The Dragon's Custodian

by Paul C Rogers

  Geron gave a gasp, drawing the dragon’s attention. The beast stared at him with unfamiliar eyes. Its snout was unafflicted, its wings entirely intact.

  With such discrepancy, Geron began to wonder if he were still lucid, a pondering emphasised by the arrival of a second dragon and then a third.

  The Knights, retreating gingerly in inches, held their weapons aloft, whilst Lornus, ignoring the immediate danger, cast his sword angrily against the wall. The noise disturbed the dragon’s uneasy stand-off with the abnormal intruders, but regardless, he did not care. For the purity of his Creed had been tainted with unforeseen supplemental detail.

  “One hero. One dragon,” he wailed. Repeating this intonation to a most disinterested collective of man and beast.

  Rather befuddled, Raim knew not what to say. Her Knights, also perturbed, awaited orders. Though as far as they were concerned, it could only be two options, attack or retreat. Unanimously they all internally hoped for the latter.

  Rounding out the ceremonial arrival came a more familiar sight, the dragon with snout crooked and wings frayed hovered above them, casting firm gushes of wind with every flapping beat.

  “If you want your legacy Sonkiller, then there is your dragon,” Geron managed to utter.

  Some would say it was cowardice that rooted Lornus to the spot. Inaction, his demonstrated choice to this very observant audience of both beast and man, but internally he was attempting to remedy the wayward lore. Tommamare spoke only of one dragon, evil manifested. Is this the presence of greater evil, he wondered? But not aloud alas, and so Raim rescued his indecision with the whispered order to arrest Lornus. The sudden presence of mythical beasts aplenty would have to be engaged at another time, she told herself reassuringly.

  The rising tension was broken however, by the arrival of yet another being. Not dragon, nor royalty, but a humble Arconan soldier came to a stop inside the cavern, breathless at his hasty efforts.

  “My Queen, the doorway, the opening in the mountain, it… it is closing,” he managed to stammer, attention understandably diverted to the collective of dragons before him.

  “Take the prisoners,” Raim said, intentions to flee prioritised, her withheld disdain for enclosed spaces aggravated at this news.

  “No, I shall not leave here without fulfilling my destiny” Lornus cried out, breaking free from the attempted seizure by the Knights. With no sword in hand, the King of Tallagate looked to his nemesis, the killer of his Queen, the bastion of his enmity, and with a howl of unhinged ferocity, sprinted towards the plummet’s edge, grasping at any feature of the beast that he could clutch. His hands touched the scales of the dragon in a fleeting contact, light to the touch, yet brimming with malice, before the King disappeared down out of sight into the chasm.

  Dismissing Lornus to his madness, Raim turned and fled, pretence at her dignitary status abandoned as she clambered through the opening. Attending to the Queen’s orders, the Knights attempted to rouse Geron, but his mortal trauma prevented any attempted movement.

  “I am done for brothers, but she…” he gently gestured to his fellow wounded, “she deserves better than this as a tomb.”

  The last of the Knights slipped through the once sizeable breach, the limp Baronet in their clasp. Raim watched as the glass wall hardened, growing denser, the narrowing sliver of space conjoined again by the crystallising mountain. No longer transparent, it were as if the clouds above had solidified themselves in a shawl over the rockface.

  The community grounds were lined with Arconan troops. Never before had any stood in such close proximity to the enemy for so long a time, and with so strange a battleground. Nervous heads poked over shoulders within the tunnels, eyeing as Queen Raim and her escort re-emerged.

  The Baronet knew she had little strength left. The Senior Captain of the Tallagatian Knight’s Order recognised her immediately. Even in this foreign lands, on the precipice of war, her presence still managed to send a cold chill down his spine. Crouching down to hear her whispered words, he did not have a chance to confirm the order, for her head had softly tilted to the side, her fingers slack.

  But he would follow it through. And accordingly Queen Raim stood by, defiantly watching as the bemused Tallagatian collective fleet of soldier and fortune seeker alike, turned back toward their home.

  Left alone within the realm of Wyrmgard, Geron watched as the dragons surveyed him. He had lived with his own beast accomplice for most of his life and yet in that moment, they seemed so very strange to him. One of the landed dragons approached, its sizeable snout sniffing at Geron’s prone torso, a growl rising that was communicably shared by the rest.

  He braced, knowing the capability of such an angered beast, but before it could strike, Geron’s dragon landed, moving between them. It attempted to rise up, displaying its full frame but could only manage a meagre effort at intimidation. Yet it was effective, the other dragon stepping back in hesitant confusion, to join the rest in what looked to be a conferring huddle.

  It bowed, facing Geron, snorting in concerned acknowledgment of their mutual vulnerable state. He patted the snout, smearing a crimson streak atop its scales.

  “Go on,” he whispered. “This is your home. These are your family.”

  The dragon turned to face its approaching kind. It rose up in defiance once more, wings spread. The other dragons adopted similar postures. Threat generating threat. Teeth bared. The precipice of combat frenzy. Stopping suddenly, the Rivermouth dragon recognised a familiar tone, foreign to this location. The medallion’s command to go free.

  Beating its wings, the dragon rose, circling around, giving a last look to Geron before rising into the darkness of the cavern interior. The others followed suit, enamoured by this new belligerent kin.

  Geron listened to the fading sounds of beating wings and exchanged roars, until eventually the cavern was silent.

  The medallion dropped from his mouth as his lips crooked into a smile, the warped steel and stone gently swaying until, at last, it came to rest.

  Epilogue

  The Spider’s Legs diminished significantly after Voltere's death. Captains claimed territories, though the unified strength of the company's tyranny was never reclaimed. Petty crime became a revolutionised industry.

  The ruling council established in Lornus' absence, upon learning of the King's death, realised that they did not need to worry about a lack of heir, nor did they need to formulate new laws to justify their own governing body for they had so entangled themselves in legislation and bureaucracy that inadvertently they had made Tallagate a self-governing Republic.

  Squabbles and politicking were aplenty, but nevertheless Tallagate prospered under the new regime. And when the time came for a new member to be chosen when one of the council succumbed to the nature of time's passage, Targus and Byre were among the first in the queue to register their vote.

  The children who made mocking, cautionary tales of the Mad Hermit of Settler’s Keep soon told their own children of these heightened stories. And those tales turned to warnings.

  The Lady Pentelli would have been disappointed to learn that a grandiose act of killing was not enough to quell the darkness within her son. For it was her own death at his hands that proved her theory to be false.

  After the botched efforts at sacrificing the dragon, the members of the Insurmountable community that survived fled the lands, seeing the approaching Tallagate and Arconan forces as some kind of incursion. Rumours that a second war between the nations nearly erupted on this very spot were dismissed by historians on the grounds of the Insurmountable being a most illogical choice of battlefield.

  The border between Tallagate and Arconan hardened further following the incident by the foot of the Insurmountable. However, it soon softened, moods tempered by the balms of time, and the formal, civil outreach from the Tallagatian council. And when her rule reached its end some thirty years later, Raim, upon her deathbed, declared that the secret of Wyrmgard should be revealed. Her last words wer
e erased and replaced with something more befitting an inspiration for the Arconan people.

  A member of the new Tallagatian council had his motion to destroy every copy of Tommamare's Creed defeated, but a blanket ban was still passed regardless. A resurgence in the taboo text occurred. Secret clubs formed to discuss their own interpretations, whilst academics, idly thumbing their copies at night, scoffed at the ludicrousness of the grip the text had once held over their country.

  After the introduction of the Rivermouth dragon, whose worldly disposition proved a challenge to the order of nature within the dragon’s abode, the habitation continued on unabated.

  And once more, for another immeasurable length of time, Wyrmgard was untouched by human contact.

  THE END