Chapter 1: The Nature of Dragons
Nestled away at the edges of the world sat a mountain range named Ered Mithrin, an expanse of grey crags and misshapen boulders that stretched far across the northern regions of Middle-earth. They housed peaks that were so high they almost kissed the heavens, covered with a rug of vibrant trees, fertile loam and bare tops that were scarfed and beribboned with snow.
If one traversed easterly across the mountain belt, they would soon realize that the ground gradually swerved into narrower topographies and dramatically changed into a much harsher landscape. Hard parched soil, blackened trees, charred shrubbery, and mounds of ash and dust were what instantly greeted the eye, replacing previous scenes of a bucolic nature.
A barren wasteland lay charcoal under the sallow sun, their feeble rays struggling to shine through broken layers of cloud that obscured this valley from the prying eyes of the world. This ruined land also had a name: The Withered Heath.
It was also the home of one Harry Potter.
Well, home was perhaps not the right description for it, for that particular word conjures up images of pleasant company, warm food and soft beds in the mind's eye. Instead, the company was terrifying, the food was either raw or rotten, and beds as a concept were in a state of non-existence. This was perhaps due to fact that this place was a breeding ground for one of the most feared and terrifying entities that dwelled in this land.
Dragons.
Creatures that carried only hearts of heartlessness, marked by an overabundance of avarice and malice that coursed through their veins. Emboldened by the hardness of their scaly hides and the superiority of their vast intellect, they would often ravage any signs of civilization in the twisted hope of acquiring specific sets of war spoils: precious minerals, priceless artifacts, and nitid gold.
Lusting for such worldly goods was not within reason for such creatures, but their rapacity was what garnered them their infamous reputation throughout the land. That attribute aside, they are primarily and more notably feared for their desire for wanton destruction, something that had been well recorded in the annals of history.
In the First Age of Middle-earth, the deepest and darkest pits of Angband, the ancient fortress to a creature known as Morgoth, birthed forth dragons of calamity, Ancalagon the Black, and Glaurung, Father of Dragons. Both were equally majestic and terrifying in their own way, but under the experimentation and grooming of the first Dark Lord to ever exist, their names – and therefore, their entire species – was etched into the minds of all inhabitants of this world as portents of doom and weapons of destruction.
Perhaps the crux of the preamble shouldn't be left so late, but through laborious effort and careful observation, Harry quickly found out why he had been feeling so strange after he was shoehorned into his new state of existence: he was a dragonling. Not any old dragon, but an Urulokë, or what he found soon out, drakes that housed the ability to breathe fire.
He initially assumed that all dragons could lick flames as his kin could, but he quickly observed others with more interesting and derivative features. Some dragons were wingless, some scaleless, some shaped like long worms, some quadrupedal, and some even breathed ice instead of fire. Despite such stark differences, the blackness of their souls was a constant amongst their ranks. He too – though not truly a dragon – could feel the thrall of dark that lined his heart. It was not a worry for him however, for he was inured and experienced against such mental strife and seductions, his past experience as a living Horcrux serving as a harsh lesson.
He was but a whelping at this juncture. Nascent red and gold spines ran from his neck to the tip of his tail, almost like a sail protruding from his back. Housing sharp, serrated meat-eating teeth designed to tear flesh from bones, and a forked tongue that was distinctly ophidian in nature, he looked strangely leonine. It made him chuckle sometimes, when he would glance upon his reflection in glassy pools of undisturbed water, for the combination of colours carried a nostalgic reminder of his youthful days in Gryffindor.
"Mother… food," Harry called out in a harsh, guttural and unknown language. His ocean-green eyes, glowing like gemstones that were embedded in an otherwise unbroken sheath scales, gazed with childlike supplication at a figure that seemed to be sleeping – and one was almost a hundred times his size.
An annoyed growl sliced through the air at the disturbance but not before a deer carcass was lobbed unceremoniously in his direction, of which he deftly avoided with a small flap of his wings. Hunger consuming and overriding all his other desires, he knelt down and sank his tiny fangs deep into the raw meat, savouring the food with his forked tongue as if he hadn't eaten in an eternity.
It had been three years since he had arrived into this strange new world. He assumed initially that he was still back on his planet he was born in, but quickly realized otherwise partly due to the fact that the dragons here differed to those back home. Most were terrifyingly intelligent and were accomplished polyglots, capable of mastering many unique forms of speech – unlike those of his old world which only spoke Parseltongue. How they accrued all this knowledge would forever be a mystery to him, for he never saw any of them perusing through ancients scrolls, studying decrepit grimoires, hoarding dusty tomes or consulting any other written work in the years he had been raised in this place.
He often had no clue what language he was speaking in, but he was taught a number of tongues, including one called Westron, whom he was assured was a necessity to learn for he was told it was a lingua franca that current spanned nearly across the entire world.
Despite all the wisdom of his mother, she taught him naught but the art of speech. Knowledge about this world, its inhabitants, their cultures, the year they were in, potential enemies, and everything else were never brought up as conversational topics. As a consequence, he yearned for the day when he could muster enough strength to beat his undeveloped wings and breach the high walls of the cave he had been dwelling in for all this time.
Apart from briefly glancing upon the outside world when his mother carried him in her jaws on one special occasion, the boundaries of his world so far were demarcated by the lining of his abode. It almost resembled the inside of a volcano in some ways, due the fact that the only way in or out of his home was through a hole that pierced the roof. The cave's general shape was ovoid, the walls below the hole curving smoothly to the floor while the walls above arched a hundred feet up to giant stalactites and bat roosts.
Needless to say, these new conditions of Harry's state of living as a non-human were rather austere.
He had finally been weaned off his mother a month ago and was now moving onto solid food. The growth rate of dragons was… disappointing slow much to Harry's chagrin, for he was too accustomed to the quick life spans and rapid aging of humans. Upon hatching he was but the size of a watermelon, and after three years down the road he was only the size of a large dog.
After he had finished ravenously devouring his food, he looked upwards at his mother.
Her red scales gleamed under wayward rays of sunlight and were ones that were her pride and delight. Black streaks were shot through them, carrying a lustre than seemed strangely brighter than the sun itself. With teeth as sharp and cold as icicles that could rip through armour with the slightest of ease and deep violet eyes that seemingly swam with endless pools of wisdom, she was truly a sight to behold.
"When will I become as magnificent as you?" he murmured quietly under his breath.
A mighty voice rumbled above him.
"Eat well, little Smaug. You will grow yet."
His overheard mutterings of admiration earned him another slab of meat, one which looked considerably more fresh and tender than the last. Chest puffed up in glee and belly reignited with a sudden burst of renewed hunger, he was just about to dive into the new arrival of food before a small noise at the corner of the cave made itself known.
He started, only now remembering he was not the only dragonling of the clutch. There were three others, two females and one male, of which all hatched shortly after him.
He glanced guiltily at the hungry brothers and sisters of his brood out of the corner of his eye, hoping that they weren't old enough to understand the concept of blatant favouritism. None of them were able to speak coherently so far, though their eyes shined with keen perception. The reason why he only could formulate intelligible words was because of the accumulation of knowledge from his past lives, and the only reason why he could enunciate his words with such clarity was because of the sharpness of his mind and the strength of his will.
Now, in litters, there is always a runt. In nature, the mother will always turn a blind eye to the runt and funnel all her resources into only her strongest and most promising progeny to further the continuation of her species. In this litter however, everyone was the runt but him.
He waited until his mother's eyes eventually closed before he surreptitiously tore of some of the meat with his razor-sharp claws and flung it toward in the direction of his siblings, making subtle hushing motions and praying that they could interpret his body language correctly. Harry held his breath as the flesh sailed silently through the air and slapped against the ground of the cave with a muted thud. Would his mother notice?
He cringed when his youngest sister gave a loud chirp of delight at his action, her maroon scales tinctured with iridescent vermillion hues vibrating in accordance to her excitement. Fortunate is seemed, did not smile upon him as his mother opened just one curious eye from the noise.
In an instant she realized what was going on and extended a massive claw high up into the air, only to bring it crashing it down on the seemingly innocuous chunk of flesh with a reverberating crash. When the dust finally settled, she then scooped it up in one grab and tossed it nonchalantly back at his feet.
Harry gave a saddened sigh from the clear message.
His mother was beautiful as she was cruel.
Harry pushed the food that had just been given back to him to the side even though there was still half of it left, his appetite instantly evaporating from the cries of outrage and sadness from his siblings that reached his ears. He knew that nature itself was taking course, but even he was unhappy with its toll.
The imposing figure above him then gave him a strange look, as if unable to comprehend his actions. The food was solely for him, so why did he give some away?
"Little Smaug, why does thee act as such?"
Harry paused for a second before padding slowly to her and curling up beside her body, basking in the gentle warmth she radiated. Her mother had never told him her name, and he often wondered why. On top of that, he hardly knew the names of his brother and sisters, for there was only one creature his mother deigned to talk to: him.
Do dragons even have the capacity for virtues such as acceptance or kindness? He thought with a small frown. Surely, they must, for they are beings of conscience and sentience, are they not?
Little did the red whelpling know, the dragons themselves as a race were created out of hatred by the entity known as Morgoth in the early stages of the Middle-earth. Into his living creation, this entity poured his cruelty, hatred and will to tyrannize all life, birthing forth a race that was ever-destined to be the enemy of the world.
Harry yawned sleepily before raising his eyes heavenward, his brilliant green-slitted pupils clashing against irises of dark and turbulent violet.
"What is better, mother?" he started in a tired voice, "To be born good, or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?"
Stormy pits that housed great pools of intelligence and cunning narrowed imperceptibly at his seemingly racial line of questioning.
"If one overcame their 'evil nature' through great effort, then are they not 'born good'?" his mother voice answered evenly, her sibilant tone of voice taking on a questioning tone at the end of her sentence.
"You're overestimating the impact that personal experience and one's environment has on an individual's character," Harry argued back after a second of thought.
A fearsome and majestic head shook silently at his naivety.
"Little Smaug, you presume determinism, which I believe we have every reason not to presume," her strong voice floated downwards, cocooning him and sending him into a state of tranquillity.
Harry gave a thoughtful hum from the brevity and weight of his mother's words. If no one can truly be born evil, then were the Dementors, Basilliks, Chimeras and more of his old world born good? He was yet to outsmart his mother in a war of wits. Even though he had lost track of how old he was cumulatively, there was always one out there in the world that was smarter than him.
It is often folly to correlate age with wisdom, merely with experience.
He gave a large yawn once again, feeling as though energy was being constantly being drained out of him. He had just eaten his fill and now an all-consuming desire to drift to the land of the dreams was threatening to take hold of him. Such was his life since he hatched. All he did was eat or sleep. It would've been a rather monotonous state of existence if not for the intense and rigorous linguistic lessons that were interspaced between his other two modes of life.
Curled up and tucked against his mother, there seemed like there was nothing in the world but them. The wind neither swooped or howled, bestowing silence that warmly enveloped them whole. His mind stared to wander, evoking halcyon images of summer days gone by as they wrapped him in a blanket of his own thoughts, hopes and dreams.
A strange and powerful urge of wanderlust coursed through his veins as his mind teetered on the edge of shutting down. One day he would be free of this place, and when that fateful day comes, it would mark the first step in another grand journey – that for him, never truly ends.
A/N: Hi folks. Thanks for your awesome comments and pointing out the typo in the last chapter! Just giving you guys a heads up. At the end of every chapter, I will try my best to give a detailed justifications about the choices I will make when deviating or adding on to the existing stuff we know from LoTR.
1) Tolkien never specified the language the dragons used for each other, only that they can learn other languages with relative ease. Although it was never explicit, we know that some form of draconic language exists. It will be used extensively and will be called Kulkodar-Flas, which means 'dragon speak' in the Black Speech of Mordor.
2) It is never specified when Smaug was born, though there is high contention as to whether it was during the First-Age in Angband or hatched in the Third-Age in the Withered Heath. I have assumed the latter case. This is because he was shown to be roughly three centuries old when shown in the Hobbit, drawn from the lifecycle of prior dragons (Glaurung grew to adulthood in two hundred years). Draconic biology tells us maturity for a dragon takes roughly 100 years, as seen from The Silmarillion. Thus, it is only logical to assume he was never part of Morgoth's army and was hatched much later in time in the Withered Heath.
3) "There is no such thing as a good dragon". Born from the dark will of Morgoth, they are creatures of pure darkness. However, this story will explore the boundaries of such a claim and put it to the test.