Dragon Emperor

by Eric Vall

  Chapter 1

  “Aunt Emma? I’m here for my costume,” I called out as I unlocked the door to the antiquities store owned by my aunt.

  The lights in the front parlor were off, and a suit of armor loomed by the entrance. Out of habit, I checked the armor for any specks of dust, but, as usual, the suit of armor known as Hunk was in pristine condition.

  I smiled to myself. It was always good to be in here. Around every corner was a surprise from one of my aunt’s trips, and after my mother’s death, this had been my home for a long time. It still was, in a way.

  “Back here, Evan!” she hollered back to me. “I hope you didn’t park out front, that’s for paying customers!”

  “What does that make me?” I closed the front door behind me. “Besides, aren’t you closed?”

  “An annoyance is what you are,” she teased, “and you never know when a once in a lifetime opportunity will knock on your door, only to find it’s been blocked by a Jeep.”

  I followed her voice past countless curios and into one of the back rooms where the smell of clove lingered.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” I promised to the older woman, who sat at a large mahogany table.

  The family resemblance between us always startled anyone I introduced her to, and if my mother had been alive, they would have thought they were seeing siblings. Aunt Emma never looked her age, with her long dark hair that lacked even a single gray strand and her purple eyes that were just as bright as ever. Instead of my aunt, she usually passed as my sister.

  “I have something to show you,” Aunt Emma laughed and picked up the silver pipe full of clove and tobacco that rested on a stone ashtray.

  “No questions about school? Or how the last few weeks have been? I missed you.” I sarcastically rolled my eyes and pretended to pout.

  She rolled her eyes back at me and exhaled a puff of smoke. “How is that EMT school thingy?” she groaned.

  “It’s great,” I replied with a grin.

  She scrunched her nose at me. “I missed you.”

  “Awww, that’s so nice of you to say first thing. You know, instead of pushing one of your random antiques on me.”

  A gleam leapt into her eyes. “Speaking of antiques…” she started.

  I sighed and looked up to the heavens. “Oh, boy, here we go.”

  “Look at this! Isn’t it beautiful!” My aunt ignored my comment and moved an open box toward me.

  At first, my eye was caught by the beauty of the box. Mother of pearl covered the lacquered wood in the design of phoenixes and dragons in flight. I could imagine it being used as a prop in a TV drama, in the bedroom of some grand and ancient royal. Then I looked inside, and I let out a low whistle.

  In a bed of crushed velvet was an exquisite gold hair pin. A delicate flower of pure white jade was set into intricate gold filigree and hung from the end of what looked like six inches of pure gold. At the center of the flower, surrounded by more gold filigree, was a stone of blue jade. An inverted triangle of gold suspended from the filigree back of the flower, and from that, hung three golden bells on golden chains.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Aunt Emma blew out a cloud of smoke that curled around her tanned face.

  Save us.

  For a moment, I thought I heard a voice, but my mind had probably wandered and dreamt up the woman who once wore this hairpin. I shook my head but frowned when the uneasy feeling in my gut refused to leave.

  “Is someone here?” I asked as I looked over my shoulder and back to my aunt. “Besides us, I mean.”

  Aunt Emma cocked her head at me with amusement. “Hearing ghosts, are we?”

  “Naw.” I rolled my eyes. “Just been super busy with school.”

  “See, you say that,” she said as she pointed at me with her silver pipe, “but I’m pretty sure you’ve been able to see ghosts and magical activity all your life. You’ve just ignored it.”

  Emma was always talking about ghosts and spiritual nonsense, but I didn’t believe any of it. I just needed to get more sleep.

  “You know I don’t believe that shit,” I grumbled before I looked back at the hairpin. “What is it anyway?”

  “A hair pin that once belonged to a princess in the Tang Dynasty.” Aunt Emma took another long drag from her pipe. “She was supposed to have been buried alive, at least that’s the legend according to the seller.”

  “Well, that fucking sucks,” I snickered. “Poor thing.”

  “What did you think you heard when you looked at it?” my aunt asked as she fixed her eyes on my face intently.

  “Nothing,” I lied. “Why did this princess get buried alive? Was she a tyrant?”

  My aunt shook her head, and a contemplative expression crossed her face. “The opposite, actually. She was supposedly a princess of purity within a palace full of corruption.”

  “I’m guessing this isn’t part of my costume,” I said with a raised eyebrow. “This looks like it belongs in a museum.”

  “Yep, that’s far out of your budget, young man.” She reached out and closed the box with a definitive click.

  “So … costume?” I chuckled as I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I need it for the video game convention, and you said you had one?”

  She winked at me and nodded at the door that led to a storage room full of boxes. “The opera masks and costumes are in there, funnily enough from the same seller. Pick one as an early birthday gift.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Emma,” I said as I turned toward the back room.

  “It’s a shame,” she sighed. “I always said you would have made a fine historian.”

  “You’re the best!” I ignored her last comment as I walked into the storage room. “Besides, saving people’s lives is way more exciting than digging around in people’s basements.”

  “Cheeky brat!” she yelled without any real heat in her tone.

  My decision to become an EMT before I started medical school had made Aunt Emma proud, even if she didn’t say it in so many words. It certainly had been worth the hundreds of hours I had spent in EMT classes and the punishing schedules of pre-med courses and shifts. All of the life-and-death situations I’d worked and would continue to work in provided an immense amount of experience and familiarity with the real world of medicine and the business of saving lives.

  The only downside was that I had less and less time for, well, anything else. If I wasn’t in classes, I was in the ambulance with my nose in a textbook in-between calls. The reason I was even at the shop today was because my weekend had suddenly opened up due to some misfiled paperwork and cancelled classes. Because of that, I was able to get my hands on a ticket to a nearby video game convention. Since this was all last minute, however, I didn’t even have a costume.

  This was where Aunt Emma came to the rescue. She’d just come back from Sichuan province in China after a lengthy buying trip that included a former opera house. I’d been given permission to have first pick of all the costumes.

  The first shipment of boxes had arrived, and it was a daunting sight. While this storage room was periodically emptied and only used for new merchandise, well, as new as antiques could get, it was still filled to the brim.

  I would definitely be spending the rest of the day and maybe even the night here.

  “Better start unboxing,” I muttered to myself. Then I tackled the first wooden crate and coughed when a cloud of dust rose up. Six wooden crates later, and I’d only found costumes for women, beautiful and intricate and probably worth a small fortune, but nothing that I could or would wear.

  At the bottom of the seventh crate was what I was looking for. In a flat, black box was an outfit of black silk shot through with purple thread. The fabric shimmered in the light as I pulled it out of the crate, and w
hen I leaned in for a closer look, I noticed that sections of the fabric had been decorated in the pattern of scales. I traced the snarling black dragon that had been embroidered on the dark purple sash, and goosebumps rose on my arms.

  I had to put it on.

  The opera costume fit perfectly, as if it had been made for me in some past life. The wide sleeved shirts slipped on like a second and third skin, and the trousers fit snugly. Even the black fur-lined boots were a perfect fit.

  The outfit was nearly complete. What I needed now was the mask.

  I walked back to the crate and dug deeper through the straw until my fingers bumped against another box, and I pulled it out. It was black, just like the other box the outfit had been in, and inside of it was the missing piece.

  A black dragon mask.

  It snarled up at me from a bed of white tissue paper, and the material of it was odd. It wasn’t papier mâché or even leather. I picked the mask up, and it felt cool and heavy in my hand. It almost felt like bone. As I studied it closely, the hairs on the back of my neck rose, but I shook my head. It was probably made out of some sort of ceramic, some bone china or something.

  With the mask in hand, I walked over to the mirror in the corner of the room. It’d always been there, a large thing with a frame of oiled bronze that reached the ceiling.

  I smirked to myself as I studied my reflection in the old mirror. “I look so fucking cool.”

  Hurry.

  “Huh?” I looked toward the door. I thought I heard a voice again, the same voice from earlier. I must have been more tired than I thought. I laughed nervously as I convinced myself I was just tired. There was no one in the storage room with me. It was just me and the costumes. I shook my head and tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. I needed to calm down, it was probably the onset of a cold. This was all just a coincidence. I wasn’t really hearing voices. I would put on the mask and everything would be okay.

  I just needed to put the mask on.

  Like the robe, the mask fit the features of my face as if it had been molded and crafted solely for me. It melded onto my cheeks, and I could feel my skin ripple as the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Then a breeze picked up inside of the room, and the dust swirled up in the air before it formed a circle around me.

  “What the fuck?” I gasped as golden light emanated from the mirror in front of me, and the dust in the air began to glow.

  Then the world was engulfed in a blinding light, and I heard the far-off sounds of moving water.

  Somehow, my heart slowed down to a gentler beat. I could breathe again, and a strange calm settled inside of me. I knew this feeling, the golden light reassured me. The mirror’s surface before me shimmered and beckoned, and somehow, I wasn’t afraid. I took a step forward and placed my hand on the mirror’s surface. The cool glass moved under my hand just like water, and I closed my eyes for a moment.

  It felt like home. It felt right.

  Come.

  Again, that desperate voice. I realized that it came from inside of the mirror. My pulse started to thrum through me like a war drum. I opened my eyes, and suddenly there was darkness all around me, but I could still see somehow. Maybe my eyes had adjusted to the lack of light.

  All I could see in the mirror, however, was the dragon mask. The scales seemed so lifelike, and I hadn’t noticed how well they had been carved before. It was such an awesome mask, and now that I had it on, I realized how three dimensional it was. The mask actually covered a bit of my throat, and I turned my head slightly so I could see that the pattern seemed to kind of blend in with the robe I wore. It really did look like I had scales all over my body, and I felt a little thrill run through my stomach at the thought of how many people would be impressed at the convention.

  When I had first put on the mask, I hadn’t noticed the exact shape of the eye lenses, but now that I was studying myself, my eyes seemed to be larger and a much brighter shade of amethyst.

  “So fucking cool.” I leaned closer to the mirror so I could see the finer details of the mask.

  Then I realized my nose was much longer when it touched the pool of water that I had mistaken to be a mirror.

  “What the fuck?” I reached to pull the mask off my face but instead of fingers, I had claws.

  My heart pounded wildly in my chest, but I couldn’t help but laugh. This was all too incredible to be real. It was so vivid and so strange, like I was tripping almost. I had to have fallen asleep in the storage room, and this was all just a wonderful dream, triggered by my aunt’s ghost stories and whatever she had put in that pipe of hers no doubt.

  Strangest of all, though, I could feel wings that stretched out from my back. Heavy, leathery appendages that were curled tightly into my sides. I unfurled them, carefully, and twisted my now long neck to look back at them. I blinked once. And then again. I really did have wings. And my body… it was covered in black scales that shimmered just as the fabric of the opera costume did. Darker than the night sky and with glints of amethyst that matched my eyes.

  My gaze traveled farther back, and shock settled over me.

  Holy shit. A tail. I had a tail.

  I shook my head. Okay, Evan, focus. That was how you wake up from dreams, right? You focused on crazy details, and it tricked your brain into realizing you were dreaming and needed to wake up.

  The first order of business was to count how many limbs-turned-appendages I had. I quickly took stock. Two wings, two forelegs, and two hind legs, not to mention one rather wicked looking tail. Aside from that, nothing out of the ordinary.

  For a dragon, that was.

  I couldn’t explain what had even happened. I just knew that one moment I was me, and the next moment I was an overgrown lizard. Perfectly normal. Nothing to worry about.

  Man, maybe I passed out in Aunt Emma’s storage room and hit my head or something.

  But as I stood there and flexed my claws against the stone floor beneath me, I realized that … this all felt too real.

  Could this really be happening? Was this not a dream?

  I looked around the space I was in to try to find some clue as to where I was and what had happened. It was a cavernous space with a dark lake and clear crystals embedded in the walls that glittered and shone with an inner light. Within them, my appearance was reflected back a hundred times, and it was clear as day.

  A black dragon. I was a twenty foot tall dragon.

  No. There was no way this could be real. I laughed, but what came out of my maw was a warm puff of air like a car’s exhaust when it started in the morning.

  This had to all be a dream.

  I probably fell asleep or passed out or something in the storage room with the dragon mask on. Aunt Emma was probably about to wake me up at any moment. That was the only logical explanation for all of this.

  I shook my head vigorously, but then I realized my neck had lengthened, and I caught myself as I started to lean off balance. I looked down and saw nothing but black scales and white claws.

  I could see my reflection in my claws. One large amethyst eye stared back at me, the pupil slit and thin.

  A dragon. I was really a dragon. I wasn’t human anymore.

  Shit.

  This wasn’t a dream.

  Panic settled itself in my stomach, and I could feel the way my chest tightened. My heart raced, a thunderous sound that echoed inside my head, and the world felt like it tilted around me.

  I forced myself to focus on the way the ground shifted beneath my claws and the distant sounds of water. Then I drew in a large breath and filled myself with air in an attempt to alleviate the stress on my mind. I held that breath for a count of four seconds and then exhaled. The technique was called four-square breathing, and it was used by yogis, athletes, and even by Navy SEALs. Needless to say, as an EMT, I used it a lot. I often used it to calm down trauma victims as my team and I worked to stabilize them and get them to the nearest hospital. If they were able to, I’d have them follow my breathing pattern.
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  And the times we’d fail to save a life, we’d use it on ourselves.

  Once I calmed myself down, I leaned backward and attempted to sit on my haunches and think about what to do next. As soon as I sat, however, my body started to lean to my right, and I flapped that wing to try to keep myself steady. My extra limb stuttered as it tried to beat, and the motion made my torso spin the opposite way. This caused my tail to spin the other direction, and then my head whipped back around.

  Suddenly, I was laying on my side, and the crystals were all spinning in my vision.

  Well, that didn’t go as well as I had hoped.

  I pressed my front right claw into the stone ground of the cavern and pushed up, but almost as soon as I put any strength into the limb, I lifted off the ground as if someone had thrown me. I was spinning on the ground again, and for a good half minute, I couldn’t tell what was an arm, leg, tail, or wing.

  “Holy shit, dude,” I hissed under my breath, and my voice came out as a deep and sonorous rumble, “get a handle on this.”

  I made a third attempt to get up, but this time I moved very slowly and used just the slightest amount of my strength. This time seemed to be the charm, and I was soon able to get my belly flat on the ground with my arms and legs spread out in the correct direction. I was sure I looked like Bambi when he tried to get across the icy lake in the movie, but at least I wasn’t tangled up into a dragon knot.

  “Okay, now what?” I asked out loud, but no one answered, and I let my eyes drift across the cave. It was pretty dark, and I realized that it was actually almost pitch black, but my large dragon eyes were able to see with the small amount of light from the gemstones.

  Okay, Evan, think. What can I use or do to get myself out of this situation?

  “Maybe I have a good sense of smell?” I sniffed the air and immediately found where the air was fresher, less stale, stagnant, and not smelling of mold. It was like my sense of smell was kicked up to eleven. I turned my head a bit to follow that stream of air, and I realized that it was coming from my two o’clock direction.

  That was probably the way out.

  Now I just had to figure out how to walk there.