The Ballad Of A Semi-Benevolent Dragon

Chapter 4: The Dragon Talks To A Tree

"Any word from Captain Evans?" Callan asked. He and Jarod had come from neighbouring towns, so they had stuck together another during their training days. Neither were of noble birth, so they had often found themselves squaring off against the children of nobles eager to put two commoners back in their place. They had proven themselves worthy in the end. Jarod had won the king's favour and had risen to be one of the kingdom's most famous knights. Callan had not risen so high, but his position as captain of a fort along the border was far better than his life as a farmer's third son would otherwise have been.

The soldier tasked with watching the lands to the east shook his head. "There have been no signals, captain."

"I see." Callan's brows furrowed. Jarod should already be on the way back with his men, and he was supposed to send up a beam of light as a signal.

"They have a lot of ground to cover," the soldier said. "Perhaps it is simply taking them longer than expected."

"Aye." Callan nodded more to himself than the other man. "That must be it."

He was not fond of the plan to raid the villages in the dragon's territory. The dragon only stirred once a century, so they should still have another twenty-five years before the beast awakened. Supposedly, the king had a plan in place to deal with the beast should it happen to show itself, but Callan was not as quick to dismiss the rumours of its size as others had been. A dragon a mile long? It sounded like lunacy, yet the stories over the centuries had been incredibly consistent on that point. It was entirely possible that all of their ancestors had been fools who gave the reptile's power more respect than it deserved, but he doubted all of them had been blind.

A shadow fell over them. Callan and the soldier both looked up, and the captain's mouth went dry. Gleaming like a cloud of ruby and sapphire in the silver light of the moon was a dragon. Normally, the outpost was bustling with activity, even at this time of night. Now, not a single person or animal dared to move or make a sound. The wyverns the scouts used to patrol the cruel, rugged terrain to the north and south had pressed their heads to the ground and folded their wings in a sign of obeisance.

Callan had ridden a wyvern into battle before. He had even glimpsed a dragon from afar. His wyvern had not kneeled then. It had been eager for battle, keen to prove that it deserved its place in the sky. Not this time. Faced with a dragon a mile long, the wyverns could only pay homage and hope that the dragon did not see fit to annihilate them for having the audacity to fly in its sky.

"Captain..." The soldier swallowed thickly. "Shall... shall we dispatch the wyvern riders, archers, and mages?"

Callan stared at him. "Are you insane? What would they even do against a beast that size? And look at the wyverns. Do you think a single one of them would dare to take wing when that thing is still in the air?" His fists clenched. If the dragon had crossed the border, then Jarod was likely already dead, along with all of his troops. "Send word to the capital with the communication crystal. We must warn them."

The communication crystal was one of the treasures of the outpost. It had the range to reach the capital itself although the magic involved was too delicate for the crystal to be taken out of the outpost. Instead, it had to be kept in a special room where skilled mages and artificers spent much of their time ensuring it was in optimal condition.

Had Doomwing known about it, he would have laughed. Imagine spending so much time on a crystal that utilised a spell of the fifth order. How utterly laughable! The captains of the Sixth Age had carried around pendants with far greater range and far better reliability. Elerion had even received one from his daughter that had let her speak to him even when he was on the other side of the continent.

Doomwing was tempted to burn every single outpost along the border to the ground. But if he was going to crown himself emperor, then those outposts would soon be his. There was no reason to burn them unless the people in them were stupid enough to fight him. Thus far all of them had done their best impressions of moles, hiding away in their little buildings and hoping he didn't notice them. He had also run into a patrol of wyvern riders. Three of the four wyverns had done the intelligent thing and had immediately gone to ground, bowing to him as was proper for the beasts. He had always found wyverns amusing with their mix of reptilian and avian features. Unlike drakes, however, wyverns knew where they stood in the food chain, and they had no qualms about acknowledging their betters. He had lost count of how many drakes had tried to challenge him. Those up-jumped lizards seemed to think they could defeat him if they simply gathered in greater numbers.

Of course, they didn't stand a chance. It was basic math. A thousand times zero was still zero.

On the upside, drakes were tasty. Ah, what he wouldn't give for a nice drake to come along and pick a fight. He could really use a bunch of sea drakes for dinner. They had a wonderful saltiness to them that other drakes lacked, and their scales were nice and crunchy too. Oh well. Perhaps he'd visit the coast later. There were bound to be at least a few stupid drakes there for him to eat.

The fourth and final wyvern was the only one foolish enough to challenge him. To the horror of its rider, the beast gave a shrill, keening cry and dove toward him. The beast was brave, albeit incredibly stupid. Doomwing grinned and opened his mouth. Why go looking for a snack when a snack had come to him? A moment later, his jaws snapped shut, crushing both the wyvern and its rider. Like all dragons, Doomwing consumed not only flesh but also metal. The wyvern and its rider were barely a morsel, and the scraps of metal that passed for armour and weapons were bland and tasteless. Mundane steel with a hint of magic, nothing above the second order.

As he continued toward where Jarod's memories said the capital was, Doomwing felt a familiar sliver of power. He gave a low rumble and then decided to change course. The capital would still be there later, and this power might very well prove useful to the farmers in his territory. He turned south and landed outside a complex of abandoned buildings. From the looks of them, they had been left to fall into disrepair and had not seen any real care in at least several centuries.

The power he sensed was further in, and he simply moved forward, smashing his way through the crumbling, derelict buildings until he reached the inner sanctum of the complex. There, gilded in faint emerald light, was a tree. It was a large tree, tall and thick and bustling with life. Families of ornery raccoons glared down at him, and groups of squirrels came forth to shake their little paws at him. He chuckled. How amusing. The raccoons and squirrels of this Age showed more courage than the humans. Elerion would have laughed until he could barely breathe.

The emerald light upon the tree coalesced into a humanoid shape in front of him.

"It has been a long time since I have met a daughter of the Mother Tree," Doomwing rumbled.

The dryad stared back at him. A human might have missed it, but he could see the small signs of fear she was unable to control and sense the barely concealed terror within her. Yet there she stood, resolute despite the utter disparity in power, more concerned about what he might do to the animals who lived in her branches than the ease with which he could annihilate her. It was worthy of praise, and he settled back onto his haunches, no longer looming but lounging. She relaxed ever so slightly and cleared her throat. Like most of her kind, her skin was a collage of greens and browns, and her eyes reminded him of fresh sap drawn from the maple trees of the north.

"What business do you have with me, dragon?" the dryad asked.

"I am curious about how you came to be in human lands," Doomwing replied. "You are no mere dryad. You are a daughter of the Mother Tree, and I have never seen your like outside the lands of the elves."

"What do you know of the Mother Tree?" the dryad asked.

"I know plenty." For a moment, Doomwing was lost in his memories. "I played in her branches when I was but a hatchling, yet even then, she was so tall that it seemed as though her branches held up the stars and cradled the sun and the moon. She gifted me with fruits from her boughs and stroked my scales when I was weary and my parents were far away. I knew her, little sapling, and I was there when she died."

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"To dragon fire!" the dryad hissed. "Burnt to ash by your kind!" Tears prickled at her eyes, and they flowed down her cheeks in sad rivers of viridian. "I know that much, though the seed that birthed me slumbered long, only awakening when the song of the Sixth Catastrophe fell silent. But her memories are within me, passed down like they were to all her daughters."

For a long moment, Doomwing was silent. He did not see the dryad. He saw her mother. He saw her insisting that she was right up until the end, begging him to try to understand, to see that everything would better if he and the other dragons would just stop fighting and go along with her plans. She had spoken those words while standing atop a mountain of dead elves, the forest-dwellers so devoted to her that they had not retreated even in the face of dragon fire, had instead chosen to stand and fight a battle against all the free peoples of the world until their once glorious empire had been nought but ash and ruin.

And still, even on that final night, the elves had fought. They had died in numbers so great that even at the end of the Sixth Age, they had yet to truly recover. But they had been glorious. He would give them that. Never before or since had any rain threatened to pierce his scales, but the arrows of the elves had been many, and the magic woven into them had been splendid. They had slain dragons back when dragons were still mighty, and they had not turned their backs, no matter how hopeless the battle had become.

The Mother Tree was their ancestral home, and she was the one who had cared for and nourished them all their lives. To die in her defence was an honour, and Doomwing had bestowed it upon many that grim day.

And then the Mother Tree had burned, scorched with dragon fire and blasted with magic, torn asunder and scattered on the wind in a storm of ash and embers. In her dying moments, she had released her seeds, and those few elves who had not been tasked with defending her had taken those seeds and fled. Those seeds had given rise to the great forests of later Ages, and the elves had rebuilt their lives around them. He had tried to speak to a few of them, but they knew his face and his fire, and so they would not speak. But he was no senseless brute. As long as they did not follow their mother's path, they had no cause to fear him.

And he could still remember the days when the oldest of trees had offered him fruits and stroked his scales. His parents had taught him all that a dragon should know, but dragons did not know mercy or comfort or a hundred other things. They were weaknesses, and a dragon must be strong. He had not learned those things from the Mother Tree. He had been too young then, too set in his ways. But she had shown them to him all the same, and if not for her, then perhaps he would never have learned them at all.

"Will you burn me to ash as you burnt my mother?" the dryad asked.

"Not unless you give me reason," Doomwing said at last. "Speak. How did you come to be here?"

"I do not know. I think my seed was carried by elves, but some misfortune befell them. Yet it was fate that guided me to worthy hands. My seed was found by King Altarius not long after the Sixth Catastrophe fell silent. He recognised what I was and brought me here." The dryad's gaze grew distant. "Back then, dragon, there were fields here, fields as far as my eyes could see. The people were happy, and the soil was rich."

"There are no more fields here," Doomwing replied. "Only weeds. And the soil is dry and lifeless. What happened?"

"Altarius was good king," the dryad said. "And so was his son. But the son after that was a mediocre king, and the one after that was worse. The fields of produce were no longer enough. They wanted more, and so they sought to use a forgotten magic to boost the growth of their crops beyond even what my powers could accomplish. I warned them against it. When the fields died and the soil turned to dust, they cursed me and left this place to rot. They would have burned me, I think, but they feared me enough to leave me be."

"Clearly, they did not heed your advice."

"And so little grows here now except the weeds." The dryad nodded at the animals in her tree. "There were many of them back then. These are all that remain, and I do not know how long I can sustain them. The ground here is no longer meant for such as me."

"The king who found you, this Altarius, who was his father?" Doomwing asked, already knowing the answer but wanting to have it confirmed.

"His father was the last High King, Elerion the Valiant, or so he said."

"I see." Doomwing had known Altarius. He had been a good man with a son of his own. Elerion had loved all his children, but Altarius had held a special place in his heart. The boy had been born sickly, yet he had survived and thrived, growing to become a son that any man would be proud of. It was pleasing to know he had been a good king although his descendants left much to be desired. "Then the kings of this land are his descendants?"

"Yes."

"Are all of them fools?" Doomwing asked. "Has the blood of the High King grown so thin that not a single one of them is worthy of the title of king?"

"The current king is a fool, or so I hear from the birds that visit me. However, he is said to have a younger brother who is wise, and it is he who has kept the kingdom from falling beneath the weight of the king's ambition. The king's eldest daughter is also said to be more like her ancestors than her father, so perhaps there is hope for the kingdom yet." The dryad's anger seemed to have banked, like the coals of a fire being readied for a long night. "What now, dragon?"

"Now... I make you an offer." Doomwing rose up from his haunches. "Your mother was my friend, for all that I helped strike her down. If you stay here, you will die. Perhaps not for a century, perhaps not even for two centuries, but you will die. The magic that was tried has poisoned this place, and you do not have the skill or power to undo it. If you were older, maybe, but you are young for a dryad." Doomwing spread his wings wide as if to carry the whole weight of the sky upon his shoulders. "Would you like to be amidst fields again, dryad?"

"I would, dragon. But do you have any?"

"I have many," Doomwing replied. "And they are tended to by good folk. If you want, I will take you to the lands I have claimed. I will plant you in rich soil, and you will be amidst fields again. The people there are simple villagers and farmers. They do not have the greedy, grasping hands of unworthy kings. They will love the gifts you give, and they will cherish and protect you."

"How can I trust you?" the dryad asked quietly. "You killed my mother. You could kill me with less than a thought."

Doomwing took a deep breath. "What need have I for the petty tricks and deceit of lesser beings? I am Doomwing, a dragon of the First Age. I am not like the weak and cowardly dragons of later Ages. I am what dragons were meant to be, and my words are truth. I do not make oaths lightly, but I do not break the ones I make. If you will swear to aid me in my endeavours and those who serve me, then my claws, my teeth, and my fire shall defend you!" He lowered his voice. "Your mother was kind to me, and there are few indeed who offer kindness to dragons. I would repay that kindness, at least in this small way."

"How... how would you bring me to your lands?" the dryad asked.

Doomwing chuckled. "I am a mile long, dryad, and I wield magic that the bumbling conjurors of this Age could not hope to understand. Transporting you to my lands safely will be no issue."

"And them?" The dryad glanced back at the animals in her branches.

"My protection will be extended to those who rely upon you as well."

"Then..." The dryad took a deep breath. "Then I will make an oath to you."

"Good." Doomwing paused as a thought occurred to him. "What is your name, dryad?"

"You're only asking that now?" She chuckled. "Daphne. My name is Daphne."