Joshua Foster

Foster 1

Joshua Foster

Creative Writing

Professor Ersinghaus

17 February, 2012

The Red Dragon of Norc

I never asked to move to Norc. It was my dad’s idea. After Mom died, Dad kind of lost it. It got to the point where he would fight anyone who looked at him wrong. When he had to be restrained by three of the Revelin guards, I knew that we had to get out of there.

Revelin was obviously too crowded, so I suggested to my dad that we move somewhere quieter and preferably less populated. I expected him to choose somewhere like Amerfall or BowstringBay, but no. Instead, he chooses the one city in all of Soris that oozes with crime.

There’s at least one killing in the city each day and the guards do nothing about it (although it does play along with my whole less populated idea). Everybody knew about the Guild that set up in the sewers underneath the city. Heck, even I knew, and I’m only 17, but I guess that didn’t occur to my dad when he was deciding where to move.

I tried to protest, but there’s really no arguing with him anymore. He’s grown to be so hard-headed, and I don’t have the heart to tear him down.

So there we were moving into our new house in the crime-ridden, wooded glen of Norc. The air was putrid, the people were disgruntled 24 hours a day, and the only quiet time I could find was when I snuck away into the woods when no one was looking.

We weren’t supposed to go into the woods alone – or at all for that matter on account of all the strange rumors that had been spreading around the city. Cattle disappearing, trees crumpling out of nowhere, flash fires in the middle of the night; It wouldn’t have been as off-setting if it were the dry season, but we were in the middle of the season of frost. This kind of stuff was strange, even by Norc’s standards.

One night, after I snuck out into the woods during the cover of nightfall, I felt compelled to venture out further than I normally would. I was sick of seeing the same trees and the same tracks – I wanted something new and inspiring.

I crept past the guards (who were half asleep as it was) at the edge of the bridge just past the city limits and proceeded down the riverside.

I traveled about a mile north before my attention was seized by the reflection of the moonlight bouncing off of something that was streaking through the woods, but only for a second. By the time I turned to investigate, it had already vanished into the depths of the glen.

“What was that?” I said to myself.

“Probably a dragon,” whispered a familiar voice from ten paces to my left.

His comment startled me and I tripped over myself, falling onto the damp, murky riverside.

“By the Gods, Ourick, you’ve got to stop sneaking up on me like that.” I crawled back to my feet as quickly as I could and brushed the dirt and muck from my clothes. The guards had already caught me out after hours once, and I didn’t want to risk them catching me again.

“Ah, quit being such a Norc. You and I both know that you’ve got bones of steel.” He said the word “steel” as if it was something to be afraid of.

“That’s a myth, Ourick,” I whispered back. “”It’s not true. No one can have bones of steel. It’s impossible.” He had gotten my mind wandering again like he frequently would. “Did you say something about a dragon?”

“Well it’s not too far-fetched, now is it?” Ourick started to pace around me.

Ourick was a very strange little boy. He was probably about six or seven years younger than me, but he acted like he was a new-born – very fidgety and narcissistic. He wasn’t a run-of-the-mill friend, but he kind of grew on me.

“How is the idea of a dragon not far-fetched?” I cried, losing some of the whisper to my voice. “Dragons, if they ever existed to begin with, have been extinct for centuries. What makes you think that one is just going to show up in the lonely glen of Norc?”

“That’s the question now, isn’t it?” He brought his voice down to an even softer whisper as if to say that this was part we had to keep secret. “Something must have happened to bring them back. But the real question is; what was it?”

“You do realize that you’re making half of no sense right now, right?”

I wanted to believe him, I really did. The idea of a dragon coming back to life would have been beyond amazing, but I couldn’t have plagued my mind with thoughts like that. My main concern was getting my dad back on his feet and out of Norc as soon as possible.

That night, after I snuck back into my house, I laid in bed, praying to the Gods for a miracle to get me out of Norc, but a part of me couldn’t help but wonder about that brief flash of light back by the riverside.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of my dad pounding his shoulder against our pantry door like a battering ram. The way it looked to me, though, was that the pantry was winning.

“Dad, what’s going on?” I yelled. I hopped out of bed and did my best to stop him fro hurting himself.

“The assassin’s in there!” he cried. “I caught him and he’s in there! I’m not going to let him out, not never!” He tried to ram the door again, but I held him back.

I was glad that I was about his size now because if he had snapped like this a couple years ago I wouldn’t have been big enough to restrain him.

“Dad! Dad, calm down. Let me check it out. You go sit down in the kitchen.”

“But the assassin –”

“No buts, Dad. Go sit down. I’ll take care of this.”

Reluctantly, and not without a few more minutes of protest, he sat down in the kitchen while I investigated, but I already had my suspicions.

I wasn’t one to take my dad for granted, though, so I always entertained his whims, no matter how absurd, on the off-chance that what he was saying was actually true.

I made my way to the pantry and slowly pulled back the door, but there was no assassin – not unless you count a buttered rice cake as an assassin, which I don’t.

“See, Dad, it’s fine,” I assured. “There’s no one else here. It’s just us.”

His shoulders began to loosen and his pupils shrunk back down to normal size. “Oh. Oh, alright, then. I guess everything’s…everything’s okay.”

I sat down next to him at the table. We talked a little about his job at the lumber yard to get his mind back on the right track, but then that nagging thought jumped back into my head.

“What do you know about dragons?” I finally asked.

“Dragons?” His eyes widened again and he became completely still. “Dragons,” he repeated.

“I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have even brought it up. It was just something stupid that Ourick said that got me thinking – but it’s nothing.”

“Dragons are not nothing,” he corrected. He looked around the room like he was making sure no one else was listening in, even though we were the only ones there. “Come with me. There’s something that I think you need to see.”

He led me out of the house and into the city. Day had just about broken, so not many people we out, and those who were out were not very attentive. That made it easier for us to enter the town armory without even so much as a second glance.

“I haven’t been completely honest with you about why we moved here,” he admitted as he tightly shut the door behind us.

We were now standing in a 1.5 acre store room filled with swords, axes, hammers, bows, and any other implements of destruction that one could think of. It seemed like overkill for such a small town, which got me thinking about why they needed all of it in the first place.

“You haven’t told me much of anything about why we moved here,” I stated. “We just kind of picked up and left.”

“Right, right.” He started to search the floor for something, but I couldn’t quite tell what.

“What are we doing in here?”

“Before your mother died,” he continued, “she told me about something – something that I, too, first believed to be nonsense.” His search grew more and more frantic as his explanation progressed.

“Well, what is it?” I insisted.

“Dragons. She told me about dragons – about how all of these strange occurrences around Soris are linked to dragons.”

“And you believed her?”

“Not at first, no. At first she just sounded crazy, but the more she explained it the more and more it began to all make sense. Dragons. Who would have thought it? Dragons. Not me, that’s for sure.”

“And where was I when all of this happened?”

“Your mother didn’t want to worry you, so we would only talk about it when you were asleep or away training with the archers of Amerfall.”

It still didn’t make very much sense to me, but there was something about all of this talk of dragons that was starting to sound less like a myth and more like a mystery.

“How did that land us in Norc?”

“The day your mother died, she told me that she was going off to find a dragon in Norc. She told me about an anonymous tip she received about a man in Norc who had brought a dragon into the armory. But, before she –” He stopped quickly and surveyed the wooden planks below his feet. He punched through one of them with ease and pulled out a chain that then opened up a larger trap door.

“By the Gods,” he awed. I was glad he hadn’t finished his previous thought. Mom’s death was never one of my favorite subjects.

“Why did you just think of this now?”

“I don’t know I forgot until you brought it up this morning.” Typical Dad.

We climbed down a rickety ladder and landed in a dank cave blessed with about as much sunlight as the inside of a conch shell.

“Where are we?” I asked, half frightened and half intrigued by what his answer might be.

“The dragon’s lair, I presume. This must be what your mother was searching for. After all this time, maybe we can uncover the mysteries that she left behind for us.” I could hear the excitement in his voice being drowned out by the sadness of bringing up Mom.

“And if not, at least we’ll be able to see a dragon!” exclaimed Ourick’s voice.

My dad and I whirled around to see the faint expression of Ourick’s scrawny body creeping down the ladder behind us.

“What in Soris are you doing here?” I cried.

“Don’t worry; I closed the door behind me. You two are lucky I’m a light sleeper or else I wouldn’t have seen you sneaking down here.” He skipped the last few rungs of the ladder and landed with a thud on the cave floor.

“Did anyone else see us?”

“Oh, Gods no. Everyone else is still half asleep.”

“Good. Let’s keep it that way,” my dad chimed. “The less people who know about this, the better.”

We started down what we thought was a path through the cave. It was hard to be sure with so little light, so we stayed as close to the wall as possible.

After a couple of minutes of what felt like endless walking we could finally see a faint beacon of light pulsing from far off in the distance. It was our best chance at the time, so we went for it.

As we got closer to the light, it became apparent that the cave was getting narrower, so we filed through, one after another, until we reached a clearing.

It was only then that we realized it wasn’t a light that was pulsing through the cave – it was a fire. In the middle of the large clearing was a roaring bonfire that must have stretched 20 feet into the air, catching the ceiling in its warm embrace.

From what we could see, that was the only thing in the clearing, but then Ourick noticed something that my dad and I must have overlooked.

“Hey guys, look at that,” he called, pointing to the immediate right of the bonfire. “I think it’s moving.”

I squinted at the fire and saw a long, thin object wriggling back and forth. Ourick was right.

“I think he’s right,” I admitted.

“Yeah, I see it, too,” Dad agreed. “But what is it?”

Our questions were answered seconds later when two enormous wings erupted from behind the blaze of the fire. I knew instantly that the wriggling object we saw was a tail – a dragon’s tail.

The wings gave a hearty flap, sending a blazing flare in our direction. We dashed out of the way in time for the wings to disappear again behind the fire, but for a split second I swore to the Gods that I saw the same flashing light as I had the night before.

“Okay, I’m not the only one who just saw that, right?” Ourick screamed. “I mean that was just so…cool! I knew that dragons were real, but to see one in real life is just…wow!”

I was beginning to think that I was the only normal one on this little adventure.

“Don’t get carried away,” I said as the voice of reason. “We shouldn’t jump to any conclusions just yet. That could have been anything.”

“Anything that breathes fire and has two wings and a tail!”

“It didn’t breathe fire, it – pushed it at us.” It sounded even more ridiculous coming out of my mouth than it did in my head.

“Wait, nobody move,” Dad interrupted. “Don’t make a sound.” We waited for a couple seconds in silence. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Ourick asked, but I could hear it.

It was a song that Mom used to sing to me when I was kid whenever I’d get hurt. I knew they were only words, but they always seemed to make everything better.

At first I thought my dad and I were just imagining it, but, as we walked closer to the blaze, the words became clearer. It was my mother’s song.

By the time we traveled all the way around the fire, it was perfectly clear that we were in the midst of a dragon. It was painted a majestic red and gold and its scales shimmered against the firelight. Its wings encircled its tempered body as it lay motionless on the cave floor. It looked like it didn’t even have enough strength to pick up its head.

The song started up again and we could hear that it was coming from behind the dragon.

“Sweet child, sweet child, rest your head on my sleeve.May your burdens be wary and your graces never leave. Let pain be an illusion and someday you’ll see that no one has love for you more than me.”

Her voice echoed in my mind, and memories of her singing that song flooded through my whole body. I had to say something.

“Mom?” I called out. It was impulsive and something that I would expect Dad or Ourick to do, but something in my heart convinced me to do it.

The singing stopped again, and it seemed like even the roar of the crackling fire died down.

“Sweetie?” Dad followed.

Ourick was too busy trying to steal a scale from the dragon’s wriggling tail that he barely noticed, much less cared about what we were doing.

A womanly figure walked out from behind the dragon’s body. Her clothes were tattered, her hands were stained with what we would later discover to be the dragon’s blood, and her hair was knotted in three different directions, but she was still as beautiful as the day she set out for Norc.

“It is you,” Dad called out. “But I thought…I thought you were –”

“Dead,” she finished. “It’s true, I was dead – murdered, actually, on my way to find what is now right in front of me.

“But then how are you –”

“The red dragon of Norc,” she answered without letting him finish his thought. “He found me and brought me back here to nurse me back to health. He was injured in the process by a couple hunters who must have thought he was rare game. When I came to, he was bleeding. I knew I had to do something, so I fixed him up.” She pushed the dragon’s saggy body and laughed a little. “But he never seems to stay out of trouble for long.”

“Why didn’t you ever come home?” I added.

“I thought it better that you two not get roped into this. I thought if you still believed that I was dead, there would be no reason to come looking for me.” She stared at the ground and started wiping at her hands with a cloth. “But I guess I always knew that would only last for so long. “She stared at my dad now. “I hope you can forgive me.”

Without even saying a word, he rushed over to her and embraced her like one would embrace his soul mate – whole-heartedly.

It was good to see my dad happy again. It was good to see my mom again. But most importantly, it was good to all be together again as a family – and Ourick.

She told us about how she’d been tending to the dragon ever since he rescued her and about all the places she’d been and seen since then. After the whole back story, it already felt like the dragon was part of our family.