And so, enjoy.

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Dracois:

Teveso's Curse

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Chapter 1

The Grudge

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We dragons are notorious for not planning ahead. We live in the moment, taking everything as it comes to us and performing any action that happens to strike our fancy, no matter the consequences. We just…are. A common saying among our kind is ‘life is for living’, and by the gods I damn well want to live it well.

It’s not my fault that I happen to enjoy burning those villages the humans create so close to our territory; they’re the ones that decided to make buildings that burn so easily and so brightly, and build them in the mountain valleys where there is no escape. I mean, they are supposed to be the most intelligent of ground-walking creatures, aren’t they? It really isn’t my fault if they keep rebuilding after we drive them away!

Village-Raiding has grown from a simple pastime into a fully-fledged sport as quickly as an ember grows into a forest-fire. And with the humans reproducing so quickly, we almost have to attack them periodically just to keep them from swarming into our mountains, stealing our metal and jewels, and using our hide for clothing.

Not to mention that it’s the easiest way to earn the respect of the rest of the dragon community; in these parts of the world our territory is claimed and held simply by the force of respect. If you are well-respected for your actions, you may claim more territory and not incite anger from your neighbors. When you lose respect you lose the standing to keep areas of your land, and others with higher standing can move in to claim it.

It is very difficult to explain these sorts of things to non-dragons.

I held an area of land I was quite pleased with at the time my story begins; not large enough to cause it to be of great notice, but with enough woodland and grass to support a population of prey-animals that would in turn support me.

‘The land provides for those in the air’ is another saying of ours. Being only thirty-seven years of age and still mostly a child, there was not much I required.

And, at the time, it seemed that the land had provided me with a human village that sprung from the ground at the edge of my territory. I spotted it while patrolling my southeastern border, which I share with a great, black female named Ikari. Unlike my hatch-sister, who controlled land to the west, I saw almost nothing of the lithe, black dragon and so I rarely visited this area of my territory. Sometimes I wish I had….gods, Ikari was a looker, even at three-hundred and twenty. But, to continue… my lax attitude towards border-patrols had paid off with a human colony, at the end of a thin trail of dust that small horses traveled upon towards the human kingdoms to the far south.

From my place in the cool night sky I could see the pitiful fires around which the two-legged beasts gathered. With no scales to ward off attack and cold, they used cloth made from plant and animal fibers to save their pale hide from harm. Without the two, straight horns atop their heads or claws on their feet they had to use metal blades to attack and hunt.

Being rather proud of my own horns, my own claws, and my own emerald scales, I think I might have taken pity on the poor creatures. Perhaps that pity would have saved their villages in some cases, had they not flung wooden spears at me as I flew over them.

As alarm horns called out from the town below, I realized that I would have to get my claws bloody tonight just to receive a good night’s sleep; otherwise they would most likely set out to hunt me down in the night. Turning on my left wingtip, I dropped wind from under me and fell towards the tiny specks of light below. A cloud that was in my path air swirled around my wings and legs tucked against my sides.

I sucked in a deep breath of air, shoving it past my lungs with a tightening of my throat and into the gland beyond, near my gut. As I spread my wings the air mixed with chemicals in my firesac, suddenly flaring bright and hot as it ignited into flame. I opened my jaws wide as I passed low over a field of brown grass, not yet cleared for planting, forcing the flaming gasses through my throat to my fangs.

My flame crackled and vanished in the chilled air as some massive weight struck me from above, crushing and deflating my lungs and firesac alike. The ground was suddenly far too close, and the weight still pressed down insistently, and I closed my eyes in anticipation.

The grass, wet with morning dew, allowed me to skim through it and turn my fall into a sort of slide. Despite this, my weight and the weight pressing me down caused my scales to dig furrows into the earth, caking the cold dirt and mud on my underside and pinning my left foreleg to me. Eventually I came to rest at the edge of the field, near a stand of trees arranged in neat rows….and the weight pressed down even harder, crushing me slowly as darkness tried to close in.

Gazing through the gaps in the massive claws that held me against the ground, I could see the form of Ikari the black. Her head alone, where it was turned towards me at her side, was almost as large as I was. I supposed that she was at least thirty times my size, and I simply was no match for a dragon of her proportions.

Damn, was she proportionate! I would apologize to any female that hears my tale in advance, but being a male I just happened to notice certain things even in the midst of heart-stopping terror. For example, she was far more serpentine than males like myself, thinner in body and limb but longer in the neck and tail. And, I couldn’t help but notice the fact that if I bent my neck in just the right angles through her claws, I could just see her hind legs and the muscles the rippled underneath large, pitch-black scales.

Suffice it to say, she was very beautiful by dragon standards. Alright, not beautiful…she was gorgeous. And she was trying to kill me!

My examinations were cut short (and my neck was almost cut short as well) when the massive female twisted around where she stood, snapping her long snout mere claw-breadths from my nose. She hissed through her teeth, scarlet eyes blazing defiantly against the nighttime cold.

“What are you doing in my territory, hatchling?” the dragoness asked, so calmly that for a moment I couldn’t think of any reply. My mind wasn’t able to come to an answer in time, and Ikari twisted her neck further so she could look at me more closely through a single, ruby eye.

I had the brief vision of myself staring at a bug I had caught when I was a hatchling.

Through her claws and past the head as large as my own body, I could see the humans screaming and fleeing for their lives as fast as their feet or any horse could carry them. Beyond that were the faint lines of the river…the physical border between territories. I must have crossed into the female’s land without noticing, bent as I was on destroying the village.

“You are called…” Ikari started, but then paused, blinking slowly. “…Teveso. I remember you; runty little spawn of that girl Niscrail. She never had good taste, and by the traits you have it is obvious she chose the wrong mate.”

I growled at the female in irritation, baring my fangs at her piercing eye. If I try hard enough I might just manage to wiggle from her grasp and claw her eye out! I thought. While she was perfectly in her rights pinning me down for being in her territory, she had no right to insult my lineage!

Ikari opened her jaw wide, coughing gouts of steam; she was laughing at me! “Come on!” I cried out, loudly as I could manage. For some reason my voice sounded small against the cage of her claws. “Let me from under here and we’ll see who the runt is! I’ll rip out your throat!”

Ikari smiled, and slowly her claws dug into the ground under me, picking me up and lifting me from the cold, damp earth. “I have no time for hatchlings like you, Teveso,” she said smoothly. “This is my territory, and therefore my village. You have no right to attack it.”

The next moment I was falling through the air to land with a grass-muffled thump on the ground. Each step Ikari took around me caused the ground to vibrate and heave upwards, and she managed to maneuver her body around to face me on the ground, knocking over a human building with her long tail. No humans were nearby to care about this, though; most, if not all, had already had time enough to hide or flee the area entirely.

Ikari jabbed her sharp snout in my face, hissing through her teeth yet again. “Never come to my territory again, little green runt.” She pulled back, smiling and spreading her wings, which seemed to swallow the stars in the sky in the pitch-black membranes. “Because, next time you cross the river border, I’ll simply blast you into bits and leave it at that. Be glad I am merciful this time.”

With that, her wings drove downwards, forcing me against the ground in a blast of wind like an explosion. With only two following sweeps she took off, gaining altitude and vanishing into the darkness towards the southeast.

For several long minutes, I sat on the ground and thought about what had just happened. The neighbor I had always assumed to be a fair female had turned out to be a violent psychopath!

Blast me to bits? I thought to myself. Why in gods’ name would she do that? She couldn’t! I don’t even know if that’s possible, much less something any dragon would do to another.

While one could hurt a dragon for entering another’s territory, unless they showed hostility it was frowned upon to kill them. Bad luck followed murderers like a sickening fog, and no one would tolerate sharing borders with one.

I glared in the direction of the town; fires spread from house to house already, started from the unattended blazes of the humans’ creation. It was no use destroying anything else, since the two-legged creatures were already long gone.

“Self-righteous coldspawn,” I muttered under my breath, using the worst term I could think of. “I’ll show you what this ‘runt’ can do some other time, old fool. But I don’t have the energy to bother right now.”

I snorted and started scraping my foreclaws along my armored chest and belly, clearing away what mud I could and spreading my wings to check for injuries. The joint in the outside edge of my wing hurt slightly when I moved it, but thankfully it wasn’t broken. A broken wing is almost as sure a death to a dragon as a bitten neck.

Trying to summon up what was left of my dignity, I leapt into the air, struggling to gain altitude in the cold. A wind from the north lifted my wings upwards, and I used it to bring myself over the trees, and slowly turned towards the northwest, gliding over the spiny tops of the pines.

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I wasn’t sure if I managed to sleep properly or not; part of me thought I had slept sporadically and part of me was simply so infuriated that it thought I hadn’t slept at all. I knew that for some time during the night and early hours, I was contemplating all kinds of grisly deaths which could fall on Ikari. Some of them I thought were quite ingenious.

But no matter which part was right about my sleeping, I woke almost as tired as I was when I lay down the night before. My wings were sore, same as my left foreleg and chest, but I cringed at the thought of having to stretch them. I was sitting underneath a massive finger of rock, jutting from the rocky ground in defiance of the flat forests around it. It had taken the efforts of both myself and my green-scaled hatch-sister to move the stone from the mountain-peaks into my territory, where there were no rocks like it that could protect me from various storms that liked to blow through.

The stone leaned slightly towards the north; my younger sister’s idea. Merava had reasoned that, since the storms entered the mountains from the south, I should shelter under the northern face. Making the rock lean would deflect rain and some wind as well. For some time I was doubtful of this, but when the spring rains entered the valleys and I was forced to the ground I realized that she had been right. The rock had also protected me from a bolt of lightning at one point…metals in the stone had drawn away the lethal magic and shattered the very tip of the stone finger instead.

I shuddered unconsciously; of all things in nature, the only thing dragons fear is wild magic, lightning included. Especially lightning; the energy used the metal in our bodies against us, passing through our scales, traveling along our metallic bones, and finally shattering our bodies from within using raw power. I’d never seen a dragon killed by lightning, but I had heard it was one of the most painful deaths one could experience.

My senses suddenly came alive as something new entered my range of hearing. A faint whump sound, and then the crackle of dragonscale breaking rock. As soon as these sounds reached me my head automatically turned towards the left to locate the source of the noise with my eyes. I could smell something in the air, just barely…the north wind, blowing through mountain passes filled with all sorts of plants and animals, was almost enough to drown out even this closer scent. But it was still there…the sharp tang of acid, metal, flame, and magic.

A dragon, most likely near my age, had landed on the broken rock on the eastern side of my nest. Whoever it was had not announced themselves yet…they either didn’t know I was here (strange, as my scent was all about), or they didn’t want me to know that they were here. I growled, deep in my chest.

“Who trespasses on my land?” I called out, getting to my feet and flexing my foreclaws. The sounds of scale on rock stopped, and a clear voice called back to me.

“Teveso? Is that you?”

“Merava?” I snorted. Speak of the fiend and it comes, I thought to myself. I tried to twist my neck around the rock to see my younger hatch-sister, but was forced to move further out from my shelter, into the faint sunlight that streamed from just over the trees.

Merava was green-scaled as I was, and like all females she was thinner of body and longer-limbed and -tailed, and her horns curved upwards almost imperceptibly. Not to mention that, unlike Ikari, she was smaller in size than I was; possibly two-thirds if I remember my mathematics. The single trait I saw that set her apart from every other female was her forelegs; her claws were longer than normal and far less curved. For years she had proven over and over again that she was more skilled with manipulating objects than I was, but had stopped shoving it at my snout a decade earlier.

The dragoness stood on the broken shards of rock as though standing on eggshells, and her cautious behavior made me uneasy. I watched her tail-tip flick back and forth for a moment, and then met her gaze.

“We’ve talked about this…” I started slowly, but was cut off when she shook her head.

“I know, I’m not supposed to come to your nest to speak with you.” Merava held her head low, clacking her teeth in irritation. “But we’ve more important matters, hatch-brother.”

“I wonder what could be more important than watching that village you refuse to destroy,” I snapped; I was in no mood for talking, hatch-sister or not. I followed her as she walked around a small, scraggly bush growing from the broken rock, which I had hadn’t wanted to remove just yet. Merava kept blinking furiously, as though trying to clear dust from her eyes. “Well, hurry and tell me; I need to mark the north border again. Tryanos thinks he can keep pushing me further back in the winter, but I won’t-“

Merava snorted a cloud of black smoke. “Tryanos has already claimed the land down to the Acedos River as his own.”

“What?” I clenched my claws, lashing my tail-tip against the side of the rock. “How does he have the right to do that? We’ve agreed that the river was mine!”

My hatch-sister nodded slowly, coming slightly closer to where I stood. “He must have decided that the deal was off, because of last night.”

I felt a cold chill creep through my bones. “What of last night? What does he know of anything that happens in my territory?”

“He knows what the entire mountain chain knows,” Merava said. I opened my jaws to reply, but she held up a claw to cut me off.

I waited as patiently as my raw nerves would allow for her to finish…but she didn’t.

Merava stepped slowly backwards from me, her gaze shifting from place to place and settling over nothing in particular. I could smell her agitation; a faint scent like that of burning parchment. She was apparently worked up about something, but normally she outright explained that she was upset about something and let it at that. So far she didn’t seem inclined to talk about herself at all.

I finally spoke up. “Merava, how does the entire mountain chain know anything of me?”

The green dragoness finally settled her gaze on my own. “That big female…Ikari was her name. She was telling every one of her neighbors about a tiny dragon she drove off from destroying her property.”

“Her property?” I almost roared, stamping my feet. “No one owns human villages! They just….are!” I narrowed my eyes. “At least they are something like dragons that way.”

Merava didn’t answer.

“So some have heard about that…incident,” I mumbled, half to myself, “does it really matter?”

“Tryanos seems to think it does,” she snapped at me, clicking her teeth together. A wisp of smoke leaked from her nostrils.

My eyes narrowed unconsciously as I thought about the dragon that shared a small point of my northern border; a lowly red-scaled dragon, brutish and insolent. “Tryanos can break his wings and freeze, for all I care.”

After that, Merava simply sat on her haunches next to me, staring off into space with her eye’s half-closed. I watched my sister for a time, but grew impatient waiting for another comment. I pushed at my sister’s shoulder with the tip of my snout. “Merava…”

“Yes?” She didn’t seem to want to look at me.

“…I have a plan.”

And so it begins. Where it will end, I have no idea, because I, like most dragons in this story, have no plan for the future.

Give me ideas, if you wish. Comment on characters. Stay tuned for some proper development of plot in the next chapter.

Akaleta, kids,

-Tyro