed views of the glittering water.

A few days ago, Alexis had received a call from a doctor in Aenescumb regarding a peculiar patient they had gotten. From the call, it had been clear that he hadn’t been the first option, if the poor doctor’s haggard tone and vague descriptions were anything to go by, speaking to a message relayed many times over. Alexis had picked up the message as soon as he had gotten home from his last trip, and in usual fashion had stocked up and set off, with only a single night to rest in a familiar bed.

The medical building in Aenescumb was really nothing more than a rather large manor, with a sign over the door reading, “Aenescumb Medical Practice” in navy blue. There was a little bell over the door that jingled meekly as he passed through.

What was homely outside was almost just as much inside. The foyer was tall, covered in shelves that housed a litany of potted plants and knickknacks, some of glass, throwing the occasional rainbow across a large rug. A large desk occupied the back of the room, piled with books and stacks of paper, and a sleepy looking attendant, who perked up at the sight of him.

“Oh!” Came the voice of the attendant, as they pulled themself back to a proper sitting position. “Are you checking in?”

Alexis smiled amicably, pulling himself together as well. He tapped his boots on the doormat, watching the dried mud and grime flake off where it wasn't already a permanent addition. With a shrug, his coat fell away, and he hung it on the hanger just next to the door.

“Not quite,” he said, craning his neck up as he walked across the room, spying the circular, painted ceiling above. “I’m Alexis Bethair, I’m here to assist with a patient. I got a call from a…” he racked his mind for a moment, conjuring the name. “Dr. Corwin Edmund?”

The attendant glanced up from where they had been scribbling something on a slip of paper, seemingly surprised, before nodding and standing. They just about kicked open the desk barrier, too practiced with being rough with it, evidenced by some chipped wood and scratches on the desk itself.

They led him down a hall, through a pair of swinging doors that clicked gently as they closed behind him, through the many roomed corridors lit with warm-toned stained glass lamps.

Alexis was brought to an out of the way room with a simple brass knocker on it, which the attendant knocked twice. After a moment, the door opened to a short, broad man with red hair and dark bruises under his eyes. He wore surprisingly casual clothing, a light sweater and slacks, and half-moon glasses, a string connected to the frame’s arms wound around his neck.

“Alexis Bethair,” the attendant said, before either of them could. “This is Dr. Edmund.” They glanced at each of them, before trotting off from where they came, footsteps echoing.

“A pleasure.” Dr. Edmund said after a pause, holding out his hand for a shake, which Alexis quickly took. “I take it you’re here about the call.”

What Dr. Edmund had described during the call had been an oddity indeed. He had mentioned that his patient, a younger lady, had come in regarding mysterious rashes that he couldn’t identify a source of. Along with them came blackened fingernails, and strange, branching marks across her back that had worsened during her stay. Alexis had spent the days musing on what it could be.

In the end, he couldn’t come up with a concrete diagnosis. But, when he had stumbled through his doorway and took the message, wobbling on his feet from the exhaustion of his last endeavor, he had recognized the tone Dr. Edmond used.

It was the tone of a dead-end prognosis. He had likely called a swath of better, closer, or more available doctors and medical professionals before getting to Alexis’s number, each unanswered or refused. They didn’t know if what she had was contagious, or even curable. It was the tone of someone who had been repeatedly told to give up on a patient.

Truth be told, he really should’ve done the same, useless as he felt in the situation. But he wasn’t the type to feel comfortable staying still anyway. And maybe he could help. Maybe.

“You heard my name just now, but a good introduction is always proper.” Alexis said, giving his most assuring smile. “My name is Alexis Bethiar, and yes, I came because of your call.”

Dr. Edmund nodded, recognition in his eyes. “Hm. Dr. Corwin Edmund. Yes, you confirmed over the phone, didn’t you. Said you’d come. Thank you, thank you.” He said, somewhat absentmindedly, turning to grab a thin sheaf of paper and a small board to write on it with.

“I’ll take you to the patient now, unless you’d like to sit for a while?” He said, and though Alexis felt the burn in his legs from the journey, he refused.

Another smile. “I’d like to see the patient.”

The walk to the patient’s room was very much similar to the walk to Dr. Edmund’s office, winding through hallways of rapidly bruising evening hues filtering through shades on each window. Alexis absentmindedly ran his fingers through the dust on the sills.

The door they came upon had a little tag hanging from a tiny hook on the door, reading, “Morelot” in thick, written lettering. Dr. Edmund knocked on the door, received no response, and gently pushed it open.

The room was nothing of note. It was a simple guest room layout, containing a bed with white furnishings, a desk, and curtains drawn over the window. A bouquet of flowers sat in a vase on the desk, bright red petals standing out against pale beige wallpaper.

The patient, Ms. Morelot presumably, sat in bed, tucked in up to her arms. She looked to be asleep, serene, a head of long brown hair spread across her pillow .

“You know the basics from the call,” Dr. Edmund said, voice hushed. “She came in about a week ago, and with symptoms like hers I didn’t waste much time before I started calling people.” With a gesture, he invited Alexis in.

It was hot in the room, noticeably more so than the hall. He pulled on a pair of gloves from his supplies, setting down his box on the floor. Her forehead was burning. A fever.

“Would you please?” He said, sitting on his box like a stool.

“Yes,” Dr. Edmund said, pulling the sheets away to reveal a two piece medical gown. Alexis didn’t need Edmund to move it far at all, only directing him to lift a small portion of the top, to see the before mentioned rashes. On inspection, they must’ve covered her, marking huge swathes of red skin that reached all the wall up to her neck. The black fingernails, looking as though she had dragged them through coal, were just as evident.

Alexis sat, leg crossed over the woman, musing. He had opened a small drawer in his box, procured a small but thick book, and had opened it, glancing between its tiny illustrations and the patient.

A nurse came by, pulling Dr. Edmund from conversation with Alexis. He huffed, but acquiesced easily, saying he’d be back in only a moment. He disappeared with a backwards glance.

He stared, hesitant to touch or move things, but closer inspection of the rashes required him to sit on the bed next to the patient. He flipped through his little book, going over everything he thought it could be, ticking off candidate after candidate.

His mind wandered with the flipping of pages. He thought of the man in the mountains. Dragons. Other people he had had to see off. He tried not to see the person in the bed as another corpse, but in his vision hazy with thought she seemed just as lifeless. He felt cold.

When he shook himself from his moment, he found he stopped on a relatively random page, and he took in the words absently. It was about burns, and their subsequent treatment.

The little illustration, drawn as it was, looked awfully familiar.

It hit him like a bolt from the blue. Another glance at the woman in the bed confirmed it. They were burns, not rashes. He buried himself in the book. Could burns appear this way, seemingly random?

Paragraph after paragraph went by, skimmed quickly. The section came and went, and he read it, reread it, and read it again. In case he had missed something. No matter how much he felt that it was something, maybe it was the breakthrough this case needed to not end the way they so often did.

But he found nothing. Maybe the closest he came was a tiny, theoretical section regarding spontaneous combustion. Not what he was working with, and by the state of the section on burns, what he was working with wasn’t there.

He sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose as his temples ached. He needed to slow down. So what if they were burns, if there was no real cause. He rocked back, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes, before dropping them to his lap.

He glanced over. The patient’s eyes were open.

Alexis doubletook, blinking. No, that wasn't right. The patient’s eye was open, right in the middle of her forehead, horizontal like the others. Her regular eyelids were open, but they had nothing in them, and were quietly leaking dark, black smoke.

The middle eye looked at him, looking equally as shocked as he was. He stared, trying to get a hold of it’s color, as it wavered like an iridescent thing, bright like a candle. Sometimes it was yellow, but when the light hit it a certain way it flashed green, or silvery. He felt distinctly seen, like he was being watched, by something he wasn’t totally aware of.

It blinked once, twice, wincing as the smoke touched it. The patient sat up, stiff as a board. Alexis jumped, stumbling backwards across the room.

It was hot. Much, much hotter than it had been. The patient sat, eye sockets smoking and new eye roving, and as she did her burns bubbled, turned black, and began to leak. It wasn’t a fluid that escaped them, not blood, but instead an orange-hot, viscous thing dripped onto her sheets, which caught fire on touch.

Alexis sweated, unable to breath in the now oppressive heat and smokey, chemical odor. The patient took one last look at him, before wailing, leaping out of bed and smashing through the window. The curtains caught ablaze as she brushed past them. In a plume of orange glow and hot air, she was gone.

He grabbed his box by the strap, sliding out of the room backwards into the hallway. “Fire!” He screamed. “F-Fire!”

His shouts were heard by Dr. Edmund, who had been on his way back. Water was fetched, a crowd was dispersed, and he was herded to another room, where he was allowed to sort through his panicked thoughts.

“What happened?” Dr. Edmund repeated, having failed to get a proper answer during their walk. “You said she—”

“She caught fire. I’ve no other way to describe it.” Alexis said, forcing himself to sip the drink he’d been given. “She grew an eye, and then must’ve… must’ve… caught fire from the inside out.”

Dr. Edmund looked at him with confusion coloring his features, but ultimately dropped it, tapping his chin with a deep frown. “Spontaneous human combustion… Maybe. It isn’t scientific, but. There’s no other explanation…” He let out a deep sigh, dropping his face into his hands.

“It’s late.” He said, standing. Indeed it was, the sun having set some time during Alexis’s visit. “I’ll- I’ll organize a search party. Why don’t you take a guest room for the night? For your trouble.”

Alexis nodded, resisting the urge to nervously tap at the wood of his singed supply box.

The attendant from earlier appeared after a call from Dr. Edmund, and they gently brought him to a room on the far side of the building, quiet and tucked away.

It was largely the same as the other, save any real decoration. He set down his box by the bedside, opened the curtains to let in moonlight, and wandered to the bathroom, where no matter how much soap and water he used his hands refused to feel free of soot.

Sleep came easy. Alexis hadn’t expected it to, as awake as he felt. It was as though the events of the past week had all at once settled on his shoulders. He stared at the blue ceiling, and drifted away.

When he opened his eyes to a windy, empty field, he knew he was dreaming.

It wasn’t bright, per say, here. It was the kind of daylight that came with heavy clouds, dim but illuminating the swishing blades of grass and reflective, occasional stones.

The field appeared to go on forever, the horizon was a clear, straight line between yellow-green and sky gray. Following it brought his eyes to a discrepancy in what should’ve been a perfect view.

He wandered over, the grass tickling his legs. What began as a thin strip of slate grew, until it swallowed his whole vision, and he was standing at the precipice of an enormous chasm.

Alexis peered inside, feeling oddly serene. The pit was black, presumably bottomless, whispering as the wind blew through it.

A noise, a deep, bassy, clicking sound, rang out from somewhere deep down. Before Alexis could react, a massive black thing rose and grasped the edge of the chasm, shattering rock with ease.

Moon shaped, as long as three men laying down, glinting in the dim light like it was hewn from obsidian, there was nothing else it could be other than an enormous claw. It, along with the four others that had joined it in its journey, dug into the ground enough to cause a swath of earth to dislodge and go tumbling into open air. It rose into the air again, came down, and found a sturdier grip.

Another came down on his other side, shaking the ground with its weight. They flexed, and with a noise that made Alexis’s heart squeeze, began dragging their body upward.

What brought its head above the earth was the head of a truly unnatural being. It was bulbous, spiked, jet black save for the gleam of the light. It’s mouth, a gargantuan thing lined with shiny slate teeth, forehead a trapezoidal shape above the shaking of the distended throat that made it seem so huge. Unlike fish-like scales, which were backwards, these were pointing forward towards the nose, it had a collection of flanges wavering off of its back in the proper direction, waving in the wind like thick, fleshy ribbons.

Another set of claws ringed him. Alexis did not notice.

The beast had opened its eyes, of which it had thousands. They were all of varying sizes, growing larger the closer they got to a main eye that sat in the middle of its forehead like a crown jewel, arranged in spirographic patterns. Its scales rattled, pulled up, and revealed even more eyes, and the ribbons did as well, like little rhinestones twined in fabric. Most prolific of them were the ones set into the distended throat, where was more eye than scale, now. Each and every one had an iridescence, refusing to choose between gold, silver, and toxic green.

They roved, for a moment, making the beast glitter like a swarm of fireflies. It brought its great head down, close to Alexis, too close, and focused each and every one on him.

It felt like being pinned down, like a butterfly to a board. The beast made that clicking noise again, far louder this time, and the throat vibrated, eyes closing and opening in waves.

Alexis could do nothing as the creature shifted its weight and raised a paw, pointing a single digit forward like a finger. He wanted to scream, or do anything, really, as the beast pressed the tip of its claw into his forehead with incredible ease, but he simply stood and let it happen.

Satisfied, it removed the claw, and reached to its own head, and plucked out an eye, as though simply wedging a stone from between its scales. Its precision was impeccable, inserting the shiny thing into the hole it had made, and when it was set, Alexis could feel the flesh close around it, open again, and realized with horror that he was blinking it, and that with it he could see in colors that he hadn’t before known.

The beast, for lack of a better term, grinned, pulling scaly lips back to reveal its teeth, eyes on its tongue blinking in rhythm. It made that overwhelming noise again, before slowly, steadily, lowering itself back into the chasm’s depths.

Alexis woke with a splitting headache.

The eyes, the eye. He scrambled, pawing over his forehead, but found no blemish. He gasped and panted, breath coming thinly, as he continued searching, anyway.

The eyes. The colors. The beast. They were all connected. They had to be. The eyes, the flashing gold, silver, green, they were symptoms. Symptoms of— of…

He stumbled out of bed, wandering through the building and out the door without a clear thought of where he was going. Without even any shoes, he walked through the streets, trying, and failing, to clear his mixed up thoughts.

He felt like his skin was crawling. He could hardly breathe. It had only been a dream, why did he feel like he was being watched, being chased, in terrible danger. He trotted, faster, desperate to not appear afraid but unable to move so slow.

He ended up ducking into a building, for no real reason other than it had the heaviest doors. They opened and closed with enormous effort, thick, rich wood embossed with deep panels and flowery carvings. The noise they made when they closed, a heavy boom, echoed throughout the building he was in, and upon wincing at the loud noise and turning, was proven to be a library.

Alexis liked libraries, because he felt like they were places where time stopped and allowed a moment of peace. Everything he could ever want to know, housed in one place. Now, though, he felt unnerved by the claustrophobic stacks, and entering them, how little he could see around himself. Boxed in.

He moved swiftly through the thin walkways, desperate to avoid some imaginary thing trying to find him behind some wall of books (an obsidian thing, with uncountable eyes). Before he could catch himself, he brushed through a door labeled, “Archives”, and hid behind a box-filled shelf.

In, out. In, out. He counted his breaths, the way he always did when his fear got out of control. He let the cold on the shelf against his skin ground him, and breathed. In, out. In, out.

He inhaled a truly incredible amount of dust, upon shifting. He forced himself to swallow the cough, and peeked at the culprit, a leather bound book that looked to be ancient, kept in a little box of its own on the shelf. He picked it up, curious, and flipped to a random page.

What greeted him was, quite literally, the face of his nightmares. He recognized the huge claws, bulbous throat, and countless eyes in the stylized drawing that filled the left-hand page. The creature was drawn in full where Alexis had seen only part, spotting a long, coiling tail and what looked like peacock feather wings.

Alexis’s only escape from the terror that again gripped him (blinking, blinking with his third eye) was the right-hand page, a wall of spidery, handwritten text that he could fall into.

The page was headed with a single word, “DERKOMAI”. Written underneath confirmed that it was a name, title being, “sire of dragons.”

It, in a voice that sounded as disoriented as he felt, described the beast as Alexis had seen it. It referred to it as the root of the beasts, that it was the start of everything. That under its gaze, humans became dragons. That seeing Derkomai marked the end.

Oh, sky above, they were symptoms.

He shook, suddenly gripped by pain in his arms. The book fell to the floor, forgotten, as fear so strong it burned surged through him. He keened, hardly able to move enough to look at the screaming points of pain that dotted his arms.

Slowly pushing from beneath his skin where shiny, black scales, pointing towards his fingers. Upon being looked at, some muscle that hadn’t been there before tensed, and the scale flicked up.

It revealed an eye, which flickered gold, silver, green. When he blinked, it blinked with him.