Heresy of Dragons

by Erik Reid

  Now she plucked the top card from the deck and held it in front of her face.

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s… monumental.”

  “Spooky,” I said.

  “Shut up, you idiot.”

  She slammed the card onto the table in front of me. It read “Silura” in a hand-drawn font. The image on the card was a castle set in the distance and surrounded by a stone wall. A creature that looked like a naked woman with leathery red wings was flying above one of the castle’s towers, while others of her kind were lying in the grass.

  “Okay,” I said. “What does it mean? That I’m about to make a major life decision? That my luck in love will improve? Another year of good harvests?”

  “What it means is simple,” she replied. “You have a chance to claim one of the seven destinies. Take this with you, you’ll need it again.” She tapped on the card’s center and started packing up the rest of her deck.

  “Now go,” she said. “And don’t fuck it up this time. I can’t keep doing this or they’ll find me.”

  I lifted the card and peered closer at the girls drawn into its scene. Or maybe ‘drawn’ wasn’t the right word. The image was so flush with detail and so resolute, it looked photorealistic in this low light. For a moment, I thought the corners of the card reflected back my phone’s light in an odd way, giving it the illusion of a faintly glowing border.

  Thunder drew my attention back toward the shack’s front door, just in time for a bolt of purple-tinged lightning to illuminate the park outside. The light was so bright it seared a violet afterimage into my retinas, glowing like a splotchy rectangular doorway against the insides of my eyelids. I squinted my eyes shut for a full second.

  When I opened them again, the old woman was gone. I had to move my eyes left and right to be sure it wasn’t just the burnt portion of my eyeballs playing tricks on me, but no. That crazy old fortuneteller lady had vanished.

  That, or she was hiding in the back room, gathering up more of her odds and ends.

  I picked up my phone to text Selena.

  Kyle: The date was a disaster, but you don’t want me coming over. I’m about to get drenched in this storm.

  Selena: Nope. Still no rain. Nice try. Captain America starts in 20 minutes and I still want my popcorn. Chop chop!

  Kyle: I don’t know what weather forecast you’re looking at, but it’s way off. The lightning is crazy bright and I can barely hear myself think over the rain. If this amusement park floods and I die here tonight, tell my family I love them.

  Selena: Kyle, you don’t have any family.

  I sent her a very sad-looking emoji in response.

  Selena: Okay, that came out wrong. What I mean is—

  The screen flickered and the image fizzled out entirely. I shook the phone, which was about as technical as my approach to electronics could get, then tapped it against the wooden table. I had charged the damn thing before I left the house, so it wasn’t the battery. Maybe I had dropped it too hard back at Wee Willy Weiner’s.

  Another flash of lightning and crack of thunder shook the entire hut. The table in front of me wobbled, drawing my gaze back to that one lonely card.

  “Hey,” I yelled toward the back room, pushing my chair back to stand. “Are you in there? You left one of your cards behind.”

  I picked up it, but that strange tingling returned as I pinched it between my fingers and gazed at its artwork. Despite the darkness of this ramshackle hut, the card’s image was perfectly clear. Almost like it produced its own faint light.

  I took a step toward the back room, splashing my sneaker into a shallow puddle that had grown inward from the hut’s front and now overtook the whole floor.

  A burst of lightning struck with a blinding burst of electric purple brilliance and an instantaneous shout of thunder, wave of heat, and crack of wood. Ceiling beams crashed in front of me, tearing a hole in the hut’s roof and filling the area with the smell of ozone and burning ash.

  I jumped backward and coughed against the wave of aromas as rainwater drenched my face. Overhead, through the gaping hole in the ceiling, storm clouds swirled and lit from sizzling tendrils of energy that snaked across the sky.

  The rain beaded down the front of the card in my hand, but it didn’t soak into its surface. I slipped it into my pocket and turned to run. Pulling my hood over my head, I sprinted from the fortuneteller’s shack in the dark, hoping I remembered the path I had taken to get this far.

  Long, menacing sounds of metal grinding against metal echoed throughout the park. These long-abandoned scramblers, drop towers, and coasters were held together with rusted bolts and nothing else. The harder the winds rocked through the park, the louder these dead machines screamed for an end to their suffering.

  My legs struggled against soaked jeans, the wet denim gripping my skin like a rubber glove. The hood flew off my head as I ran, blown by the wind I charged headlong into.

  That wind was fierce and unforgiving. It didn’t matter how hard I pumped my legs, the onslaught of air that pummeled my front was like a wall I couldn’t push through. Even breathing was hard in the face of it. The soles of my sneakers skidded against the cracked pavement without propelling me any further toward the park’s exit.

  When I stopped fighting it altogether, I expected the wind to blast me off my feet. Instead, currents and eddies swirled around me like a newborn hurricane, whipping at my hair and flinging my hood in alternating directions while the sky pulsed brighter and faster by the second.

  The dense clouds overhead were a thick black blanket that erupted in waves of blinding purple until the sky shot a bolt of that impossible lightning at the ground beside me. I flinched and leaned to the side, but the wall of air that encircled me prevented any escape.

  Another arrow of lightning struck just inches from the glowing crater the first bolt left behind. Again, and again, lightning cracked open the ground all around me in quick bursts.

  I raised a hand over my head to shield my eyes from the rain that pelted down and the searing flashes of purple light that accompanied the storm.

  Right there, in the center of my palm. That’s where the final bolt of lightning struck.

  My hand burned with the heat of a thousand suns and my throat tore itself to shreds from the pitch and volume of the scream that escaped my lips.

  Then the rain eased, the wind slowed, and my head hit the hard ground as I blacked the fuck out.

  CHAPTER 3

  When my eyes opened, the sun was bright overhead and I was lying face down on soft grass. My mind was hazy and my body hurt. I blinked a few times and let the world come into focus.

  In the distance, arranged identically to the hand-drawn art on the old woman’s it-wasn’t-really-a-tarot card was a landscape straight out of the medieval era.

  A stone wall stretched as far as I could see in each direction. Three iron gates were spaced at even intervals, though the one in the middle was by far the widest and most popular. Each gate was worked by a small group of armored guards with metal helmets and impressive, leathery wings that they kept spread wide, intimidating the pedestrians and horse-drawn cart drivers that approached on the outer roads.

  Set farther behind it was an impressive castle. Its parapets towered over the wooden shingles and red thatching that comprised most of the other buildings’ roofs. Each castle peak held light blue flags, over a dozen in total, with a bright white insignia stitched across them: a balled, four-fingered fist with a crown resting on its knuckles.

  Those stretches of sky blue fabric tapered to points that rippled in the winds high above the surrounding city. They would have blended into the sky itself if not for the puffy white clouds that hung overhead like giant floating cotton balls.

  The stone spires they decorated, however, were not idle towers. They held arched windows at each story that a few people had jumped from. Wings spread out from their backs as they swan-dove from the castle’s highest peaks, and then they glided to the ground, arcing smoothly until
they descended past the city’s retaining wall and out of sight. Long, slender tails trailed behind.

  Something about the way they carried their arms and tails while they flew reminded me of Charizard. I chuckled to myself at the crazy thought of it. Those people looked like dragons.

  I had died and gone straight to Anne McCaffrey.

  I groaned as I shifted my weight against the ground, reminded of my injured arm as I rolled my head to face the other direction and see what that horizon held.

  “Gah!” I gasped. There was a woman lying next to me in the grass, her face inches from mine, staring at me intently. Her eyes had vibrant green irises with vertical pupils like a snake’s.

  I scrambled to a sitting position and stared back at her. She was smiling and propping herself up on her elbows, holding her head in her hands. From that angle, I could see right down her front. Supple breasts pillowed against the grass, spilling past the low neckline of her shirt.

  Her hair was a dark green, far darker than her eyes, but her skin was peachy and her teeth straight and white. She was pretty, and from what I could see, in excellent shape. There was just the curious matter of the long, slender tail that stuck out from the base of her spine. It was a pale shade of green, and covered in small, overlapping scales.

  And, of course, her bat-like wings. Green, smooth, and thin.

  “Hi, little monkey,” she said. “Enjoy your nap?”

  “I’m not a monkey,” I said. “I’m a man.”

  “Your ears are rounded,” she said. “You have shaggy brown hair. You’re a monkey man.”

  “My hair isn’t shaggy,” I said. “It’s just messed up from being caught in a storm.” Even as I said that, I realized I wasn’t soaked through from the rain. I wasn’t even damp. “I have no tail, you might notice. No human does.”

  She didn’t flinch at the accusation embedded in my words. If having a tail made her non-human, it was a classification that didn’t seem to bother her.

  “What’s a human?” she asked.

  “I am,” I said. “How can you have monkeys here but no humans?”

  “That’s a question for the Goddess alone,” she said. “I didn’t shape the world from the formless void, and I certainly didn’t breathe life into the races that share it.”

  She smiled throughout this exchange, her cheeks dimpling and her eyes crinkling up at the sides. There was something entirely disarming about her. I woke up in a strange place, after a sour date, a witchy old woman, and a weirdly ominous fortunetelling — yet this woman exuded enough warmth and gentleness to push that ordeal to the back of my mind. I felt oddly relieved just by her company.

  “And this world,” I said. “It’s just some whacked-out dream world, right? When I wake up in a hospital tomorrow with a concussion, I won’t remember any of this.”

  “This is Silura,” she said, confusion drawing her lips into a cute pout. “It’s pleasant enough, but ‘dream world’ is overstating things. How did you end up on this hill with so little sense of your surroundings?”

  “Not by choice,” I said. “I got caught in a lightning storm.”

  “I don’t understand,” she replied. “Are you Goddess-touched? Did you ride the lightning?”

  “No, I’m not Lars.”

  “Who’s Lars?”

  “Nevermind that. I’m Kyle.”

  “Hi, Kyle,” she said. “I’m Daniana, but everyone calls me Dani.”

  “Hi, Dani,” I said. “Let’s assume that I’m totally new to the world and I don’t know anything, even manners. What species are you?”

  “Draykin.”

  “A dragon,” I said. “You want me, a person with a halfway-working brain, to believe that you’re actually a dragon.”

  “No,” she said, maintaining her warm, pleasant smile. “Dragons are big and fat and fire-breathing. And extinct, I think. We’re their descendants. I’m a pterodraykin myself, hence the wings, but there are other kinds of draykin out there. Just like there are other kinds of monkey men.”

  “I’m not… fine. It’s not worth fighting about. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of Earth?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s all around us. The grass grows in the earth. It holds the trees by their roots and provides a home to all the worms.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no.’ That’s fine. Even if this is all a dream, I’ll play along for now. It’s not like I have anywhere else to be.”

  She took a deep breath and gave me a look halfway between amusement and pity. “Of course. It all makes sense now. And I don’t blame you for keeping it secret since we’ve only just met.”

  “What are you getting at?” I asked.

  “You’re a vagabond, with nowhere to be and nowhere to belong. That explains the torn, stained clothing and messy hair. Your confused sense of place. The lack of proper education.”

  “I’m not a vagabond,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean it as an insult,” she said. “But… do you have a home?”

  “Not in Silura.”

  “Any possessions besides what little you carry or wear?”

  “Not that I can access or prove.”

  “A job or a trade that provides a sense of purpose and a livelihood?”

  “I get it,” I said. “I’m a vagabond.”

  “Then it’s decided.” She stood up and smoothed away a few strands of grass that stuck to her legs. Aside from a pair of short black shorts that hugged her thighs and ass, her legs were bare all the way down to her black leather boots. She positioned her hand carefully as she brushed her legs off, holding her dark, inch-long nails outward to avoid scratching her skin.

  Her black top matched the rest of her outfit, squeezing her breasts together and holding them firmly while leaving her flat, toned stomach exposed. Her skin was pale, but now I saw a greenish undertone to it. The tips of pointy ears poked through her thick, dark hair in similarly green peaks.

  “What’s decided?” I asked, snapping my attention back to our conversation before my lingering gaze became too lecherous.

  “You’re coming with me,” she replied. Her smile broadened at that pronouncement.

  “This would be a pretty boring dream if I said ‘no,’ wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know why you think this is a dream,” she said.

  “Let’s see,” I replied. “Castles, flying dragon people—”

  “Not dragons,” she said. “Draykin. We’re descended from dragons.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “All this is just whimsical fantasy daydream fodder where I’m from, but the real kicker is waking up to a sweet-natured, scantily-clad woman with perfect proportions and dripping with sex appeal.

  “If this is a dream, I hope it’s a wet one.”

  Dani blushed and opened her eyes a bit wider. “You think I’m attractive? Not plain, or humble, or boring? I’ve never had the benefit of a glamour mage to perfect my features. Compared to most of the women in the capital city… I’m nothing.”

  “You’re everything,” I said, unafraid to cheese it up in this not-real definitely-unconscious fantasy-dream. “And you don’t have some big burly draykin boyfriend somewhere waiting to kick my ass, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Perfect. If you want me to follow you, lead the way.”

  Dani stood, brushed herself off, and took a few steps. I trailed behind, walking away from the castle city and toward the trees ahead. They grew far apart from each other, more like a well-tended suburban park instead of a forest. They dotted the expansive green landscape that stretched out in short grasses with occasional shrubs.

  I took the opportunity to observe Dani’s tail as she walked. It swished back and forth in time with her hips, bouncing in tandem with her ass from one side to the next.

  I could watch this view all day, but I wouldn’t. Because I wasn’t a total creeper. Instead, I sped up my gait and took a place beside her. “Any reason we’re not going toward the castle?”

  “It’s not tim
e to head home yet,” she said. “There’s an errand I’ve been meaning to run, and I think today might be the day for it.”

  “Home,” I said. “You live in a freakin’ castle?”

  “Could you imagine?” she asked. “The castle at the heart of the city Varrowsgard, with servants, and attendants, and banquets for foreign dignitaries? Maybe even an audience with Queen Zolocki — when she’s not egg-sitting that is.”

  She laughed, so maybe that was a draykin joke.

  “No,” she continued, “I live in a crowded neighborhood in the castle city’s south end. I have a tiny room in a shared boarding house between larger buildings that stop the sun from ever shining in my only window.

  “But,” she continued, “there’s a kitchen. And if I stay up late enough, I can use it all night long without any interruptions.” She reached inside her pocket and pulled out a thin wafer wrapped in wax paper. “Taste this.”

  I took the small treat and twisted the paper loose. A semi-transparent sliver of rose-colored something sat in my hand. I placed it in my mouth with a “maybe-it’s-not-poison” shrug.

  The second that delicacy touched my tongue, my senses erupted with flavor. It was like sweet, ripe raspberries melted slowly across my tongue, distilling into a smooth, syrupy mouthful soaked in roses and kissed by vanilla.

  “You make these?” I asked, the candy still dissolving into a rich bouquet of berry goodness.

  “It’s one of my original recipes,” she said. “I’ve been perfecting them for a long time, and saving as much money as I could. I think I’m ready now. I hope so, anyway.” She took a deep breath. “I’m going to open my own candy shop.

  “That’s why I’m out here today, actually,” she said. “Working up the nerve to bring on my first pair of helping hands.”

  “I get it now,” I said. “You spotted me lying on the grass and thought ‘he looks like man-candy, that’s close enough.’ Well, I hate to break it to you, but I’m a lousy employee. I don’t take orders very well.”