Crimzon & Clover Read online



  Crimzon and Clover

  Copyright 2005 by Michael Robb Mathias Jr.

 

  Crimzon and Clover

  By M. R. Mathias

  The week-old hatchling nudged its horny head against the cold, lifeless bulk of its mother. Getting no response again, the puny male dragon whined pitifully. Instinctively, he reared his weary head back and squeaked out a high-pitched wail. The sound would have brought a living mother dragon raging home from a hundred leagues or more. A living mother dragon would have stopped at nothing to feed her hatchling’s hungry belly. This hatchling wasn’t so lucky. His mother was dead. After a long, sorrowful time of nudging and wailing, the song of misery finally ended. Mercifully, the starving little dragon fell into an exhausted slumber.

  Being highly intelligent creatures, dragons are taught by their mothers the skills they'll need to thrive in the ever-dangerous world of men. This particular hatchling's mother was now four days dead. She was once the proud and ferocious high predator, and undisputed queen of the small, but very active, range of mountains sheltering her nest. Sadly, her reign had ended.

  Years ago, she summoned a mate. His seed readily quickened inside her. She laid her eggs in this remote cavern high up in the rocky passes. Then, as all female dragons do after laying their eggs, she began warning away every living creature that might threaten the welfare of her unhatched young. It wasn’t long until every beast in the area, great and small, understood what valleys, caves and streams to avoid, and what the consequences were for not doing so. She then returned to her nest and spent a full year tenderly and methodically incubating the eggs.

  When the day of hatching finally came, she proudly coaxed her two little ones out of their shells. She fed them their first meal of red meat from a valley stag she slaughtered. The two baby dragons devoured it greedily. She beamed as they began growling and tumbling with each other all around the gravel-strewn cavern floor. They were working their tender muscles and fluttering their wings awkwardly. Every now and then, one would pause to shriek at the wonder of life and belch out a puff of smoke. More than once a thin tendril of flame accompanied the swirling gray clouds that left the hatchlings' toothy mouths.

  On the second day after the hatching, she left them to hunt their next meal. She didn’t know how horrible a mistake she was making. She hadn't considered the small group of men traveling through the neighboring valley a viable threat to her nest. Her valley was much higher in elevation, and no man had ever dared venture into it.

  In her campaign to warn off possible threats to her eggs, she attacked and terrorized several nearby human towns. She scorched a human dwelling or two, and plundered their animal herds. She devoured a few humans as well. Humans aren't very high up on a typical dragon's preferred sustenance list, but to keep the rest of them frightened and wary of her nest, more than a half dozen men ended up in her belly. In her long life she had been lucky in her dealings with the pesky humans, but her luck in that area, as well as the luck of her two rambunctious hatchlings, was about to run out.

  The men came a short while after she left to hunt, and they came with murderous intent. The male hatchling woke to see his nest mate being roped by the angry men. He lashed out at them in a feeble attempt to save his sibling. He clawed one man to the ground and lashed another to the floor with his whip-like tail, but he was too small to do any real damage. Ultimately, he ended up tangled in a throw net the clever humans had brought. The humans paused to argue whether the two young dragons would be taken and sold or killed on the spot. If the mother dragon hadn’t returned during the argument, the latter is exactly what would have happened to both of them.

  With a single blast of her noxious breath, the mother roared out her anger at the intrusion, scorching several of the men to cinders. Then she unleashed her true fury on them. A purplish-turquoise blast of prismatic dragon magic erupted from her claw and pulverized the bones of two more of the attackers. A blade slid between her scales, but the pain only angered her further. Relentlessly, she went about destroying the men who violated her nest.

  The battle that followed was swift and bloody. Though she managed to slay all of the men and save the life of one of her precious young, she took several wounds that couldn’t be healed with her magic. Some of the wounds were mortal. She lived just over two days, and in that time she used her remaining energy to try and instill everything she could think of into her surviving hatchling's mind. She wanted to increase his severely slim chances for survival any way she could. She named him Crimzathrion. He was only two days old when the men came, so he understood almost none of his dying mother's melodic ravings, but she wisely cast a spell on her words so they would come to him again and again as he grew. It was all she could do to help him survive in a world full of ignorant men. He would have to find a way to prosper as a hunter while often being hunted himself.

  She let Crimzathrion feed on the human bodies she killed, but only because in her wounded condition, she could not hunt for him. She regretted this, because he was so young that he could grow used to the taste of them. She knew a young dragon might mistake the humans for easy prey. Though most of them were generally easy to kill, some were not. Some men were brave, and that made them dangerous. Beyond that, some humans were just plain lucky.

  The mother dragon died singing the complex, harmonious songs of magic to the hatchling. She sang the contagious songs of battle, the light and airy songs of flight, and all the songs her own mother sang to her. Then she cursed the Gods for her hatchling’s misfortune, as well as for her own. She managed to do more than she ever could have hoped possible to increase her hatchling's chances for survival. She died listening to his persistent whine of hunger, knowing it meant all of the human flesh had been consumed. She couldn’t help but cry a tear of sadness for Crimzathrion as she passed into the Everland.

  The tear she cried crystallized as it fell. It thudded loudly on the rocky floor. Held inside its sparkling blue beauty was a wealth of magical power, born from love, pain, hope and misery.

  Now Crimzathrion lay against her cold, scaly body in a state of partial slumber, exhausted, hungry and afraid. Of all the lessons she'd forced so overwhelmingly upon him, the lesson of death was the one he learned best. He wouldn’t get to grow up feeling the immortality of youth. He understood all too well the nature of death, and the magnitude of his loss. He too cried a tear of sorrow that hardened and clacked away across the cavern floor like a shiny pebble.

  It wasn’t long after his mother’s death that her soft voice magically filled his ears. It urged him to go out and hunt for a meal. Feed to grow. Grow to survive. The voice told him. Ravenous with hunger, and with no knowledge of what lay beyond the protective walls of the cavern, he eventually summoned the strength of will to leave his mother's side and do just that.

  He screeched out in frustration as he started from the nest to find himself a meal. He was humming the melody to the song of magic as he made his way through the cavern entrance toward the bright and scary light. Crimzathrion didn’t know it, but as he stepped into the first sunlight he'd ever known, he was also leaving behind the horrible run of bad luck that the Gods had thrust upon him, for he wasn’t alone now.

  Far across the valley, a lone traveler, strawberry haired and clad in leather hunting attire, heard the hatchling's long, anguished wails. She was coming as fast as she could to investigate.

  Clover Shareon was lucky, to say the least. Some said she was the luckiest human alive. She hadn't the slightest idea what luck really was, but luck was with her this day, as it always seemed to be. She was a third-rate swordsman and a second-rate archer, but a first rate hunter. She knew by heart nearly every peak and valley of this treacherous mountain range. She hunted here for
the skins and meat she sold to earn her way. Miraculously, she managed to survive peril after peril over the dozen years she’d been coming here.

  Once, the sudden and highly improbable fall of some loose rock and built up ice saved her from being dinner for a pack of hungry snow cats. A deflected fist she once threw at an angry campsite gambler caused her to stumble just out of the way of a surely lethal bolt loosed by the sore loser's friend. She’d been barred from all of the wager houses in the nearby towns because she won too much and far too often. In a battle with road bandits, she'd taken a sword clean through the middle of her belly and survived with only the two scars the blade left on her skin.

  Once she fell through a hole in the ice. That was probably the luckiest thing that ever happened to her. She fell only moments before the sleeping wind gusted and sent a massive ridge of loose ice and snow avalanching down into the valley where she was traveling. The hole she fell into turned out to be a tunnel-like shaft that led to an underground cavern. The cave had glowing patches of moss on the walls, illuminating the area well enough to see. There was a spring-fed stream that pooled up in the middle of the bowl-shaped floor. In the pool, schools of eyeless albino fish swam lazily against the mild current. The pool not only provided her with sustenance on her long wait for spring to come and melt away the snow piled above her, but its warm water kept the cavern relatively cozy.

  The wailing Clover was hearing now ended suddenly, bringing her back into the moment. She stopped and looked at her surroundings. She was so eager and curious to find the origin of the long, harrowing calls that she lost track of where she was. After a brief moment of panic, she located a familiar peak in the distance and chided herself for her foolishness.

  Clover hoped it was a wounded snow cat. Rare and beautiful, their thick, silvery pelts were worth more than she could make in a year guiding traders through the mountains or hunting antelope. Their screeching cries were common enough, but Clover wasn't sure if what she was hearing was a snow cat. The snow cat cries she heard in the past were lower in pitch and more constant. What she heard for the past two days was urgent and higher in tone. It sounded more pain-filled. Snow cat or not, she had to lay her own eyes on whatever it was that sounded so pitiful.

  She started toward the sound twice and ended up going in the wrong direction, but both times she was forced back onto the right track by natural obstacles that somehow seemed to help her along the way. Now she was frustrated because the horrible sounds had stopped completely, and she wasn't sure which way to go to continue her search. True to form, luck was with her this day. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glinting reflection of scarlet in some trees below her in the valley bottom. She crouched to get a better look, trying not to be seen by the unknown creature. She was disappointed when a mid-size hopper shot out of the undergrowth she was focused on. She laughed, knowing that the melting snow this late in the spring sometimes reflected in crazy colors, but her instincts told her there was something else down there. Some small predator was probably chasing the hopper, or a bigger beast might just be passing through the hopper's territory.

  She turned away from the trees below her to look back up the mountain and was stung on the cheek by some tiny insect. As she slapped the pest away, she spun herself back toward the valley and nearly cried out in amazement at what she saw. It was a dragon -- a small, red one. It wasn’t much bigger than her in body size, though it was longer. It was trying to catch the hopper, clumsily grabbing with its fore claws, while trying in vain to use its small, undeveloped wings to lift itself into flight. Clover felt sorry for the inexperienced hunter, and silently put an arrow to the string of her old bow. She watched until she had a clear shot at the hopper. The young dragon didn't even notice the shaft as it struck his prey and pinned it to the ground. He was too busy pouncing to tear a piece of the long-awaited flesh from it. Clover watched in awe and amazement as the little red wyrm ate its meal.

  She wondered suddenly where its mother might be. The huge fire wyrm that sometimes ventured out of the peaks to badger the humans was notorious. She nearly dislocated her neck scanning the skies around her, but the wailing call she’d been hearing the last two days sounded out again from below. It told her on some completely feminine level that no dragon was going to answer the call.

  The little dragon's mouth was pink and bloody from the meal, but it was still hungry. It filled the valley with the sound of pain and sorrow. Clover understood that this young dragon was alone -- either lost or abandoned -- left to fend for itself without the benefit of a mother's nurturing guidance. The sound of the dragon's screeching forced a tear from Clover's eye. She knew in her heart that the little beast had no one in the world and it probably wouldn't survive without help. Clover was careful not to spook the rare, magical young creature as she followed it back up the other side of the valley into a large cavern opening. As she eased into the eerie cave, the stink of death filled her nostrils. It took a while, but she held down her gorge and made her way deeper into the tunnel. Clover's eyes adjusted to the darkness, but they were watering from the fog of rot that hung in the air. When the passage finally opened up into a cavern, she made out a huge mass that nearly filled the place. She had to cover her mouth to keep from screaming in utter terror. Even a weeklong-dead dragon looked horribly scary. Clover found herself trembling as she took in the massive corpse.

  Gray, milky eyes the size of wagon wheels, slitted with sword-like pupils, stared out lifelessly. A huge curl of pink tongue split a row of yellowed fangs as big around and as long as Clover's legs. The dead dragon’s nostrils were big enough to crawl into and explore. They were like black holes in front of her. It didn't take long for Clover to spot the cleanly-picked skeletal carcasses of the huge red dragon's killers. They were probably all the little wailing hatchling had eaten before the hopper.

  Clover crept back out of the cavern and climbed up on a shelf of rock overlooking the valley below the entrance to the little red's nest. There she set up a well-camouflaged camp. After overcoming her nausea, she ate a thin meal of dried beef and hard bread. Then she started out to hunt some more sustenance for herself and the little dragon.