Dorolance Blackthorn
From beneath a stand of high mountain firs in the shadow of Mount Urdon, Dorolance Blackthorn combed the length the valley below. His hard blue eyes rapt, looking for the tiny dots that meant prey. The black leathers he wore were supple and adorned with silver buckles that glowed in the pre-dawn. Bear fur, sable and thick, poked out from his wrists and neck. Emblazoned across his chest was the glaring silver dragon of his house, and from over his shoulder glared a silver dragon.
Dara. The dragonair's long serpentine body stretched through the firs, in some places coiling around the trees. Her length was near the height of three men, and when the thick muscles of her tail wrapped around the firs, even in repose, the proud trees looked like twigs ready to be snapped for kindling. But then, dragons were never at repose, truly.
The old dragoness' head was adorned more richly than a queen's, and her deep violet eyes were locked on the valley floor, searching well past the range of the boy. A great, silver blue orb glinted at her throat, more opaque and yet more lustrous than the finest gemstone and larger than a strong man's fist. The horn that sat on her forehead was worn ivory, the point dulled by the ages, but harder than bone and without blemish. Where a fox might have ears, or a bull might have horns, Dara had wings, each a foot tall and of a silver so fine it made the precious metal clasps on Dorolance's hunting doublet look like crude iron. They were folded back against the dragon's metallic head now, but the boy knew that when he gave the command, they would spring up in a flourish more extravagant than the fan-dancers his mother kept – their tall silver-wrought fans twirling in great arcs in a poor facsimile of the dragon's splendor in flight.
Winter had descended formally a full month ago, but the mountains surrounding Blackthorn were indifferent in their white magnitude. When the low lands coated themselves in the white of snow the servants of his father's house would call it beautiful. His sister would set up an easel and paint them walking with their wool-clad children through powder that came up to their waists. But to Dorolance the fields and byways under the mountain looked like a harlot, cheap and gaunt, wrapped in the snowy finery of a lady far outside her station. When spring came the snows would melt away and all that would be left was muck over every day toil and unremarkable routine. The sun would burn away the façade, and the low lands surrounding his father's village would be left naked and filthy; the servant's children would wallow and fight in the mud.
Dorolance preferred the mountains, and it was here that he came with Dara to hunt and train. Six inches over his right shoulder, the dragon's lips drew back to show the front most row of her silver-steel teeth. Hot breath steamed from the small nostrils at the end of her blunt snout and plumed out in front of Dorolance's face to form a glittering cloud in the sharp morning air.
"Where?" the boy asked the great serpent, his face craning up to see where the dragon looked. Dara's eyes where a violet storm, as beautiful and clear as they were terrifying and violent. Her gaze was fixed at the base of the valley, where the evergreen forest of the lower climbs was at its greatest reach and met the gushing Urdana. From this height, the trees below looked like green feathered blades of grass and the mighty river looked like a black thread, but Dara saw what he could not. Dorolance reached to pull a collapsible telescope from one of the leather purses that hung from his hip. Scoping through the silver tube, he eyed the trees where Dara was glaring.
Still several yards in to the lush of the forest below, something was moving. The boy couldn't quite make it out, but it was making for the river. Through the multiple lenses of the telescope the trees had grown from blades of grass to chess pieces, the branches at their spiked heights were white with snow. Even through the scope they looked miniature, but Dorolance knew each was older than his father's palace and wider around than two men could reach, wider even than the thick band of Dara's musclebound body. The dragon let out a hiss, long and low, and the boy could hear the trees her tail was wrapped around groaning and cracking under the steel of her grip.
"Dara. Wait." Dorolance said in a deadpan tone, dropping his hand to rest on the smooth scales of the beast's throat. He was taking a risk touching her while she was in this state, but Dara was an old dragon and had known his touch and that of his father and his father before him. The sensation of the dragon's vocal chords rumbling under his gloved fingers was soothing. Dorolance's serious face broke in to an uncharacteristic smile as he watched the source of Dara's ire step from the old firs; an Ursaring.
As old and gnarled as the mountain forest itself, the great bear lumbered from the trees on all fours, pausing to stand on its wooly pillar legs to survey the valley. From his vantage point, the bear looked no bigger than a dog, but that was just an illusion of the looking glass. Dorolance knew that the bear stood no less than eight feet tall, and that its paws where as big as his chest. Each of the bear's five claws was as long as his slender hands and half as thick. This one, in particular, was a monster of a bear. Its roar was an open challenge to any in the valley. The shaggy depths of its dark fur broke in to splashes of tan on its face, and Dorolance had caught glimpse of the signature ring of light fur on its broad belly when it stood.
It would take ten men with long spears to subdue a bear of this size, and some of them would not come home from the hunt. Dorolance had seen such a thing only once as a child. The man that struck the beast first, a strong hunter from a line of strong hunters, had his arm taken off at the shoulder by a single stroke of the beast's paw. For what was a man to a bear? Just a bag of guts bound up by a bit of muscle and skin?
The ursaring was at the river now, trying to drink the black rush dry with great laps of its pink tongue. Dorolance lowered the scope from his eye, and raised his right hand from the dragon's throat in a fist. The dragon squirmed in her great scaly skin, the length of her body pulsing with power and anticipation and her violet eyes flaring hatefully on the bear below.
"Hai, Dara! Kill!" the boy shouted ferociously, dropping his fist. No sooner had the "K" in the command to kill passed from his lips had the dragon erupted from the high mountain firs, ripping the bark of those unfortunate enough to be held in her coiled grasp. She dip not soar through the air like a fearow, riding the thermals that climbed up the rocky mountain walls, nor did the dragon saw through the air like a zubat. When Dara flew it was as it all the world were an ocean, men where lobsters crawling upon its sandy floor, and she were a great water serpent, moving through the air as swiftly as a trout in the Urdana's roiling black.
She came down on the bear like a thunderbolt, covering the several hundred yards that separated the river from their mountain perch in seconds. Her battle scream was a high pitched grate that made the ursaring look up sharply just in time to catch a long fountain of purple flame full in the face. Dorolance watched Dara swim over the roaring bear, now engulphed in flame, and double back on it in a graceful flourish of silver scales. The ursaring swung its blade-claws wildly through the air in great arcs as menacing as they were empty. Just the same, those claws where made for murder and could rend through dragon scales near as easy as a man's skin.
Dara floated impossibly some six feet off of the ground near the flailing bear, probing for an opening in the wall of claws that was rapidly approaching her. She could simply evade the monster in the air, and cook it from the air, but Dorolance knew better. Swinging the end of her silver-steel tail like a flail, she smashed the two canalope-sized pearls at its tip against the bear's iron hip. Even from a distance as great as this, Dorolance could hear the impact, like a cannonball smashing in to the oaken hull of a warship.
The bear twisted grotesquely to the side, its pelvic bone and left leg clearly shattered. It was all over now, the boy thought as his lips turned up in a grin of satisfaction. How many winters had this bear reigned in the thick fir forest the clawed up the mountain? How many stantler had it ripped through like wet tissue? Was this perhaps the king of bears on this mountain? The chief and grandest of their number? Dara circle behind the struggling bear, deaf to its anguish as it tried to follow her on its ruined lower half. A gout of purple flame roasted the bear's flank, searing off what fur remained. The broken and charred monstrosity that remained was a roaring nightmare. Its cries were high and shrill, the regal roar of its entrance forgotten forever.
In the end it didn't much matter how old or storied the ursaring had been. What wonderful, terrible battles it might have fought in the great forest. If it was the best of its race. For what was a bear to a dragon? Only a bag of guts bound up by a bit of muscle and fur.
Dara came in on the hulk with her gleaming fangs, locking her jaws down overtop the ursaring's neck and shaking her steel body with force enough to rip trees from the earth. The bear was an inanimate boulder of muscle, shaken now as a rope is shaken by a dog at play.
When the dragon began to feed, Dorolance produced a silver whistle from his purse, and blew at it with the full strength of his lungs. The noise, to him, was a whisper, but Dara looked up as if he had shouted down thunder on her hidden ears. Two more whistle blasts told her to bring the kill, and wrapping it in her steel grip, the long silver dragon pulled the limp, blackened bear through the air towards Dorolance's fir lookout. She set the steaming mess down at his feet and coiled her body like a snake, waiting on his approval.
"Lo, Dara. A good kill." The boy said, looking up at the dragon's flawless head with its eyes young and old: young in their fervor and old in their knowing, endless depth. From another purse on his belt, Dorolance tossed the beast a rolled packet of meat and herbs, specially attuned to Dara. The dragon snatched it easily from the air, and purred lowly with vocal chords made of fire. The boy strode to the kill, taking from his hip a long silver dagger with a handle of blackened bone.
It took him near an hour to dress the kill, taking breaks to break his and Dara's fast on the choicest of the meat, the thick bands of muscles that ran along either side of the bear's spine. He was bundling the ursaring's shoulders and flanks in a buckskin when his father's greathorn cut the air in the village so far below them.
The boy and the dragon's head shot up in the same sharp motion. Silence followed. One blast. Another blast charged the air. Two blasts, the boy thought, his blood rising. Behind him, Dara squirmed with the anticipation of a kill. Dorolance stood and walked from the meat, its fatty opulence forgotten.
"Whoa, Dara. Easy." He breathed, raising his hands to calm the beast, which had risen up to its full towering height, trying to see the village over the fir ridge they had flown to. When the third blast of his father's horn reached his ear's it was drowned out in the same instant by Dara's schreeching cry. Her violet eyes were wild with excitement, purple flame whispered out from between her silver smooth maw. The dragon lowered herself to the ground so quickly that Dorolance had to hop to one side to avoid being caught underneath her. Dara barked at him impatiently.
Leaping on the dragon's waiting back, Dorolance locked his ankles against the steel of Dara's sides and slapped her scaly back, "Go, saranna! Go, sister!" He called to the beast, and just as soon they were soaring over the fir ridge, leaving the ruin of the bear and the mountains behind and sliding through the sky. Far below, smoke rose from the village of Blackthorn and with it the sound of bells.
