To Own

It was snowing today. Agersith knew, because it was one of the days he found himself suddenly able to fly above the forest’s treetops—though it was a rough, unceremonious, scratched-up journey both on the way up and down, filtering through the drapes of pin-pricking, oversized pine needles. With the forest too dense to begin a flight with his wings, the dragon could do nothing but wait for the days it snowed and his body levitated rapidly, of its own accord, through the intricately laced branches overhead.

The trees had never housed birds, Agersith thought, because of those branches. Too heavy, too dark, and too unbreakable for a bird to nest within. He had never seen one flying with him, either, on these, his snowflight days. Game, too, would never roam the white forest floor, nor insects buzz and chirp.

They used to, once, back in that first and only autumn he remembered.

Hibernating, he thought, as they should. “As I should,” he mumbled, no small amount of despondency creeping across his mind.

Once, he recalled through flashes of citrine yellows and muted oranges, he had seen vast, leaf-strewn meadows. Leaping and earnestly flapping his wings, a breeze beneath him, trying to stay suspended in the air. His mother said he was ruby-red, that he would master flight as surely as he would master his fire. Whenever he would lay in the little dry snowflakes stacked neatly on the ground, whenever he saw and felt his glittering red limbs squeaking through the thick blanket of white, he was reminded of her. It felt like forever since he had seen her last, falling asleep in their cave together for the coming winter.

But he had woken up, in the middle of a snowstorm, bruised, and alone. The forest had looked—smelled—different. Agersith and the winter had lasted over a hundred years now, and he wasn’t sure he would last a hundred more.

Feeling his snowflight magic fail, Agersith closed his eyes, tucked in his wings, and let himself tumble from the sky. Freefalling and ricocheting off sharp pine needles and branches, he thought. He philosophised when a twig pierced the skin above a claw, he meditated as a deep gash was torn along his wing, and he pondered his place in the universe when he finally collapsed in the mound of dry snow he’d torn from the trees’ branches.

He lay there for a while, thinking. Stagnancy. Sameness. Purgatorial insanity. Am I alone? Why is it just me—no. This was approaching dangerous territory, grounds Agersith could not bring himself to tread.

The light had not yet been removed from the sky, so Agersith hauled himself upright and began to walk, without a care for direction. Eventually, he knew, he would reach the Wall. He walked, and crunched the snowflakes beneath his talons as he meandered, wove himself between pine trunks and gently descending white dust. And, as always, he reached the forest’s border, and stopped.

He stared at the Wall, pressing his nostrils right into the hardpacked air, watching the surface steam up, yet remaining unable to use dragonfire to melt the barrier. Mother had fire, Agersith thought, the feeling as flat as it had been even fifty years ago. Slowly, he rotated his head to the left, to the right, keeping his nose pressed firmly on the Wall. Colours of every description blurred together, a rainbow void dyed deep into the solid air before him. Above the forest was a single, piercing light that hung in the sky, not moving, not dimming, that made all these colours possible.

Removing his face from the Wall, Agersith plodded along the perimeter of the woods, not bothering to duck under branches as the sky continued to fall with snowflakes. His forehead cracked sharply against a particularly low-hanging pine limb.

Stupid dragon. The whisper echoed through the atmosphere like it always had, rebounding off the Wall in slow motion before disappearing into the trees. It was a power that had manifested on the same day he found himself alone, his innermost thoughts becoming audible and nearly drowning him in their warped, warbling glory. “Stupid power,” Agersith responded to himself. He would have much preferred his wings and wind magic working properly, or for the fire in his belly to be rekindled.

Mother had always told him that the witch in the middle of the woods could help him with those magical questions so deep, even she couldn’t answer. A benevolent, experienced magic wielder who was so old she could not have lived much longer, much less the hundred years Agersith had been stranded here.

Walking around the forest, Agersith caught a glimpse of the little log cabin shrouded by pine and the too-dense, too-green clumps of needles that encased it. As if a burrow was made for the cabin right in the midst of this matted natural maze. He’d gone there before, of course. On his first, second, third year here, every day seeing the same sign on the little door: “Out looking for mushrooms.”

In the middle of his tenth year, Agersith went back. And he raged. Bellowing and throwing his body against the rigidly stolid logs, he willed the building to break and crumple against his might. Stupid dragon, the thought went, sneaking out from him.

Alone, with the light ripped from the sky once again, he had stopped his rampage, and he wept by the witch’s stupid little door. His fire would not return. His wings would not carry him away.

Agersith had stopped his march around the forest, gazing blandly at the cabin whose lights never went out. Revisiting unwanted memories. It had been many decades since he last visited, but still the wood did not rot, nor did the green cocoon grow, shrivel, or fade. Witch magic, probably.

He turned to continue his routinely-walked path.

And was blinded by a sudden tearing of light, of a zapping sound across the treetops.

Shielding his eyes with a wing, and hunched beneath a branch, Agersith waited for the ringing in his ears and the phantom light flashes behind his eyelids to stop.

But there, falling from the sky, was a sound that pierced through the din—high-pitched, completely uninhibited screaming. Agersith lifted his head, daring to open his eyes to the now darkened sky, above the tips of the pines. He caught a glimpse of a small… something… hurtling down towards the centre of the forest.

What in the world…?

The dragon watched the figure drop lower, and lower, until—he broke into a four-footed sprint, wings tucked in against the pine branches whipping past as he raced for the spot where the thing would land. He heard its screams morph into wails and grunts as it breached the treetops, now bouncing off and scraping by the pines just as Agersith himself had done just today.

Closer, closer.

The thing landed with a thump in the snow, gasping for breath and beginning to cry in little huffs of upset.

Agersith wove his body between the pines and followed the sound that had been foreign to him, and this forest, for the hundred years that he had been here. A child.

Closer, closer.

A girl.

Closer, closer.

A baby? Agersith reared his head back from where he had approached, now not a metre away from the crumpled, sniffling body before him. No, it was a little older—a toddler. And it was cloaked in black garb from head to toe, and its tiny, pointed black hat lay in the snowflake crater it had made upon its descent.

She stopped her gasping cries to look at him, and without flinching, said “H-h-hi, dragon.”

Agersith’s eyes widened further. Nostrils flared. Wings flared. Claws out… then, with a thought, he retracted them again. He crouched, but did not move closer, nor did he retreat. “Hello,” he replied, eyelids now slitted in suspicion.

She didn’t say anything for a while, the two of them waiting in what would have been silence, but for her sobs, now hiccupping through the darkness.

Then, “Do you want to play?” Eyes hopeful, but red and puffy.

The dragon considered her. The first living creature he had seen here, ever, and it was asking him to play? “What do you mean?”

“Well…” the girl tilted her head, eyes wandering around the forest. “Go outside?”

Alarm seared through Agersith. But… hope, too. “How?” his voice trembled with excitement, and he blurted “How?” again, with the adrenaline of his first-ever flight as a youth. “Who are you?”

She waddled through the snow on her short legs, retrieved her hat, and set it on her head. “Jojo.”

“How do we get out, Jojo?” Agersith asked again. Nerves. Heart pumping. Tremors jittering through his muscles.

“I have a magic wand!” She brandished it now, the winding brown stick flickering red at the tip.

A witch. Was she the witch who lived in the cabin? Before he could ask, she continued, “We go quick! Hide-and-seek with mummy and daddy!”

She strode away confidently, and Agersith couldn’t help but follow along behind, tentatively matching her pace as her path took them to the forest edge. He watched the footprints appearing behind her, awed by the girl’s rhythmic march, dumbstruck that another living being was with him. He hoped she would stay. It would be nice to have some company if she was mistaken about her ability to get them out.

As they reached the Wall, Agersith felt the same thoughts of depression taking over his mind. The colours were now gone in the darkness, but he could still see some shapes morphing the Wall as he moved.

“Stupid dragon.”

He jerked his head to face her. It wasn’t his thought that he had heard—it was her voice. What was going on?

“I’ll do it,” she giggled, eyes now clear and peering intently at the dragon. “I’m stronger than you, so I can break the glass!”

“Glass?”

Without another word, Jojo pressed the tip of her wand into the Wall—the glass Wall. One by one, little cracks of fiery red light shone through the wall, as if they were entering a world of red suns. They spiderwebbed their way in concentric circles around the wand’s point, snaking faster, faster, faster up the wall in a dome high above the trees. Agersith’s heart was racing. What was this place?

And the Wall shattered.

Little pieces of the wall came hurtling down. Jojo lifted her wand again, and a shelter made of wind appeared above them—a whirlwind swinging shards of glass into…

Agersith turned. He was inside a darkened house, now cluttered with gently gleaming piles of glass crystals and dust. The cabin, supersized beyond his imagination.

With one haphazard flick of her wand, Jojo sent a flame to the lantern hanging from the ceiling, and with another, she leapt into the air, soaring over the edge of a coffee table at least a thousand times larger than her.

She flew.

Landing on the ground, she flicked her wand again, and transformed into a rather large-looking toddler.

She picked up the dragon from his frozen spot in the destroyed snowglobe, for he was now little more than a lizard, and carried him to the door. He peered behind them at the specks of microscopic, dry snowflakes hovering in clouds above the coffee table. Above the snowglobe.

Stretching to reach the handle with one hand, Jojo squeezed Agersith a little with the other. He let out some smoke. Smoke. Something stirred deep in his abdomen. Her wand blinked red once… twice.

The door was open. And Jojo was walking out. Warm, night-time hues flecked Agersith’s vision. Leaves were on the ground, and on the sumptuously curved oaks surrounding this little clearing. No snowflakes. No needles. And the smell… the dragon lifted his head, nostrils almost burning with the rich scents colouring the wind.

And he saw the shining night sky, and stared.

The girl set him down in the middle of the clearing, the miniscule reptile statuesque as he gazed at the heavens. She fumbled with her wand, chubby little hands searching for a good grip on the stick.

She looked at him. He looked at the sky.

From its perch in Jojo's belt, the red wand began dribbling, then streaming, then flooding red magic toward him, the colour seeming to infuse his scales with life. He grew. And he grew, his body stretching and muscles ripping forth across his wings, his limbs, his back.

The wand flicked out, now completely white, just as Agersith’s belly turned to embers, the warmth holding him like a close friend. He looked upward, still, but something was…different—the cool night breeze touched his wings, daring the dragon to unravel them.

Something loud slammed behind him.

“Jorelle!” A new voice yelled, and Agersith turned to see a man, the girl’s father perhaps, running to clutch Jojo to himself, eyes wide and fixed on the great red beast before him.

Anger welled inside Agersith. He seethed and he stoked the flames churning inside his belly. “You took me captive?” he growled.

“N-no!” The man stammered out, “We didn’t know you were there—I swear!”

The dragon hesitated, reluctant to set his saviour and her family to flames.

A new figure flung herself out of the doorway, dressed in grey, and she raised her own wand, tipped by rapidly fading blue, at Agersith. “Leave us!”

Agersith narrowed his eyes. The flames within and the torrent of wind dancing at his wingtips were rising, swelling, and growing more vicious by the second, and the lights in the mother's and child's wands were fading. The girl’s red wand… his fire. The mother’s blue… his wind. Stolen from him, himself stolen—a dragon enslaved by humans for his magic.

This witch… not the kindly old woman his mother had trusted—this witch who had captured him and taken him as her prize.

He bared his teeth for an instant.

Then, he opened his jaws and spewed forth fire onto the cabin, the woman, the man and… he hesitated before Jojo, who had pried herself from her father’s grasp he went up in flames, and now ran towards him, wielding her deadened wand in a terror-stricken panic.

She mouthed a few, simple words. Agersith waited.

The girl’s attack was pathetic. A glittering spiral of sickly red launched sluggishly at Agersith. He dodged it, leaving it to slam into a pine behind him, imploding into nothing.

The dragon’s fury rose, and he breathed fire again.