Meghan's Dragon

by E. M. Foner

  Meghan’s Dragon

  Copyright 2016 by E. M. Foner

  www.ifitbreaks.com

  Chapter 1

  “Show me a dragon. Show me a dragon.”

  Meghan paused the mumbled incantation long enough to reach for the stone bottle and take a sip of watery beer for her parched throat. Most mages could get magical results without vocalizing their wishes, but despite years of practicing in secrecy, she still needed to shape and expel the words to get any action.

  “Show me a dragon. Show me a dragon.”

  The bronze relic gripped in Meghan’s left hand was her most precious possession, but it was so worn from handling that only the closest examination would reveal the outline of a dragon in flight. Once the emblem had stood out in proud relief from the surrounding metal and could be pressed into hot wax to create a seal. Now, worn around her neck on a leather cord, the medallion served a more important purpose as a lens and a reservoir for magic. Every day she worked with it for hours, using it to focus her search, while at the same time storing up her excess magical energy for what would be the turning point of her young life.

  “Show me a dragon. Show me a dragon.”

  Her mind soared above Dark Earth like a bird of prey, watching for a hint of the pattern that would trigger an all-or-nothing effort. When she had embarked on the quest for a dragon in her fifteenth year of life, each outing had required nearly an hour of preparatory meditation to sharpen her concentration and awaken her senses. After two years of practice, Meghan was able to launch into the extra-dimensional search like slipping on an old dress, which, coincidentally, was the only sort of dress she owned.

  “Show me a dragon. Show me a dragon.”

  The dragon pendant began to glow softly and vibrate in her hand, like a crystal that was tuning a sympathetic source of energy. Horrific scenes of battle and villainy danced before the girl’s tightly shut eyes as she allowed every intense emotion rising from Dark Earth to sift through her consciousness. Before too long she’d have to break off and leave for work, but there was just enough time left to investigate the brightest death vision she had ever encountered.

  “Send me a dragon. Bring me the dragon!”

  For the first time in more astral outings than she could count, everything fell into alignment. With a muffled cry that expressed more pain than triumph, Meghan opened the floodgates and allowed her stored up magical energy to begin coursing from the relic clenched in her left hand, through her slight body, and into her outstretched right arm and hand.

  “You must come with me. NOW!”

  Chapter 2

  The sole surviving marine of the Dankner Expedition to the Alpha Centauri colony refused to give up the fight. As battered war drones returned in a steady stream to his defensive position, he worked like an automaton, field stripping the useful parts and rapidly reassembling them into useful weapons. The temperature on the battlefield was becoming intolerable, and Bryan took a quick slug from his canteen before wiping the sweat from his eyes. Cathy Trichet, the beautiful young mission specialist, emerged from the doorway of the command bunker and gazed at him in admiration. In that moment, he realized that the perimeter breach alarm had sounded, and all of the drones froze in place.

  “What are you doing?” Cathy asked.

  “Huh?” Bryan replied. He looked down at the collection of damaged drones, glanced up at Cathy, and then back to the drones again. During the millisecond he had looked away, the war drones had somehow morphed into heavy, white restaurant dishes.

  “The alarm,” Cathy said, pointing at the blinking red light on the dishwashing machine. “We can hear it in the dining room every time the door swings open.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Cathy. Just daydreaming, I guess.”

  Bryan hit the “Stop” button to silence the alarm and to disengage the drive that conveyed the racks of dirty dishes and glasses along a closed oval track through the stainless steel washing machine. He ducked under the outer conveyer track and stood up in the center of the oval, a position from which he could slide open the machine’s access panels. Steaming water dripped from the perforated tubes at the top of the final rinse stage, and he could almost feel the temperature in the small room spiking up.

  “Anything serious?” the waitress asked. “They’re about to start clearing the Lincoln Room after that retirement bash, but I could tell the other girls to take a break first.”

  “It’s just jammed with a kitchen spoon,” Bryan grunted. He yanked out the offending industrial-sized utensil, which was longer than his forearm. “Handle slipped through the rack under the high-pressure wash jets. Man, that’s hot,” he concluded, tossing it into one of the now-stationary racks so it could go through the machine again. Then he slid the access panel shut, ducked back under the front section of the oval track, and hit the green “Start” button. The train of racks jerked back into motion, and the sound of water jets spraying inside the stainless steel box began again.

  “They shouldn’t make you work alone,” Cathy observed, setting her tray on the counter. “All of the other dishwashers work in pairs, with one guy scraping and loading and the other guy taking off and stacking.”

  “I’ve been doing this since I was sixteen, and I’ll bet I get through the rush faster working by myself than any of those two-man teams.”

  “But do they pay you twice as much?” Cathy asked. Then she offered him an ironic smile before heading back through the swinging door to the east wing of the restaurant and banquet facility. The afterglow of her perfect white teeth made Bryan fumble a wine goblet that he was putting into the sectioned glassware rack, though as always, he caught it before it hit the no-slip floor.

  The solo dishwasher grabbed a clean rack of coffee cups off the moving belt, put it aside, and replaced it with the newly loaded rack of wine goblets. The next rack on the conveyer held a silverware carrier and he couldn’t remember if it was the second time through yet, so he let it go by and moved the coffee cups to the drying area. He hadn’t been lying when he told the waitress he could get as much work done by himself as the typical two-man crew.

  Towards the end of his shift, he rescued a short-haired girl disguised as a young soldier who turned out to be a princess, and together they manned the only undamaged laser cannon left to defend the castle. Moving faster than he ever had in his life, Bryan worked alone at loading the white, one-shot crystals into the breach of the crew-served weapon. Peering through the open sight mounted on the laser’s barrel, the princess targeted and destroyed their nightmarish attackers. The burnt air began to stink of rotten eggs, and as lights began to flash in Bryan’s peripheral vision, a man’s voice shouted something indecipherable.

  “You must come with me!” the princess yelled at him.

  Bryan looked up from the nearly empty ammunition crate to see the gunner’s chair empty and a ghastly red and yellow cloud billowing toward them like a fireball in a disaster movie. A small white hand, so pure it could have been sculpted from steam, reached down for him from above. He thought he saw the delicate features of the young princess swirling in the mist, her mouth stretched wide as she shouted, “NOW!”

  He grabbed the hand a split second before the wall of fire swept through their position, and as she pulled him through the vaporous white curtain, Bryan felt every individual cell in his body burn.

  Chapter 3

  An oil lamp guttered in a nook set into the stone wall, casting a flickering light over the sleeper. A somber middle-aged woman stood over the cot, humming a tuneless song while she moved her hands in a series of intricate passes above Bryan’s prone body.

  “Is he alright, Hadrixia?” asked the anxious girl standing by the healer’s side.

  “He’s fine, Meghan,” the healer said. “They say the pass
age from Dark Earth takes a toll on those who travel it, though it’s been hundreds of years since I’ve heard of a mage managing a retrieval.”

  Meghan blushed in the dim light and mumbled something about her skills being nothing out of the ordinary. Bryan moaned in his sleep and rolled onto his back, his mouth falling open as he began to snore.

  “His clothing doesn’t resemble any uniform I’ve ever seen, and I can’t figure out why he’s wearing an apron,” Meghan said. “Do you think it’s to protect him from the blood of his enemies?”

  “Sometimes an apron is just an apron,” the older woman chided the girl. “Perhaps he was working in a kitchen when you pulled him through.”

  “I could see clearly through his eyes,” the girl protested. “He was in a desperate battle to protect a princess, and I reached him just as the castle he was defending was destroyed.”

  “Perhaps,” Hadrixia said. “Turn around.”

  Meghan reacted automatically, turning her back to the older woman, who stepped closer and began to separate the girl’s raven black hair into four equal parts.

  “I wish you had told me what you were planning,” Hadrixia continued in the same gentle tone, as she began to expertly plait the girl’s hair into a long braid. “If somebody with sufficient power was watching the passage and traced your magic back here, you would be discovered before you’re ready.”

  “Was I that loud? Would you have noticed if your public visiting-room wasn’t next door?”

  “You’re a very stealthy mage,” the older woman assured the girl. “You couldn’t have survived all these years in the castle without being detected if you weren’t. But as your power grows and you expend more energy in the higher realms of magic, it will become harder and harder to hide your trail.”

  “I’ve been searching for him every afternoon before work and every night after I get home for over two years,” the girl said. “We both know that I need a dragon if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in hiding.”

  “You’ve been patient to this point,” Hadrixia admitted. She wrapped a short length of ribbon around the end of the long braid and tied a knot.

  A bell began to toll somewhere in the castle, and both women counted silently along with the sounds.

  “Fifth watch already,” Meghan groaned. “I’m going to be late for work again.” She dashed to the door of her small room, but there she came to a sudden halt. “What am I going to do? He won’t know where he is when he wakes up, and he’ll only be able to speak his Dark Earth language. If he transforms when he regains consciousness, he might not even fit in the room.”

  “Now you sound like a frightened child who doesn’t know that dragons are just alternate forms assumed by powerful people,” the healer scolded the girl. Hadrixia saw Meghan’s face fall and she relented. “I’ll stay with him. I’ve had some luck in the past teaching foreigners our language while they slept. It’s been a while, but hopefully I haven’t forgotten how.”

  “You never forget anything,” the girl declared confidently. “I’ll be back before the seventh watch,” she added before fleeing from the room.

  Hadrixia dragged the sole chair over to the cot and sat down next to the young man. She sighed and shook her head ruefully at his undeniable physical presence in her young friend’s bed. Did Meghan think that once her guest woke up he would never need to sleep again? There was barely enough space in the room for the narrow cot, the small corner table with the unmatched chair that she now occupied, and the wooden chest that held the girl’s meager possessions.

  Bryan made a sound like he was choking on his tongue and then rolled back onto his side. The healer sat very still in the flickering light, humming beneath her breath and concentrating on something that only she could see. A faint yellow aura began to form around her hands, and she slowly extended her left arm out over the sleeping youth’s head. Placing her right hand on her own forehead like she was checking herself for a fever, she curled the fingers of her left hand around the empty air as if they were gripping a funnel. A stream of liquid yellow light began to cascade through her fingers and fall into Bryan’s ear.

  Chapter 4

  “Has he woken up yet?” Meghan asked breathlessly. She had run all the way home from work with her small daypack bouncing off her back, and then up the stairs to her room in the castle’s outer wall. Most of the servants and less successful tradesmen had their lodgings in the wood structures built up against or inside the wall, which was wide enough for easy movement of a small catapult on the wall-walk behind the crenellated battlements. The palace and the keep had their own higher walls in one corner of the castle grounds, which all told housed over a thousand people.

  “He’s ready to wake, but I put him into a light trance so you could be here to explain what happened,” Hadrixia said. “He should be able to speak and understand you, but he’s going to be very hungry and may believe that he is dreaming.”

  “I brought some bread and cheese, and there should be some beer left in the jar,” Meghan replied, working one arm out of her daypack and letting it slide off the other. She hesitated for a moment. “I was thinking while I was at work that I may not have prepared as thoroughly for his arrival as I should have.”

  “Like where he’s going to stay?” the older woman asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “I guess I thought he would either fly off to the mountains to sleep or claim quarters as a visiting knight, but dressed like he is, they’d probably put him in the stables. I’m going to have to risk passing him off as a long-lost relative, and I’ll ask Phinneas to loan him enough equipment to compete in the next tournament.”

  “There may be a complication with that,” Hadrixia said quietly. “I would never look into the mind of another person without permission, but a few impressions leaked through while I was teaching him our language.”

  Meghan did her best to ignore the sudden hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach. “I know I should have talked to you about choosing a dragon beforehand, but I was afraid you’d tell me to wait until I was older. Do you think he’ll refuse to fight for me?”

  “He may not be a professional soldier,” the older woman hedged.

  “Do they have yeoman on Dark Earth?” Meghan asked, exhaling in relief that it wasn’t something more serious. “That would make him a small landholder who was called up to fight for his local baron.”

  “Not exactly,” Hadrixia said. “Are you sure you were concentrating on finding a warrior when you were searching this afternoon?”

  “Of course,” Meghan declared, but an overwhelming dread reduced her voice to a hoarse whisper. She had spent well over half of the magical energy she had stored up over the years to claim her dragon from Dark Earth. “What else do I think about day and night? I’ve been working towards this my whole life!”

  “Isn’t there something else you work at?” the older woman hinted.

  “You know better than anyone that my only goal is to control my own destiny. I’ve dedicated every waking hour outside of work to building my skills and—oh, no! Please don’t tell me that I was thinking about work,” she begged, as the meaning of Hadrixia’s last question sank in.

  “You’ve been searching twice a day for two years and you’ve put yourself under tremendous pressure. It’s normal for a young person’s mind to wander.”

  “The other scullery maid got married last week, and they haven’t replaced her yet,” Meghan practically wailed. “There’s always a mountain of pots waiting for me in the kitchen, and I’m beginning to see them in my sleep. But I know that my dragon was fighting a hopeless battle to defend a castle at the moment I pulled him over.”

  “What do you daydream about while you’re at work?” Hadrixia asked softly.

  Meghan’s legs turned to jelly beneath her and she half sat, half collapsed into a cross-legged position on the floor, where she buried her face in her hands.

  “He’s a scullery maid?” she sobbed out the question.

  “According to the
secret lore, he will have as much potential as any other soul retrieved from Dark Earth,” the older woman reassured her. “He just isn’t a trained warrior. I gather that in his world, most of the dishwashers in large establishments are male. Are you ready for me to wake him now?”

  “Do we have to?” Meghan replied glumly.

  Chapter 5

  The first thing Bryan saw when he regained consciousness was the face of a kindly, middle-aged woman who was wearing a brilliant blue hood that for some reason struck him as an official badge of office. The second thing he saw was a skinny teenage girl with a long black braid and a red face and hands who looked like she’d been crying. He wondered what they were both doing in his basement apartment and why the flickering light from the failing compact fluorescent bulb was even weaker than usual.

  “I am Hadrixia, and this is Meghan,” the older of the two females said.

  “Why are you in my room?” Bryan demanded in return. His own voice sounded strange to him, as if he were speaking a foreign language, but the words came fluidly and he understood what he had said.

  “It’s my room,” Meghan retorted. “Your daydreams tricked me into bringing you here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Bryan sat up rapidly and was rewarded with a spell of dizziness for his efforts.

  “Meghan,” Hadrixia admonished the girl. “Even if there’s been a mistake, you are responsible for his being here and there’s no sending him back. I have to make my final rounds now, and as we discussed, I expect to find this young man informed of his situation by the time I return.” The healer reached out and took hold of a hand from each of the young people, and then she pronounced, “Happy truths.”

  Bryan and Meghan both snatched their hands away as if they’d been burned, but Hadrixia merely smiled and left the room without another word. Behind her, the two young strangers regarded each other sullenly. The sight of the rough stones of the outer wall revealed by the feeble light from the oil lamp was enough to confirm for Bryan that this wasn’t his room after all. He swung his legs off the bed so he could sit facing the girl, who took the seat vacated by the older woman.