top of page

The Honorable Death

Writer's picture: Gwenna LaithlandGwenna Laithland

This story was crafted with a prompt from Freewrite's Words Are Hard Creative Writing Prompts. If you'd like your own deck of prompts, please consider using my affiliate link. I appreciate your support!


I heard him, the poor bastard. He was a young one. The young ones still bother with stealth and cunning. Not that it matters. My hearing works through their silence. They can slither and skitter and be the fleetest of foot but I can always hear them. I can hear their heartbeats in their chest. The young ones are the easiest to hear, all that pounding and hammering in their ribs. The old ones, by the time they get to me, have typically forgone the slinking and quiet but their hearts are never racing quite so fast as their more inexperienced counterparts. Killing the older ones never bothers me as much as the young ones. The young ones, their eyes are still bright even though awash with panic as they watch their death drip from my fangs. I remember that hope. The hope is why I have to kill them. I don’t have any way of explaining to them. I don’t have a voice with which to try. Just snarls and roars and growls. I lost my words when I became the beast they hunt.


This one was very, very young. I was no longer quite sure what was happening outside the keep that contained me but they’d been getting younger and younger. For a few years I tried to know the comings and goings of the world lost to me. But that became difficult. In so many ways. I was dependent on the knights and warriors and well-intentioned heroes sharing their tales around campfires in my caves. They never knew I was there, listening. But the parties became fewer and those that arrived were less talkative than they once were. And it hurt. It hurt hearing how the world was moving on without me. I stopped hovering in the shadows, my hunger for what I could not have sated by the pain of knowing I’d never be allowed to truly taste that freedom again.


His heart stuttered, the hero before me. Tendrils of ink-black hair, dripping with sweat and blood, peaked out below his helmet. His face guard was down and I was grateful. I hated when they left the masks up and I had to watch the shadow of death darken their features. It was for their own good, the end I would bring. But they couldn’t know that. To them, I was the beast to slay, the obstacle to their greatness, the barrier between them and the legends that would be told of their heroism and bravery. To them I was a fearsome black dragon, gluttonous and jealous, hoarding my treasure and damning a fair maiden trapped in the tower atop my keep.


I wasn’t. But again, they couldn’t know that. How could they know that? Because I was a fearsome black dragon. But there was no gluttony or hoard. There was jealousy but not for want of jewels or gold. Turns out those do little for the spirit once you have them. And I did have them. In droves. Great piles of priceless treasure littered my caves and my hovels. That only deepened their conviction, the knights come to slay me. Look at the wealth this great beast keeps for himself, they think. Look at all the good a single handful of the dragons hoard could do for the people, the bellies that could be filled with bread and the armories that could be filled with steel.


And if they would just take the treasure and go do their good deeds with the money it would fetch, I’d not stop them. I wouldn’t even so much as lift a single claw to prevent them from leaving with every single coin and jewel they could carry. But they never stopped at the treasure. They saw the glinting gold and the rainbow of gems and pressed on, their swords seeking my blood, their hearts seeking their princess in the tall tower high above. Princess, indeed.


That’s why I had to stop them. That's why this boy in a knight’s armor and I would battle, maw to metal. I had been them. I had, once upon a time, long ago in a land that is very different from the one that exists now, been a foolhardy boy with too much armor, too big a sword, and too many foolish dreams of true love and chivalry. I stormed this keep and fought my way through the dogs and the wolves and the beast of nightmares to stare down the maw of the great black dragon. I had thought I feared nothing but injustice. Death was a friend, not a foe. And if Death welcomed me into her embrace while I fought for goodness and rightness, so be it. I was so naive. So godsdamned naive.


I had battled and bled. I had fought and found. I had stumbled into this very same cave, weary to the bone and moving forward on sheer spite alone. And I found a fearsome black dragon. Only it wasn’t quite as fearsome as I’d expected. It, despite great globs of spittle dripping from its snout, claws sharpened to needle points crusted with the blood and dried gore of those who’d come before me and failed, was not fearsome. It had looked…tired. So, incredibly tired. When I entered the mouth of the cave in which that dragon lay languidly across mounds of bones and drool-rusted armor, it didn’t even bother to lift its head fully at me. It’s great yellow eye looked right into mine for a moment before drifting down, taking in my shining breastplate, the sword held at the ready at my side, the greaves that shimmered slightly, despite the dirt still clinging to them from the journey to this cave. It took all of that in, slowly, intentionally, before its eyes, terrible, yellow, hollow eyes found mine again. It blinked once. Twice. And then lay its head down on its feet, closing those eyes.


I stood, paralyzed. Not with fear but confusion. This was a black dragon. A single spark from its throat could melt a man’s armor to slag, the man within roasted alive. A single swipe from its claws would have my guts meeting daylight. A snap of its jaws could tear me in two. But it never sparked, it never swiped, it never snapped. It laid there, eyes closed, neck exposed for the beheading I could give it. I stood, stuck. Lost. I'd known the tales of hundreds of knights, thousands perhaps who had marched up into these mountains to free the mythical beauty this dragon protected. They had failed, but against this? What trap was laid that I had missed?


I scanned for the trickery yet to befall me, raising my blade to defend against the unseen danger I knew must be there. But there was no secret spell yet to unravel. There was just this great black beast before me and his utter lack of desire to kill me. I dared a step closer. And then another. I was just an arm's length away and I could feel the intense, suffocating heat of his breath through his nostril when his eye opened again, fixated on me. I scrambled back and that eye watched. I tripped over my own haste and that eye watched. I righted myself, a roar building in my core, and that eye just watched. When I was at the ready once more, the eye blinked, slowly. It opened again, only halfway. It was tired. I knew, deep in me, it was tired. And it wasn’t going to fight me. That princess was mine for the taking, that slow blink said. Have her if you want her.


And so, I lifted my blade high above my head as the eye closed for the very last time. My steel sliced through the air, whistling as it cleaved skull from spine, life from death and in the last moment, the second before sleep eternal settled across the corpse, I would have sworn that mighty black dragon smiled. I wasn’t sure if dragons could smile then but I would have sworn unto all the gods known and unknown, that creature smiled as Death embraced it instead of me.


I know why, now. And this toothpick of a man before me would not also know that fate. The dragon I slew had met its match, not in me but in time. But I still had time. I still had need and desire and rage and a sense of justice. I could not spare this man his life, but I could spare him an eternity of torturous pain and isolation. Because that is what fate held for this poor bastard if he bested me, if I laid my head down and begged him with my blinks for death.


The blood was still oozing from the stump of that smiling dragon's shoulders as I climbed the last stairs to the princess in her tower all those years ago. Around and around and around I went. My stomach threatened rebellion and my legs were little more than brittle sticks of charred ash but I climbed. I’d come this far and this princess deserved to know that she’d been freed from her captivity. At the top of the stairs was a plain door. Simple slabs of wood joined with a brace of iron. There was no lock or magic shield. It was just a door. Cautiously, I opened it and inside was a beautifully appointed apartment. To my left, was a cozy living area, every flat surface stacked with books and tomes and sheafs of paper, notes prettily dotting the pages I could see. To my right, was a warm, cozy looking bed, the curtains hanging off the four posters fluttered in the breeze that traipsed through an open window beside it.  Directly in front of me was a great workbench covered in all manner of things. Jars and pots, bits of crockery, some broken and some whole, more books, bowls, and various utensils for poking, prodding, and stirring. A kitchen, or perhaps an apothecary’s workshop, stood before me and, in the very center, was a woman.


She was no great beauty with flaxen hair and porcelain features. Perhaps in her early thirties, the hair coiled on top of her head was a mousy brown. Her cheeks were round but also somehow gaunt. Neither short, nor tall, she looked rather like a school matron or the baker’s wife. Was this the princess? Perhaps this was her handmaiden, trapped and ageless with her in this tower. I dared ask a question. I asked if she were the princess in need of rescue. She’d laughed then. She'd asked if that’s what the commoners had taken to calling her. She'd found it interesting and amusing and amazing that I’d thought her a princess. I know now she was never a princess. She was a witch; a sorceress, a kernel of evil wrapped in flesh and made sentient by hate and malice. She did congratulate me on slaying the dragon though she'd known I’d not had to try very hard. She’d had a name but had forgotten it, she'd told me. And she had known her dragon had been nearing the end of it days. Karamir, she’d called him, had been with her for a very, very long time. But with Karamir gone, she'd found herself in need of a new dragon. And what better a man to be the beast than the one capable of slaying the one that came before?


A snap of her fingers and pain like I’d never known engulfed me. It ate away at me from the inside out, burning away my humanity and the flesh of man, blackening and hardening my skin, my bones growing and lengthening. It was agonizing and endless. For days or months or years or millennia, I writhed in pain and sorrow. When the needles withdrew from my flesh and the burning cooled to an ember of heat in the pit of my stomach, I was new and fearsome and full of rage. Somehow in my pain that woman had carried me down to the caves, or perhaps she’d just opened the door and kicked me back down the spiraling, twisting, spinning stairs. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.


I’d lashed out and tried to escape. I’d scaled every wall and hurled myself against every opening. All for nothing. The magic that had turned me from man to monster kept me here. Her pet and her guardian. When the first knight came to challenge me, to rescue the princess, I knew I couldn’t let him. I’d have to truly become the monster they thought me lest they meet the same end as I. And so I did. I fought that first knight and I killed him. I sent him to his new mistress Death and was glad to do it. He had been like me and deserved to die with honor in his heart and his sword in his hand. I found new purpose after that first night. I would fight until my very last, long-lived breath to be the last dragon the witch ever made. The treasure I protected was not riches or wealth, but honor and freedom. That I could protect. That I could fight for.


The black haired boy didn’t even scream as I snapped him in half. Rest well, honored knight. Enjoy the honor of the death I’ve granted you. It is the far more desirable end than mine, I assure you, good sir.


All rights reserved. No part of this story may be republished, reprinted, or reposted without written permisison from the author, Gwenna Laithland and the owner, Pleasant Peasant Media, LLC.

376 views1 comment

Recent Posts

See All
Coolflower

Coolflower

Calico

Calico

תגובה אחת


Tarah Ferdinand
Tarah Ferdinand
23 באוק׳ 2024

Wow! What a wonderful story!! I've read all of your posted short stories and thoroughly enjoyed every single one of them! I'd be hard pressed to pick a fave. Looking forward to reading the next one, hopefully soon!!

לייק
bottom of page