Dacei the Dragon

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Dacei snarls her snout at the other dragons in the circle, smoke curling out of her nostrils dark with anger. “How can you all be so idiotic for creatures with such big brains?” she snarls, “the human wizard has a brain half the size of the most foolish of you, and yet even he sees the necessity of this course of action.”

“The wizard has a tiny brain, and yet you’re more than willing to throw in with him?” Ryu argues back, voice just as growly and smoke just as dark.

picture of a knight in shining armor on horseback against a sunset in the background

The man with the squat hat looks back and forth between the dragons, the only expression on his face one of intrigue. As though he wasn’t surrounded by creatures, on average, three times his size. The human wizard was either just as foolish as Ryu’s not-quite-hint would portray him, or far braver than other humans Dacei has seen. 

knight hiding behind bush in the woods

Including the two hiding behind the bushes several feet away–the woman with a tall, pointy hat, and the man with the helmet and what the wizard calls armor. That in particular was strange. Normally the metal men were angry and violent–not quiet and cowering. Maybe this one was smart enough to realize his metal wasn’t nearly as protective as Dacei’s own tough scales. About time they realized that.

witch's had peeking out from above a bush in the woods

“The wizard has shown himself to be a friend of our kind in the past,” Dacei retorts, “more of a friend than even some of own. There are some among us who foolishly argue that we should let the metal men continue to kill us for the simple sake of pride, if you hadn’t noticed. Oh, wait.”

Ryu’s ruff shakes and rattles dangerously at that. “The metal men are the wizard’s kin–sons of Adam. And yet you would trust them to protect us? He said himself that the price for this agreement is giving up our teeth, claws, and scales.”

“I would trust a son of Adam to do this, because he is a son of Adam that has proven himself trustworthy,” Dacei retorts, “I operate on logic and truth, not a skull as thick as the earth itself.”

“I thank you for your trust, madame dragon,” the wizard bows low, hand atop his flat, squat hat to keep it on his head.

“You’re a fool, Dacei,” Ryu snarls.

“And you have the brains of a sheep,” she fires back. Literally. The wizard ducks, and the lady behind the bush screams as her pointy hat catches on fire. She whips it off her head and begins stomping on it to put the fire out.

“Excuse me?” Ryu shows his teeth.

“Scared to go anywhere new, stubborn to a fault, and what part of your brain that doesn’t take up is full of fluff,” Dacei explains. She sees the hair on the wizard’s face twitch a little. That meant amusement, right? Dacei can’t remember.

Before Ryu can snap anything back, Dacei turns away from him and steps toward the wizard, lowering herself to the ground so their faces are at the same height. “You promise the dragons gathered here, wizard son of Adam, that we will no longer be hunted to extinction for the sake of your kin’s courtship and rite of passage rituals?”

The wizard rests a hand between her nostrils, where smoke continues to pour out. The pulse of blood in his hand is in no way elevated. Does the creature have no survival instincts? “I promise, madame dragon.”

“Then I volunteer to be the first changed if only to show this pompous sheephead that you mean no harm.”

The wizard shows his teeth, and Dacei reminds herself that that’s not a challenge from this puny creature. His eyes seem to glisten more than previously. Is that a good thing? Is he breaking? Humans did that sometimes, and this would be a very bad time for that to happen to this wizard. “May God bless you for this trust, madame dragon. It is neither given nor taken lightly.”

That… sort of sounds like he’s breaking. She eyes him uneasily, but nothing more happens than him patting her snout and then stepping away to pull something out of the sack he’d set on the ground. He holds it in an open palm so Dacei can see it clearly. It’s a small round thing. She snorts smoke, colored with her confusion.

“It’s a cake,” the wizard explains, “well, sort of. It looks like a cake, at least, but there’s stuff in there I’d never put in a cake. Deer entrails, for one. And ground-up raccoon bones. Of course, the language in the recipe book is far more colorful than that, but that’s what it amounts to.”

burlap bag resting on the grass in the woods

If Dacei hadn’t already agreed to the transformation, that description alone might’ve convinced her. There aren’t many humans that care to learn to cook for a dragon, but Dacei had had a princess stay with her for a while that learned the trick really quickly. That was before she ran off to marry a wizard, anyway. Suddenly, it occurs to Dacei to wonder which wizard, and she eyes the one in front of her with a new sense of suspicion.

He apparently misreads it as his expression changes to one Dacei recognizes–the wizard is upset. “…you don’t like deer? Or raccoon bones?”

“No,” she hurries to assure him, “that’s not it at all. My mind was somewhere else.”

“Rethinking your decision to trust this hairless monkey?” Ryu growls behind her, “you don’t know what’s in that cake.”

Dacei growls in her throat and throws the lizard a glare. “I’m rethinking nothing. I trust this wizard. I was just wondering…” she turns back to the human. “Are you married?”

Both the wizard and the other dragons around them appear confused. The woman with the pointy hat lets out a short and harsh bark of a laugh.

“…yes. Why do you ask, madame dragon?”

“What is the name of your wife?”

“…Amirah.” His answer is more question than statement.

Dacei rumbles, amused. “Anyone who doesn’t trust this wizard is a fool,” she states shortly before crawling a half step forward to eat the cake in a single bite.

The wizard looks between his hands and her mouth. She can’t read the look on his face.

“…does that name mean something to you, madame dragon?” he asks after a moment.

lumpy meat patty held in someone's hands against a blurred forest background

“The name and the taste of that cake. Tell your wife hello from Dacei, when you get home. And thank her for sharing her brilliant wiz–oh!” A prickling around her tail cuts her off, and her head swings around to check on it, eyes narrowed.

Her tail flicks from side to side, checking to make sure she can still move it. She can, although it looks different, not catching the light the way it normally does. It looks… scuffed. and the visible texture is different, as well. She can still move it, but the feel of it is… muffled. That’s not the right word for it, but she’s not sure there is a word for this feeling. She searches along her tail for the seam of the change, but can’t find it with her eyes. 

She can feel the difference, though. The muffled-ness climbs up through her tail and over her hips before sliding both across her back and chest, as well as down her hind legs. She shakes herself–the sensation neither hurts, nor does it feel pleasant. It just feels… strange. She thinks she wants the feeling to go away, but isn’t sure why, seeing as it doesn’t hurt, making its way across her belly and back, and then both down her front legs and up her neck.

Sensation is definitely muffled, and it’s as though she lost some of the sense of touch in her feet. There’re no more claws coming out of her toes, and the ones she’d had had fallen off. She can see them lying in the grass as the muffled sensation crawls its way over the spikes protecting her neck and her face, before finishing by climbing her horns. Her eyes, too, feel weird. She can’t blink, and it’s like she’s no longer seeing so much as sensing.

Her brain tells her head to shake, and the response, while it does happen, is delayed. She feels lighter, and her vision feels far wider, without the constant twin curls of smoke in her eyeline. She turns in a circle, trying to mentally adapt to this change, but, in the turn, she notices something and frowns at the wizard. Or, tries to, anyway. Her yarn face doesn’t seem to move that direction very easily. Nor does it open. Instead, she stares at his eyes and thinks the irrate words as loud as she can. He may not understand her, but at least she can give words to her thoughts enough to, hopefully, release the frustration. You said small and yarn. Able to be mistaken for a children’s toy, made in a style that won’t be invented for another thousand years, at least. I don’t seem to be any smaller.

The wizard, too, is frowning, and his head cocks to the side. “I admit, that was the plan, and it doesn’t seem to have worked ou–“

A loud roar echoes around the tree-covered mountains and hills, and Dacei sees Ryu land over top of the wizard, even as she tries to piece together how the wizard read her thoughts.

“I knew we shouldn’t trust you,” Ryu snarls. The other dragon sounds as angry and dangerous as Dacei has ever heard him, and he once tried to take on a honey badger and viper at the same time. “Look what you did! Now she’s helpless and doesn’t even have the pathetic disguise you actually offered just–“

Maybe it’s the fact that the wizard isn’t even looking at the looming specter of scaley death, or the lack of fear in the man’s voice, or some blur of movement, but Ryu follows the wizard’s gaze. When he sees what caught the wizard’s eye, he stops talking.

Dacei was trying to pay attention to the altercation in front of her, but, for some reason, she’d fallen on her face. She pushes herself back up, but standing feels uneven. What in the name of– she swings her head over her shoulder to find… it takes her a moment to actually understand what she’s seeing.

Her tail and hind quarters are significantly stubbier than they were a moment ago, and her belly and midsection seem to be shrinking and pulling closer together, too. Her front legs and chest soon follow suit, the shrinking following the same path the yarn transformation had.

It’s not long before she finds herself looking up at the wizard–an extremely bizarre and unnerving feeling, considering what she’s used to. And then to have him pick her up… it’s not an unpleasant situation, but it’s far from familiar, and she’s not at all sure what to do about that. Ryu moves his head, so it’s right under her wing, and sniffs. Her wing twitches in response. She feels her wing hit his nose, but he doesn’t even blink.

White-haired, bearded, smiling man wearing a squat hat looking into the camera with a blurred forest background behind him

Njall slowly shakes his head, and Dacei can feel the wizard frown. “I heard it clear as day.”

“You can also hear them normally, Merlin,” calls the woman with the pointy hat, standing from behind the bushes, “maybe it has something to do with that.”

The wizard considers this. “Maybe. I can understand the dragons because I have The Gift. Maybe that works even when they’re not flesh and blood, but, because none of you have The Gift, you can’t communicate.”

Ryu looks affronted. “We’re dragons, and so is she. We should be able to communicate.”

“Not necessarily. You cannot communicate with someone outside of your species unless you’ve got…” he rolls his hand, searching for the right word, “unless you’ve got something… extra. Humans–those who know about it–call it The Gift. Whether through practice and learning, or it’s literally just a gift, you do need something more. She may be different enough, now, that it works. Yarn is different from flesh and blood. Maybe it’s enough?” He turns toward the bushes. “Does that sound believable? Arthur?”

Metal clinks as the man in armor shrugs.

“Eadburga?”

“I’m just an alewife, Merlin,” the woman sounds exasperated, even to Dacei’s ears, which are rusty on picking up human emotion. At best. “I don’t even know why I’m here.”

“You’re here because I trust you, Eadburga. And you said you’d help me protect them.”

Dacei sees the woman’s eyes dart around, taking in the large gathering of dragons. “…I don’t want them to die out,” she says slowly, “but what exactly did you have in mind?”

“As you have seen from this first and bravest dragon–” Dacei hears Ryu growl deep in his throat. “–it is a relatively simple thing to turn them into yarn and shrink them down. What isn’t as simple of a thing is finding somewhere for them to live after that.”

“Okay…?”

“It goes without saying what a popular image a dragon is. Could bring even more traffic to your store.”

Eadburga considers the yarn dragon in the wizard’s hands. “…alright. As long as it won’t randomly become…” she waves a hand around, “real, again, and scare my customers.”

“She won’t. They’ll only turn back when it’s safe to, and that won’t be on their own.”

“Convenient,” Ryu snarls.

Eadburga eyes the large dragon uneasily. “And she won’t burn my shop down?”

Merlin laughs quietly. Eadburga scowls at him, pulls her hat off, and waves the burned top in his face. “I don’t think it’s exactly impossible. Or ridiculous.”

“Maybe not if she were flesh and blood, but she’s yarn, Eady. Remember?”

The woman’s scowl deepens. “I told you not to call me that.”

“Alright, alright. I’m sorry.”

“Hmpf.”

“So, what do you say?” Merlin lifts Dacei out to the cranky woman.

Eadburga considers the effigy for a long moment.

“Alright, fine. I suppose keeping it on a shelf is harmless enough.” The woman takes Dacei, much more tenderly than Dacei expected. And that doesn’t stop being the case as, one by one, other dragons come forward to be turned into yarn. Merlin gives a few to Arthur, who looks just as uncomfortable as Eadburga had. The others he puts carefully into a sack, assuring the rest that it was really quite comfortable, and would only be until they got back to his cottage.

Dacei hears Eadburga sniff at that, and feels her hold tighten just a little. At which point, Dacei starts to wonder if she’d misjudged the woman.

Finally, when maybe a little over half of the dragons have been turned and placed in the sack, they stop coming. Merlin pulls out another cake and looks around. “Who’s next?”

No one steps forward.

“Anyone? Come on, it doesn’t hurt.”

Ryu, who, as of yet, has refused to step forward, growls again. His smoke is dark and heavy. “None of the rest of us want your protection, son of Adam.”

The cake lowers a little. “But… you know the dangers you’ve faced. If you stay like this–“

“We’ll still have claws and teeth. We’re stronger than your kind. We’ll survive just fine.”

lumpy meat patty held in someone's hands off-center against a blurred background

“Like you’ve been doing, so far?” the wizard retorts, eyes narrowed. “You’re going to die, out here on your own. The knights won’t listen to me that no lady wants a bloody, severed head dropped on her doorstep as a token of affection. Especially when it’s from someone she hasn’t even talked to. There are far better ways to woo a woman than the extinction of a species. Seems like common knowledge, but does anyone listen to me? No. Why would they? It’s not like I’ve been happily and faithfully married for fifty years, or anything. Just a loony old wizard, me.”

Dacei would blink at him in confusion, but her eyes don’t seem to be able to do that, anymore. It seems as though she’s not the only one confused, as Ryu’s challenge only comes after a few moments of silence, likely trying to figure out where the burst of bitterness came from, and what exactly he’s supposed to be responding to.

“So come up with a better answer,” he finally growls, “we’re not giving up the protection the Creator Himself gave us, no matter what the other fools decided.”

The wizard winces. “The other fools that can hear you.”

“So? What are they going to do about it? Throw themselves at me? They don’t have the claws or teeth, anymore. They can’t hurt me. They’re yarn.”

Eadburga cradles Dacei closer to her chest.

The wizard frowns. “…alright. I suppose I see your point.” He thinks for a moment, muttering numbers to himself for a long while. Finally he stops and closes one eye in hard thought. Finally, he nods slowly. “Alright, I have another option for you. A place I’ve found in my travels where you can live without fear of being hunted, but that has a different ecology than you’re used to. You’ll have to adapt. And live with other creatures you’re not used to. And it’s a fairly small island.”

Ryu’s smoke lightens a little as he considers the offer. “We don’t know that we trust you enough to take something you offer.”

“Then you can learn to trust the knights’ mercy,” the wizard shoots back, a tone to his voice Dacei doesn’t think she’s heard before.

“Merlin…” Arthur says slowly. Dacei does know that tone–warning.

The wizard takes a breath and lets it back out, slowly. “Look. You don’t have many choices, here. Either you trust me, or you get to continue as you have been. I’m really your only option. I know the knights haven’t been kind to you–their skulls are as thick as their helmets, and I’m not the only one that says so. I understand your hesitancy. I do. I probably wouldn’t trust me in your situation, either. But I’m really your only option, here. There are some of us that want to help you. Or, at least, don’t want you to die.” He waves his hand around at himself, the man in the metal skin, and the alewife. “You get to decide whether you want to let a few people ruin their entire species for you, or trust that we’re not all like that. And, while you think about that, I could point out that it takes two sides to be at war. Our innocents haven’t exactly been left unharmed by your kind, either.”

Close up of an angry, realistic-looking dragon with smoke behind him

Ryu’s smoke has been darkening the entire time the wizard has been talking, and now his throat clicks. Dacei wants to scream for the wizard to watch out. Even if it was physically possible for her to do so, however, she’s too late. Fire pours from Ryu’s throat, engulfing the wizard. Eadburga screams, and her hold on Dacei tightens sharply. If Dacei were flesh, it would’ve hurt enough for her to consider snapping her teeth at the woman.

There’s the dreaded sound of a sword being unsheathed, and Arthur rushes forward.

“Stop!” shouts the wizard that should be dead.

Arthur does, if only out of shock. Which is probably the same reason why Ryu’s fire dies.

“…Merlin?” Arthur’s voice does something strange as the flames along Merlin’s robe diminish. With several well-placed slaps, they die.

“Don’t kill him,” Merlin’s voice sounds remarkably calm, Dacei thinks. Then again, anything short of panic would be, at this point.

“How are you… alive?” Arthur wants to know.

Merlin inspects his sleeves. “A little trick I found, the other day. Thought it might come in handy.”

“‘A little of this, a little of that’?” Arthur guesses.

“Something like that.” The wizard turns back to Ryu. “Do you feel better, now?”

“A little,” Ryu admits, clearly still in shock.

“Good. Can you think logically, now?”

“I still don’t trust you.”

“I’m willing to,” Njall steps forward. He lifts his chin. “I know what it is to not have many natural defenses. I’m not giving up what I have, but I trust this wizard more than the metal men.”

“Merlin?” Eadburga speaks up, voice shaky. “I… don’t know that I can take much more. You… you should be dead. And I…”

Merlin’s voice is softer, when he speaks, next. “If you need to go, Eadburga, you can.”

The woman nods, turns, and practically flees from the forest. Her hold on Dacei is tight. Maybe it’s being made of yarn, maybe it’s the fact that she can feel Eadburga’s heartbeat in her stuffing, but, for whatever reason, Dacei finds herself not minding at all. 

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