Chapter 10: Insane

After the mage had climbed from sight, the sweet smell of Saoirse's magic drew the beast through the boiling pool to the ledge on which Alyse had stood. Shaking with need, black spots swimming in front of its eyes, the crazed dragon collapsed, desperately flicking out its long lizard tongue, probing the crevices and cracks of the ledge, seeking even the tiniest morsel of magic. Each precious sparkling flake it gobbled up. Long after the magic had all been consumed, it licked the rocks, eager for one more taste.

And she just a babe!

Reeling from hunger, it flexed its huge wings. “The old woman is not worthy of a dragon's promise. We shall have our meal now!”

Long ago before the scarcity of food had weakened its mind, two hundred, no, four hundred years before, the dragon had a thousand voices in its head. Voices that spoke of art and science; of music and the wild adventure of mating season; voices that roared with joy, riding the updrafts, and voices that dared to fold its wings and plunge downward, shouting as the ground rushed closer, “Don't pull up, not yet, not yet”; voices that caused the dragon to pause and greet its kin, the chameleons, and voices that rejoiced as they changed color; voices not too proud to whisper, “Teach me, little one, teach me,” and voices that despaired when the chameleons could not teach, because they were silent. As its huge brain weakened, one by one the voices had gone silent, only two remained, the voice of fear of its desperate need to survive, and the voice of reason.

Reason spoke, “A babe this powerful? If we had not found our answers in that old fool's mind, I would not have believed it. A female. How rare. Her magic tingles my tongue.”

The ravenous dragon whipped around its huge head as if searching the cave for the voice that spoke from within its schizophrenic mind.

“If she is one of the blessed, one like the ancient seers, we must wait until she awakens,” reason cautioned. “She alone could sustain us for another 100 years—or more. We must wait. She must be harvested only when ripe.”

“We will die waiting!” Fear shouted.

“We know what we must do.”

Weary, ungainly, stumbling, often hitting the rough cave walls, its movements like a drunkard, it withdrew into the dark recesses. Reaching an underground vent spewing hot, acrid gases, the beast closed its eyes. With a roar of pain, colors burst from its back: greens and golds, splashes of silver, and bright cerulean blues, purples and oranges blazing like the colors of a sunset, pinks and yellows and whites. Like a thousand stars simultaneously being born, light illuminated the cave. The brightness would have burned and blinded a human's eye. The dragon's head, its teeth, its snout, the horns on its back, its scales, its clawed feet, all its 500-foot, tip-to-tail-long body, dissolved and dripped, one stinky drop after another, into the vent, flowing down into the hot earth and the molten lava that was its birthplace.

As goo the dragon remained floating on the lava's surface, dreaming psychedelic, schizophrenic dreams of magic and the sweet taste of a child.

 

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