Freakish Fatherhood of Milen

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The mist rose from it in dancing billows and puffs, easily seen across the flat expanse half a mile away. This suggested the dragons were currently there. With luck they would all be hibernating, packed together for warmth.

Milen paused in his trek through the knee-deep snow and dropped his backpack on the sled he had been pulling, loaded with the rest of his supplies. Then he pulled out and assembled a shovel. The fresh snowfall was light, not yet iced. It was easy to shift. The hard-packed desert ground beneath the snow required much more strength to crack. As his human muscles strained, he imagined how handy it might have been to have an earth elemental or magic user here, if he could have found any foolish enough to join him. Either one would make short work of digging the subterranean cave he needed. Even Anishi would have been able to help, if it pleased her, and she brought other advantages as well.

Thoughts of his wife’s sweet curves, teasing green eyes, and sharp teeth filled Milen's body with welcomed warmth and lent his movements more vigor. If she were here now, she would be watching him with a pretense of boredom, but he knew her gaze would be fixed on his flexing muscles.

Milen was in his early 30’s, strong, well-toned, and shaped exactly as Anishi liked best, or so she often told him, though she giggled at his sparce, human body hair and scowled when he grew a beard. Only the dark curls on his head pleased her. She loved playing with them, pulling them straight then letting them spring back, or wetting them until they were flattened by the weight of the water, then watching, fascinated, as they changed their shape back to silky spirals as they dried. His brown skin was covered in small scars, many scratches and bites – Anishi’s marks – but each one had been formed with a pleasure so intense that he was glad for the memories the scars invoked.

In his mind, he could almost hear Anishi suggesting he strip down to bare skin to make his movements easier, denying any other reason for him to be almost naked in front of her, and unaware of how the snow would freeze him. He did not have a Katish’s pelt to insulate him from the cold. As the sun started to set, however, her nocturnal blood would rise, shifting her from her languid, careless state during the day to the graceful, alert, huntress at night – and knowing her, he would be her first hunt.

Milen imagined how she would start to fidget, then pace. She would get irritated with him, complaining about how slow he was at his task, but she would be drawn to him more and more. As the sun finally disappeared below the horizon, she would no longer be able to resist the pull. Her hands would need to stroke his skin. Her face would press against the crook where his neck met his shoulder, so she could breathe in his scent, while her sleek body would rub against his back, her soft, golden fur tickling him wherever she had succeeded in getting him to remove his clothing. She would begin to kiss him, with gentle nips, rising up the side of his throat toward his jaw, then onto his ear, which she would lick with her rough tongue until he shivered with desire.

Milen grew aroused by his own imagination of Anishi. He longed to pause in his efforts and close his eyes to render the memory of her more vivid. If she were really here, however, he would have to resist her. He would not be able to push her away – he knew better than to anger a Katish, even one in love with him – but he would be focusing on counting to 1000 in all the languages he knew, or reciting to himself the elements of the earth – anything to render himself unresponsive to her as he continued at his task. When she finally got demanding enough to insist on his attention, he would promise to serve her every desire as soon as his task was finished, stressing the vital importance of getting this job done. Then, and only then, would she finish it for him with a swift, silent spell – and she would include a large bed, deep inside the earth, complete with silky sheets and blankets, so he could keep his promise to her.

After they had played together to their mutual satisfaction, she would leave him dozing while she hunted. He would wake up in the morning with her curled beside him, asleep, and a pile of gutted, stripped carcasses waiting for him to finish butchering and cook for their breakfast. When the scent of roasted meat woke her up, she would report to him, between her ravenous tearing and devouring of her breakfast, everything she had noticed during her nighttime prowl, which was usually far more than he needed to know. With her night vision and phenomenal hearing, she rarely missed anything at all.

He sighed, wishing he had brought her. She was pregnant, however, with their first litter, and this job was far too dangerous to risk her and their kits. It had been too dangerous for her to agree to let him go, but he had snuck out anyway, mid-day as she napped, determined to take the chance. He was soon to be a family man, with an unknown number of new mouths to feed. The pay for this job was too good to pass up. Besides, the wiz in their village had said he knew a spell to help with their bi-species kits, turning them to shifters instead of merely mixed “mutts,” who would be barely tolerated by either the Katish or the humans. The only ingredient the wiz lacked for the spell was a dragon egg. One egg for the spell, one egg as payment for the wiz, and the rest of the eggs that he could snatch would go to the Sorstrum, who demanded three of them, minimum, plus exponentially more pay the more Milen provided. Even if he could get away with only five eggs, he and his family could be wealthy for years, and their kits would be able to hide their mixed heritage as necessary to build happy, prosperous lives. It was worth the risk.

He worked through the night and the following three days, digging deep and carefully shaping the cave. By the following sunset he had, at last, finished the cave to his satisfaction and melted a gently inclined path from the mouth of his underground hideout to the edge of the Dragon Valley, leaving a layer of slick ice that would soon be hidden by snow. Luckily, nothing had stirred in the valley all the while he had worked. It was mid-Winter, the climax of the dragon’s hibernation, but there was still a risk the giant beasts would awaken if he wasn’t very careful and quiet.

As the sky darkened, the warm mist rising from the Valley refracted the moonlight. There was something in Dragon Dream Mist that glistened softly during the day, hidden by the bright sun and reflecting snow, but glowed with sparkling incandescence in the moonlit night. Milen had come to believe that every dragon had its own color, represented in the mist, so he watched intently while the darkness swelled around him. He was hoping for ten or less colors, but as the night filled with the dancing sparks, circling, spiraling, and playing with each other, he lost count of all the different ones. It was an incredible display, and he might have enjoyed this rare and wondrous sight, had it not meant his job was even more dangerous than he had imagined. While he watched more colors than he had believed he would ever see in one place before, while knowing there were more, still, beyond his ability to see, he suspected that he should have listened to Anishi and passed on this job. He was here now, however, with the cave already dug. He only hoped he would live to praise his wife’s wisdom to her in person. It might help appease her anger when...if...he was able to return.

He waited until almost noon the next day, trusting to the folk tales that Dragons were inclined to be nocturnal. It was difficult to tell if that belief was true. He had encountered dragons before, both during nights and days, and not noticed any difference in their behavior because of the time of day. Also, since they were hibernating anyway, did it matter if they were more nocturnal? If nothing else, however, the sunlight might help him see better as he ventured into their Valley. He’d take whatever advantage he could get.

The morning he set out, he wore a suit of densely woven, pliable threads formed from the sap of a special tree, boiled and dried. It was thick in most places, but woven thin at his joints for maximum agility. It came up over his head, covering most of his face, with a see-through section over his eyes and hooded breathing passages. This, and the matching bag, were supposedly fireproof, temporarily. It had cost him all their savings to buy, and he did not expect the suit or bag to survive for another use. He only hoped it would buy him enough extra seconds to survive.

While walking toward the Dragon Valley, he torched, again, the ice road he had made, making sure the bottom layer of solid ice was topped with a new layer of water to make it extra slick. At the end of the path, a few feet from the edge, he had planted a couple posts. He tested them for strength, to see if the ice had hardened strongly enough to trust. So close to the valley, it was much warmer than it had been where he had dug his cave, however, and the ice had not firmed enough to please him. He was anxious now and eager to have this task done, whatever would happen with it, so he decided to let one post stay loose, and hammered, as quietly as possible, the other one deeper into the ground. To the weakest post he now tied his sled, a large, rounded disk. To the firmer post he fixed a makeshift pulley with a pile of heavy stones tied in a bundle, and a strong, thick rope for climbing. The climbing rope, and one attached to the bundle of stones, both went over the edge, into the valley, while he held his breath, listening for any response. He thought he could hear among the steady hisses of shifting bodies, a grunt or two, and many huffs and sighs of sleepers’ breathes, but nothing seemed to startle. Could he have been so lucky that his climbing rope had reached the bottom but not hit a dragon?

Cautiously peering over the edge, into the depths below, he could make out the distant shapes on the floor, glistening in the sunlight. More dragons than he had ever seen before lay entwined with each other, one on top of another, at least in part, writhing slowly as if constantly seeking better positions while they slept. He watched for a long time, fascinated. No, it wasn’t discomfort that kept them shifting, he decided, but the desire to keep the sensation of the other bodies fresh against their thick skins. During warmer weather many breeds of dragons preferred to be solitary, but during the vulnerability of winter hibernation, these breeds, at least, seemed to crave the comfort of other dragons.

Milen scanned the carpet of layered, slithering bodies, searching for the communal clutch of eggs. The eggs would either be in the middle, surrounded by the parents, or else hidden by the Valley’s side where they would be less vulnerable to something swooping in from above. The dragons would want them hot and steamy on all sides, but not covered by anything. The eggs needed the sunlight and starlight to develop properly. All he saw, stretched for miles, however, were hatched dragons of different breeds, from the size of horses to the size of large hills. They were of all kinds of patterns and colors, some looking scaled like fish or snakes, while others looked as if they had painted skins. There were more breeds below than Milen could identify, but for all his searching, he could find no eggs. He could see all the way across the Valley clearly enough to know the clutch wasn’t on that side either.

The Valley was long, almost more a canyon than a valley, stretching on either side of where he was for miles, well beyond his view. He had been assured that the egg clutch were always toward the middle, but it could be further down in one direction or the other. It would be safest to take his time creeping beside the edge of the Valley, searching first in one direction, praying that none of the dragons woke enough to notice him. Then, if he still hadn’t found the clutch, it would be necessary to backtrack and spend days going in the other direction. All during that time, all it would take was a bad turn of the wind carrying his scent to the dragons below to incur his certain death. Still, it would be safer…but there was only this brief period, mid-winter, when the dragons were most deeply asleep and the eggs not yet developed enough to be useless for those who chose to eat them. A more thorough search to the far ends of the Valley could take up to 48 days if his first direction proved fruitless. Unless he found the clutch within the next 10 days and found a way to dig a new cave wherever they were, he had failed his mission. All the money, time and effort he had spent preparing for it would be wasted, with nothing to salvage from this venture. He would have nothing to feed his family. Worse, he would have to wait another year to steal an egg for the spell for his children, and by then it might be too late for the spell to work on them. It had to be cast while they were still unborn for the best chance of success. He needed the eggs now.

Looking again, Milen saw there was one spot, below him and a little to his right where an overhang hid the Valley floor from his view. He might as well check it out. He tensed at the thought of dropping into a dragon den on a guess, but, before he could think too much about it and paralyze himself with fear, he took a deep breath and did exactly that.

His suit insulated him from the temperatures around him, but the breath he drew, as his hands slid on the rope, while his feet ran down the steep side of the Valley, quickly grew hotter and wetter, almost choking him with all its moisture. He tasted a metallic tang as it passed through his mouth. Meanwhile his brain played, over and over, the image of him sliding down a molten sword just placed on a blacksmith’s anvil, awaiting the hammer.

“I’m not scared, just excited,” he told himself. “What a thrill! Who else has ever done this and survived?”

“Survived. That’s the issue,” his terrified mind responded.

“I’ll survive,” he assured himself. “I’m too pretty to die.”

He chuckled under his breath at the stupidity of that remark – but chuckling was better than screaming or crying.

He angled his steps diagonally, toward the overhang. There, at the bottom, as his body was half hurling, half falling, he saw a female Kangfang curled on the ground, wedged beside the wall, her deep brown speckled pattern rendering her invisible until he was practically on top of her. On instinct, alone, he pushed off the wall and swung out, hoping to find a bit of ground on which to land. His left foot barely missed her snout, but there was space for the ball of it, only, to connect to the earth. He could smell the stench of her breath while he flailed with his free arm, struggling to find his balance, and some part of the dragon beside her moved to rub against his leg. There was no time to think about that. Even as he was landing there, he was looking for his next step, needing to use his momentum to help him jump and swing across the bodies. There it was, a miniscule spot of earth visible on the other side of the Kangfang’s head. Gripping his rope, he jumped up, then used the rope to swing him over. Right ball landed this time, and the next place to step would be…

Three more jumps and he saw the clutch on a bare, charred patch next to the side of the Dragon Valley. The Valley wall swelled, like a pregnant woman’s belly, hiding the clutch from the view directly above, but from below one had only to look up and out, at a slight angle, to feel the rays of the mid-day sun. It was the perfect place for the clutch, and the dragons had left a wide open space around the eggs to separate them from the parents’ sleeping forms.

Quickly Milen began scooping the nearest eggs into his bag. They were varying sizes and colors, from a large bird’s egg size, as big as his palm, to the size of a sleeping pony, but they all seemed more like firm leather sacks than like fragile birds’ eggs. Even focusing on the small ones, they were too big for him to fit more than 8 into his sack. As he straightened to head back, however, one last egg, a deep maroon one with golden flecks, resting a few feet away, caught his eye. On impulse he carefully cleared a pathway through the clutch until he could reach it. It was a smaller one, only slightly bigger than his hand, but still too large to fit into his filled bag. He should leave it, he told himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. Instead, he loosened his suit until he made just enough of an opening at the collar, beneath his hood to tuck the egg into it, wedged by his suit against his chest.

The egg was hotter than he expected. It sizzled against his skin, making him grimace from the pain. He began to reach for it again to pull it out and leave it, but a shifting sound, different from the rest, caught his attention. Turning toward the closest dragon to the clutch, a massive female with skin that flowed in colors between blue and aqua, he watched, frozen, as she lifted her wedge-shaped head and turned it partway toward him.

“Go to sleep. Go back to sleep,” he silently prayed.

She opened her mouth – what would look like a yawn to a human. Milen knew enough, however, to know she was tasting and smelling the air. His suit was insulated, hiding his scent, so it didn’t smell like human, but it didn’t smell like anything that belonged in the valley, either, and he had opened it to slip in the egg – had that been enough to give him away?

He had two choices: freeze and hope she decided to return to her hibernation, or run, now, before she was fully awake.

Before he was even aware of making a choice, he had shouldered his bag and tugged on the second rope, pulling the bundle of stones over the edge of the Valley brim. As they fell, they pulled down the other side of the rope, to which he held, and lifted him, fast. The blue dragon’s head snapped toward him, her eyes opened, showing a swirling, hypnotic pattern as she began to rise to her feet and stretch her wings. He closed his eyes against that view, afraid of being entranced and frozen, as he shot up toward the desert surface. Then he heard another dragon roar an angry protest – probably as the bundle of stones hit him and woke him up, too. Milen’s plan wasn’t perfect, but by the time the stones hit the dragon at the bottom, he was at the top, scrambling over the lip of the Valley and hurling his bag and himself onto the metal disk awaiting him.

One tug was all it should have taken to unfasten the sled from the post, but the post was so wobbly, it came away with the rope, bouncing behind. He was sledding down his icy path before he had fully set himself, so he was also bouncing behind his sled while he gripped it, holding on as tightly as he could, while trying to pull his trailing body up without slowing it down. Behind him, Milen could hear the tornado tumult of dragon wings taking to the air – at least two, probably more, he guessed. He dared not look. All he could think about was the egg against his chest, however. It had slid down and was now searing into his flesh just above his heart. His survival depended on him clinging to the disk, and the disk moving at top speed into his cave, but his mind was praying for that egg, wishing it gone while, simultaneously, hoping he was not crushing it as he lay practically on top of it.

Not all dragons breath fire. Some favored acid, others poison, still others gasses of various sorts, and there were some, rare dragons, who zapped with lightening. Some blasted nothing at all, but most mature dragons were big enough, with nightmarishly sharp teeth and claws, and wings capable of blowing his tiny human body crashing into whatever was around, that they had a luxury of choice for how to kill him as long as he was above ground. His only advantage was their poor vision verses his speed. They could hear him and smell him, but by the time they located him he would, hopefully, be far away.

A blast of flame engulfed him as he neared the mouth of his cave. He was almost disappointed that it was an attack by such a common, fire-breathing dragon, but, although his suit and bag were smoldering on his body by the end of the blast, they had done their job and saved his life.

He whooshed into his cave, his sled crashing to a stop as it collided with his first fire wall, just as another blast followed him in. Grabbing the remains of his bag, he ducked behind the firewall, watching as the flame rushed past him. Then he ran to the left, deeper, toward the middle of his cave. Here he had dug a chamber, at the cave's deepest point. He had created multiple angled vents in the ceiling of this chamber, leading out to the air above. The vents were angled enough so that fire or gas blown into the vents would be blocked by the earth and rebound, and anything blown from either entrance of the cave, front or back, that made it past his fire blocks, would quickly rise and exit. All he had to do now was stay low, still and silent, until the dragons went back to sleep

He left the rest of the eggs in the remnants of his bag, to help mask their scent. He wanted to keep his scent shielded as much as possible within his suit as well, but he had to get the last egg out, away from his skin. He couldn’t stand the burning any longer. He covered himself with a blanket and reached inside the opening near his chin. As he grabbed the egg he felt it burn his fingers, forcing him to let it go. The gloves of the suit had disintegrated completely in the last blast, he realized, leaving his fingers bare. He ripped the remnants of his suit, instead, to let the egg fall on the ground in front of him.

His chest still felt on fire, even as the egg lay at his knees, no longer touching him. The places where it had pressed against his skin were already blistering. He had brought burn salve, of course. It was buried with the rest of his supplies. For the moment, however, with the angry dragons stomping and huffing on the desert floor above him, it seemed better to stay still and wait.

The egg on the floor below him glowed. He threw a blanket over it and himself, forming a kind of tent, so he could watch the egg but, hopefully, hide its light and scent. It definitely had heat rolling off of it, warming the space beneath the blanket. It was too dark, and the egg was now too bright, for him to see its color, but he could see the glowing orb clearly enough as it started to deform, with strange bumps moving through it, making it look less and less round. There was a dark liquid oozing out of it. Had he cracked it? It hadn’t seemed so fragile, but it had been smashed beneath his body. Was it deflating as its contents oozed into the dirt? But, no, it seemed almost to be expanding again. All of a sudden something sharp, from inside the egg, pierced it. It looked as if a black thorn had suddenly sprouted. He heard a ripping sound and watched as the thorn hooked the egg and tore a chunk from its skin, then another, and another, until a little head pushed its way through and opened its tiny beak to scent the air.

“Shit,” he thought to himself. The egg was too old. Were the other eggs as well? They shouldn’t be hatching until after spring thaw, but here it was, useless for eating or using in spells. All that work, all that risk, and he had failed after all.

The new hatched dragon turned toward him and opened its tiny eyes. They caught Milen’s gaze, swirling and changing in such fascinating patterns that he couldn’t look away. Without intending to, Milen drew nearer, staring, while his baby dragon gazed back, drinking in the view of him. Meanwhile, her teeth and claws tore frantically at the rest of the eggshell, until she had ripped a big enough opening to squeeze herself out. She collapsed onto the ground, seemingly exhausted, but then forced herself up and dragged herself toward him, mewing plaintively. She wanted him to pick her up. Milen knew that as clearly as if she had spoken to him.

He made a cradle of his hands and scooped her up in them, pulling her back toward his bare chest, which was still hot and raw from the scorch of her egg. In his hands she rolled onto her wings, baring her tummy, her head tilting from one side to the other as she contemplated him. Then, suddenly, she lunged at his chest and bit him hard in the center of his blisters. As the blood began flowing from the wound, she lapped it up, slurping loudly.

Milen watched her, frozen in horror, uncomprehending. Was she eating him? Might she be venomous? He couldn’t sense a poison but, maybe, he would feel it later. If she had poisoned him, however, why was she drinking his tainted blood? That made no sense to him. Never once, as he watched her, did he think to stop her.

At last, satiated, her tummy round and full of his blood, she lay back down in his hands, curled into a ball, and fell asleep.

Milen stared at her as she lay, so trusting, in his palm, while his fingers and thumbs took turns stroking her softly. She felt smooth, no scales. He could sense a pattern on her skin, but he couldn’t see it properly in the dark, especially since the eggshell’s light had dimmed to nothing after she had left it behind.

Forgotten now were the dragons outside his cave, though he could still hear them and feel the heat, even so far below ground, as they scorched the area above and around, looking for him. All his attention was on this tiny miracle in his hands. She seemed beyond beautiful, and more precious to him than his own life. She was his and he was hers now. He tried to tell himself he was merely curious, but he felt filled with something much more than he had ever felt before. Was this what it felt like to be a father?

“Shit,” he thought again. How was Anishi going to deal with this new, badly timed addition to their family? She would be angry, but she would have to accept the little dragon, because he knew there was no way he could leave her behind.