"Okay," I said. "That does make a lot of sense. Why don't I go this way, you and Greg go that way, and we'll meet back here in about thirty minutes to make a plan."
"Sounds good to me, but why are you going off alone?" She asked.
"It's not that I'm going off alone, but to be brutally honest, I'm not the most graceful thing in the forest, and neither is Greg. If he and I split up, then anything that hears us will wonder why there are two rampaging elephants rummaging in the forest outside a dragon's lair. Hopefully the noise will be so distracting that any beasties just decide to leave us alone instead of attacking."
"Hey!" Greg protested. "I'm stealthy. Like a ninja." He leaned on the trunk of a tree, which proved to be rotten and toppled over, taking my fat vampire ninja to the ground in a crash.
"Yeah, you and Kung Fu Panda, bro." I turned and headed off into the forest as quietly as possible, which really isn't that quiet. I'm a city vampire, despite my years at Clemson. I don't spend a whole lot of time in the great outdoors, mostly because there's never anybody to eat out there. The wilderness is wild, man. I'll stick to someplace with delivery.
I wandered around for about ten minutes until I came to what looked like the front of the cave. Now that looked like something a dragon could get into - an opening easily fifty feet wide and thirty feet high. The ground in front of the cave mouth was packed hard and smooth, like something really, really big and heavy used this entrance often. I looked up and saw Greg and Sabrina coming around the other side of the hill. "I guess this is probably the front porch." I said as they came into view.
"Yep." Sabrina said. "Now what do you think about a frontal assault, Braveheart?"
"Might not be my best idea ever." I admitted. "What does your plan smell like, Sun Tzu?"
"Actually, it's Greg's plan." She said, waving at my out of breath partner.
"Then we're doomed. I'm pretty sure we don't have the cheat codes for this boss fight, gamer-boy." I said as Greg sat down heavily on a boulder.
"Maybe not, but I've still got a pretty good idea for how to make a dragon trap." He panted.
"I'm all ears, bro." I said.
"No, Jimmy, you're usually all mouth. But I'll take it." He pulled a dagger from his belt and started to sketch out a diagram in the dirt. "You and I get up to the top of the cave mouth with our swords. Sabrina goes back around to the back door and sneaks in with her bow. She shoots the dragon in the butt with a few of those nasty arrows, and when it comes running out the front door, we jump on its head and kill it. If we each go for an eye, we should be able to stab straight into the brain and drop the beast without any fuss or bloodshed."
"At least on our part." Sabrina said.
"Yeah, shedding a whole lot of dragon blood is sorta the plan." Greg agreed.
I hated to admit it, but it sounded pretty solid, especially the part where Sabrina stayed back and didn't get in the way of the teeth and claws part of the fight. "What about the whole fire-breathing thing?" I asked. "Won't the dragon just turn around in the cave and roast Sabrina?"
"I'll have to scout it out. Hopefully there's a crevice or a crack in the wall I can hide in." She didn't seem too concerned about going into a cave to shoot a dragon in the butt, so I figured let her go for it. I was the one volunteering to jump off a cliff onto the same dragon's head, after all, so I didn't have a whole lot of room to talk about good decision-making.
"Alright, boy genius. Do we do this now, or wait 'til dark?" I asked.
"I don't know. I have no idea if dragons are nocturnal or diurnal." Greg replied.
"Since I have no idea what that second thing means, I guess I don't know either." I said.
"Diurnal means that a creature is active during the day." Said a new voice from directly behind me. I jumped about eight feet in the air and turned in midair, landing eye to very, very large eye with the golden-scaled head of a dragon. Apparently they can move very quietly when they want to. I backed up as quickly as I could, and out of the corner of my eye saw Greg and Sabrina doing the same thing. I tried hard to stay directly in the monster's field of vision as they moved out to flank the creature's head.
"Good afternoon, heroes. I am Tivernius, welcome to my forest. I do wish you would put that away, my dear. I would prefer not to incinerate you quite this close to my home. After all, only we can prevent forest fires." Sabrina put down the bow she had been trying to slowly draw, and Greg and I sheathed our swords. "Thank you. Now please, come into my home and we can continue this conversation in a more civilized setting. I give you my word that I will bring no harm upon you as long as you do not attack me." With that, the giant head, which was the size of a Mini Cooper, pulled back into the cave on a long, sinewy neck.
We stood there for a moment looking at each other until finally Sabrina started walking toward the mouth of the cave. "Where are you going?" I almost shouted.
"I'm going to do as he asked." She said. "If he wanted to kill us, we'd already be dead. He caught us completely flat-footed, and let us off the hook. I'm going to give him the courtesy of a conversation before we fight, at least." With that, she leaned her bow and quiver against the cave mouth and followed the head into the side of the hill. I looked at Greg, who shrugged back at me and followed her. I waited there for just a moment before I realized that they were in no hurry to come back to their senses, and followed my friends into the dragon's lair.
Chapter 17
The passage was long and deceptively winding. I briefly wondered how the dragon's neck could be long enough for him to extend all the way to entrance, and then decided that I didn't really care. We walked for a solid five minutes down the tunnels until it the passageway opened into a huge room that made Milandra's great hall look like a dorm room. The ceiling vaulted high above our heads, at least fifty feet into the air, and just at a glance, I figured you could have fit a couple of football fields in the room with space left over for at least half a racetrack to boot. Everywhere around us was opulence decked in gold themes. The floor was made up of marble slabs set in place and lined with gold. The walls covered in enormous tapestries in amber, gold and orange hues. The ceiling, almost high enough to have its own weather, was sculpted to look like there was a canopy of trees, all covered in golden leaves.
I was almost disappointed not to see a huge lizard lying sprawled on piles of treasure, but there was no huge pile of booty. No fire-breathing monster running its talons through piles of gemstones, no priceless works of art carelessly piled around the room. There was just a sparsely decorated but expensively appointed hall, with a large table near one wall. Seated at the head of the table was a tall, well-built man, who rose when we entered and beckoned us to him.
"Come, my guests. Sit, be welcome, and I will have food summoned." We walked over to the table, and he gestured to three of the chairs, which slid out from the table as if on wires. Somewhere in this world there had to be somebody who didn't make David Copperfield look like a clumsy middle-school kid giving magic shows at a birthday party. I'll admit it; I was starting to feel a little inadequate. After a few years of being the most phenomenal creature in any room, it can be a real blow to the ego to run into dragons and Fairy Queens.
We sat at the table, and our host took his chair at the head of the table. "Welcome. Thank you for agreeing to join us. Now, please, what can I do to help you?"
"I'm sorry if I'm missing something, pal, but wasn't there a dragon in here a few minutes ago?" I asked, sipping from a goblet that appeared in front of me, full of rich red wine. The wine had a coppery tang to it, as though there was a little blood mixed in. I wasn't going to complain, but I had my concerns for Sabrina if we were all drinking from the same carafe.
"I am sorry, my friend. I should have realized that you were not from our land. I am Tivernius. I am the dragon." I looked sharply at the man and could see just a faint hint of scale at his eyebrows. His gold-tinged complexion did seem to ripple a little as the light struck it, and we were in FairyLand, after all.
"Sorry. I thought you'd be bigger." When in doubt, quote Roadhouse. It's a philosophy that has served me poorly for many years, but I'm not smart enough to change it.
"We have multiple forms, my vampiric friend, just as you do." Tivernius said.
"Huh?" Greg said. "We don't have multiple forms, we're just vampires."
"Then you have been poorly taught indeed, or are very young for your kind, not to have discovered your other shapes." Said the dragon-man. "But it is not for me to teach you. Why are you here? Are you also here for my head, like the others that Fae-witch has sent in the past?"
"Well..." I looked for a delicate way to put it and couldn't come up with one. "Milandra did send us, but I'm really hoping that we can come to some type of non-violent agreement." Mostly because I couldn't think of a single way that we could get in a fight with this guy in his dragon forms that didn't end up with my femurs being used for toothpicks. I thought we might have a chance at him in human form, but I wasn't counting on it.
"And how do you suppose we do that, vampire? She sent you here, didn't she? And she told you that the only way to get her help is to bring back my head? She's been doing this for months, ever since the last time our negotiations broke off."
"Actually," Sabrina interjected. "We're only supposed to bring back your heart. She didn't say anything about your head."
"Well, isn't that just perfect!" Raged the dragon. "She refuses to marry me; then she sends bounty hunters and assassins to rip out my heart! Like she hasn't done a good enough job of that herself!" He stood up abruptly, toppling his chair over backwards and pacing back and forth at the head of the table. We all jumped to our feet, hands on sword hilts, as I fully expected to be flambéed at any moment.
"Well, maybe...nah, I got nothing. Sorry." Greg said after thinking for a minute.
"What were you going to say, vampire?" Tivernius said, picking up his chair and sitting back down. He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, running fingers through his shoulder-length blonde hair. The dude really did have a serious gold-tone thing going on.
"I was just thinking...nah, it just doesn't work out." Greg tried to start again, but gave up.
"Spit it out, bloodsucker! I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. I'm just so frustrated by the whole thing that I don't know what to do." He leaned further forward, his chin in his hands. If I didn't know that he could turn into something big enough to swallow bison whole, I would have thought he was just another schmuck with girl troubles. As it was, he was a monster with more teeth than I have IQ points with girl troubles.
"Well, why don't you tell us the story? Maybe we can come up with something to help." Sabrina asked. "After all, we're here, and we don't really want to try to carve your heart out, and we're in no hurry for you to barbeque us or whatever, so what harm can come from it?"
"Alright, fair enough. Have some more wine." He waved a hand and two carafes appeared. The larger red carafe for Greg and me, and another carafe of white for Sabrina.
"Stay outta the red, Sabrina. Just trust me." I said, filling my glass. She gave me a look, but didn't say anything.
"It all started at a party," Tivernius began, and I felt an odd sense of déjà vu. "I attended a ball in the lands of House Cintharion, a neighboring realm to Armelion. The King of Cintharion was ailing, and he wanted me to meet his daughter, in hopes of building an alliance marriage. But she was a harpy with a flat chest and huge nose, and I wasn't interested. I may weigh seven tons and have scales, but in human form I have my standards. Besides which, she had a horrible personality, full of entitlement and a ridiculous sense of self-importance. So I was standing at the bar being miserable, because that is where one stands at a party to be miserable, when Milandra walked in."
"Cue harp music." I muttered, earning myself a sharp look from Sabrina but a chuckle from Tivernius.
"Exactly, vampire. The moment I saw her, I was awestruck by her beauty, her carriage, and her very rightness. Even at her young age I had never seen any mortal so suited to rule. And she was quite young, even by human standards. She was barely twenty summers, not queen yet but already so obviously the most regal thing in the room. So I introduced myself, and we spent the rest of the night talking about everything under the sun and moon. We connected on a deeper level than I have ever connected with any living being, human, fairy, sanguine or dragon."
"I was in love, if you can imagine. Me, who had seen seventeen centuries without ever giving my heart to another creature, had been completely smitten in one glance! And by a human! It was inconceivable, but we continued to correspond, and to build a relationship, and we began to plan to marry."
"Wait a second," I interrupted. "You were going to marry Milandra?"
"Yes, of course." Answered the dragon. "We were very much in love."
"But she's human!" I protested. "And you're not!"
"Don't be speciesist, vampire. It's petty. When I am in this form I am as human as any other, except for the immortality, but that seemed a small hurdle."
"You're immortal?" I asked, my heart sinking. Now I was sure Sabrina's cute cousin had sent us on a suicide mission.
"Yes. I can be killed, if anyone is brave enough and skilled enough, but I will never die of natural causes. By the way, you're not."
"I'm not what?" I asked.
"Skilled enough. The three of you never had a chance to kill me. That's why you're down here sitting at my table. I'm as safe from you as I am from old age." Tivernius leaned back in his chair and sipped his wine while I processed all this. I couldn’t figure out a way to be insulted by his matter-of-fact tone, so I just drank more.
"Okay, so you're in love with Milandra, and she's in love with you. And you guys are planning a wedding. And she's about twenty, so that would put this at least a couple decades ago." I was thinking out loud, but I had a feeling I might be getting somewhere.
"All true." Said the dragon.
"So what happened? Why aren't you living over there with Milandra in human/dragon bliss or whatever?" Greg chimed in.
"She became Queen. The needs of her land and people must come first. I knew as soon as she took the throne that we could never be together, so I moved my capitol to this chamber here and resigned myself to a life of solitude." Tivernius took a long swallow of his wife, and then waved his hand over the glass and it refilled. That's a trick I could put to some use.
"Wait a minute," I broke in, "your capitol?"
"Yes, my capitol, my seat of power. It is here now, on the border of my lands as opposed to in the center. If I couldn't be beside her forever, I could at least be nearer to her kingdom."
"So what are you, some kind of dragon king?" Sabrina asked.
"Yes. I rule my lands, which are adjacent to the lands of House Armelion. I have ruled here for more than a millennium, keeping my people safe and prosperous. And I daresay we are good neighbors. There is no conflict between the Armelion Fae and the Tivernian humans."
"Tivernian? Pretentious much?" I took a shot, counting on the dragon's sense of hospitality and his desire to bare his soul to keep me from being eaten.
"After a dozen centuries it just seemed the logical thing for my subjects to call themselves." I had to give him that one. Twelve hundred years is a long time.
"So you've been hiding in this cave on the border of Armelion territory for what, thirty years, pining after Milandra and moping and doing nothing about it?" Sabrina prodded. I gave her a little poke as if to say, "Don't piss off the dragon!" but she swatted my hand away.
"That is a fair, if unbelievably rude, assessment of the situation. Except it has been more like a hundred years than a mere thirty," replied the mopey dragon.
"A hundred years? Man, she looks good for a hundred-year-old broad! But how can she be...I mean, humans don't live...I don't get it." I gave up and just looked at Tivernius, hoping he could pull the question from my pleading look. He was pretty smart for a giant lizard, and jumped in to save me from myself.
"As I'm sure you understand,
time moves differently here than in your world. To that end, all beings, even the frailest, like humans, become exceptionally long-lived. While not immortal like dragons or the Fae, humans here can expect a lifespan numbering in the hundreds of years. Milandra has barely lived through half of her cycle, if that. She is still considered to be quite young."
"So," Sabrina began again, and I knew by the look on her face that this was going to get ugly. "You've been sitting here on your scaly butt for a century while the woman you love is just across the border? And you haven't once even made the effort to go across the border and visit, just to see if you might be able to work something out? Okay, go ahead and change into uber-lizard form, because now I see why she wants you dead - you're too stupid to live." Sabrina stepped away from the table and into the middle of the room, drawing her sword as she went.
You know it's a bad day when the bloodsucking creature of the night is the one trying to play peacemaker. I watched for a second as a very angry Tivernius sat in his chair, stewing at the insults to his manhood that Sabrina was tossing his way, and then I got up and went to her side. "What the holy hell do you think you're doing?" I whispered angrily.
Black Knight 02 - Back in Black Page 8
