‘Wait.’

  Surely I could find my gemstone. I knew it like it was a part of myself. Like another limb that was just out of eyesight. I could not explain how, but it was connected to me as surely as any of my scales. If I could find it, then I would find my Huntress.

  I looked around, using something that was not sight, scent, or sound. It was like my Huntress’s inexplicable ‘gut feeling’. I felt a tug from far away. It reminded me of what continued to elude me in my dreams. I was awake this time. If I concentrated, I could follow its direction.

  I followed that feeling out of the bedroom and out of the Den. Unthinkingly, I dragged the door shut behind me so that it would latch itself shut. I didn’t know if I would ever return to it, but it was the correct thing to do. The feeling led me out into the nighttime forest. Though it was cloudy tonight, there was enough moon and starlight peaking through that I had no problem finding my way.

  For a little while, the woods were calm. The cool silence of winter would soon give way to spring. If it were any other night, with my Huntress by my side, I would enjoy it. My eyes hardly focused on anything around me for the moment. I followed a trail that went beyond concerns of the cold and darkness.

  When my path brought me to the edge of the Dark Wood, I stepped through without a care. Its tricks couldn’t turn me away from the place I was going.

  There was an uncommon serenity within me. I had passed beyond anger into something like a new purpose, where worry and doubt couldn’t reach me. My Huntress lay at the end of that course. Whatever happened after, would be a bridge I crossed when I came to it.

  Deeper and deeper into the Dark Woods, I walked without hesitation. Out of the corner of my eyes I could see it twisting and turning, attempting to throw me off track. So long as I ignored it, its whims held no relevance to me.

  As I drew close, the Dark Woods seemed to flex and boom like a drum that had been struck with an open palm. The dead trees shuddered and rocked against each other, making the sound of a million dull rotten windchimes. They tried to press in against me, to block my way, but I just shouldered them out of my path. They were like dry twigs against my scaled body.

  At last, something snapped. A scream from a voice I did not know called out far and away. It was not my Huntress, so I didn’t care who it was. When the scream ended, I passed out of the Dark Woods into an open field. Rather than a lush lawn of grass, what laid before me was a festering mound of mud and rot.

  Half sunken tree stumps littered the ground along with gaping holes into the earth. Frost clung to everything, but it was a sullied brackish brown instead of the pure white of snow.

  If I looked closely, I could see the exoskeletons of a million-million frozen insects clinging to everything. Whatever this place was, it was only being held back by winter’s grip. When the Thaw came, this place would become a putrid source of infection for everything around it.

  I ignored the unsettling crunch of what was beneath my clawed feet as I strode into the Foul Glen’s depths. I could sense my gemstone in the middle of all this. The how or why didn’t matter to me. So long as my Huntress was here, I would not be stopped.

  At the center of the Foul Glen was a single broken tree. The tree was a twisted thing. It could possibly have been a mighty oak at one point, but such days were forgotten in the dust. What was left was a butcher’s refuse pile.

  In some part of the world, there was a creature called the butcher bird. It was a small and unassuming thing with a simple white and black plumage. In normal places, this creature would take voles, mice, or whatever small prey it could get its hooked beak on, and impale them thorny bushes. It then tore off bits and pieces for itself and its chicks at its leisure. The bush the butcher bird roosted in was called a ‘larder’ and was fertilized by the refuse the butcher bird threw away.

  This tree was nothing so quaint and symbiotic. More creatures than I could count were impaled upon its branches wholesale, left to rot without anything to consume them. It was foul and unsettling beyond anything I had ever seen. An untold amount of creatures killed for no discernable purpose.

  A memory flashed through my mind, of a lone tree standing in an open field. I remembered how a bird had hung from its neck, swinging in the breeze. That had been a trap laid for the Beast by my Huntress. I’d swore to myself that I would never fall for such a trap again. Yet now, I stood in front of such a familiar scene.

  It didn’t matter. If it was for my Huntress, a prideful promise was meaningless.

  My eyes landed on a red glimmer in the midst of the carnage. The moonlight caught and reflected its beauty towards me. I walked towards it in a trance. I could smell nothing, hear nothing. Every ounce of my attention was fixed on that single point, mesmerized by the shine of my gemstone buried in that horror.

  Without thinking, my claws lashed out, digging into the tree and its collection of foul waste. Things I could not look at and would never describe cascaded to the sides as I dug a hole. I burrowed into the twisted larder like a wild animal.

  I’d tear it into the tiniest bits of kindling if I needed to.

  There, amongst the vile waste, was my gemstone. It was around a soft and familiar neck. As delicately as I could, I tried to pull both out of the stinking morass. For how viciously I had dug, my claws had not pierced her. I had promised I would not hurt her, never again. The muck resisted. I pulled harder, as hard as I dared.

  Finally she came free from the sucking muck. My frantic eyes checked her over, hoping beyond hope. My mind screamed against what would fill me with unthinkable despair.

  She breathed. The cold and filth had not yet taken her. Relief flooded my chest. A powerful desire to take her away from here followed.

  I pulled her back, away from the vile tree and its disgusting larder. She was injured badly. Splinters of her bow were embedded in one hand. Even with a glance, I could tell that her fingers would have difficulty ever nocking an arrow again. She would also have trouble walking, for multiple reasons, most pressing of which was a hole in her thigh where the wretched tree’s branch had been pushed through her.

  She wasn’t awake, which perhaps was a mercy. A large bulge on one side of her head showed that something had hit her hard, knocking her unconscious.

  I knew nothing of healing, not for myself or for those like my Huntress. The most I could do for either was lick their wounds. That would not help her now. Beyond her immediate injuries, I could recognize that she was afflicted by rot and decay. Her flesh was feverish and a foul smell came from her wound. The rotten essence of this place had infested her.

  My Huntress knew something of poultices and herbs, but I feared she would not wake in time to tell me how to help her. I feared she would never wake at all.

  There was only one solution I could think of. I needed others, creatures like my Huntress. Beings that knew the ways of healing, of vitality. I would find them. They would heal her. If they didn’t…

  I refused to think of that. It would not happen. I refused.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  As I wrapped my claws around my sleeping Huntress, a sucking, wet, and rumbling noise assaulted my hearing. I looked back at the tree. Out from a cavernous hole beneath it came an immense and horrid creature, one that was familiar in a way I couldn’t immediately place. It had claws larger than my limbs and a head full of rotting sharp teeth. As it stood on its hind legs, its full bulk was exposed to the weak moonlight.

  My Huntress had never described a creature like it, but I remembered that shape. The one I had known was missing pieces, but so was this rotting corpse animated with unlife. I remembered the four legged furry shape of my first Friend. In another time and place, I would learn that Friend and the creature before me, were full grown Grizzly Bears.

  This thing was not like my Friend, however. Friend had the decency to lie still and stay dead. It had let a weak dragon hatchling gratefully eat a small meal. I could now recognize the Beast from the feeling of its loathsome gaze. It was just as dead as my Friend, but it refused to act like it. It roared with a sound that was beyond noise. The roar slammed into me and made my gut want to vacate my body.

  I understood that sound implicitly. It was supreme, unthinking dominance. I was in this Beast’s Dark Wood, within its very lair. I was a thief, stealing the Beast’s prey. It did not matter that the Beast was a rotting corpse, that it did not eat, and that it had hunted every living thing for as far as the day’s light shined. The Beast would destroy me for my defiance and I too would be speared on its tree.

  This truth was as inescapable as when I’d heard the roar of the avalanche that carried me into this forest.

  As the roar faded, I felt something inside of me shift. It had always been there, from the moment I had awoken inside of my egg. My siblings had it in a greater quantity. Perhaps that was what made them push me out of the nest. They could not accept that I possessed that vital trait in a lesser form.

  Better that I should die unborn than to bring shame on dragonkind.

  But that vital trait was still a part of me. I had let it smolder within me, secretly tending the weak flame until the time was right. Little by little I had fed the flames with the vitality that I drained from my prey. Not knowing what it was, I had been afraid of it. Not because of what it might do to me, but because it might harm what I had claimed as Mine.

  I rose from the muck and mire, cradling what was precious to me in my claws.

  What I had denied was the essence that flowed through my veins. The gnawing in the back of my gut that clamored always for more. It was the one true deciding factor between a dragon and a monstrous lizard.

  What roared through my veins was undiluted Greed.

  It would never be enough. My Huntress, My Gemstone, My Den, My Prey. They were just the beginning. I had played pretend for a little while, afraid of myself and my desires. I had adored the simple little life I had made for myself. The rejection of my own kind, of my mother, had made me turn my back on what I was.

  The truth was clear to me now. I had thought that I needed to reject that part of me to protect my Huntress from myself. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The moment I had claimed her as my own, I should have fostered the flame inside of myself.

  Now and again, flickers of the flame had flared up. The things that were Mine had the scars to prove it. They were marks of a frustration with myself that I could not comprehend. I did not understand then that the way to keep them protected was not to play it safe and keep them hidden.

  It was to take more.

  More, and more, and more. The only way to keep what was Mine safe, was to take everything I laid my eyes upon and make it my own. The revelation flooded through my body. It was a burning endless flow, like an avalanche of fire and embers.

  This wretched bear had roared out a claim against what was M.I.N.E. It had tried to take my forest. My den. My gem. My only companion.

  My Huntress.

  I opened my own maw and roared back.

  In other places, scaled heads turned towards a noise that they could not hear, but feel in their blood.

  They knew how many of them there were. Six siblings. They had known each other from the moment they had hatched. One was too weak. Their sibling had been unfit to live as dragons should. An accord was struck. Sixth became their meal. It was unfortunate, but Sixth would live on through its Vitae in their bodies.

  They had then sworn to go their separate ways and to leave each other unmolested until the time came to decide who was worthy to rule amongst them.

  Fifth had let her wings carry her to somewhere warm and sunny, her den amongst the shifting sands. Fourth had crept away to a place of swamps and bogs, skulking in his underwater hole. Third had made its lair in a place full of frightened animals, scaring away anything on two legs that tried to chase it away from their herds. Second had nested in a place of many thinking creatures which were not dragons, using her great cunning to trick them into bringing their treasures to her.

  None of them knew where the strongest sibling, the one who called itself First, resided.

  Each of the siblings knew each other’s roars. They had used them against each other often enough. None of them knew this roar, one that so loudly proclaimed for anyone listening that it alone would possess all that existed. Some scoffed, others scowled. One simply listened and waited to hear what would become of their unexpected new brother.

  First supposed it was proper to call the new dragon ‘Seventh’.

  The Rotting Bear’s roar was drowned out. Mine held something it did not. Whatever pale mockery of life that animated the creature’s flesh was unable to compete with the raw power echoing through me. The Vile Tree shook, its horrid collection scattering in heaps as the roar ripped them free from the branches.

  The roar was not enough.

  The Rotting Bear attempted to push forward, to swipe at me with its claws and bite me with its broken teeth. Deep in my throat, shaken loose by my roar, a small valve I was unfamiliar with opened. At the top of my mouth, close to where a human’s uvula would rise, there was a small hard structure. On the back of my tongue just before my throat vanished into my gullet, was a striking plate.

  The hard surfaces clicked together, igniting a spark.

  In a nearby human village, a woman stood up from her vigil over an ailing child and looked out her window. The cloudy sky over the Cursed Forest was ablaze with light.

  In a further away castle, a lord’s knight looked up from his paperwork, certain that he’d smudged his glasses. The night was suddenly far brighter than the weak candlelight of his study.

  Over the forest, a particular Bastard Bird tried not to die when the sun came out early beneath it, followed by a subsequent sonic boom that knocked it clear out of the sky.

  Just as suddenly as it came, the light shut off.

  Whatever I had built up in my body to produce that fire had all been expended. My jaws snapped shut. The Rotting Bear was gone. The Vile Tree and its contents were gone. A sizable portion of the hillside was also gone. It looked like a god had removed the entire thing and replaced it with a burnt bowl of glass.

  Even with every lid shut over my eyes, the light had been so powerful that I was dazed. Strange thoughts slithered through my head. ‘Good thing I never tried to light the hearth with that, huh?’

  In the distance, small pieces of rotten flesh began to drop out of the sky. When I looked up, a hole had been punched through the clouds. The gentle moon draped its caress across my scales. I didn’t watch it for long.

  My focus wasn’t on the sky. It was on My Huntress. She was still breathing. In spite of the destruction my dragon’s breath had caused, it had left her unharmed. My gem gleamed against her skin, brighter than ever.

  That didn’t mean she was not horribly wounded. I could tell that her body was no longer festering with rot, at least. That had been an effect of being close to the Vile Tree and Rotting Bear. With both erased, there was nothing to sustain that wretched unlife. It had withered away.

  She still lived, but she desperately needed a healer.

  As I unfurled my wings, an irritated squawk was heard. The Bastard Bird had landed in the muck and now dragged itself up onto a charred stump. It flicked the filth off of its wings and looked at me. It’s head then turned to the splatters of organic ‘stuff’ I didn’t want to ever see again. It looked back at me.

  ‘Have it all, wretched creature, and may we never meet again,’ I thought in its general direction. My wings rose and flapped, carrying me into the sky. Unfamiliar power coursed through me and aided my ascent. I didn’t have the time to contemplate its origin right now.

  Each wing beat carried me and my Huntress away into the night, away from the Dark Wood, likely for good.

  The vulture, now sole king of this domain of delectable refuse, squawked its victory to itself and began looking for its first meal.