A Dragon Story (non-MLP) · 3:21am Dec 10th, 2022
I thought I'd posted this somewhere. Might have just been Patreon. Anywho, here is something from the same world as my Mimic Slime series.
The world was developed primarily by Hidden Master with a little input by myself and a few others on Discord. Anywho, enjoy the story of a woman for whom power is more than a desire—it's her destiny.
I had no idea how old I was, just that I was mature enough to be angry at the world. I was angry for a lot of reasons, most of which had to do with getting food for me and my crew. My crew were like me, but not like me. They were street rats, thieves, beggars, and tricksters all of 'em, and I was their queen.
"What you got, Pinch?" When I asked a question, here in the heart of my domain, I got answers.
Pinch was a rat-faced (not literally) kid a bit younger than me, brown hair, slightly dark skin, and wearing rags—he looked like every other street rat, but had a brain in his head, he did. "Found it. One o' dem white-robes was tryin' t' burn it. Shoulda seen how much trouble 'e was havin'."
"And you figger it was worth somethin'? What'd you do?"
"Tossed a pop-bang into 'is fire. When it went off, I grabbed it an' ran."
"Ha! Good goin'. Give it here." My demand resulted in him bringing the big box-thing over to me. Like I said, Pinch wasn't stupid. He hefted it up onto the table so I could lean over it and look down.
The thing looked like a book, but not. The outside was a soft sort of pinkish leather and the "pages" inside looked to be made from metal. "Mr. Knives, get me my tools."
Mr. Knives was no relation to me by anything but our mixed blood fighting off the various scum of the streets when we first got here. He loved knives, and I loved that he loved knives. I also loved that he had a habit of appearing behind anyone I got in a fight with. He tossed my ratty old tool bag on the table.
Unrolling my tools, I lifted out my best pick and tensioner and went to work. The lock wasn't hard, but it also wasn't simple. Took me nearly a minute to get all the levers just right. "Well, well, well, looks like them white-robes aren't so clever. Shoulda used a better lock."
Hefting on the cover, I opened the book myself. Yeah, I should probably have had another rat do it, but I led my rats without standing behind them. The first "page" was engraved metal. There was colors and stuff, and a few pictures, but most of it was writing. I didn't get along with writing. "This is shite."
When I flipped the cover closed, though, the world seemed to wobble and one of the pictures from inside the book glowed right in front of my eyes.
Open it again.
I don't know what it was, but I don't like things getting in my head. "Fuck you."
Open it again!
It was like the voice was pulling strings in my head. It was so loud and so big that it made the whole city crumble around me. I couldn't think about anything but what it told me. Fighting it seemed impossible.
Reaching out, I struggled to even see the book well enough to grasp and open the cover again.
Pain lanced through my head as soon as I saw what was inside. Pain and fire and strange thoughts that didn't make sense.
"The Spellbook of Ulther Dragonsworn." The words left my lips tasting old and strange. They were right there at the top of the metal page. Whatever that voice had done, it had shoved how to read the book into my head. "Who are ya? Are ya Ulther?"
Booming laughter was my answer.
"What is this?" I asked.
Power. Yours.
It wasn't a command, but I understood those two words with every fiber of my being. Power was what I held when I ordered a begger knifed for not paying his dues. Mine was the control I held in my hands, of the people and things around me. I liked both of these things a lot.
Breathing slowly, I noticed that there was a gray tint to the air each time I exhaled. Heat, fire, power, strength—they all welled up inside and sang a wonderful song in my head. The first ritual was one of empowerment, it fortified the body and spirit both.
"Mine."
All yours. Yours if you are loyal.
I shivered at the power behind that voice. So much promise. What surprised me was my hand on the inside cover of the book seemed to change. My fingers grew darker in color and turned the kind of red that blood from someone's heart was. A claw sat on the end of each finger, and when I held up my other hand it had changed too.
"Mine." The word wound its way through everything I was, but it relied on something else—an understanding of whose power this was. "Yours."
This was an idea as old as dirt. This power was only mine so long as I belonged to another. It angered me so much that I felt a burning pain in my throat just before a dribble of liquid flame leaked from the corner of my mouth.
This was power.
"What do you want me to do?"
Grow. Build. Take. Prepare.
I liked all those words. I liked them a lot.
Most of my rats were still with me. I wasn't the wiry little waif of the city slums anymore. By all account I was probably about fifteen. Six years with my master guiding me had left its marks on me, on those around me, and on the city.
I smiled at Mr. Knives. "How'd it go?"
"She's a fucking whore, just like you said. In and out was all she wanted"—he flicked out a long, slender blade and then tucked it away just as fast—"and in and out was what she got."
It was a step, like all the other steps. Ulther had never completed the final ritual. He'd been a great asset of my master, but I would be better. "You don't have regrets?"
He laughed and shook his head.
"And you'll never tell me if you did." Looking from the spellbook to a map, I used a claw to burn a cross over the palace. "Just Pinch's team left to go."
"Are you sure you'll know when they do it?"
"Of course. Ever since they installed that fucking artifact, my scales have been itching." There were crosses all over the city now as its spiritual defenses had been removed one by one. Only the circle around the white-robes' tower remained.
I didn't need the map to know where that damn tower was. The relic they'd installed—supposedly because the city was having a problem with cultists—was like a beacon that sapped at my strength with every second it remained in place.
My master had been teaching me patience, but it hadn't really taken yet. Less than a minute passed before I was pacing. I didn't care that my clawed feet were tearing at the carpet or that I was breathing smoke again. "How much long—?"
A shiver ran through me and I froze in place to appreciate it. "They did it." All my senses sprawled out and filled the room, then the building beyond, and slowly started to seep into the city itself.
It is your time.
More than just my senses were spreading, though. For a regular human, their will was bound to their body and no further. The white-robes could extend theirs to items they carried. My will was so much more.
I touched Mr. Knives first. My will recognized him as a possession and thus I moved on. There were more around me, more of my rats, and they too belonged to me.
The first my will encountered something different was a person walking past the mansion we were inhabiting. My will pressed into them and took one of the four most precious things to a human. Their feet didn't move a step further as I drained their very soul from them and ate it.
Power. Power like I couldn't believe. It poured down my throat like a fine wine and fueled my magic as my will spread.
One by one people fell. They didn't have time to feel pain or fear, they were snuffed out like moths straying too close to a fire. My fire.
Mr. Knives moved, using one of his namesakes to slice my shirt and trousers free. I didn't need to question his motive—I trusted him because he was wrapped so firmly in my will.
You grow. A gift suitable to your new stature is appropriate. It will hurt.
I laughed as another hundred people died. Pain ripped through my body as bones rearranged and muscles corded. Flesh wrapped around new limbs and scales chased over them. I fell to my hands and knees and begged my master with all my will to gift me as much as I could survive.
When my will coiled around the white-robes' temple and snuffed out the lives of all within—except for one that belonged to me—I almost screamed with joy. "More. More. MORE!"
Fire poured from my mouth as the agony of my change reached a crescendo. I howled as my master's magic ripped me apart and rebuilt me, but now the pain had given way to pure pleasure. My will extended to the very walls of the city—and the last humans that didn't belong to me fell dead where they stood.
My child, you have consumed the finest of meals, but there is still a great feast ahead. I have a task suitable only to one such as you.
Lifting my head, I smirked and flashed pointed teeth that yet dripped flame onto the floor. When I turned my head to Mr. Knives, I could already feel his own change. It wasn't as much as my own, but he now carried the mark of scales at his brow and had claws similar to what I'd borne on his hands.
As the building caught fire and became engulfed in flames, I stood and picked up my spellbook. "We have more work."
The words, I knew, would echo in the minds of all my rats.
It had been nearly a hundred and fifty years since I had gained my wings and fully embraced my power. Task after task had been put before me, and task after task had I completed.
All my rats had found their own powers: Mr. Knives no longer strictly needed his namesake anymore, but he had accepted the gift of shadow-walking from my master, Pinch had instead embraced sorcery like a dry throat embraces water.
I'd lost one here and there, and whenever that happened my master assured me that my rat was safe. I believed him, given my own brushes with death. Now, however, we faced our greatest challenge to date.
Your heritage.
"You're a fucking liar. This is no one's heritage, least of all a gutter rat like me." The sight before me shouldn't have been possible. It was as if a god had ripped reality apart, stuffed it with more magic than was possible to exist, and then tried to put it back together while it was inside out. A vast underground tomb that civilizations had grown up trying to delve and fallen apart without succeeding. "But I'll take it, just like I've taken everything else in this world."
My master laughed in my head. He knew me better than I did, but it didn't take that knowledge to tell that I'd disregarded the title of gutter rat and taken whatever I could get my claws on.
No finer creature has existed. Continue this quest.
And so I led my rats forward into the maze—a confusion of motion and space built from reality itself. We'd been here for ten years now, ripped apart the outer defenses of this old tomb and were now on the precipice of victory.
Beasts came at us, but fiery sorcery cut them down on one flank while a red shadow blurred on the other—both of my companions left only corpses.
They could certainly fight their way through this easily enough, but there was just one among us who could find the way through the maze. With my senses stretched to their limit, I led the way through the maze and focused my will on navigating it.
It would have been simple if the maze didn't keep constantly changing—all except for where I focused my attention. The path ahead and where we stood was safe and immutable, but the further we traveled the less I could hold.
The monsters, too, seemed wilder and more exotic. Hundreds of years evolving within the grip of the maze's magic would make even the most harmless of beasts into a deadly tornado of claws, teeth, tentacles, and pincers.
Eventually, though, I felt the weight of having to hold reality in check lighten. We stepped out of the maze and onto a verdant hill. The air was chill and still, the grass under my claws felt barely real—my senses told me it was complicated.
"Spread out and keep an eye on the maze." I turned to look at Pinch and Mr. Knives and got a nod from both. This was it. It was all up to me.
Each step was like walking through the ocean—like the tide and waves were fighting to push me back. There was so much power here that didn't want me to advance that I had to summon my will as a wedge and hammer both.
As the old grass under my feet crackled and burned to dust, I had to lean forward to fight against the pressure of magic. There were two outcomes of this expedition and both were perfectly fine with my master. The first was I would open a path for a single lance of pure power from my master that would kill the undying corpse once and for all.
Driving my legs forward, I fell to my hands and knees and even resorted to using my wings to pull me forward.
What I wanted, what I needed, was to recover the not-corpse intact. Now almost at the crest of the hill, I could see my target. "There you are." My mind burned as my will strained against the timeless, devastating force contained within the ever-rotting carcass of a dragon before me.
I could feel time passing—hours, days, months, then years—while I crawled closer. Hunger, the same hunger that had driven me to read my master's tome in the first place.
Do it! Feast!
Leaning forward, I opened my jaws and managed one bite of the dragon's flesh.
Brown things, long and root-like, shot out of the ground and started sinking into the dragon. Wherever they touched it, the not-corpse withered. It was all wrong. They were consuming and burying the dragon's remains. Reaching one hand up, I barely managed to open the required portal. "M-Master! Strike now!"
My master didn't hesitate. Heat like the inferno of a million stars shot from the portal and literally rent the roots and the remains of the dragon into ash. It should have killed me just being close to the dragonfire, but for that one mouthful of dragonflesh.
My muscles corded tighter, my bones became so heavy in my body I could feel them sinking me into the hill just a little, and my senses exploded outward to wrap around the hill and the maze. With my will I stilled the ancient magic to calmness and then undid all the spells wrought into it.
Pinch was the first to reach me. "Queen?"
Tears rolled down my cheeks. "I was so close, Pinch. What was that?"
"Roots. Some kind of parasite burrowed through when you broke the seal. I've never seen anything like it." Which meant that the parasite wasn't human or draconic in nature.
"Well, we need to find out what it was. I want it dead. I want everything on the same continent as it dead. I want it smashed into so much dust that it will cease to exist. We can't seek another dragon before we kill it." Standing up seemed harder. My talons started to sink deeper into the hill until I used my will to stop it.
I was bigger, so much bigger, than I'd been before. "We have research to do. Come on."
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Lab
Oh man, this was such a fun piece. I'm still touched you wanted to mess with my homegrown setting to make this lovely text.
I skimmed this to read later, but, what the heck is that tag?
This is the kind of protagonist who I hope ends up dying a very ignoble death. Ideally both painful and humiliating.
5702581
I know the song and I appreciate it, but this parody was the version I first heard and it's the one my brain always falls back on.
Man, I'd forgotten this world. I went back and reread the slime series, and would love to see a continuation of that, but I look forward to more of this, too.
Horrifying in the best way. Excellent addition to that world.