by Dante King
I grinned. Could this actually be happening? Could my Timberlands really be coated in the blood of that jackass that tried to steal my phone? Were the cops really on their way? More pertinently, was there a pair of dragons sitting to either side of me?
The Onyx Dragon broke our locked gaze, and the world came flooding back. Then, with the sure, sharp movement of something that feared nothing, it turned its head and looked at the corpse lying a few feet away. The pupils of its amber eyes dilated, and the dragon moved toward the body.
I was struck with a sudden premonition as to what was going to happen next. It seemed highly inevitable.
“Guess we’re not going to have to worry about whether he gets buried or crema—” I began to mutter.
The dragon stuck its graceful neck out, extending it a good five feet or so, and let rip with a sudden burst of blinding fire. The brick walls of the alley in which we stood glowed in the intensity of the light given off. The litter and dog shit and other debris in the alley shriveled or was blown away. The dragon’s flame was so hot that it burned almost white, with flickering tongues of shadow rippling through it. It was less like a tongue of flame as I had so often read about in books, and more like the afterburner of Maverick’s F-14 Tomcat out of Top Gun—or so it seemed in the flesh.
After making these fleeting observations, I had to close my eyes or run the risk of going completely blind. My eyelids glowed red for a second or two more, and then the heat and light faded.
Before I opened my eyes, I heard the steady clink-clink-clink sound of cooling bricks and smelled the nauseatingly familiar scent of roasting meat.
I swallowed, steeling myself, and said in what I hoped was a light voice, “So, the Onyx Dragon is more a barbecue guy than a carpaccio guy, huh?”
My eyelids creaked open. I was just in time to see the Onyx Dragon’s large reptilian head lunge out and grab the corpse of the unfortunate almost-thief. The body did not look much like a person anymore, which was the saving grace. I’d had a rather eventful evening already and it wasn’t even 5pm yet. I doubted the old cranium would have been able to process watching a former human being eaten. As it was, the cadaver now looked like a sausage that had been burnt to fuck on the grill. It was mostly black, with a few glistening streaks of red and pink running along it.
“Chaos magic,” Elenari said.
“Chaos magic?” I asked, blinking sunspots out of my eyes.
“That’s why the flame is black and white,” Elenari explained. “That is the physical manifestation of chaos magic—the magic which Onyx Dragons employ.”
“Chaos magic…” I said, liking the sound of that somehow. “Fucking aye…”
The Onyx Dragon gave the dead thief a jerk, an action that reminded me of the way that chickens killed and broke apart lizards. I’d witnessed it while hitchhiking around Northern California when I’d stayed a week at a farm to earn some money. It had always struck me as a particularly violent and prehistoric action. Like the way that the T-Rex in Jurassic Park ate that dude on the toilet... sort of.
Such was the power of the dragon, that the extra-crispy thief was ripped cleanly in two. With some savage jaw work, the onyx beast crunched and ripped up the dead thief’s upper torso and swallowed it with the incredible dexterity of throat and mouth that enabled crocodiles to gulp down whole wildebeest heads.
Elenari watched impassively as the dragon disposed of the evidence, far more efficiently than Tony Soprano ever could have.
“Oh and look,” I said, “the legs just go down a fucking treat. Like slurping up those last two strands of spaghetti.”
The incredible sable creature finished its meal, stretched its coal-black wings, refolded them, and then looked up at me.
Clear as day, I read the expression in its ancient sage eyes.
What now? they asked.
“Shit, I guess I should give you a name, huh?” I said, patting the dragon’s scaly snout. “Where’s the harm in naming you?” I pulled out my phone, only realizing now that it was slightly sticky with blood. I had a quick Google, picking the Latin—old and classy, like the dragon itself—word for “night.”
“Noctis,” I said, running my hand down the sinuous neck. “That sounds right.”
The sound of sirens was all around us now. If the cops didn’t have us bottled up in this alleyway within two-minutes, then it wouldn’t be much longer after. I could feel my pulse picking up, as it did before I stepped into an octagon for a fight. I almost felt the adrenaline being released into my system.
I turned to Elenari. There might have been two dragons in my immediate vicinity, but I made the mental decision to put my awe and amazement on hold for a minute.
“You have to tell me what is going on, and you have to do it fucking fast,” I said to the beautiful elf. “Because we’re about to have a whole lot of trouble.”
Chapter Three
I was expecting Elenari, to play it all coy and evasive. It’s what the situation would have called for had it been produced by D.B Weiss and David Benioff. Thankfully, this was real life, and Elenari clearly wasn’t clueless as to the significance of the approaching sirens.
“I was sent here—sent to find you—for a reason, Michael Gilmore,” the elf woman said. “There is a seer—I suppose an Earthling like you would call her a witch—who lives in the grounds of the Drako Academy. She tends the gardens there. Gardens that remind me of my home…”
I snapped my fingers a couple of times. “I’m going to need the Late Late Show summation of these events, yeah?” I said. I cast my eyes up and down the alleyway. There seemed to be some commotion at one end, the sound of cars honking their horns and people yelling.
Elenari might not have understood my reference, but she certainly grasped my tone. She flushed and then continued. “This seer is a kindly old soul, known once to have cast prophecies that etched the future of our world, but now she simply tends the gardens. I often went to speak with her and help her weed and prune.”
“Shit, Elenari,” I said. “Quick version!”
The elf nodded, glancing herself down the other end of the alley. “The seer used Luck Dragon blood on a portal-scroll. She told me that this scroll would transport me to a place where I would find the person who would save the Mystocean Empire, find the person that would be able to multiply the dragons once more. I experienced a brief vision, where I saw you from behind but not your face. It’s why I never considered that you’d be a man.”
“I’m gonna be frank with you, Elenari,” I said. “None of that made a blind bit of sense to me. You’re saying that I’m this person that is meant to save an Empire and multiply dragons?”
Elenari nodded and gestured at the Onyx Dragon that was still eyeing me intently. “I found you here, and you passed the test. What is most significant though, is that you are a man. Finding such a one as you cannot be mere chance.”
There was the screeching of rubber as the black and white rides of the LAPD’s boys and girls in blue pulled up and corked each end of the alley that ran between the back gardens of two streets of houses.
Doors slammed. Instructions that I couldn’t make out were yelled as cops piled out of their vehicles.
Elenari observed the cops through sanguine eyes. She didn’t look at all like she had just become the meat in a shit sandwich. I took this to mean that she had an ace up her sleeve, or else she was so far off the reservation that she was coming back around from the other side.
“Will you come with me?” she asked simply.
I looked into her emerald eyes. My gaze ran down and followed the line of her angular jaw, down her neck to the open collar of her jerkin that plunged down to…
I almost asked where she wanted me to go. What with the gathering firepower at either end of the alley though, this question was pretty much moot. So long as wherever we were going wasn’t jail, that was all good with me.
Abruptly, every fiber of my being hoped that what I was experiencing was true and real and not just some
fucked up chemical dream created by a knock on the head. I had lived a transient, unsettled life on Earth and had enjoyed almost all of it. How much cooler might it be living the life of a nomad in some other world? Did I want to try my hand at being this dragon-riding badass if I could?
Of course, I did, I answered myself.
“I’m in,” I said, nodding and shooting the elven woman a quick smile. There was no denying it, delusional or not delusional, she was a damn fox.
Something rubbed up against me, almost pushing me over. I turned about and saw that Noctis the Onyx Dragon had given me—what I hoped was—a friendly head nudge.
“You’re happy about that, are you?” I asked.
Noctis blinked in a way that I instinctively knew was in the affirmative.
Next to me, Elenari had fished out a small, furled scroll from her pocket and was reading it under her breath.
“Will your dragon back into the crystal,” she said to me.
I did it without thinking, closing my eyes and inwardly housing the dragon back inside the crystal that I still clutched in my palm.
There was a distorted squeal that heralded a loud-hailer being turned on.
“Hurry, and take my hand!” Elenari cried.
I opened my eyes. My dragon was gone, and so was Gharmon the Emerald Dragon, who had been sitting on the dumpster. Elenari grabbed me by the wrist in that surprisingly strong grip of hers and pull me through a—
—through a goddamn window that had been cut from the very fabric of the alley. It was like my entire surroundings had been nothing more than a material backdrop to something beyond, as if I was in a version of The Truman Show with a far smaller budget.
And, not knowing what the fuck lay ahead of me, but understanding that a series of really awkward questions from the police awaited me if I stayed, I stepped through the portal.
There was no dramatic swirling and contorting of reality, no pulling apart and rebuilding of bodily molecules as my essence traveled across both time and space. Not that I noticed. I stepped from Earth into whatever world it was that Elenari was leading me. From the blood and soot-stained concrete of an alleyway into the mildewy, fragrant leaf mold of a thick wood. My stomach lurched slightly, like I had missed a step going downstairs, but that was about it.
“Holy fuck,” I said, basically exactly mimicking what Sam Gamgee said when he got caught eavesdropping on Gandalf and Frodo when they were discussing the ring.
I whipped my head around and was just in time to see the portal close behind us. It looked like the material world was healing itself, the background of the scene knitting itself back together. I heard a last distant shout of confusion from one of the cops, and then Los Angeles vanished, and I was staring at the bole of some gnarly old tree.
It was the smell of the place that convinced me I had just teleported to another world. You couldn’t fake that smell. It was the smell of ancient trees and flowing sap, of leaves that had fallen and rotted and had more leaves piled on top of them. It was the smell of age and time.
A smile spread across my face. This was like a dream! Only, it was far better than a dream because it was real.
I was really in another fucking world!
“How—how did we just casually step from one world to another?” I asked when I had managed to sort the queue of questions that were jostling and shoving each other to be the first out of my mouth.
Elenari looked distracted, but she held up the scroll in her hand.
“This is a portal-scroll,” she said absently, her eyes darting from one tree trunk to another. “It is written in the blood of a Luck Dragon—a breed that can pass from one world to another as their fancy takes them, though they seldom move at all unless goaded. These scrolls can take you to the worlds that the spell written on them states.”
“Magic scroll,” I said, trying to pretend that was totally normal, “written in blood. Yeah. Obviously.”
Elenari took a long breath in through her nose. I saw her nostrils dilate as she sniffed at the still, damp air.
“You don’t look entirely pleased to be here,” I said.
I ran my own gaze over the knobby and twisted trunks of the cedars and firs that surrounded us, pressing in on every side.
“The scroll was not supposed to bring us here,” Elenari said. Her hand crept to the hilt of the curved dagger that hung at her belt. Only half-consciously, I relaxed into my fighter’s stance; setting my feet and opening my legs so that I was nicely balanced to both attack and defend.
I’d never been much of a boy for drawn-out silences. “Hey,” I said brightly, “this wouldn’t happen to be the Wyrmwood, would it? You know the one that you mentioned in your sweet-ass introduction?”
There was mist sitting low to the ground in places, and the branches of trees, though far above our heads, were so dense that there was more wood and leaves over us than sky.
Elenari spared me a glance and gave me a curt nod. “Yes, it is,” she replied.
“Well, this is your hood then, isn’t it?” I said. “Your homeland,” I amended when I caught the blank look on the elf’s face.
“Yes, but just because a place is your home, does not necessarily make it safe,” Elenari replied.
I thought of places like Skid Row, West Adams, and Lincoln Heights back in L.A. I had gotten into my fair share of scrapes in neighborhoods like that, and people most definitely called those places home.
Elenari looked about as on her guard as I had ever seen a woman look before.
“The old seer must not have drawn the return scroll properly,” she murmured to herself. She motioned to me and drew her dagger. “Follow me,” she said.
I followed Elenari through the dense wood.
We wended our way between trees that looked like they had stood since the dawn of time, clambered over rotten logs, and ducked through curtains of lichen the color of lapis lazuli stone.
Parasitic mushrooms bloomed from a few of the trees, so big that I could have snapped them off and used them as an umbrella if the weather turned. There wasn’t much in the way of birdsong, but by the time I heard the harsh croaking of a raven or a crow or something like that, I wasn’t surprised in the least.
Elenari moved like a wild thing, like a ghost, through the trees. She flitted from shadow to shadow on nimble feet, the blade in her hand gleaming with eldritch light. I followed along behind her, my body primed and ready to fight if we had to.
It was hard trying to concentrate on listening and watching out for potential danger when the forest itself was so captivating. The only other forests that I had been in were the redwood forests in northern California. They were impressive of course, but the wood we were stalking through now was awe-inspiring in a totally different way. It was a formidable place, the sort of environment from which monsters and legends must spring. It was Fangorn Forest on a comedown.
I approached Elenari as she paused at the base of an enormous tree that had finally had enough and toppled over.
“This place, the Wyrmwood,” I said in a low voice, “what sort of malicious a-hole creatures live in a place like this? You know, I’ve been through neighborhoods where you could just feel trouble mounting, the longer you were in there. I get that feeling with this place. I mean, there’s mist pooling in the hollows and around the roots of these trees, Elenari. That’s not a good sign, everyone knows that! This is exactly the sort of neck of the woods that I’d expect fucking gob—”
Elenari laid a hand across my lips. She was obviously telling me to put a sock in it, but I felt my always simmering sex-drive give a little lurch, nevertheless. Her hand was soft and smelled of pine needles and wood smoke.
“Through there,” she mouthed, jerking a thumb over her shoulder.
I crept over the edge of the fallen tree and cautiously poked my head over the top. For a full thirty seconds, I stared open-mouthed out at the sight in front of me. Then, just as cautiously, I lowered my head.
“Are those, uh, are those fucking go
blins?” I asked in a steady, unemotional voice.
Elenari nodded.
“I thought they might be,” I said, and raised my head back over the fallen tree trunk so that I could peer out at the clearing in front of us.
The goblins were gathered in the glade that had been created by the falling of the large cedar tree. About ten of the green-skinned creatures were gathered around a campfire where a large haunch of nameless meat dripped fat into the flames.
The nearest goblin must have been sitting at least twenty five feet away, but I could still smell their reek. They exuded a smell that I could almost taste. From my vantage point, I could make out the shared features of these goblins. They were a bent, crooked folk, dressed in simple loincloths of hide and fur. Their spindly frames were covered in skin the color of moss, with a thick thatch of hair across their shoulders but none on their heads.
“What are they doing?” I asked, slowly dropping back into cover again.
“They look to be hunting,” Elenari told me with a small shrug. “Or, at least, pausing in the hunt so that they can refresh themselves.”
“Hm, well, can’t we just wander out and wish them luck and mosey on our way?” I asked.
The gorgeous elf woman adjusted the armor across her chest, in a thoroughly distracting rearranging of tits, and grinned wryly to herself. “They think the Wyrmwood is their land. They do not recognize the rule of the Mystocean Empire. They hunt the game that belongs to Empress Cyrene, and they hunt our citizens, those that call the Empire home.”
I nodded. “So, going out there and trying to ingratiate ourselves…”
“You’ll end up with a stone spear point through your ribs for your efforts,” Elenari said.
“But we have dragons,” I said with a smile.
“We do,” she said. “I suppose then, that this could be an exercise for you.”
“I can test Noctis on some filthy goblins?”
Elenari nodded. “You’d be doing the Empress a service.”
Despite what she was talking about, killing a bunch of living, sentient creatures, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of excitement. After all, if you didn’t kill some goblins during your first few hours in a fantasy world, you were doing it wrong.