The Lonely Dragon

Dragons are vastly misunderstood.

Everyone sees those dark eyes and thinks, “Evil.” Everyone sees hard scales and thinks, “Untouchable,” which is only a short step from “Irredeemable.” They run in terror from fiery breath.

The one feature that never comes to mind is memory. People don’t know that a dragon never forgets a single thing it has seen—or done—even over the long years of a dragon’s life.

Vizz-Meena-Gorra, Conqueror of the Belaton Mage Clans, Devourer of the Emerald Groves, Flying Devastation, was stomping southward through the Forest of Rune when she saw something she had most definitely, without any question, never seen before: A naked baby girl. No pike in hand, no metal plate armor, no steely scowl. No intent to kill. Only the sweetest, softest skin, and large eyes that had a frosty sheen.

The baby, moments ago shrieking in fear, now lay quietly, holding her own toes, eyes roving around but unseeing. She gulped, and spittle dribbled down her quaking chin. She sucked in a single breath.

“Muh muh?” she asked.

Vizz-Meena-Gorra, with all of her illustrious titles, had never been able to add this to her list: Mother.

Her memory flashed back, sun-bright, to the first moment of birthing: Light streaming in through the crack she had just made in her egg’s shell. Her siblings dancing around, licking goo from their eyes with long tongues, testing their wings against the wind at the eyrie’s peak, and quailing in fear.

Yes, her long memory held something more firmly than her many conquests. It held her fear. When she realized she was the runt of the litter. When her fire breath didn’t develop at the proper age. When her mother carried her in razor-sharp claws across the mountains to the icy Northyrn Waste, and told her to either find her fire or freeze.

The first village she attacked…the first humans she ever killed…were only guilty of one thing: Keeping a warm stove.

Vizz-Meena-Gorra stared at the girl who was defenseless before her and wondered if this young one would taste the same.

She wondered if she had already destroyed the parents, perhaps as casualties of the Flame Wars with the kingdoms of the East. Or perhaps they were one of the many people she had uprooted and forced to flee. A hundred more homes ruined in the name of dragon.

She approached, wings rustling as she folded them down and leaned in close. She sucked in a breath through her nose, but was careful not to exhale and set the trees alight.

It was the smell of fresh dirt, exposed where the child’s hands had scrubbed away the fallen leaves, that sent the second wave of memory crashing over her: Mother plucking out a row of Vizz-Meena-Gorra’s scales on the soft spot under her left forearm, punishment for not bringing back a kill on her first hunt. Vizz had rolled in the loose earth of the cave, trying unsuccessfully to dull the pain.

The child’s eyes squeezed shut and she started to bawl. Her face, streaked with mud, turned red, her fists clenched tight, and the dragon could not help but feel that this pitiful creature was something like Vizz-Meena-Gorra, herself. She was an accident of her own species. Untouchable. Abandoned.

Vizz-Meena-Gorra reached down to crush the child, to end the misery she could not bear to witness. But as her talon approached, the blind girl reached out and clasped one mighty claw with a tiny hand. Small fingers traced giant scales.

The girl paused for a moment. “Fish?”

Vizz-Meena-Gorra stopped. She had killed and eaten north of the mountains. She had trampled over the southern plains, and laid the eastern kingdoms to waste. But she had no memories of the Western Sea, because west was somewhere she had never been.

Centuries of life, and Vizz-Meena-Gorra had never tasted fish.

She heard a hunting horn in the distance, and her sharp dragon eyes picked out torches, crossbows, men on horseback. A woman with them. A rescue party.

The child was not abandoned.

Vizz-Meena-Gorra knew this would be another moment she would never forget.

The dragon raised her wings and lifted herself into the sky, then crashed down. Her tail swept back and forth. Leveling trees. Leaving a mark. She pressed one claw into the loose soil beside the little girl’s head.

She rose into the sky, sending a jet of fire toward empty space, holding it long enough to hear the horn call again, then turned west.

She pumped her wings. The earth sped by underneath. Her long neck bent backward, letting her glimpse the humans and ensure they were able to follow the trail she had left.

Then she looked forward again, to the west and the faint glimmer she could almost fancy she saw, like something reflecting off of distant waves.