The Dragon King and I

by Adrianne Brooks

  The change was instantaneous. In the blink of an eye the view of the library morphed into that of a barren wasteland. It was so hot on the other side that the sun looked white and the blackened earth was cracked like a jigsaw puzzle. The emptiness stretched out into the horizon and I quailed at the thought of going in there.

  Beside me Flo was sneezing violently into her handkerchief, her slim body wracked by the force of each one.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Goblin fruit.” She got out between bouts of sneezing. “Allergic.”

  Which is probably why she didn’t live beyond the veil with the rest of her kind, and why she’d disappeared soon after stepping foot there. For the first time I got a whiff of something. It was carried along on the dry blasts of heat coming from the other side of the archway and my stomach grumbled.

  Baking fruit. I’m not sure if it had been outside forces or if this was just how the world looked at high noon, but the heat in conjunction with the Goblins’ wares reminded me of cherry turnovers, apple pies, peach cobbler, and a host of other goodies that left my mouth watering. When a miserably sick Flo indicated that I step through, I didn’t even hesitate; and all too soon I found myself trapped, once again, on the other side of the veil.

  * * * *

  I walked for an eternity.

  I died ten times over and every time I opened my eyes, Hell looked exactly the way I’d left it. It would have been comforting if it hadn’t been so hot. I would have cried, if the tears didn’t scald my cheeks as they fell.

  Time stretched on in slow, painful increments. My skin dried and cracked, my lips peeled, and I’d stopped sweating a long time ago, my body too exhausted to produce even that. Eventually it became harder and harder to walk, and I realized that in addition to exhaustion, the bottom of my tennis shoes were beginning to melt, the material sticking to the cracked ground and slowing me down even further as if I were swimming through tar.

  Eventually, the shoes melted all the way through and I let them fall from my feet without a backward glance. The feel of the ground eating through the bottom of my feet was excruciating but I numbed to the pain too quickly for comfort. I smelled burning meat, and morbidly enough, my stomach growled. I should have had lunch or something beforehand.

  The ground began to slope upwards on me, the incline so sharp that the only way I was able to make it to the top was on my hands and knees. When I cleared the rise and looked down, the sea of bone glinted harshly beneath the blazing light of the sun.

  The goblins were all dead.

  The knowledge had come to me the second I’d stepped across but it wasn’t until this moment that I knew for sure. The slope on the other side of the hill was a lot gentler so it was easy enough for me to get down and all too soon I found myself standing at the edge of the Goblins’ final resting place.

  I stared down into the gaping black holes of what used to be a Goblin’s eyes and shivered. My mind felt blank, all of me dried up and empty, but something about the evidence of so many lost was making the wheels start turning again.

  I would rather have stayed numb.

  Ignoring the way my vision dipped and swayed, I began making my way across the bone yard. In a way I suppose I wasn’t surprised by what I’d found. I’d gotten the impression that Sam had a very ‘them or me’ sort of mentality. There was only one thing left alive in this wasteland. One thing. And I was supposed to bring it back home? As I stepped around the melted bones of goblin merchants, I wasn’t so sure doing so would be a good idea. Whatever could do something like this…

  How did I know I could really trust Sam? Had he always been capable of this level of destruction or had he really run out of time? When the beast dropped down out of the sky, my only warning came in the form of momentary relief from the heat as a shadow blocked out the sun. Other than that I didn’t hear it, I didn’t sense any danger, and I certainly didn’t smell it despite the all too distinctive scent of sulfur.

  When it landed in front of me, it shook the ground, lifted me off my feet and had the skeletons around me levitating a few feet in the air before they crashed back down. Something, the edge of a bone or a rock, stabbed into the back of my forearm and I tried to make some sort of noise to express the pain, but my throat was to dry to let me. Instead I fought of a wave of dizziness and tried not to pass out. I’ve never dealt with a dragon before, but I somehow doubted that it’d just walk away from unconscious prey.

  But strangely enough, it didn’t attack me. At least not right off. Instead we simply stared at one another. The stillness gave me a chance to investigate it, to catalogue the sight of it in my mind. I never thought I’d find a giant, fire breathing, lizard beautiful but that was the only way to describe it.

  The armor that covered its body looked man-made. Beaten bronze, expertly engraved and fitted to protect the giant beast from snout to rigged tail. The armor shone brilliantly beneath the sunlight as the creature stared down at me. The armor not only acted as protection but as a containment, because beneath its weight wasn’t flesh and blood, but flame. It shimmered and stretched, reaching past the constricting armor to lash out into the empty air. Like the rays of the sun, though this particular star wasn’t red and gold, but toned like the most priceless of gems. Vibrant greens, deep yellows, burnt oranges, and violent reds combined with soothing tones of brown, topaz, and iridescent pearls.

  I could see how ancient men would have confused the flame as skin from a distance. The way they moved and rippled with the beasts every breath left no doubt in my mind that they had life and sustenance of their own.

  Awed and shaking, mind no longer blank in any sense of the word, I met Sam’s eyes. They were jet black. Polished obsidian that held a human’s intelligence if not an ounce of compassion. My hand lifted of its own accord and I found myself reaching for him. Wanting desperately to touch the armor plated snout, so see if it felt as cool to the touch as it looked.

  He was the size of my mother’s estate, but at the sight of me walking towards him on legs as weak as a newborn calf’s, it lowered itself to the ground like some giant, man-eating, cat. He tracked my movements warily, tail whipping along the dirt restlessly as it waited for…for something.

  I was less than a yard away when Sam angled his head to one side and a stray patch of sunlight broke free from his influence to ricochet off the surface of the platter I held. To be honest, I’d forgotten about the damn thing, and at the sight of it Sam’s snarled.

  I realized that he must recognize the platter as goblin made and would have thrown it away from me, but it was too late for that. I caught of glimpse of his tongue, ruby made living flesh, and teeth chiseled from diamonds, before his back arched and he took a deep breath.

  Then he exhaled, and just like that my world was engulfed in flame.

  * * * *

  It was reflex that made me lift the platter like a shield. I didn’t expect it to save me, and was stumped when it did more than simply melt away in my hands. It sent the dragon flame spreading around me as if I were a rock in the middle of a streambed. I felt the force of the flames being leveled on me but I didn’t feel them, simply watched them wash around me like the trailing ends of a comet.

  I had a moment where I was so, I don’t know, hypnotized by the beauty of it all, that I almost reached out to touch it. But sight of it melting a skeleton not five feet away from me as if it were made of wax was a stark reminder of my situation.

  So instead I hunkered down and held on to my shield grimly. Whatever magic had been worked into the steel must have been impressive indeed, but it could only stand up to an all out assault for so long. The oval ends of it began to round out, and against the palms of my hand I could feel it slowly, slowly, beginning to heat. If I planned on making it out of here in one piece, or any piece for that matter, then I needed to do something drastic.

  So that’s what I did.

  I came to my feet, and rushed forward. Going either left or right would have me just as deep within the fir
e zone. It stretched as wide as a football field. My best bet was getting in up close, where he couldn’t get to me unless he took to the air again. Then I’d see what I could do about convincing Samuel no-last-name that I was anything but an enemy.

  But first I had to get close enough, which turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. The force of the dragon fire simply got stronger and stronger the closer I came to the source until I was literally leaning forward just to keep from being thrown away like a leaf on a particularly flammable gust of wind. I had a wild, panicked moment of wondering if he ever had to stop to take a breath or if he could just keep blowing flame indefinitely.

  Each step became a struggle, and the closer I got the hotter it was. I was drowning in heat, sucking it down into my lungs and letting it boil my blood. I bathed in flame, and the platter in my hands began to shudder and scream, the surface becoming first red, and then white as the flames punished its magic and swallowed it down. The noise was deafening, and my arms began to shake beneath the strain of holding the Goblin platter before me for just a little bit longer.

  That’s what I kept telling myself.

  Just a little longer.

  My hands blistered, skin melting into the steel, feet digging madly into the earth, as I tried to take just.

  One.

  More.

  Step.

  Until suddenly, I was through. The opposing energy disappeared so abruptly that I fell flat on my face, rolling just as the dragon’s foreleg came crashing down where my head would have been. I rolled again, and again, trapped between the earth and the massive chest of the creature, its bronzed armor reflecting my own terrified face back at me a thousand times over.

  I crawled, trying desperately to stay beneath the animal, but it was all I could do to keep up with its movements. At one point I almost lost an arm because I didn’t move it out of the way of its foot in time.

  Then I heard it. A great rolling sound, like thunder. The air shifted, the bones that I could see from beneath the dragon’s shadow flying away like so much debris as its wings began to move. This was it; he was going to take to the air. And when that happened he was going to cook me, because there would be nowhere else to hide.

  Its body shifted, upper torso rising, and legs tensing as it prepared to launch itself into the air, and that’s when I saw my opening, that space in its armor where the chest plate met up with the metal protecting its elongated neck. Common sense screamed at me not to be stupid, but the same thing that had made me lift the platter up in the first place had me scrambling to my feet to run, crouched and awkward, towards the opening. I didn’t know what I was going to do until I felt Sam about to take off, and then I leapt. Fingers clawing into the metal, blistered skin popping and oozing, as I gritted my teeth and forced myself up, and in.

  My first thought when I’d seen what made up the core of the Dragon was that it would be hot in here. That wasn’t the case at all. I felt instead as if I stood at the edge of an ocean, spray licking my skin and cooling burns that I hadn’t had the strength to deal with just yet.

  And the sights…

  It was…blinding.

  I’d heard stories of people who’ve had near death experiences. Some of them talk of a tunnel leading up to heaven, and sometimes in my darker moments I allow myself to dream of what that tunnel may look like.

  I’d often imagined it like this.

  A vortex of color.

  A star given life and intelligence.

  Alice’s rabbit hole, painted blinding white.

  And coalescing it all, holding all that chaotic magic together into some loose semblance of a sentient being, was the heart. Beating, beating, redder than any jewel and floating there above it all in a spider’s web made of fire.

  I’ve always been that kid that wanted to touch things.

  You show me something pretty and my fingers will itch, my mouth will water, and every thought in my head will desert me faster than I can say my own name. Sometimes I like to lie to myself, say I outgrew such childish urges, but that isn’t true.

  You show me something beautiful, and my first instinct is to touch. To take.

  I wasn’t the classmate who ate glue. I was the one who stole your stuff.

  I saw the dragon’s heart, Sam’s heart, and without thought, without reason, or care for the consequences, I reached out, and touched it.

  Just the tiniest brush of my finger across the cool hard, surface of it.

  It pulsed like a beacon. Like a bomb.

  I was suddenly reminded that I was inside the body of a mythical creature as the world as I’d come to know it shuddered. There was a groaning sound, like breaking metal, and then the armor I’d been standing on collapsed beneath me, disappearing into the abyss like sands through an hourglass.

  A sigh, and then everything, everything, simply fell apart.

  * * * *

  I’d been alive once.

  There used to be something other than darkness, other than cold. I remembered it. But the memory was hazy. Surreal.

  Once, I’d been alive.

  Now I simply floated on a bed of stars and hungered.

  I hungered for life. I hungered for warmth, I hungered for something, anything at all, that would make me feel.

  But the beat slowed down, and the sky grew dark, and all the things I’d wanted up until that point didn’t seem nearly as significant as closing my eyes and giving up the fight.

  Then he came. The dragon man. All hot hands and soft lips, all corded muscle straining beneath bronzed flesh. He looked down at me in the darkness and his eyes were so blue they burned with their own icy fire. His fingers brushed across my chest, his nails dug past my shirt to mark my skin, and then he sent an inferno into my ribcage.

  My mouth opened and I tried to scream but no sound came out. The flames forced their way through muscle and bone, past veins and skin, and surrounded my heart like a cage. I fought against it, clawed at my own chest, tried to make it stop, but it just kept coming. Then my heart gave a single, sluggish, beat and my back arched, mouth opening on a gasp as lava traveled through my veins to replace the ice.

  I was flesh. I was blood. I was life.

  And I hurt like nobody’s business.

  The Dragon man closed his eyes and his hair fell forward to shield one side of his face. He was momentarily cast in starlight, his face flickering eerily from the dance of the flames that surrounded his hands. He forced life into me until the beat picked up and the darkness fell apart. He only let up when I could finally breathe without consciously forcing myself to do so. My heart hammered away in my ears. Beating steady and strong like a drummer’s beat. Then, still hovering above me the Dragon man grabbed my hand. His wings burst free with such violence that the air around us shuddered and cringed back. The great, black, silken sails of them consumed the sky before, without so much as a warning, they flexed and we were airborne.

  Chapter Ten

  And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

  - Isaiah ch. 34, v. 13

  I opened my eyes to the night sky. Or, the city’s version of the night sky. There were some stars that tried to peek through, but mostly it was all tall buildings, streetlamps, and the occasional brights from a passing car. My entire body ached, and I groaned as I sat up, fighting off a wave of dizziness as I worked to place where I was. A few feet away Sam lay curled up on his side, his breathing deep and even. He looked peaceful but chilly. Which made sense considering the fact that he didn’t have on a stitch of clothing.

  I suppose shape-shifting into a dragon gets to be hell on a wardrobe.

  I hadn’t seen him with a suitcase though he’d been wearing a change of clothes the morning we went to market. It made me wonder if Maleficent had to keep him dressed the same way she had to do with me of late. Groggy and limping like my grandmother, I struggled to my feet and glanced around. I was on a rooftop, and if my su
rroundings were any indication, I was on the rooftop of my very own apartment building.

  Excellent.

  Now all I had to do was make it down to the fifth floor without being seen and I was golden. Considering our disreputable state, I expected the task to be a lot harder than it was. But once I convinced a sleepy-eyed Sam to shuffle in my wake, I got us through the rooftop fire exit and to the nearest elevator in almost no time.

  From there it was just a waiting game. I told myself that I was too tired, too hurt, to appreciate the site of all that male goodness standing so close to me, but it was really hard not to note, in a distant sort of way, that Sam was as dangerously beautiful as a man as he had been as a dragon.

  I wanted to touch him.

  The elevator dinged, announcing our arrival and I jumped guiltily as the doors slid open. It was right around then that I realized that it must be at least 5:00 in the morning. I figured that out not through any inner sense of time, but because Mrs. Pearson always took her Pomeranian out to tinkle around this time before she started watching her early morning programs.

  The way her eyes bugged and her mouth dropped you would have thought the old girl had never seen a naked man before.

  “Hello, Mrs. Pearson.” I said cheerfully as I angled around her on my way out of the elevator. Sam was dozing off against one wall and I had to clap my hands sharply to get him to come back to the land of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

  “Hello, dear.” Mrs. Pearson answered absently, her eyes narrowed as she surveyed him slowly from the top of his sleep tousled head, to the bottom of his wiggling toes. I pulled him behind me and started walking backwards as she and I continued to exchange pleasantries to try and protect his virtue.

  Sam yawned but came along obediently enough.

  “It’s good to see you Alex, it’s been awhile. We were all worried for a while that you might be,” Mrs. Pearson glanced from side to side and lowered her voice to a whisper. “dead.”

  My brows shot up and I almost stopped walking, but her attention sharpened so abruptly I almost saw her ears perk up. I looked behind me to see that Sam had fallen asleep with his forehead against my apartment door the only thing holding him up. This, of course, left his finely chiseled man cheeks on display for all to see.