Spoiler! :
The trouble all began when the forest burned.
The drought was all well and good – nature doing what it would – with the sun welcome after such a long period of gloom and mist. The lake that lapped at the village’s heels was expansive and clean, more than large enough to keep the village alive for however long the dry weather lasted.
The forest beyond the ridge, however, suffered greatly. It grew drier and drier with each passing week. Plants wilted. Boughs drooped. Animals accompanied the trees they depended on to death’s door.
We were forbidden to start any fires near the forest and warned that the slightest spark would send the whole thing up in smoke. We listened to the warnings; it wasn’t as if it were an inconvenience. We never went near that forest anyway. Not with the wyvern about.
We’d often seen those scarlet wings, and that blazing red, serpentine shape, slithering through the sky. Queen of the forest. Feared from afar by our grandparents, and their grandparents, and their grandparents before them. That something should live so long seemed a travesty – a mockery of life itself.
We kept well away from the creature’s hunting grounds, spending more of our time in the groves that lined the lake’s shores. The ridge was too steep for the crossing to be worthwhile anyhow.
No… The spark that devoured the wyvern’s forest was not born of human hands, but of lightning, once the dry storms rolled in. Not a drop of rain fell, but the clouds raged, and the wind screamed. They tried their hardest to send us moisture that simply was not there… Or perhaps they had simply tired of the wyvern’s presence in its midst, and had decided to set her upon the humans.
Whatever their motivation was, the lightning was surely the cause of the forest fire that raged beyond the ridge. Ancient trees dissolved into ashes. For the first time in centuries, the land past the ridge appeared flat, unbroken by neither sapling nor shrub. In most cases, the animals that fled in the direction of the ridge found themselves trapped - easy pickings for the village hunters.
But the wyvern was not a simple animal.
At first, we saw no sign of the creature. We wondered if we’d seen the last of those crimson wings. A melancholy hush settled over the village. It was as if an intimidating yet wonderful older sister had suddenly passed away.
But then, one day, a scarlet ‘S’ rose up from the ashes. More like a phoenix than a wyvern. Dozens of people witnessed it; dozens of eyes were fixed on the forest’s wreckage at any given time, in those days. They cried out, and so it came to be that nearly the whole village watched as the creature grew larger and larger in the sky…
Almost the whole village.
I was swimming in the lake. Glorious water enveloped my body and filled my ears, dulling them to the exclamations of the outside world. And how that world must have exclaimed when the wyvern settled down in the village square.
They certainly exclaimed about it later. ‘Those glittering ruby scales.’ ‘Those luminous eyes, like miniature suns.’ But most of all, ‘those red, red curtains of glossy, perfect feathers…’
It seemed that not a single person in the village would be satisfied until I’d heard their account of the matter at least six times.
Perhaps they were simply sorry that I’d never be able to see it clearly for myself, my eyes being as bad as they were. More likely, I gave off the impression that I needed to be convinced. That I needed to have it explained to me over and over again, how I could come back from a swim and find the entire village catering to the every whim of something we’d been warned about for our entire lives.
That isn’t to say that the explanation was a good one. ‘It was beautiful.’ So was the flowering plant that had sprouted a few years earlier, at the edge of the pastures. They’d torn it out of the ground all the same, once it made the livestock sick. Yet this creature had entranced all of them. It ate from their hands, swallowing our best meats whole.
My first impression was that of a smear of red across my vision. Like a smear of blood, right in the midst of all the familiar smudges that were my friends and neighbors. My breath caught in my throat. I felt the way I did when I stayed underwater for too long.
But they all assured me that it was safe. Not just safe, but wonderful[i]. Who [i]knew how the old ones had gotten such a twisted perception of the thing.
Not dangerous. Only different.
Different and wonderful.
I’m not making a joke when I say that I’ve never been one to believe blindly. Even when observing something with my own eyes, I’ll always take a few minutes to really figure out what I’m seeing. It was no surprise, then, that I did not welcome the wyvern with open arms.
I slipped out of the square, a worried feeling settling over me. Something is wrong. This is wrong. I said as much to my family. My neighbors. My friends, my teachers, my leaders. Everyone I’d ever looked up to. Everyone I’d ever despised.
Perhaps the only one who paid any attention was the wyvern herself. I think now that it had a sense of things… Not of words – those were still foreign to her - but of feelings.
A few days after the displaced queen found her new subjects in my village, I had already tired of being around while it ate up my people’s food, time, and attentions. I went where I always went when I was out of sorts.
Underwater, the world made sense. Everything felt the same way that it looked to me. Soft. Not like on land, where fuzzy things turned out to be sharp, and where smears and smudges turned out to be very concrete indeed, and very painful to run into.
Underwater, I did not have to carry the long tree branch I used to find my way. Underwater, I was free.
But that day, it was wrong. That day, I saw a flash of muted red in the corner of my vision. And then I felt a crushing pain against my ribs. Something squeezed me, tighter and tighter, ordering me to gasp at the pain. To struggle. To breathe.
To drown.
My fists flew, but were mostly useless underwater. I found the bottom of the lake and grabbed onto the weeds, the sunken branches, anything. Scraped its ropes of muscle, along with my own body, against the sharp, uneven rocks. My lungs burned. I thought slippery fish thoughts, wriggling and twisting and trying to push the coil down past my hips. Perhaps my only salvation was that I was not the only creature that needed to draw breath in order to live. The coils relaxed, and my legs slipped out of the loops completely. I was free.
Free, and swimming faster than I ever had before. I dragged myself, choking, onto shore. But I couldn’t stop there.
People. I needed people.
In a stroke of luck, I stumbled across my walking stick. I used it to get to my feet and run into the village.
People, people, people.
I was still coughing up water as I staggered into the square. Everyone was still gathered there, laughing. Singing. Dancing. Like it was some kind of festival.
They kept laughing as I made my accusation. They didn’t seem to care that something had just tried to kill me, and that the wyvern was mysteriously absent from its ‘throne’ of all our best cloths and fabrics.
They just kept laughing.
They said that I must have seen it wrong. And they all thought that was even funnier. As if I could mistake ‘a clump of weeds’ for something alive! I didn’t just see it. I felt the scales. The contracting of its muscles. Its feathers had brushed against my back.
I knew what it was.
But they just kept laughing.
Even when the wyvern slithered back into the village from the direction of the lake, cutting a wide path around me on her way back to the throne.
Why had she even tried to catch me alone? It wasn’t like anyone would try to stop her. One flutter of her blood-red wings, and the villagers would probably line up to assist her.
I had to stop it. If the half-blind child was the only one who could see the truth, then so be it. I would be the spark to start the fire. And this time, the blaze would end the wyvern’s life.
There were books in the schoolhouse that I remembered from my younger days. Rumors of legends. Printed down neatly not because the writer expected them to be needed, but because he thought that they made a good story. One worth passing down through the generations.
The only problem was finding someone to read them to me. I could hardly make out the shapes of my own fingers, let alone the words on a page. In the end, I took them to the square, looking for anyone willing to read for me.
My teacher happily obliged. And when he realized that the stories were written about the village’s new pet, or prize, or ruler… Well. They passed the book around, reading in loud, happy voices. The wyvern must have been unable to understand words, or she would have put a stop to it.
Or maybe not. Because even as the villagers read chilling stories about predators wrapped in the guise of beauty, and pale, glowing eyes that could lure prey right into the jaws of beasts…
They did not stop laughing.
They sang. They danced. Completely under her spell. And my own heart sunk lower and lower.
That night, I took the largest knife my family owned from the kitchen.
It was dark in the square, but that hardly mattered; sometimes I closed my eyes as I walked, even in the daytime. It gave me less headaches that way.
I knew I was at the throne when my bare toes touched the soft cloth that should’ve been wrapped around some baby as he slept. Not this monster.
A faint luminescence came from her eyes, even with the creature asleep. Enough light for me to make out that smear of blood.
One quick chop.
And then it was joined by smears of real blood. I couldn’t make out the difference by sight, but I felt the wetness on my fingers – on the wyvern as I grabbed her middle and tried to still her death throes.
I cut off her wings. I don’t truly know why. The creature was already dead…
But I think it was probably because I wanted them all to finally see.
Cut the wings off a wyvern… And it’s just a snake.
I stood trembling. Covered in its blood. The stains will never come off of the cloth.
It was a ridiculous thing to think.
I went to the lake.
And I swam.
The villagers were not happy to be free. When I dripped back into town the next morning, they were angry. Screaming at me. Many of them weeping openly.
I had killed their wyvern and defiled its body. The beauty was lost, and it was all my fault.
They locked me in the dark, damp cell on the far side of the village. Far, far, far away from the lake.
Some wished to give me a death sentence. It didn’t come quite to that. As he locked me away, mere moments ago, my jailer told me to be thankful for the miracle that had swept away some of their anger.
They’d discovered something along with the body. Something that my own eyes had missed in the dark.
The sparse light that had aided me that night had not come from the creature’s eyes.
It had come from the village’s new prize.
Their future queen. Glowing with a radiance meant to lure in prey…
A large, pale egg.
So let's take a look at this from the other side.
Gender:
Points: 12987
Reviews: 162