Song and the Dragons

September 5, 2014 at 8:23 pm · Filed under Stories and tagged: Dragons, Elf, family, friendship, healing, hope, sacrifice, transformation

Song and the Dragons
Many will not believe what I say to you now.  Know that it is the true story of my birth.

In ancient days, long after the light of Teleperion and Lauralin, the great trees, glowed quietly against the starlit night, a new age came forth:  The age of the dragons when the skies pulsed with the wing beats of fire breathing noble giants;  the age of the Noldor Elves, tall and swift footed and fearless warriors in the deep forests;  the age of the Teleri Elves whose swan boats moved smoothly in the salty sea where they sang to the surf;  the age of the Orcs, whose ugliness and terror was feared above all creatures of the land and of the sea.

The Great Purple Dragon Mage chose his mate late in life, but the elegant Water Dragoness was lithe and graceful.  He had never beheld a dragoness more beautiful than she.  In flight she glowed and shimmered in alabaster and abalone colors.  Like a wisp of light she resembled a giant sparkling swan against the sunlit sky.  By the light of the moon she was iridescent blue like ghosts.  The sound of her wings was like the singing of bow against string.  Just as the sun began to wane in the season, she had readied her nest in a crisp cave high in the icy south eastern mountains.

Water Dragon had laid only one sparkling egg and nestled it in rare aquamarine gems and gold thread.  An ancient dragon, she licked the egg gently, and knew it would be her only offspring.  She chose the ledge well, and knew it was safely hidden in the clouds from predators.

Orcs had decimated the village in the valley and began to move up the mountains to the craggy knolls that were often snowy and obscured by cloud cover.  They left a trail of bloody carcasses in their wake.  Half eaten cattle, wildabeest strewn, headless and gored out.  Nothing was safe from their vicious destruction, neither man nor beast.  Higher they climbed, towards the ice lands. The hunt was on for juicier prey.

It was deep into the birch wood beyond where the mighty river poured into the icy sea off the west coast of Edhelmar, and beyond the diagonal cut of the banks leading to the headwaters, it was that the Teleri Healer, Estel, had started her journey.  She had collected coastal herbs and kelp and now dug beneath spicy cypress for truffles and roots. As she dug in the rich soil she felt the kicking of her unborn and she paused to caress her belly. “Be sure, my Song, my little Surf-Singer, you shall find your time to let your voice be heard” she whispered to her unborn.

She strayed deeper into the wood, collecting shoots, mosses and rare bark specimen.  The summer had been good to the valley.  Away from her shores more than 2 weeks travel would not be entirely safe, considering how far along she was, but her stores had been so depleted in the winter she simply could not wait any longer.  Her responsibility for gathering herbs was great, but too was her hope. Though with child, her strength was full, and her focus unimpaired.  This babe was coming, and she had work to do.

Breaking through her concentration she had caught whiff of the fetid smell of Orcs on the wind and it brought a queer shiver to her making her nauseated.  She adjusted her route to where she was downwind of their stench and she could monitor them and stay undetected.  Another few weeks of this invisible and strenuous hiking drove her further to the southeast than she had wished. Now she found herself forced to climb into the highest mountain pass into dragon territory.  This was not what she had planned at all.

Camping in the open worried her most.  Estel climbed to an outcropping of rock with a good vantage point of the valley below, hoping to rest.  She had found a cave in the side of the rock and knew by the smell inside it had been a nesting site for a very large animal. Perhaps even a dragon.

She felt the disturbance in her belly more and more frequent.  Her body was wracked with pain and she knew she had no choice but to risk staying at the opening of the cave for fear that, in her exhaustion, she might be over taken by something much more hideous, and worse that her child would not wait any longer.

Late in the night, the healer laid herbs and kelp down and in the crisp air illuminated by the full moon. Estel began an earnest prayer of respect and desperation…  “Oh great dragons who fill the sky, oh mighty beasts of honor and beauty, please allow sanctuary for my unborn in this place of your dwelling, I would not ask this of you, but I am without choice.”

Her dreams were full of torment and screams, of ugly grimacing faces with horrid eyes, of torn flesh and grotesque hands tearing at her unborn child.  She awoke with alarm. She heard the Orcs in the distance.

Down the trail she could see them by moonlight.  A group of some two dozen hunched, pasty and grotesque shapes with clubs and torches prowled her way.  She scrambled to her feet and slipped ahead of them into the rocky cliffs–her only escape.  Climbing down from the precipice she planned to lead her predators down the side of the mountain–if she could, where she might lose them in the river. She remained out of view and moved swiftly and silently.  Her pain came in waves and blood began to trickle down her thighs.  Were they more excited in their grunting or did she imagine it?  They were nearly on her.

She could see no possible escape ahead of her, so she struggled to climb into a scraggly tree where she would have to wait, bow ready. She pulled from her satchel some bitter and poisonous herbs and smeared them on the tips of all of her arrows.  Her hope was in her throat.

The fates were against her and she felt the tearing pain of childbirth begin in her belly.  Her dire situation now impossible, she shot off her arrows carefully one by one.  She watched to see one, then a second Orc scream with it’s terrible voice and drop.  They broke into two groups, one above her, one below.  They started the trees on fire forcing her to withdraw and take to the rocks.

She gripped the edges of the cliff face and kept moving lower down the sheer face from precipice to precipice.  The extra weight of her unborn seemed like rocks in her pack.  Her hands bloody and aching began to give way.  She moved her weight more over her feet desperate not to be over taken by her nightmares come to life.

Suddenly the ledge broke away and she fell.  It seemed in slow motion. Her prayers to the great one left her lips, not for her life,  but for her child inside her whose impatience to come seemed not to be reconciled with the timing of her mother’s doom.  All she heard was the wind.  Blue ribbons of magic like ghosts chased her and called out to her with beautiful music. Like the shells of the sea they sang “Come home, come home”.

The enormous talons of a foot too large to be anything but dragon flexed and grew still.  The enormous beast had been awakened by the sound of the dark haired elf female as she lead the horrible Orcs down the crevasse away from her clutch.  Her great eye had watched the pitiful being fall from her perch.  The Water Dragoness took to flight, her alabaster wings opening across the night like angels, like demons.

The Orcs sent fiery torches into the air catapulted with speed.  The Water Dragoness dodged and spun to avoid them.  The Orcs launched giant boulders into the sky at the graceful dragon.  She was hit again and again.  One wing broken in three places she glided and spun downward.  The graceful swan-like dragon, now wounded and bloody, wrapped her working wing around the elf as they both fell.  The Water Dragoness and the Telerin Elf locked eyes in one moment as the two of them careened ever towards the rocky bank of the river.  One moment of knowing. Two lives became inextricably intertwined.

The great dragoness managed to soften their landing on the slate bank of the river below and pulled herself up to her towering height and thundered out a terrible cry.  She blew fiery jets towards the first of the Orcs as they closed in on them.  Water Dragoness expelled furious plumes of fire through her teeth.  The inferno scorched Orc flesh as it hit them.  The air smelled of boars on a spit. Her exhaled breath ignited all around her with blazing light.   Water Dragoness screamed and growled, burnt and maimed until she could barely breathe.  She used her last energies to gore and crush the last of the Orcs to reach where the two bloody mother’s-to-be laid.   Crushed bodies and burned flesh was all that remained.

Smoke plumed in circles from each nostril as the limp giant sniffed at the fallen Elf.  There was much blood. She drew closer and listened with her keenest detection to the fallen Elf.  Life still moved from within the belly of the dead one.  She was immediately moved to tears. This Elf had drawn the Orc from her egg–her only offspring.  Her dragon heart became swollen with grief for the infant Elf who now had no mother.  Grief for the beautiful baby dragon in the sparkling egg hidden in spun gold who would never know it’s dragoness mother. Her great eyes flowed with giant dragon tears.  The salty viscous tears fell upon the limp Elven mother.  Water Dragoness cried over the fallen and cried for their kin.  Her tears landed where the babe was to take it’s place into this terrible world. The magical dragon tears drew the tiny elven babe out of the birth canal in a wondrous act of mercy.  It lay wiggling and glistening in the sparkling afterbirth, so full of life in a scene so full of death.

*****
Purple Dragon Mage told me this story as often as I would ask him.  “Mighty Mage, where is my mother?”  He would lick my face clean and coax my smile.  “Your mother is with my beautiful Water Dragoness beyond the sea in the land where music dances upon the waves like swans.”  “Mighty Mage, are you my father now?”  He tucked her into his left wing softly as the moonlight came from behind the clouds, “Yes, my Song, my little surf-singer, I am your Father now, and your dragon brother Ember is waiting to play with you”.

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