Short Story: Dragon Sorcerer- Part 1 (Patreon)

This story is meant to be told from the perspective of a dragon who has taken a human form and developed a curiousity about humans. He is quite young by dragon standards.

One thing I'm aiming for is to use euphemisms and such from the perspective of a dragon.  A simple example would be "I knew something was off but I couldn't put a claw on it" rather than "putting a finger on it"

If you have any feedback about how that works here please let me know:

Dragon Sorcerer: Shedding Scales

Part 1- Escape

Gone was the warm clime of the desert and the cool cave where I had hatched with the rest of my clutch. I could no longer spell the pleasant scent of ozone which had been the first thing I smelled. It was a scent that even know I associated with my mother.

Oh, I and the other hatchlings could spit lightning almost from the moment we were born before our scales had even changed from their initial dirty gray. That was back when we were mewling little wyrms, little more than creatures of instinct. We ate what mother provided and grew both in body and mind.

Not that it happened overnight. I had slept long months which sometimes turned into years. My body developed and grew and my mind absorbed the dragon dream. It would be hard to explain what that means to beings with such fleeting lives, but suffice it to say that it is what all dragons of a given lineage share. A heritage of knowledge, inborn abilities, and an assurance of our place in the world.

Now, I was the only one left from my clutch. Siblings who I played with, cuddled with, and fought with were gone. Some by my claw or fang and I took no joy in it but life is very hard for a young dragon. Everyone thinks dragons are so indestructible. The greatest of my kind are feared not just by lonely princesses and small villages but by entire towns, but life never starts out that way. We may become the apex predators but we have to claw and scorch our way to the top.

When mother was with us we were safe, but she had to go and hunt for us. Then we were subject to burrow worms, phoenix, and other predators who like to raid a dragon’s nest. After a few years we grow strong enough that most predators will seek easy prey. At that point other dragons are the worst threat and not just any dragons. It is our clutch mates we fear the most.

Mother feeds us but the older we get, the less food she brought or perhaps it was simply that we were all growing so fast that we out grew what she was willing to share with us. Dragons are not known for they maternal instinct, so it is a wonder that she kept coming back for twenty years to feed ups, even if the trips became less and less frequent.

Then once we started to stray from the next there were other predators. The nomadic tribes of the desert greatly valued our scales. The brilliant blue of those scales was used from potions, dyes, and armor. Worse were the adventurers. Fortunately, they were few and far between.

A mother dragon never lays her eggs inside her lair because she doesn’t wish to share her hoard with her offspring. Nor does she want to have us ranging from that lair and bring unwelcome guests. So my mother’s nest was nothing but a cave deep in a rocky escarpment in the high deserts of Taleia.

If adventurers found out about a dragon nest though, it was never safe. Some of the fools would likely have even attacked if mother had been there. I knew through the dragon dream that we were valued by wizards for their enchantments and as re-agents for spells. Some of them even sought to tame a dragon. I scoffed thinking of that, but the memories of my ancestors contained the sight of men or women riding upon the backs of dragons.

That was probably where it all began for me. I always got the sense that I was a bit different, but I couldn’t help it. Something about the manlings made me curious. Thus when I escaped the final attack upon our nest, I was nearly fifty years old. I hadn’t seen my mother in decades and had not yet scene a dragon other than my clutch mates, well except for in my dreams.

I was strong enough to be a young adult for I had reluctantly slain two of my fellows and absorbed their energy. I had done the same for my other creatures. It honed my instinct to hunt and the lust for power that dragons feel. The adventures who final killed my sister and drove me from the nest were to strong.

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe I could have killed any single one of them but rather the way the worked together. When I mattered the one where the shiny armor like a turtle, his wounds would disappear their priest healed him. Divine magic is foreign to my kind, but I could feel the touch of the gods on that one. Then there was the one who kept sneaking up behind me. She would manage to find tender spots between scale for her little fang, a dagger think humans call it to pierce my flesh. It wasn’t fatal but it was painful.

The worst of them was the old one in robes. It was hard for me to tell them apart with my eyes, but my nose new the difference between fresh young flowers and wilted remains. The only reason that I managed to escape was that this human kept insisting that I be taken captive rather than slain. When Sheraleigh, my sister came into the cave it provided me an opportunity to escape.

I am ashamed that I escaped, but every creature owns the right of self-preservation. With our long lives, dragons feel this perhaps more acutely than other races. I have no doubt that they killed Sheraleigh but I may never know. We shared the same dream but that is of our past not our future.

When I escaped the cave, I took flight. I was strong enough to fly, but not yet strong enough to risk drawing the attention of another dragon. There might not be many of us but all it would take would be for another to believe I was encroaching on their domain.

Two tiny slivers of wood had also impaled themselves in the membrane of my right wing. One of the humans dressed in green and browns had used a stick and string to hurl these slivers at me. They weren’t enough to stop me from flying but they felt weird each time I beat my wings. Still, I had to put up with it. It wouldn’t do me any good to escape the adventurers to only let them catch up to me.

For that reason, I raced to the east. I wasn’t sure what drew me, but I had always been curious about the haunts of man. It was as good a destination as any. My memories told me there were great cities with hundreds of thousands of the tiny humans to be found in this direction.

I flew for more than a hundred miles, rising up and then slowly gliding down on the thermals from the desert. Even with the annoying slivers it was a joy to fly. It was the very definition of what it meant to be a dragon. I was above everything and everyone, looking down at the lesser races. At least that was what my memories taught me. I found that my curiosity was greater than my desire to control.

Eventually, I landed when the desert gave way to rolling hills. They were covered in scrub grass but I found a massive herd of an animal I had never seen but which my ancestral memories gave a name to, cow. A good meal would go a long way towards changing my mood.

I circled down and delighted as my mere presence sent a wave a terror through the bovine snacks. I was only twenty-five feet long at this point but that was easily enough to make short work of a pair of cows. I dove down and simply for the love of my power I opened my mouth.

Sucking in air I then exhaled. The power inside of me surged forth and hit the small spot on the roof of my mouth which contained my lighting, so to speak. I’d love to say that a great bolt of power lanced out and ripped up the ground before me, but that would be a bit of a stretch. Sparkly arcs leaped from cow to cow with an effect which even if not as impressive was just as awkward.

They spasmed and jerked. Current popped out of them into the ground and left explosive burns as a swath one hundred feet long and ten feet wide collapsed. In total some two dozen cows fell over still shaking. Then I landed and bit into the first morsel. My snack wasn’t dead but she was definitely immobilized.

Maybe it was cruel to bite into her while she was still alive, but I was a dragon after all. And it was so worth it. Cow tasted amazing. It had a wonderful diversity of flavor depending on which part I ate. I looked up while chewing a mouth full from my now dead snack and saw the eyes bulging on the nearest cows. They clearly wanted to get up and run but their survival instinct hadn’t yet overcome the paralyzation induced by my breath weapon. Well that and dragon fear tended to make the mind of lesser beasts so fuzzy that they couldn’t act decisively.

That enabled me to leisurely eat my fill. After three cows I didn’t think I could take another bite. I looked and saw a small patch of mint in the field. Normally that would be good for removing the smell of raw flesh from my mouth. I might be a predator but I wasn’t uncouth. It was just that today I felt like one more bite would make me explode, even if it was just a tiny mint.

I even let the other cows get up and run away once they recovered. Although, truthfully that had more to do with the fact that chasing my food is more fun than storing it up for the future. So, I stretched out and basked in the sun. My leisure was only spoiled by the small but nagging pain in my right wing.

I had tried to stretch my head far enough to bite off the offending splinters but it was to far even for my sinuous neck. A problem that I couldn’t solve wasn’t worth thinking about. The confidence of generations through time immemorial told me that eventually a solution would present itself. Dragons could be patient when they needed to. Thus, I drifted off to sleep, secure in my supremacy over a field of cows.