The Dragon Attacks!

I pushed the intercom button again.
“Who’s asking?”
“We’ve got reports of a gas leak in the area, Mr. Scott. This is Mr. Scott, isn’t it?”
“And who are you?”
“I’m with the gas company, sir.”
“Sure you are,” I said. “There’s no gas leak here, so keep moving.”
“I can’t do that. I’ve got to have you sign this form first.”
His buddies were in the back door by that time, although I didn’t figure that out until later. Two of them, armed with the same gun that I was carrying, creeping through my kitchen door, while I was yakking on an intercom. It’s embarrassing to look back on. I was lucky to live through it. If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Alderton, I wouldn’t be telling this story.
She backed into the kitchen carrying a wad of kitchen towels and surprised the two just as they passed the kitchen table. Mrs. A is too old to look dangerous. So when she turned to face them, the first, a round-faced little prick whose name we never did find out, took his time raising his pistol to plug her.
I heard the shot from the study- from her gun, not his. She fired through the stack of towels and caught him clean in the face with a round. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone take a bullet in the face, and I don’t know if I even want to tell you about it, so let me just say that his head sprayed a lot of brain and blood all over my kitchen.
She turned and shot the other guy in the throat. Same result. Later, she told me that he was too pretty to shoot in the face. I’ve never asked Mrs. Alderton about her sex life. At sixty-eight years old, I guess it’s her call whether she wants to check out a guy before she pulls the trigger.
excerpted from “Dead Wait,” by Ferrel D. Moore

The rush of wind from the dragon’s wings as it rears back mid-air flattens me against the earth, expelling the breath from my lungs as if I have been struck on the chest with a hammer. My vision blends with the sight of giant talons, bright black and curved to terrifying points. Pearlescent scales flex and slide together and apart with each breath the dragon takes. The size of the creature is beyond my ability to comprehend- it is hovering directly over me and the very sky is lost behind its body.
Steaming acrid mists roll across everything and I have no hope of finding you. A cry of dragon rage fills the day and my body is racked by the sound as though I am inside a giant ball rolling down a mountainside. I scream your name, but all is lost in the rolling thunder of the monster’s anger.
Fear propels me in a sideways roll, and a black talon the size of my entire body slices the ground a hand’s width from where I just lay. My sweating palms are still pressed to my head and I have kept them there even while rolling to protect my ears. But they are wet, and when the dragon’s roar dies down, I take them away and see that one of them is red with my own blood.
Screams pierce the hot mist as the dragon’s talons cut the ground. I try to get to my knees to find you but feel rather than see a giant whip snap at me and I drop to the ground again and cover my head. The sharp flexing tail whips past me and I feel one of its spiked points slip between the hairs on the back of my head. I push my face into the dirt as hard as I can and cry out your name.
The sound of the platform splintering under the impact of the dragon’s tail causes me to pull myself and run toward that noise. I take only two steps when the dragon glides overhead and up enough that I can see the village. I see my heavy friend cut in half mid-stride as the Dragon of Separation screeches out a sound so damning that I can hardly bear to hear it and cuts him in half with its giant sword.
With the sound of a mountain rockslide it drops to the earth and crushes the Prophet Andiron with the hilt. Meat and blood explodes out the side of Andiron’s body as he is flattened before my eyes to the height of a blade of grass.
“Run,” I scream at everyone I see, turning my head this way and that and shouting it over and again.
A woman is crying out for mercy when the Dragon of Separation cleaves her in two pieces from head to toe with a slice of his sword. I smell the crisp, cooked smell of her singed, blistering flesh as the fiery blade divides her.
A flap of the dragon’s wings and I am sent rolling through blood smeared grass and carnage. I get to my knees and throw up with such force that I fear that I have expelled my stomach through my mouth. With my sleeve I rub my face dry of the offense and look up to find you. I cannot bear the thought of your cleaved body in the platform’s rubble, but I can bear still less having you left alone in the open.
“Damn you,” I cry. I stand, turn toward the great beast and shake my fists plaintively. I have no weapon to defend myself against such a monster.
The Dragon of Separation stalks the village it has flattened and doused with writer’s blood. The huts and stalls are splintered and destroyed like the rude platform where you sat with the great Ferdinand.
At the sound of my railings, the dragon turns its long neck my way and its luminescent eyes find mine. It snorts a billowing cloud of hot mist and I cough and turn my head to save my sight. When the mist has dissipated, I look back and see that every man and woman in the village is dead. I see an arm ripped loose from some poor soul and hanging in a tree. A headless corpse lays in a patch of yellow and blue wildflowers, and if I had fluid left in my stomach, I would be sick again.
The dragon is taking great, ponderous steps toward a walled pen near the edge of the village, and I feel the ground shake with its every movement. Its muscles roll like waves in a storm across its broad and powerful back. Its mighty wings are poised over its body, ready to take flight in an instant to attack from the air.
Where is it going? I wonder.
The image of the Sword of Commerce rises in my mind like a swimmer breaking water to take in life-giving air. I turn and run toward the rubble, keep my eyes downcast to avoid seeing your body. But I do not see you. Instead, I see only the formerly great Ferdinand, his head cut off clean and cauterized at the neck stump by the dragon’s fiery blade. I am about to turn away in despair when I see its hilt sticking out from beneath broken boards.
A sudden explosion overhead causes me to jerk my head upward, but I see that it is merely lightning setting the sky on fire with its power and glory. The sky has erupted like a festering boil and I fear that we have somehow angered the heavens themselves.
The dragon has its back to me, facing the walled enclosure called the Writer’s Pit. I fear the woman trapped at its bottom will be dead any moment if I do not take up the Sword of Commerce and save her and avenge you. The air is filled with the stench of blood and death and I am for a moment too overwhelmed to move.
When I finally reach for the sword, I notice Shrift lying a short way from me. A splintered board sticks out his mouth and scarlet-black soaks his clothes. I shudder and look down, grab the Sword of Commerce, and heft it before me. Its weight feels like power and as I see it shine, I feel powerful.
But I take only one step toward it when you call out my name. Shocked, I turn to find you coming toward me from behind.
“You’re alive,” I say. I am shaking so badly I almost drop the sword.
“Put it down,” you tell me.
“But we have to save the woman in the Pit,” I say desperately.
“Look,” you say, and extend a finger.
I turn to see the dragon lifting the red-haired women from the Pit. She is not screaming, and I think she has fainted til the dragon places her gently on the ground and she stands straight.
“Run,” I scream.
I start out again, but I have not made a single stride when you grab hold of my sleeve and will not let go.
“It will eat her,” I say.
“Look,” you say again.
The moment is all for me, as I am lost once again in the wise beauty of your face. You stroke my cheek and turn my face toward the Pit. The Dragon of Separation is reared back on its hind legs, its sword held before it, its wing spread the size of a ship’s sail to either side of it. The red-haired woman is walking toward us. The dragon’s eyes are like looking into twin suns, but I can feel that it knows me, that it knows us. I feel the presence of its fiery sword, and in the dragon’s eyes, I think now that I know what it is for, and why the Dragon of Separation carries it.
The dragon voices a sound more like a single elegant trumpet’s note, and it thrusts itself upward, gently flapping its wings at first, then harder and harder until once again the heavens above are filled with the reverberations of its flight. I follow path until it grows to be nothing more than a speck in the sky, which has begun to clear, its mood sympathetic to that of the dragon.
As the red-haired woman joins us, I see that the bloody dead bodies around us are disappearing before our eyes. Confused, I turn to you for strength. You are smiling.
“No one has died here today,” you say.
“But,” I stutter, “but Ferdinand, Andiron, and Shrift are dead.”
When I look around to show their bodies to you, they are no longer there. The platform is still shattered. Trees and huts are still destroyed. But there are simply no bodies anywhere.
I am about to ask if you if this was just another dream-vision, when I realize that I still hold the Sword of Commerce, clutched tightly in my hands.
“Throw it away,” you tell me gently. “We have no need of it.”
“But the City of Writer’s Gold,” I protest. “How will we ever get in? And how will you ever have endless admirers to flatter you with their praise?”
It is the red-haired woman who answers. I will tell you more of her later, but for now I will tell you what she said to us both. She said: “We have no need of either. If we do, we are no longer writers or storytellers. The Dragons of Creativity are jealous guardians, my friends, and if we do not nurture and grow our stories as if they were precious— if we think instead of wealth and admiration— then the Dragons of Creativity will take them away.”
So now we are three writers on our way to find the Fourth Dragon, the Dragon of Conjunction. The Dragon of Conjunction is the Dragon that we writers fear most. It is sometimes known in stories told by the wise people as The Dragon of Condensed Starlight or The Dragon of Sacred Marriage. As we walk along together, it disturbs me somewhat that I will face the Dragon of Sacred Marriage with two women instead of one. But the Dragon will decide if this is good or not.
Behind us, discarded on the ground like a broken fence-post, lies the Sword of Commerce.