by Dante King
People were always surprised to learn that I was an avid reader of fantasy and sci-fi. It was a sadly common misconception that, just because I was capable of handling my own, I wouldn’t be interested in any book longer than the TV Guide. Living such a transient life though—ever since I had been booted out of home at fifteen—left a lot of time for reading, and books were portable and didn’t require batteries.
I stood up. I was at least a foot taller than the self-proclaimed elf and must have weighed twice what she did. However, she stood before me totally at her ease, radiating a self-assurance and confidence that I could feel more than see.
Her emerald eyes moved slowly over my body. “You stand as a warrior should,” she mused to herself, running a thumb over the pommel of the curved dagger at her belt. Her head straightened, and she looked at me through narrowed eyes. “Tell me,” she said, “are you a woman?”
“What?” I asked.
Considering the plethora of things that this stranger could have said to me after abruptly murdering someone in front of my eyes, a question about my gender was the last thing I would have expected.
“You are not a woman, are you?” Elenari asked me again.
“No,” I said, “I am not a woman.” I pointed at my face. “There’s the stubble for one thing.” Then I pointed south of the belt that held up my jeans. “Then there’s the… Well, you know. There’s that.”
Elenari ran her gaze over me once more. Was it my imagination, or did her eyes linger on my crotch a little longer than was necessary?
“Strange,” the elf woman said.
I looked from her to the eviscerated body of the thief lying amidst the detritus of modern humanity; an empty Fritos bag, a crushed Mountain Dew can, and a few torn pages from the Playboy magazine.
“What the fuck is not strange about this?” I asked before I could stop myself.
Elenari shook her head. “No, it’s just that the seer must have been referring to you—she couldn’t have been referring to him,” and she gave the corpse at her feet a nudge with her boot.
“The seer…” I said, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, the seer,” said Elenari, as if she was explaining something to a child. “She told me that the warrior I was supposed to be meeting would be here. You have the long, brown hair that I saw in my dream, but I could not see your face and only assumed that you were a woman. Besides, for you to be a man, well, that would be the greatest thing to happen to my world since the beginning of the last age. No wonder the seer told me to beware of assumptions when I left the council that I sought with her.”
I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. I had a sinking feeling that, no matter what happened here, I wasn’t going to have the pleasure of meeting Titty McSweetass, or whatever the hell her name was, for our Tinder-crafted rendezvous this evening.
“Why is it so odd that I’m a man?” I asked.
Elenari pursed her lips and then said, “Because a man cannot be bonded to a dragon.”
I blinked. You would have thought that the whole slaughtering of a running thief in a Los Angeles alleyway thing was the wackiest part of this whole interaction, but nope.
“A dragon?” I asked. I realized that my hair was all over my face from the chase. Slowly, I re-tied it as I tried to give my brain a few seconds to play catch-up. “What, is that like a euphemism or something? Is this some weird fetish thing that Tinder has brought in? ‘Cause, if it is, I’ve got to say I’m a little behind the eight-ball on this one.”
Elenari gave me a puzzled look. “You don’t know what a dragon is?” she asked me.
“Well, look, I know what I think a dragon is,” I said, “but it can’t be what you’re referring to. You say dragon, I think fire-breathing beasts that make their beds on piles of hoarded and ill-gotten gold.”
“Ridiculous,” Elenari said.
“Right,” I agreed, glad that this chick hadn’t gone completely off the deep end.
“Yes,” Elenari said. “What use would dragons have for beds of hoarded gold? They covet nothing more than battle and glory and the fall of their enemies.”
“Yeah, right,” I said.
“And, while they don’t sleep as we do, they take their rest and regenerate while lying dormant in their crystal homes,” Elenari told me.
I didn’t really have much to say to this. I mean, what the fuck can you say to that without sounding either sarcastic or like a complete crackpot?
“Hm,” was all that came out of my mouth. Then I managed, “I can’t help but think though, that if dragons were to exist, they’d be pretty damn easy to spot, wouldn’t they?”
Elenari pointed over my shoulder. “I think you might be surprised, Michael. You didn’t see him after all.”
I turned, and I came nose to nose with a dragon. At least, it was either a dragon or some species of enormous lizard that I had yet to see anywhere. Ever. Then there were the wings, of course. The fucking thing had wings.
“That’s a… that’s a dragon then?” I managed, fighting the twin urge to lash out with a roundhouse kick, while simultaneously running for the San Gabriel Mountains. Something in me told me that my best course of action here was to hold my ground. Besides, I’d never run from a fight before. I’d never run from anything.
The dragon was about the size of a panther, and the first thought that struck me was that here was a perfect killing machine. It was the same feeling that you got when you saw a picture of a great white shark or a Nile crocodile. It was the visceral feeling that here was something that was to be respected and feared. It was the same feeling that men must have been experiencing ever since they climbed down out of the trees and started poking about in places they shouldn’t.
The dragon was a luscious, vibrant, vital green. The same color green, I realized, as Elenari’s eyes. It was scaled like a snake, each individual scale slotting into place with the ones around it to form a flowing, mercurial armor. They looked thick, those scales. Tough and leathery almost, but with a captivating iridescent sheen to them. Its large, three-toed feet ended in claws that reminded me more of blunt trauma than surgery.
The dragon leaped with a cat-like grace that I had not been expecting onto the top of the dumpster nearest me. Its leathery wings were folded tight along its flanks.
Spines that looked very much like the leaves of some otherworldly, spiny succulent plant ran from the sharp horn on its snout, down its body—getting larger in the middle and tapering off toward the tail—before ending at a sort of spiked club at the tail-end.
The dragon let out a soft snort, and my light jacket blew open with the power of it. Its breath smelled like you might expect; strong with the coppery scent of old blood, charred meat, and sulfuric smoke.
I coughed.
The creature’s eyes—set above a mouth stuffed with the sort of teeth that would make Venom look like the dog from Marley & Me—were what really held my attention though. They were old eyes—crazy old. They were intelligent, patient, and completely without fear.
In an instant, I truly believed—before my good old human brain could impose the cynical disbelief that shelters us all from the things that we can’t rationally explain—that here was a thing that was not from our world.
Chapter Two
I blinked. So did the dragon.
“Holy shit,” I said. “They’re—they’re real.”
I reached out a hand to the green beast and before it could retract its sinuous neck, laid a hand to one scaly cheek. It was as smooth and strong as I had thought it would be, and hot too. It was like holding my hand to a kettle that had just boiled.
I pulled my hand away and let out a little laugh of disbelief. What else could I do? I was face to face with a creature that had been inscribed in human legend for millennia. It was goddamn insane.
“He let you touch him. . .” Elenari said in an awed voice.
My eyes were still fixed on the magnificent creature sitting on the dumpster like a fucking prehistoric parody of a cat on
a fence. “Is that not normal?” I asked the elf woman.
“Wanting to touch a dragon is normal,” Elenari replied in her lilting accent. “Having your arm still attached to your body after actually doing it is not normal. You have no fear.”
I grinned at the Emerald Dragon. “Why would I be scared of it? The worst it can do is kill me, right? You can’t let fear get in your way. I’ve seen fear cripple people more effectively than a baseball bat to the kneecap.”
I tore my gaze away from the dragon and looked at Elenari.
“Is this for real?” I asked. “Are you real?”
Elenari frowned as if she did not understand.
“Am I real?” she asked. “But, of course. Do I not eat and breathe and live? Do you not feel this?” Her hand shot out in a vicious backhand. Unthinkingly, my own hand flashed out and caught her wrist in a grip of iron. Still, the force of her blow almost sent my own hand jerking back into my face. I had a feeling that, had she really intended to strike me with serious force, she would have busted my lip open. For such a slight woman, I was amazed at her strength.
A smile split Elenari’s face, showing off a set of brilliant white teeth. “You must be the one that I was sent to find,” she said when I had released my arm. “A powerful Earthling man, with a natural affinity for dragons… Such a thing has not been seen in our world for centuries!”
“Your world?” I repeated.
Elenari waved my question away. She seemed, in spite of her reserve—which I found to be typically elvish somehow—to be rather excited. She reached into the neck of her leather jerkin and pulled out a thong—not the red, lacy variety that the Tinder girl had sent me a picture of earlier, but a cord—on the end of which was a black crystal. She removed the crystal from the end of the thong and tossed it to me.
I caught the crystal. It was an opaque black—not completely clear—and smoky in the center. It sat in my palm, heavy and oddly warm, like it had been sitting out in the sun.
“What’s this?” I asked.
In a distant corner of my head, I couldn’t help but be amazed at what the human brain was capable of momentarily setting aside. Here I was, asking a seemingly innocuous question about something that could have been taken from some kid’s crystal collection when, not ten feet away, a dead body lay with its guts spilled over the street and a dragon sat watching me.
“It is the final test,” Elenari answered.
“Test for what?” I looked up and down the alleyway to make sure that there was no one coming.
“The test to see whether you are one of us,” Elenari said simply.
“Looks like one of those stones that meant to change color depending on what mood you’re in,” I said.
“It is a stone that will allow you to summon your dragon,” Elenari said, in the chilled voice of someone explaining how to use a new app. “Though, I do not think that you, as a male, will be able to wield it.”
I couldn’t help but scoff. “Oh yeah, because me having a dick is the crazy part about this whole scenario.”
Elenari frowned at me. “Is that so?”
I cast an eye at the dragon, whose name was apparently Gharmon, who was sitting behind me. It was watching me with the intensity of a cat looking at a mousehole. I took a deep breath.
“Okay, look,” I said. “Say I go along with you here. Say I decide to overlook the fact that you just almost cut a man in half in the middle of fucking Mar Vista—not that I’m saying he wasn’t asking for it but, you know, it was, in retrospect only an iPhone 8, and some people might think that sort of punishment was a little harsh. Say I decide to roll with this whole absurd sequence of events—even though I have a sneaking suspicion this might be some intense trip brought on by a concussion.” I paused and puffed out my cheeks. “Saying all that, how might one go about summoning a dragon?”
Elenari stared at me apprehensively. “I should have known that this might be difficult,” she said. “I have only been at the academy a few months myself, you see. I’m not an expert, you understand, but I’m a bloody scholar compared to an Earthling like yourself.”
I didn’t retort to this barb. She was undoubtedly right. I was half certain that this was some elaborate hallucination.
There was a scream from one end of the alleyway. I glanced up and saw a short, fat man pointing in our direction, toward the body on the ground, the woman dressed like she was on her way to a cosplay orgy, and the dragon on the dumpster. Shrieking and tossing down the shopping bags he’d been carrying, the man vanished from sight.
“Crap,” I said. If this chick was to head back to wherever she’d come from now and leave me here, I doubted the LAPD would believe the old “it-wasn’t-me-it-was-a-dragon” excuse.
“Hold the crystal, and your dragon interface should appear on it,” Elenari instructed me.
I pushed aside the horde of cynical replies that popped into my head. The crystal was still in my palm, still as warm as something that was, well, warm-blooded. I stared into its black surfaces.
Far off, but growing louder, I heard the sound of a police siren. With a desperation born of not wanting to end up in Pelican Bay State Prison, I willed the crystal to fucking show me something.
I gasped in amazement. A small interface had indeed appeared out of the crystal smoke and inscribed itself on the surface I was looking at.
It read:
Head [insufficient skill]
Chest [insufficient skill]
Right Arm
Left Arm [insufficient skill]
Legs
Weapon Slot A [insufficient skill]
Weapon Slot B [[insufficient skill]
Wings [insufficient skill]
Titan [insufficient skill]
All of the slots that ended with “insufficient skill” were also grayed out with what looked like smoke. The ones that weren’t were marked LEGS and RIGHT ARM.
“You see the interface?” the elf woman asked me as the police siren drew slowly closer and was joined by another siren.
“Yeah,” I breathed, “I see it.”
“The list that you see, are the places in which you can ‘insert’ your dragon,” she explained, with commendable patience for someone looking at twenty to life.
“And the ones that have been sort of colored in by smoke?” I asked.
“You need to grow in power before you can access those slots,” Elenari said.
“I see,” I said, not seeing at all.
“Now, my dragon is currently occupying my legs slot,” Elenari continued. “This is the slot that I suppose you could say is most relevant to travel. Depending on your need, personal magical ability, and surroundings, your dragon will take the form most conducive to overland or air travel.”
I nodded, not having a fucking clue what she was talking about.
“Sounds like something from a video game,” I said, but the elf didn’t hear me.
“Your dragon is contained in the crystal,” Elenari said.
I looked at her blankly. “There’s a dragon in the crystal?” I tapped the crystal with a thumbnail. “Must be pretty fucking small.”
Elenari rolled her eyes. “The dragon’s purest form—its essence is inside the crystal. You need only impose your will on that essence, select the slot you wish the dragon to occupy, and call it forth with your mind.”
I recalled all those movies where the hero had to battle the memory of how he let his uncle die or some shit, so that he can tap into his inner strength and learn how to do something or defeat the baddie or whatever. In my present situation, though, I discovered that all the dude in question really needed to do was envision having a few squad cars of LA’s finest coming for his ass. The thought of all those nine-mil pistols waiting to point their evil little muzzles in my direction really helped to sharpen my mind.
As I stared at the black crystal, I imagined the crude shape of a dragon. I took this mental picture and mentally slotted it into the ‘legs’ slot on my interface. I did this in much the sam
e way that a video game would set it out—and tried to convince Los Angeles to let me spawn a mythical beast in its midst.
There was a flash of heat, as if I had walked past the open door of a furnace.
Then another dragon was standing in front of me in the alleyway.
“Holy shit, would you check that out,” I said to myself.
This new dragon was as different to Gharmon the Emerald Dragon as a cayman was from a crocodile. Similar, and yet most definitely different.
For one thing, this new arrival was the size of a horse. It was also as black as sable, as black as the space between the stars, like it was wearing midnight. It had a faint pearlescent sheen to it too, like it might have been coated in oil. Its limbs, compared to that of the Emerald Dragon, were slim, with muscles knotted along with them like dumbbells strung along steel cables. The beast’s claws, rather than looking like blunt punching tools, appeared sharp enough to cut through plate steel like butter. Its teeth glinted like Satan’s steak knives.
The black dragon’s eyes regarded me somberly, without malice, and I realized that the dragon was waiting for me to make the first move.
“An Onyx Dragon!” Elenari gasped. “Can it really be? Not only are you potentially the first male dragonmancer in eons, but you also have an Onyx Dragon.”
I held out my hand. The Onyx Dragon stuck out its snout—with its trio of small sharp horns at the tip—and took a long slow breath in. It blinked, and its eyelids closed together from side to side instead of from the top and the bottom.
“What’s so crazy about that?” I asked as my fingers brushed the scaly snout and ran up the line of a jaw that looked powerful enough to crush my head like a grape.
“I thought they were extinct,” the red-headed elf replied. “They were all supposed to have been wiped out during the Massacre of the Aeries.”
As the Onyx Dragon and I gazed at one another, the sound of the encroaching sirens faded away to a murmur in the background. The mythical beast’s deep breathing seemed to boom in my head.