The Cursed Dragon

by Rachal M. Roberts

  As she searched for wood Kalara rubbed her arms to bring back the feeling that the ocean pressure had taken from her. She was thankful she wasn’t his foe and tried to massage away the lingering pain. She was still angry at him for torturing her like he did but she needed him for answers. She had to get over it and go on.

  As she threw dead wood onto the pile she’d made, she muttered to herself, “I don’t see why he won’t just tell me right now who I am. ‘hear my words’!” she huffed, “I have nothing to say. I want to hear his words!”

  “It’s not that simple.” Again, Ravanan startled her from the darkness made darker by his blue mist. How could he have heard her say that? She had practically whispered it to herself.

  Ravanan went on “The moment you told me you didn’t know who you were, was when I knew that you were not safe. I know you need answers, you need a lot of them. But before anything else, we must get away from the dragon who did this to you. You don’t realize the powerful magic that has been over you all this time, silent, watching, and waiting from far away. You don’t understand how vulnerable you have been.”

  He tossed a blackened dead cow onto the rock near Kalara.

  Ravanan rose up high and cast “MORPH TO HUMAN”. The large dragon practically vanished because the spell happened so fast and in his place stood a man whose dark hair was still falling down over his shoulders. His naked human body didn’t bother him, but like all dragons, Ravanan cared deeply about blending in when morphed to the human form so he then cast “DRAPE SAPPHIRE”. Ravanan the Azure Wizard walked up to Kalara wearing his favorite apparel. His blue velvet robes were embellished with sapphires and light blue topaz gems that set off his blue eyes. The heaviness of the velvet accentuated his broad shoulders giving him an even more impressive build.

  For the first time since they traveled through the anchor Ravanan looked Kalara over as if to make sure she was still herself and alright. “Did anything happen to you after I vanished from the mall? Did you see or hear anything?”

  “No, nothing. What happened to you? Where did you go?”

  “I was banished as I told you.” Ravanan knelt down and cast “EVOKE BOLT”. A dirk appeared in his outstretched hand that had a jagged crystal blue blade with edges shaped like a lightning bolt and he savagely cut the cow’s throat with it.

  Ravanan waited for the blood to collect on the rock and said “Until your memories come back you will have to work on learning your magic again the hard way. It’s in you, but you have no understanding of it and it is lost to you. Just watch everything I do.

  “The way we craft spells is to just do it. It is physically and mentally exhausting at first, using our blood to work the magic and causing us to eat great amounts of food. But with each repetition the chosen spell slowly becomes easier. It takes a long time to refine a spell to perfection. But finally if a spell is cast enough times it hardly uses any magic at all. This does not give us unlimited power, it just rewards the work we put in towards a particular spell. Such as the dismissal spell that was cast on me. Whoever that dragon is he probably tired himself out completely just vanishing me. That was powerful magic to watch a dragon through a seer pool and then displace it from its point of origin. It was a rare spell, not needed for normal living.”

  The small pool of bovine blood was overflowing now. Ravanan cast “ANCHOR” and he watched it form on the rock where they had landed. Seeing where the anchor was located, he dipped his finger in the blood and quickly drew a two foot circle next to it. The first anchor faded after a few heartbeats as Ravanan worked on the second anchor.

  He wrote out a spell using the same runes Kalara had seen on the other anchor around the edge of his circle and he explained “What I’m writing is the command to break apart our molecular bonds and to send our atomized flesh to the place I’ll draw in the center.”

  Kalara was distracted by the flies that had started buzzing around the dead cow and disgustingly asked “Why did you need cow’s blood for this? Have you ever heard of a magic marker? Humans make them to write on things.....”

  Ravanan smiled to hide his shock at her total memory loss, ‘How could she not know this?’ he thought to himself. He tried the best he could to put on a teacher’s face for her, amazed he would even go the trouble, and answered. “I’m drawing an anchor, it needs iron-filled ink to call forth the iron in the rock. I will go back and kill the dragon responsible for banishing me and taking your memories, this anchor will make it faster to get there.” Now he was deftly sketching the cliff they had flown to in Tulsa.

  Kalara watched him draw with the cow blood and asked “What is this blue mist?”

  He paused to look at the mist “It’s a barrier that protects against outside magic and prevents those outside of it from seeing us. In here we are hidden from the world.”

  After he finished his sketch he cast “IMPRINT” which caused the blood ink to soak totally into the rock.

  By then Ravanan was ready to eat. He was exhausted from casting the protective blue mist spell. The wizard breathed a quick jet of fire on the wood and sat back to wait on a rare steak.

  Kalara watched the flames grow tall. “Who am I?” she asked.

  He replied “I know who you were, but telling you about yourself won’t help you. I could tell you about any dragoness and say it was you and you wouldn’t know the difference. What you really want to know is your memories; once you get those back you can decide if you still want to be who you were. Until then, you must be who you are right now.”

  “Alright, can you help me get my memories back? Do you have a spell for that?”

  “Yes, I do, but you might lose your recent knowledge in the process and the possible clues about who did this to you. I need those clues intact, your memories can wait.”

  Kalara was disappointed. “Wait? But I don’t want to wait! How did this happen to me? Can you at least tell me that?”

  Ravanan’s voice remained low and paced, as if time had no hold on him “I wasn’t with you when you lost your memories therefore I don’t know how it happened.”

  “So that’s it then, you don’t care that I’ve been like this for months. What’s a little longer gonna matter? All you are wanting to do is take me far away from all I know. Why? Why you? Who are you to me? And where are you taking me? Why not help me get the one thing I need, the very thing I crave more than anything else?”

  His answer was tinted with a scoff, “You don’t know your needs. I was chosen to escort you back to your true home, Kynasteryx. You are a dragon and you’ll not be left to the fate of a common animal, lost in a herd of humans.”

  “And if I refuse to go with you?”

  Without pause Ravanan gave her a choice “You’ll go or you’ll die.”

  Kalara came undone. “WHAT?!”

  With cold reason he answered her “You are dangerous. Your ignorance is too great a risk for discovery of our kind. Either return with me or prepare yourself for total destruction; which, I assure you, would happen should you choose to fight me. Even in the extreme chance you could kill me, you’d still die.

  “You see, I’ve modified the common burial spell. Normally the burial spell activates when the body dies. But my spell will bind you to my carcass; and your last breath will be taken from your lungs as our bodies sink to the deepest ocean trench where the earth will erase all traces of our blood and bones.

  “But try not to think about it like that. I really don’t mean you any harm, far from it actually; and I think you honestly want to come with me, or at least you did back in the mall.”

  Kalara couldn’t dismiss what he had just revealed. She had been captured. She couldn’t fight him. But did she want to escape? No. The only thing she was living for now was answers. If finding her identity meant being his prisoner, then she would endure that. Really, was it any different than Jenniffer keeping her locked away in that miserable apartment? She would get her answers eventually. She just needed to hang on.

  Ravanan seemed to know wh
at she was thinking “Kalara, you don’t have to suffer. You can relax. Yes, I could tear you limb from limb, but there would be no sport or reason in that. If you suffer at all it will be fully self-inflicted I assure you, it will not be from me. If you truly want help then work with me. Tell me about your recent memories, like what you were doing in that city.”

  Kalara was still tense despite his nice words. “There is nothing to tell, I have been lost for months. I know nothing to tell you. My existence has been uneventful and boring.”

  She just wanted answers and now she was being taken even further away from Annette and her only alternative was death by his hand. Relaxing on demand was not going to happen. She didn’t want to talk with a man ready to kill her. If he truly knew who she was why not just tell her, it wouldn’t take very long. Once she had her past, then she would know who did this to her and could go after them.

  Ravanan sighed “I can see you’re not going to tell me. You know I could force you to, but I won’t.” He got up and walked away to make his own bed on the other end of the blue mist.

  With him gone, Kalara thought back on her day. So dragons and their magic was real, just as real as the bumpy and flat rock she was laying on. How could people not know there were dragons big as houses living among them? Ravanan was huge. Kalara wondered what her base dragon form looked like and if she was really as large as he was. Knowing she was a dragon didn’t make her feel any different really. She still didn’t know who she was.

  How would she get him to tell her about her past? Ravanan was so set on getting her away rather than helping her find her memories. Why? With each anchor she was moving further from Annette. How long was she willing to follow him without getting her answers? Or was she even being willing at all? He so easily held her still, calmed her heart crushed her with pressure. Could he be controlling her mind too? How would she know it if he was?

  He was handsome though. As she tried to find comfort on the hard ground, she allowed herself to run free with the image of his disrobing. How could she be attracted to a dragon that threatened and hurt her? Yes, his human form was so tantalizing, but he wasn’t human. Why was she so strongly attracted to someone she had just met? What if he was causing her to desire him? If he was manipulating and commanding her, how then could she trust that he would tell her the truth when she asked him to? No, he was nice, mostly, he couldn’t possibly want to harm her. He did come back for her and said he would help her.

  Nonstop images of his cloths vanishing from his lean body ran through her mind. He was hot. She didn’t know if her former dragon self enjoyed the human male form or not, but her current self did. Had living among humans changed her? Changed who she had been and her personality? Was it for better or worse? Deep in thought, she drifted to sleep.

  Kalara’s eyes began to flutter from her dreams. Jumbled images flashed before her, they were mostly clips from the past day. She saw and smelled the grease cesspool behind the mall as she flew over it with Ravanan the giant blue dragon. Then Jenniffer was poisoning her plant with cola and Seven the house cat came and clawed up Jenniffer’s arm to punish her for it. The dreams all converged with Kalara following a naked Ravanan through the woods, after some time she became lost. The woods filled with smoke and ash and she could feel tiny shards of glass cutting her throat as she breathed in the toxic air. She covered her mouth, but it was difficult to do because she had black talons for fingernails that were way too long. From the ash cloud Kalara heard a distant voice that sounded like shattering glass “Stay lost Acama, don’t ever come this way again.”

  In her dream she was coughing up blood as the splintered voice faded away. All the coughing and spitting made her wake up spitting nothing but air.

  Kalara tried to recapture her sleep. She didn’t care for the dreams of ash and hated waking up that way. She liked the dreams where she was hunting. If she could just get back to sleep then maybe she would dream a hunting dream.

  In her dreams though she was always a human. Try as she might, Kalara couldn’t grasp feeling like a large dragon. She wasn’t what Ravanan said she was. There was no way she could be a dragon; surely she couldn’t have forgotten something as basic as that.

  Sleep wouldn’t come back. Her mind was frustratingly awake for the day, it was busy thinking as the sun was thinking about rising.

  “I must still be laying on the floor at the mall.” she mumbled. The floor was not comfortable. She wondered what Jenniffer was doing. How did Jenniffer react to her disappearance? Kalara wondered if she even called Annette about it; probably not.

  Suddenly she was fully awake. “Annette!” she said and sat up, worried, wanting to talk with the Medicine Woman to sort out her dream. “What?” Kalara looked around her, she was on a cold rock that brought her back to cold reality. The stars were still fighting the dawn, trying to give light to the world, they glistened abnormally beautiful from beyond the blue mist.

  She had slept on a rock all night in the middle of a wide plain. She needed to call Annette. She wasn’t laying on the floor of the mall, drooling and babbling about a fictitious life. She hadn’t imagined the whole thing! She really was in the middle of nowhere.

  Kalara searched for her cellphone in her purse only to realize she had left it behind. “Shit!” she paused and absentmindedly played with the ring on her finger. There was nothing else to do except go forward with Ravanan the dragon, assuming he was still there somewhere, and try to get him to stay in his charming human form rather than the menacing dragon one.

  This life did seem easier to handle, just move along as his prisoner. Months of complexity – learning how to get along with Annette and Jenniffer, learning how to do the things that no one else had problems with, things that had been stolen by her amnesia – now they were no longer needed. It was incredible to think that in the short span of an afternoon none of it mattered anymore. She was relieved that for the first time she wouldn’t have to worry about conforming to a society that she had no recollection of. She could relax, just be what she was, a living being of questionable origin and expected to do nothing. Annette and Jenniffer didn’t matter anymore, she wasn’t going to waste another second trying to fit in with them or any human. She had moved on and wasn’t looking back to that small apartment. No matter what, she was finally truly free from that place.

  Her past would find her, it had to, Ravanan seemed so sure and so knowing......... perhaps today was the day she was going to get her memory back. Kalara’s excitement grew.

  She watched the sun appear and finally spotted Ravanan as he walked towards their small campfire site to relight it.

  Watching the fire grow, she asked, “Do you always cook your food?”

  He chuckled as he turned the meat over, “No, not always, I like it both ways, hot with blood or flavored by flame. I assumed you are used to flavor and went with that. We’ll head out in a moment, no sense in staying here.”

  “So you’re taking me to Brazil? How long will that take?”

  “Not long, Brazil is another eight anchors away. The longest part will be making the return anchors at each one.”

  “You know I was found in Brazil.”

  Ravanan seemed indifferent, “Your home was in Brazil so it would make sense.”

  “Do you think that dragon followed us?”

  “Are we in a duel right now with another dragon? No, we’re not.” he answered himself. “That dragon watched our electrical clouds leave and then lost us as we went out of range. He would have been too tired to try and follow. But it’s still a good idea to keep going and burn our tracks.”

  After Kalara’s quick meal he erased all signs of their presence and gestured for her to get ready. Then he cast “ANCHOR” on the cap rock.

  Kalara mentally prepared herself to be turned into a cloud as the dark red anchor started to form, this time with two destinations.

  Ravanan was careful to synchronize the dissolving of the protective blue dome with the forming of the anchor. Kalara felt a low sonic
boom when he released the mist to expand into nothing. Following the sound wave, when the anchor was at its zenith, they were in mid-step and Kalara doubled over, screaming in agony from stomach pain. She was being attacked and couldn’t tell from where.

  Popping sounds could be heard coming from her legs as they broke then she went down.

  Holding her stomach, Kalara knew something was really wrong. She pressed her palm closer to herself and discovered that her belly skin had large jagged holes in it. Her skin had curled away from massive cuts. It felt strange without the sense of touch on her belly because the injury didn’t hurt and guts don’t have sensitive nerve endings. Her fingers felt her own hot, wet guts like she was butchering someone else’s stomach. With the skin gone, her hand fell in and her organs slid past before she could stop them. Her hand was covered in blood as she tried to hold the intestines in place, but they kept slipping through.

  Kalara was curled up on the ground in so much pain, the soles of her feet were now bubbling and searing as if on fire. She looked at where she had been standing and saw melted pieces of her feet stuck to the rock.

  Ravanan scooped Kalara up with awesome speed, stepped onto the older of the two anchors, then their bodies vanished into turbulent clouds of lightning. Her last thought before changing into a cloud was that magic had to be real because her pain sure was.

  Chapter 4

  Todd woke in a sweat, his dreams were of his spirit guide, a bull. It was mating with all the cows in a field except that the bull’s member was a gray snake. There were so many cows that needed him, the bull was incapable of satisfying them all. Getting tired he ate other bulls to keep up his strength, the task was never-ending. Todd couldn’t get back to sleep after that and decided to drive over to Annette’s to get her opinion of the nightmare. He’d just wait on the couch for her to wake up.

  As he was pulling up, Jared Brownfield was leaving. Todd found Annette in the kitchen eating a nibble of fruit before bed, her housecoat was pulled up to cover her nightgown and he could see a bruise on her neck that wasn’t there yesterday “What’s up with Mr. Brownfield?”