Voidhearts Chapter 0: Dragon
Unkind dreams has Alicia see how her first adventure could have ended.
Alicia felt the weight of her axe, the roughness of the wood grain against her calloused hands, the way the weight pulled her into a slight slouch. She had pulled from the Deep Song both from above and below this day, and it had not made a lick of difference. Her adversary was every bit alive and every bit as terrifying as it had been prior to her misguided charge. Her warriors lay scattered behind her, Chanters and Singers alike, laid low by the beast that Alicia stood as a lone bulwark against.
The Dragon Thane was massive. More than massive, the squat scaled form was as big as a city block, maybe even bigger, and that was before it spread its terrible wings. It breathed poison, it’s claws were sharp and unbreaking, its eyes glinted with avaricious intelligence, the ruthless brilliance that had seen it subjugating well over half of the known world. The beast knew Alicia’s strength, the strength of her clan, of her confederation, and it bothered it not in the slightest. Even so, the ancient wyrm was wily, approaching at a measured pace, a predator that was wary of its prey’s dying strength. There would be no feinting this foe, no using its own strength against it like Alicia had done in the Trial of Steel.
The Dragon Thane was savoring the moment, Alicia could tell now that it had come so damnably close. It’d be near enough for the dangerous fumes the wyrm exhaled to harm her soon. It was possible it was going to let the fumes do the job, and merely wait and watch while the poisonous gas ravaged Alicia’s lungs, burning soft tissue, forcing itself into her blood to make it acidic, to hollow her out from the inside. She had seen it done before, to emissaries or tributaries that had particularly displeased the beast. Not that there was any pleasing it. No tribute could ever be grand enough, no conquest could ever be total enough. It would eat and burn and despoil and have its terrified underlings burn and despoil and conquer, until the only thing left on this world was itself, and a pile of its enemies bones reaching all the way to heaven.
“I really am starting to sound like I’m from here”” Alicia said, an aside to herself. There was a humor to it that she didn’t expect. The Dragon’s ears twitched, as shocked by Alicia’s grit as Alicia was. “So whatsup you huge scaly jerk? Is that all you got?” Alicia shouted. She needn’t shout, but there was a power to being loud and rude that she didn’t want to let go of, now less than ever.
The dragon’s lips pulled up in a snarl, showing the curved teeth that could tear supply wagons in half with ease. She was getting to him, which suited Alicia just fine.
“I’m still standing you big dumb lizard motherfucker, why don’t you Jurassic Park your ass somewhere we can’t smell your terrible breath?” It wasn’t so much what she said, Alicia figured, as how she said it. She’d been told she had a bad attitude several times, and while she didn’t always agree, there was no denying this particular mood was what the social worker at school would call “highly antisocial.”
The dragon’s posture shifted. It would’ve been a subtle movement if it hadn’t been big enough to require it’s own zip code. It was preparing to charge. For a creature that defied size descriptors this was a very scary thing to do, but Alicia couldn’t help but letting her lupine grin grow even more furious.
“Or better yet, drag yourself off your cloaca and come over so I can chop the ugly off your face… it’s going to take a few chops though.”
The Dragon Thane charged; Whether it was Alicia’s estimation of the amount of ugly on the its face, or the malicious cockiness in her delivery that did it, Alicia did not know. The earth trembled as the beast approached, moving faster than anything that size was meant to move. Alicia faced the charge. There was nothing else she could do. There was nothing else she wanted to do. There was nothing else they had planned for her to do.
Much was riding on this, entirely too much by Lia’s estimation, but the plan had seemed solid enough to Alicia. A party of half of the coalition’s most elite warriors would go out and challenge the Dragon Thane to honorable combat. When the Thane inevitably rejected this proposition, the trap would spring, and Lia would lead the other half in ambush. The small groups, elite though they may be, wouldn’t be able to kill the Thane with the biggest axes in the world, but wounding one of its massive wings would be within the realm of possibility. With their foe thus robbed of flight, even if it be just for the morning, the remainder of the coalition army could move in, and if nothing went wrong and everything went right, they might just slay the beast.
Something was wrong. Alicia could feel it. She wasn’t sure if it was a sway in the Dragon Thane’s posture, or the way its’ golden eyes glinted at the apparent open and shut engagement. The Thane rumbled past the entrance to the valley of spears, and as little as she liked it, Alicia could naught but watch as the trap snapped. It was all in motion, entirely too in motion, and Alicia took it all in.
She saw the Dragon Thane grow from huge to impossibly vast before her, she could see the glinting of metal and hardwood of Lia’s ambush party amid a thicket of sharp rock protrustions. For a scant second she swore she could see Lia, her pleasantly round face growing angular with rage as the Deep Song filled her body with the power of the very earth itself. The ambushers leaped into action, springing high up in the air with weapons drawn.
Then, it all went wrong. It wasn’t a huge dramatic thing like the movies made it look some times. It wasn’t slow motion and choral song and the chiming of bells of this doom or that. It was a shift. The Thane did not move much, it didn’t have to. All it did was come to a sudden stop, and striking out with its massive wings.
Again, Alicia felt like she could see Lia like she was next to her. In mid-leap as she was, she was powerless to change her bearing or direction as the massive wing, and more importantly the bony ridge along its edge, smashed into her. In a movie it’d cut at that point, in a movie they wouldn’t have shown the strict but loving mentor of the hero smashed into a pulp by high-velocity bone, neither would it show the spikes around the wing’s joint dig into Lia’s face and torso, gouging baseball-sized holes where they retracted, and popping Lia’s screaming mouth open. Lia had died the second the wing hit her, so she suffered no further indignity to this desecration. This bit, Alicia realized, was for her. For her to see, for her to suffer. Not to die but watching death, watching her failure, watching the woman she’d realize years later she had come to love die ignobly, be erased by the Thane’s merciless strength.
It had been foolish to run out against the Thane, as the War Council told her. It had been foolish to unite the tribes, as the Allthing had told her. It had been foolish to take up the way of the steppe tribe as Lia had told her. It had been foolish to wake up that night to the sound of chanting and investigate it, as she now told herself.
The Dragon Thane told her nothing as he looked down on her with the kind of hateful pity one would deign to give an enemy too weak to be of relevance. He would kill her, he would kill her in ways that lasted for a thousand days, and before he was finished he would see everything that she had made destroyed, everything she had learned unmade, and everything she had been eradicated.
Alicia woke from the nightmare; Not with a scream, but a whimper. An exhalation of the cold, grimy relief that came with a bad dream passing from your mind and back into the subconscious shroud from whence it came. Or maybe that wasn’t how dreams or the human mind worked at all. Alicia had no idea; It just gave her some cold comfort to think that heinous shit came from somewhere. In reality the ambush had worked, and although Lia got beat up pretty bad in the thick of it, she had survived. It was the Dragon Thane that had died that day, punctured by thousands of spears, slashed with every blade in the Steppefolk armory. The seidseer had predicted the dragon’s blood would putrefy the earth it touched for decades, if not centuries, but Alicia hadn’t stayed around for long enough to find out if they were correct or full of shit, like they usually were.
Alicia wanted to get up. The part of her brain that managed discomfort was winding up. She had to get up and do something. Shake the sweat off. Go gather up her laundry. Go somewhere she could take a good sunrise selfie. Do some late-night moderation of her feed. Hell, getting out of her sweat-soaked night clothes was at least a start. There was just one problem. She couldn’t.
People who were into combat sports called it Knock Out Syndrome, the more workout-centered crew she usually ran with called it Reaching Your Limit. Alicia called it A Fucking Problem, and it was only through the grace of knowing she couldn’t do any influencer work even if she could get up since she was stuck in a parallel universe that something real big and bad had broken into a million pieces. This was to say there was no data network coverage, as well that now it was her job to fix it all. Not only her, of course, but she and three other former childhood heroes. Never mind the fact that keeping these three from clawing each other’s eyes out and/or fucking nasty out in public was enough of a job to qualify for health insurance if it actually was a paid position. Alicia registered that she was being unkind, but decided to let the matter slide considering it was late or possibly early and that she was tired.
Thus absolved of her sin of unkindness, Alicia slid back into a light sleep. It was the kind of sleep that left you with a headache and stinging eyes, but it was better than nothing, and best of all, it was blessedly empty of dreams.
Author’s Note: And just like that we’re back in it. Alicia’s dream feels a lot like anxiety dreams I’ll get some times, when I’m back in junior high school and just utterly floundering at some subject I should in theory do just fine at. Granted, the scale is a bit grander for Alicia, but what is fiction if not everyday emotions set at a grander scale, optionally with a dragon?
Catch you next time, when Alicia’s morning routine is interrupted by something unusual.
VSD