Stedl and Dragons

Stedl stood and watched in sorrow as the parade of knights marched
through the main street of Holmfast. Those around him cheered or
stood in quiet awe, but if a single other soul shared his
misgivings to the knights, they were out of his sight. Three
knights--one at the head of the procession, one in the body, and
one at the tail--carried ten foot tall poles, atop which were
enormous meat hooks, skewered onto each of which was the green
scaled head of a dragon. The eldest dragon that the knights had
killed was still a youngling. The youngest, Stedl doubted it was
older than three years.

Stedl steeled himself and approached one of the knights on the
periphery. "Ho there."

"Liven ye, fellow!" the knight encouraged, stopping to speak with
the somber man.

"Tell me the tale," Stedl asked, looking up to a dragon head to
indicate he meant the murders.

The knight happily indulged with an animated speech, which drew a
crowd around Stedl to listen and watch with him. "The accursed
endessium mines of Herdra are accursed no longer! Under the
blessing of Sah and with the wisdom of our Good King Hest, two
score of we knights marched a fortnight and a day from Tellan to
Herdra. There we saw that the legend was true: that the mines from
which our grandfathers drew out endessium had fallen to the hold
of monsters! All the buildings of the town, once homes and shops
and churches, smashed to pieces under their wickedly stepping
claws! We knights tarried not, but advanced upon the foul beasts!
With slash of blade and sting of arrow, we felled not just these
three dragons you see today, but a dozen more which are now
parading north and east and west of Herdra! Praise be to Sah!
Glory be to the Good King Hest!"

The knight lifted his begauntleted fist into the air, and Stedl's
neighbors cheered. Stedl's sorrow had only deepened as the knight
had spoken, but the knight had long since moved on from speaking
only at Stedl.

Without a word or gesture, Stedl turned and left. He could have
said much: They are not fearsome because they are evil. They are
fearsome because you are evil, and they are powerful and good. He
could have gone on a long, long while, if he were still youthful,
still under the impression that any such sentiment would not be
falling on deaf ears.

He returned to his home at the outskirts of town, near the bank of
a river, built there himself with the help of his then-new
neighbors. He walked slowly, his aching knees fussing that they
had long since served their purpose, let us rest now, we have
served you a full life and then some.

When he arrived home, he sat in a rocking chair before his unlit
fireplace, rocking and staring blankly at the dim stonework. His
mind's eye was racing. In his mind's eye, he was climbing up into
his attic, dusting off chain mail, restringing a bow, and buckling
on his quiver. He was stalking after the knights, and one by one
he was picking them off as they split from their formation to
relieve themselves or to search for those who were mysteriously
absent, until before they realized it, they were few in number,
and then none.

But with his age and the life he had lived, he begrudgingly knew
better.

Do not tempt revenge, he sat and thought. Do not create martyrs.

As the day was waning, Stedl lit his fireplace, lighted a lantern,
and ventured up into the attic. He drew out his old equipment and
laid it out before the fire, examining each piece. The pack, the
tent, the boots, the tinderbox... On the whole, it had held up
better than he had. He sorted his equipment, packed his pack, and
then he went to sleep.

Before the sun had risen in the morning, Stedl was standing, his
armor donned, his bow strung, his pack upon his shoulders and
waist. He stepped out of his door and began on the road northward,
toward Herdra.

Midday, while kneeling over a stream to drink, the man's
reflection in the water caught him. Looking back at him was a face
with wrinkles set into dark skin, and a short beard that was more
grey than black. It was strange, bordering on inaccurate, to say
that this was the same face as that of a man who had been taken by
a dragon as a husband, long, long ago.

The old man took his drink from the stream. He then stood and
continued marching on. It was three more days to Herdra. Perhaps
four or five if his knees did not get on board with the idea of
the journey.

Each night in his tent, before he could begin falling asleep,
Stedl laid and stared at the tent's ceiling, casting his mind back
thirty, forty years. Back to a young man who barely looked like
him anymore. Back to the clifflands of Venderra, and a big red
lizard. He couldn't keep the thoughts in any order, and even when
he tried to recall the timelines of what had led into what, it was
as though there were no such conceit as causality, but rather that
each fragment of memory was its own atomic existence. In one
flash, the young man and the dragon were sitting in a canyon
across a campfire from each other, the young man cooking, the
dragon lying flat with her chin on the ground yet still looming
over him. In one flash, he was helping unpack crates of clothing
and food from off her back, delivering them to a camp of refugees
from a flooded city, and then riding atop her back as the wind
stung his face on the return journey to make the route yet another
time. In one flash, he was kneeling on a hill aiming an arrow,
when from the corner of his eye, he saw her struck by a mortar,
and then watched her spiraling down, and by the time he could make
it through the battlefield to her, she had been killed, and he
felt at once in his heart that no creature deserved to die again
as long as the world should turn, and also that no revenge would
be great enough to make up for the loss of her. In one flash, she
was humoring him in letting him examine the fractal complexity of
the writing of dragons, not imagining that he would actually be
the first human not to dismiss it as impossible for humans to
learn. In one flash, they were in a dark and safe place, falling
asleep chest to chest, heart to heart, breath to breath.

It was five days' journey to Herdra. When he arrived, he found the
town to be in more or less the condition that the knights had
described. Every building was smashed down. Hardly anything in the
township stood taller than the man's line of sight. The town was
quiet save for the wind blowing against the ruins. There was not a
soul up here except for Stedl.

He made his way through the town, past the fallen churches and
shops and homes, and over to the mine entrances. There, he lit a
lantern, and proceeded in.

It was a long and cold way down. As he marched, he wondered
whether his magical talents had left him over the years. They had
fallen into disuse, and he would not blame them for going away. He
stopped, turned, and raised his free hand. With a tide of force,
gravel on the ground began rolling up the tunnel slope. Stedl
smiled a little, and resumed his journey downward. As if his
talents had only needed a nudge to get started, he soon began to
smell the sting of endessium. He followed the odor down and down,
and as the tunnels branched out, he followed the smell of the
magical rocks, until arriving at a dead end, a slope of loose
rocks from ground to ceiling. Stedl picked up a rock, and saw with
confidence that it was mined with teeth, not picks. He began
casting the rocks aside, freeing up the passage. When he had
cleared enough at the ceiling to crawl through, he did crawl so
through, lantern first, into the dragon's hutch. Inside, atop a
nest of endessium pebbles, was a green egg as tall as Stedl.

Stedl sat himself down on the slope that descended toward the egg,
and looked at it by the lanternlight. All at once, he was relieved
there was a survivor, and distraught for the loss that he or she
had suffered before they had so much as committed the crime of
hatching.

With the family of dragons murdered to make way for industry, the
king's men would be back before much longer. Stedl crawled back
out of the hutch and set about repairing a covered rickshaw from
the town above, to bring the dragon to a safer home.