Luminous

41 - The Dragon's Despair

Meya didn't count herself among the precious few blessed with dreamless sleep. Ever since she could remember, her nights had been plagued with bizarre dreams, building up to a failed escape from rolling boulders, bears, hogs, barbarians, or the occasional dragon, depending on what was the trend for puppet shows at the time.

Fluctuating trends notwithstanding, Utlon's Escape was the panacea for bards suffering from creative blockage. Throughout the centuries, the blacksmith's grim account of Nostra's midnight attack on Rutgarth, and his flight for survival, had been heavily exaggerated and embellished upon, to the point some wondered if Utlon truly existed, and wasn't simply an amalgam of several survivors' tales lumped into one hero.

Last night, instead of dreaming of being one of the poor miners' wives fleeing torrents of dragon fire, Meya dreamt she herself was a dragon. Fans and jets of flame shot out of her mouth, now on an elongated jaw. Her back muscles pulsed as her wings beat against her silvery, scaled body.

Below, in her field of vision tinged with green, men and women and children ran pell-mell from her. Some stood their ground and shot arrows that glanced off her impregnable scales. Then, a Lattis-tipped one pierced through. She knew because of that searing, rapid-spreading, all-consuming pain radiating from her arm—no, front leg—as the melted Lattis coursed through her bloodstream.

Boulders spun through the air from catapults and pummeled her as she fell, screaming and spitting fire. She saw armored yeomen with swords scampering towards her broken form through half-open eyes. The first knight who approached her lifted his helmet, freeing his dark brown hair. Cold silvery eyes glared at her through a coat of grime and soot—

Meya would have screamed if she hadn't woken with a start first.

She was lying on her bed in Hadrian Castle, her forehead and hands drenched with cold sweat. Through the gap in the magenta curtains, she saw the bedchamber illuminated to a dull gray by the light of dawn. After a moment of heavy breathing, as her senses reattuned to reality, she felt Coris's arm draped over her, his cold hand covering hers in a loose grasp. For once, he was still asleep.

Relieved yet also unnerved, Meya kept his bony forearm hoisted with her thumb and index, as she slid out from under it. Once free, she laid his arm down on the bed, keeping her eyes on his face. A trickle of drool dangled from Coris's gaping mouth as he drew in ragged, pungent snores. A side-effect of his damaged bowels.

Meya slid her vacated pillow under Coris's to ease his breathing, then slipped silently down the bed. Like a drunken wraith, she treaded her way across the room to her Solar, slow, soundless footsteps lugging the weight of her heavy heart.

Swinging the door carelessly behind her, she stood before the half-body mirror. With unfeeling fingers, she undid the knots on her linen nightdress and slid the collar down her shoulders, then scrutinized her naked body in the grayish light.

She looked just the same as she always had. No different from any other woman. Apart from faint pink sores along her shoulders that Coris had left upon her in happier nights, and a web of blue veins spreading under the taut skin of her strangely itchy, sore breasts.

She wondered why she even had breasts at all. After all, dragons laid eggs. Like snakes. And snake babies don't need to suckle on their mother's non-existent nipples. They just slither out their holes fully-fledged and start scarfing down rats.

Still, apart from the heat your attributes are human, Coris had said. Meya reckoned she'd have to take his word for it, since he'd sent his middle brother in to explore her so-called birth canal multiple times.

So, she may not lay eggs, at least. The knowledge wasn't much consolation.

Meya pinched her arm and felt skin and flesh and pulse. She couldn't tell whether the hard core she felt underneath was made of bone or metal, whether the red blood that had pooled there was a mixture of the same components as everyone else's.