Oh dragon sovereign, I heard you came from a proud race. How did it feel when you were stripped of your power by Astraline? Beaten and chained you blessed your next reincarnation with your memories, and now you’re here today. Here at the present the humans unknowingly rekindled your old flames.
So, how does it feel being worshiped by your jailer’s descendants? -- Anon Guest
[An: Removed other people's IP from the prompt]
When the world was young, there were Dragons. They ruled and reigned the world worse than the most vainglorious despot you could imagine. It was a time of tyranny for anything not a Dragon.
The worst of them all, tyrant of tyrants, was the Dragon King Harroth the Red. If you didn't accept hir reign, ze would rain fire down on any potential rebellion. Ze was the sort of king that lead to the legends about heroes slaying Dragons. In fact, it was Harroth's first demise that became the stuff of legends.
But that's another story.
The first hero to face Harroth was an Arch-Elf known forever as Astraline. He was the one to find the lost well of magic and begin the process of sharing the font with the world. He was the one to seek out kinder Dragons and strive for them in order to gain their secrets.
All but one.
Astraline was how the world learned about the concave scale, or the confluence point that's only vulnerable when the Dragon in question was charging their weaponised breath. And it was how, eventually, they learned of Harroth's little trick.
Ze'd learned how to reincarnate.
More specifically, ze poured hir memories and experience into an unhatched egg near to hir hoard. Soon, ze was reborn, apparently innocent, but already plotting hir revenge. It took civilisation twenty such re-risings to figure it out.
The last time, they found the egg, and did whatever they could to pause its hatching. And then took it to the furthest place from anywhere intelligent life could ever want to go.
Intelligent life found hir anyway.
The tiny birdfolk had recently figured out how to get metal out of clay. They hadn't figured out what metal was good for, but they had it and they generally used it to show off their skills. The one with the most, and the most colours, could attract all the lovers they could want.
Harroth had never worked with less.
Ze hatched in the midst of a ritual bonfire and blinked in confusion as less than two hundred finch-sized Aviad gasped and began to genuflect. Well. Ze had been a god before. Ze could work with this. Harroth began at easily four times their size, and grew as Dragons did to mountainous proportions.
The people of the Tirruppi islands worked for most of their days to secure enough food for Harroth, with barely time for rest. It didn't take long for them to want to rebel against their new god. But they were tiny, and Harroth was larger than their tallest mountain.
They were tiny, and they were not strong, so they had to use cunning. Guile, wit, and a lot of stealth. It took dozens of them to bring Harroth down to a point where they could strike the final blow.
"Go ahead," growled Harroth. "I will hatch again. Become a new Dragon."
The hero, a little sparrow-like mother of half a dozen, lifted her blade. "And where will you hatch from?"
Too late, Harroth realised that there were no Dragon eggs to breathe hir life's memories into. Too late, ze experienced the horror of hir upcoming death. Too late to remedy the situation. Too late to save hirself.
This was the end of a tyrant. Killed for the sake of others' wellbeing. Ended by a nameless member of the society she loved, not with malice, not with anger, but with necessity. Her legendary blade was melted down and re-forged into a cooking pot, and the people who survived ate Dragon stews made in it.
It helped them all survive until the fish returned and their crops could grow again. Lucky for all of them that Dragon blood and bone made an excellent fertiliser.
[Photo by Marshall Patterson on Unsplash]
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