Act Two

    Lindír’s wing muscles, sapped by starvation and withered by lack of use, could carry him no more than five meadows’ distance from the Red Citadel. Within ten minutes of that moment of triumph, he was cast back to the earth, barely able to arrest his fall with his limbs. It was not far enough. Even with the impediment of the woods, a knight on horseback could cross that distance in half an hour. The rising flames from the Red Citadel were still visible over the trees.

    So Lindír was forced to pick himself up, his many wounds stinging, his wings dragging across the leaf litter, and flee. Through copses of trees more dense than he had thought possible, through tributary streams whose waters burned with cold, through rows of hills that reached higher to the sky than the highest rooftops, he fled. In his imagination, the hooves and hounds of his captors were always at Lindír’s heels, and no distance could separate them from him. He fled until his lungs burned and his heart felt about to give out. And when he finally collapsed, unconscious, to the forest floor, it was not by choice: Lindír’s brain and body alike were so overwhelmed with fatigue that he fell asleep while still standing.

    When Lindír awoke the next morning, he thought it had all been another vivid dragon’s dream. It would not have been the first time that he had dreamed of freedom, though most of them included much more bloody revenge, devouring of his family and relishing the taste, than that one had. The first proof that this was no mere dream was the pain. There was no part of him that was free from it, even the webbing between his toes and the vitreous humor of his eyes seared with pain. Every breath was a challenge which needed to be faced.

    It was only after some hours that Lindír recovered well enough to do more than lie on his back on the ground. After several minutes for his eyes to acclimate to the sun, Lindír rose to his feet, and saw the wilds for the first time. Lindír had never seen something so green. Neither had he seen something so chaotic. In the Red Citadel, the dominant objects had always been walls and ceilings, furniture, containers, people clad in woven and sewn cloth. Everything was restrained and orderly, the product of human craft and creation. 

    But in the woods, there was no restriction. Each tree was a unique thing, and its branches spread out in an infinitude of possible directions, splitting and splitting and decorated with more leaves than any person could hope to count. And the leaves moved as well, swaying softly in the breeze and singing their soft rustling song. For all of Lindír’s life, he had trod on flagstones, or else on the dirt of the wards, which had been smoothed and made hard by the trampling of hundreds of feet over many human generations. The convolutions of wild ground, of hardy grass and strewn pebbles, of roots and underbrush and rising and falling soil, were all so unfamiliar to Lindír that he was at first forced to walk gingerly, as though upon wounded feet.

    And the sounds! Gone was the murmur of human speech, replaced by the murmur of stream-water. No more did Lindír have to hear the call of church bells and prayer, but instead the call of songbirds and hunting birds alike as they echoed across the landscape. Even the silence was not the cold silence of the dungeons and Lindír’s subterranean cell, but the soft quiet of wind and wood and stone. 

    It was overwhelming, impossibly so. One who had lived their whole life with a translucent veil over their eyes, catching only the faintest taste of the world, only to have it removed in adulthood, could have perhaps understood how Lindír felt that day. But even they would have had some idea, some vague impression, of what it was they were missing. Lindír had not even begun to guess at the true beauty of the world beyond the castle walls. He spent that first day of true freedom in a daze of overstimulation, wandering at random through the forests of Hvalheim as all five of his senses struggled to take in his new surroundings. Hunger, thirst, pain, uncertainty; all were lost to him. When the sun set and plunged all of existence into darkness, Lindír sank down into a patch of soft moss and slept more deeply than he ever had before.

    The next morning he set out once more, this time with greater purpose. Though he would hold and cherish the memory of his awe at that first day during the darkest moments of his life forevermore, it was inevitable that the brilliance would fade. His thoughts turned to more practical matters. First and foremost among them was the matter of completing his escape. Even if he was a score of meadows away from the Red Citadel, two score, three, he would not be beyond the reach of his parents until he had left Hvalheim behind in its entirety. His lessons of geography were far in the past, but he remembered them somewhat: the Red Citadel lay on the island of Kojur, which was ruled entirely by Hvalheim, and had been for many decades. Escape was only possible across the sea; Lindír’s flight would rely on flight.

    Though the broad flight muscles of his chest were still sore from their first flight, Lindír’s second attempt came on the morning of that second day. He found a low knoll which rose above the others, and climbed to its peak, seeking to hurl himself into the air without immediately crashing into the branches of the trees. It worked, after some effort, though his second flight was barely the same length as his first. His third flight, later that same day, was somewhat shorter. He moved in the manner of a dolphin, swimming long lengths below the forest canopy, briefly leaping into the open air for as long as his wings could carry him. 

    During one of those short flights, Lindír caught a scent on the wind that made his stomach convulse with gluttony, and brought the hitherto-suppressed hunger rearing back to the surface. It smelled of beast, sweat and fur and blood, but of a sort of creature whose scent he had never detected before. Whatever it was, it had meat. Without even having to think, Lindír turned in the air, twisting to the side in order to bring himself closer to his prey. The closer he came, and the hungrier he felt, the hotter grew the heat in his gut, until he slavered embers into the tree-tops.

    It was, as it turned out, a herd of deer, a dozen hinds grazing away on the shrubbery. Lindír licked his teeth. These deer, grazing as they did within the King’s Wood, were all the property of the King. He would feast, Lindír determined: he would poach his father’s herds into extinction, render the King’s Wood barren and lifeless, and glut himself on as much fresh meat as he desired. And once he had ruined his father’s lands, he would move west and do it all again.

    Hunting came easily to Lindír, despite his utter lack of experience. He was not stealthy, and the deer heard his wings well before he arrived. He swooped down over them as they began to dash for cover, disgorging a huge arc of flame onto them from above, then landed atop the charred section of grass where his flame had touched. Three hinds had been unable to flee fast enough; three lumps of char-coated meat lay on the ground.

    It was the largest meal Lindír had ever seen, and he ate with gusto. His teeth crunched ribs and shattered spines with effortless ease, breaking into the torso and tearing out great chunks of heart, lung, liver, and entrail. He gorged and gorged, his muzzle soaking with blood, his throat slick with it. It was a feast for smell, touch, taste, meat to reveal the true inadequacy of the salt-pork ration, meat to make one revel in the true nature of dragonhood.

    And then Lindír vomited most of it back onto the burnt grass. His stomach had contracted after years of tight rationing, and it had reacted poorly to the orgiastic consumption. Lindír growled at himself. He was a dragon, dragons were meant to be able to consume entire herds in a single sitting, not spew red slurry before finishing even a single deer! He waited a few minutes, watching the nearby trees slowly wither and dry as they burned, until his stomach felt settled enough that he could move on to the second hind.

    This one he ate more slowly, tearing off small strips of flesh from its hindquarters, savoring the sophisticated, mingling flavors of carbon burn and fresh blood. But a strange thing happened as Lindír ate. With each strip of raw flesh sent down his throat, the hunger which had sunk its claws into the back of his mind since the onset of adolescence, began to abate. After consuming about half of the second hind, Lindír found himself chewing idly on a long, strong femur-bone, breaking off all of his loosened teeth in order to make room for their replacements. He didn’t want to eat any longer.

    It seemed absurd at first. This was his curse, the curse of the dragon, to consume endlessly and reduce all before him to poverty and ruin. It could not have been banished by a few hundred measures of poached venison.

    Unless, of course, it was not some primordial curse at all. No ancient instinct, no all-consuming fire was this that had tormented Lindír for so long. It was merely hunger. The hunger of a growing dragon whose daily ration did not grow with him, who was kept in a cold, dark cell, prevented from following the draconic instinct to hunt and feed. A single solid meal, not even equivalent to a single deer fully consumed, had been all it had taken to sate him. Lindír was starved, profoundly so. In the last year or two of his captivity, his ribs had begun to show through his sides. His growth was stunted, his body weakened, and it was only the fire burning bright inside of him that buoyed him at all.

    Dragons cannot weep. But as the cold realization slammed over him like a great ocean wave, stinging at his eyes, making his heart flutter, Lindír knew that he would have wept if he could. He dropped the femur-bone and went into a state of shock, reclining in the position of the sphinx, and tried to wrap his mind around the sheer scale of his grief.

    Although he might have wished to, Lindír did not grieve forever. He filled his stomach to capacity on charred venison before setting off once more. He moved always to the east, away from the Red Citadel, and with each passing day Lindír found himself growing stronger. Soon he came to find flying barely more exhausting than running, and could skip over many meadows of woodland and hill-country in a single flight.

    Even as all the other myriad pains of his escape faded, one remained stubbornly constant. The web of scars, the brand left behind by the white-hot steel of Lindír’s shattered muzzle, refused to fade. Indeed, for days on end they seemed to do nothing but weep pus and complain at the slightest touch of wind or dust, making every movement of his jaws a painful process until they finally scabbed over with bulging bands of hard tissue. Lindír sometimes gazed at his own reflection, examining the way they shaped his countenance. He could not find them entirely ugly.

    The King’s Wood did eventually come to an end, and was replaced with endless expanses of farmland. Lindír found them distasteful. They reminded him of the all-consuming nature of humanity, reshaping everything along its desires, turning the world to its whims. And there was the matter of these farms being part of Hvalheim’s kingdom, the taxes taken from them feeding into Hvalheim’s granaries. His claws were in need of exercise, his throat itched to bellow forth flame, and the farmsteads provided an excellent target. A string of petty vandalisms stretched across the island, accompanied by countless thefts of the abundant livestock.

    And it was good that livestock was highly available, for Lindír devoured them daily. Though he was not possessed of the same hunger which had scourged him for so many years, the urge to feed was nearly constant. Finding itself suddenly in a place of plenty, his stomach was attempting to make up for all of the years of deficit at once. He would grab them and fly off, then pin them down and snap them to pieces with his jaws, killing and slaughtering in a manner akin to a thieving bear. Many times, Lindír was forced to find some place to sequester himself and sleep after becoming so stuffed with meat as to be effectively paralyzed.

    When Lindír at last reached the strait which separated Kojur from the remainder of Northland, he found it no trouble at all. It was a journey of but fifteen meadows, less than an hour. When he set down upon the rocky shore on the far side, Lindír had, for the first time in his life, ventured beyond the borders of Hvalheim. 

    As he wandered, Lindír continued to indulge in petty acts of destruction. A burned field or barn here, a few deer killed and then dropped intact upon some unsuspecting village there. And a wealth of stolen livestock. But even a small village consisted of three, four score of buildings, and that level of destruction was exhausting. Lindír’s flames would give out, leaving him with a sore throat and an empty feeling in his chest, before he could even burn half of the village. And destroying the buildings with claw and tail was out of the question: he attempted to take apart a stone church that way and quickly sprained his wrist.

    Perhaps, Lindír reasoned, infamy was not something which one obtained via action, but which was naturally accumulated. Any day now, a famous knight would arrive to challenge him to single combat, and Lindír would inevitably burn the man—Lindír’s thoughts about burning a knightess were inevitably more muddled than those about burning a knight—or tear him limb from limb, or crush his spine with his tail, or visit some other terrible fate upon him. And then the story of the horrible death of Sir Suchandsuch would spread like wildfire, carrying with it the name of the mighty dragon that had done the deed.

    There were times in his wanderings, once or twice, when Lindír would come across something greater than a mere village. A town, a city, a grand castle or fortress owned by a king or wealthy lord. Those would be proper targets, symbols of human civilization which he could bring low with flame and claw, whose destructions would bring infamy untold. Whenever he passed near one of those shining symbols of civilization, Lindír would hide amidst the trees, or fly around them in a wide arc, and leave them be.

    Instead of destruction, Lindír’s primary occupation turned out to be exploration. There were cliffs upon the southern shore of Fóthrheim where the wind threw the sea against the rock so fiercely that great walls of spray rose up all the way to the clifftops where Lindír would stop to rest. In the inland sea off the northern shore of Garganland, there were islands still in the process of being birthed by the volcanic churning of the world, islands covered in glass and lava-rock, where only the hardiest of grasses could survive the constant pall of toxic gas. Lindír loved the smell of volcanic gas, and the rough stones polished his scales well. On the vast pastures of Eskilia sat untouched stones twice the size of the Red Citadel’s keep, large enough to make one remember the tales of the giants, and the First Men who had come before them. When the North wind met the South wind over the borders of Witland, the skies ruptured, pouring forth great gouts of rain and lightning until it seemed that the world would end. Lindír would stare up at the writhing heavens and roar at them in challenge.

    As his world grew, so too did Lindír. Within the first months of freedom, as he gorged himself on all that the fields of Northland had to offer, Lindír’s flesh filled in. His flight muscles swelled and his limbs grew sturdy, his stomach thickening and the girdle of his shoulders becoming broad and houndish. His bones often ached. The scabs over the web of scars on his face flaked away, leaving permanent furrows in the scales of his face, furrows that ached softly the day before a storm, or if he attempted to open his jaws too wide. Even at the time of his escape he was larger than an ox, but now he dwarfed even the great wisents of the deep forests. Glutted on livestock and game, Lindír soon found that he could place himself on eye level with the thatched roofs of peasant huts. His claws hardened, his teeth sharpened, his horns lengthened like the branches of a tree, and Lindír grew into a fierce and terrible being.

    Growing up in his cell, especially after that first taste of freedom, Lindír had become deeply accustomed to being alone. This is not to say that he never felt the urge to seek companionship, or that there were not times when he curled tightly about himself and day-dreamed of talking to a woman with curly hair and shining armor. But on most days, he scarcely thought of his aloneness, his thoughts instead being occupied by draconic impulse and the never-ending stream of observations about the world around him. Besides, who would react to a dragon with anything other than blind, screaming terror?

    Nearly a year had passed since Lindír’s escape. It was late spring, or perhaps early summer, and the forest was all a-riot with flora and fauna. Lindír had spent some weeks traveling further east than ever before, deep into the rocky, forested, wild high country of Witland, further from the sea than he had ever been.

    There was a hillside where a gap in the trees allowed the sun to shine down on him, and where the ground was predominated by soft gravel upon which he could rest; perfect conditions for Lindír to laze about, half-awake and half-asleep, warming his wings and daydreaming of gold and maidens. He had been in that cattish state, his tail curled around in front of his snout, for many hours, when a sound interrupted him. A human would not have heard it. But to a dragon, the heavy thudding vibrations in the earth were as easily identified as the drums of an oncoming army, and just as alarming. When he listened, Lindír could also hear the sound of something brushing against branches and crushing foliage underfoot. All of these together spoke of danger. No ordinary creature was large enough to produce such a deep noise.

    Immediately, Lindír rose onto all fours and prepared to fight. He arched his back for intimidation, wings pressed tightly against his shoulders, tail swaying softly. His head went low to the ground, teeth partially bared, as his limbs splayed out. An attacker would be most likely to strike without warning, requiring him to be ready to leap or dodge in any direction.

    As for what his attacker might be, Lindír had no idea. Another dragon, perhaps, but a dragon would be more likely to attack from the air. He had heard legends of other beasts that dwelt in the far woods, blundering trolls and walking trees and mighty hydragores. What he had not expected to emerge, pushing through the evergreens with casual ease, was a living giant. He was thrice the height of a man, his hips level with Lindír’s shoulder, though sturdily built. The giant’s wooly beard was peppered with streaks of white and patches of black, and that combined with the wrinkles around his squinting, deepest eyes conveyed the impression of a man past his prime but not yet having fallen to old age. 

    The giant wore only a single garment, a belted tunic which extended from shoulder to knee, made from a truly colossal quantity of un-dyed wool or linen. Slung over his shoulder were two objects: a large leather sack which must have been made from the whole skin of an ox, and stranger still, a hurdy-gurdy larger than a man’s height.

    Lindír took all of this in in but a moment. His eyes and brain alike were focused solely on his belt, and on the weapon suspended from it. To a human it would have been a large sword, though with an unwieldily broad blade; to the giant, it was but an unusually long knife. At any moment, Lindír expected the knife to be drawn. But the giant was in no mood for a fight. He rested one arm gently against the trunk of a tree and furrowed his brow. 

“Hm,” he said. “Ah.”

    Lindír hissed at the giant, his faculty of speech almost forgotten after a year of total isolation.

    “Suppose it’s not the strangest thing I’ve espied,” the giant said. His voice thundered; it must have been audible for miles. “Looks like a dragon, but acts like a starving wolf.”

    “I am a dragon,” Lindír said with a sneer.

    “Aha! So you do speak. It has been a great interval since last I met one of your kind, dragon. I had begun to wonder if I had misremembered your people’s capacity for speech!”

    Lindír cautiously stalked down the hillside, growing more assured that the giant meant him no harm. Indeed, by the look of him, he seemed more amused to have run across Lindír than in any way frightened. Being as he was larger than Lindír, it could be understood.

    “You are a giant?”

    “Indeed,” said the giant.

    “I thought the giants were all dead.”

    He gave a half-shrug. “We are a scarce people, that much I will admit. But we’re far from extinguished. What is your name, I pray?”

    “I am known as Lindír Heimirsson, of Hvalheim. And you?”

    “My name is Ámnistr.” He paused, scratching at his bush of a beard. “My people do not trifle with titles, as humans do. But if it pleases you, many have named me Ámnistr the Drum.”

    Lindír crept a few steps closer. The giant smelled like a human, albeit magnified, with a faint air of wood and resin about him. “Do you travel alone, Ámnistir the Drum? Or have you some band of giants whom you follow?”

    Ámnistr shook his head. “It is only me, though my instrument provides me no shortage of friends wherever I travel. Do you wish to accompany me?”

    Lindír reacted with reflexive disdain, his lips peeling back as he flinched away from the giant. He had not been thinking of becoming Ámnistr’s companion. And yet, when the idea was put forward, he immediately found it as agreeable as if it had been his own idea. “Why do you suspect that that is my intention?”

    “I am old, and the troubadour’s art gives me a great wisdom of matters of heart and soul. What I have said before, that you possess the cast of a starving wolf; I hold by that. The way you assumed I meant to strike at you, the way you hold yourself low to the ground, the way you bare your teeth. And I very distinctly remember the dragons which I met being somewhat larger than you. At least, those that were adults.”

    Lindír felt chastised, though he could identify no word or phrase within Ámnistr’s statement which chastised him directly. Still, an unaccountable sense of shame and bashfulness came over him. He finally lifted his body away from the gravelly hillside, though his neck and head sloped down. 

    “It has been some time since last I spoke to another,” Lindír admitted. “Though I have traveled far, I have seen only humans in that time. I hate humans… but though you look and smell like a human, you are not the same as them, are you?”

    “No, I am not. Though I warn you, I meet humans often. They are my most common patrons, after all.” Ámnistr grinned slightly, and his eyes gleamed.

    Lindír’s animal instinct warned him away from the offer being extended, told him to take wing at once. But his higher mind craved the end to his solitude, and the kindness that he saw in the creases at the corners of Ámnistr’s mouth.

    “You call me a starving wolf,” Lindír said. “But I think your size is about right for me to act as your mastiff. Though I promise not to beg too much of you; I know how to hunt.”

    The giant chuckled, turning back to the wood. “Then follow me, nephew. I have always wondered what it would be like to have a bodyguard on my wanderings.”

    Lindír’s legs refused to move for a moment or two. But as Ámnistr’s long strides quickly caused him to become obscured by the trees, Lindír suddenly found his fear of being left behind growing greater than his fear of strangers. He broke into a quick trot in order to catch up, and soon walked at the giant’s left side.

SaffronDragon

Welp, I *meant* to upload this on Monday, but then stuff happened. Anyway, welcome to Act 2! Now Lindír is going to suffer in entirely unique ways unlike anything in his previous experience, while also realizing that the outside world isn't actually much like how he thought it'd be. If you want to see some of the ups and downs of freedom, click the link below and check out my Patreon, where I have the next two chapters uploaded early for only $3 a month. If not, that's fine, I'll see you next Monday for Chapter Seven: The Hellira.