“Oooh, yes! I love riddles,” grinned the old thing, Witherfinger. Was she a woman caked in mud, an Ent-wife, long-lost and forlorn, or was she some fell spirit behind a benevolent—if not strange—mask?
Irwin loved riddles too. “What kind of tree has two eyes but cannot see?”
The creature crooned with pleasure. How long, Irwin wondered, since this being had been stumped by a riddle? It was a riddle she fancied she’d come up with herself, but she couldn’t remember, really, yet she felt a little proud of herself all the same. More than a little, especially when the tree-ish woman replied, “that is a challenging one, but— I will see you again, and when I see you again I will have the answer.”
They parted; Irwin and her company were journeying north.
It was a cheering thought, that they would see kind Witherfinger again. The land grew more desolate, the sky blacker, the air more foul, and it was hard to believe they would ever see anyone friendly again. Birds stopped calling. At night, while the others slept—her kind do not sleep—Irwin watched her companions turn, moan, their dreams restless.
They were seeking a dragon, the lord of dragons, Wutherhand. It had come to Irwin, a vision: a winged monstrosity, scales white and breath cold enough to wither forests.
Somehow, she was supposed to make friends with this dragon. Or kill it. What a stupid proposition, though, killing a dragon.
As the sallow mountains neared, she was lost in these thoughts, circular, how to befriend a dragon but with riddles, how to get close enough to one without becoming its meal, how to answer its own riddles—dragons were cunning and cruel and seldom played games fairly—when a pebble she was about to kick shuddered out of the way of her boot. For a moment she wondered, how could a pebble scuttle away like a beetle? before she realized that the damned little one, always quick to disappear when trouble came, was no longer beside her. Past where he had just been, through the sparse trees, she saw the trouble.
The hills were moving.
No, the hills were not moving, she thought stupidly, it’s just that the hills are a dragon.
—A dragon. “Hide,” she bellowed, and her companions did wait to understand; they hid. The elf-trained ranger vanished up a tree nearly as well as the little one had, but the clumsy dwarf and klutzy bookworm tripped over themselves.
From her own perch in a cedar Irwin watched the dwarf bend a bough until it snapped, falling straight back down onto the man. It would have been funny—the dwarf could be a bit noisome, especially when he snored—if certain death weren’t hurtling toward them. The ground was shaking, the trees they were in shuddered, all thoughts were overtaken by cacophony; the sky darkened as its bulk rolled past.
The man and dwarf were cussing, frantically trying to bury themselves in leaves and sticks and the shade of a tree as the dragon’s hull sailed by and Irwin knew it wouldn’t be enough, it wouldn’t be enough for the dragon and just then she saw the dragon’s head, now a furlong distant, veer around. It swam over the barren grasslands, back toward them, sniffing the air. This wasn’t the dragon she had seen in her dreams, this was some leal servant of Wutherhand, and that thought alone chilled her, to think that this thing slithering toward them could be inferior to anything.
Near the tree where her friends were struggling to hide, struggling even to stay still—she could see them trembling from here—the massive beast drank deeply of the air.
A malicious grin cracked its face.
And Irwin didn’t think—was she drunk?—she just dropped out of her own safe tree and into plain sight.
“Hello,” she said calmly, really in shock, to the beast. She was about as big as one of its teeth.
“Hello,” it rumbled. A nearby pine toppled under the gravity of its breath.
From beneath the snapped branch, the dwarf’s eyes boggled, met Irwin’s. She knew what he was thinking of doing, and it was stupid. He was young and feckless, but kind; and the man with him far, far younger, also kind, a healer. They had long lives left to live.
“Do you like riddles?” she queried.
“I do,” the dragon grinned. “What kind of tree has two eyes but cannot see?”
Now it was Irwin’s turn to grin.
What if once in a while what I posted were fictionalizations of a DnD campaign I GM? Do you want to know what happens next? Me too.
This made my Witherfingers and Withertoes wiggle with delight!
Uhh...yes!