Chapter 10: Dragon Nest

Korwyn sat quietly in the devastating dark for a little while, calming himself while ensuring that Montoule was comfortably several floors above the dungeons. Then he felt his way around the walls in the utter darkness, building a picture in his head where the corners were and the door, which appeared to be the only gap in the cold solid stone walls. Then he lay down on the rough stone floor, he thought was probably once the surface of the worn down mountain that the castle was built on top of all those years before, as there was no discernible rectangular pattern of flagstones that he could feel in the surface fissures under his sensitive fingertips. His senses appeared heightened by the absence of sight.

Remembering his history of the castle, that he oft heard while sitting on his beloved grandfather’s knee as a young boy, twenty or more Kings of Man had successively called this castle their home. Underneath the foundations there were streams, some of which were mined into by internal wells to haul up fresh water, others were streams about to exit the castle through pipes into rivers downstream and these were used to flush effluents out of the castle. He listened to the vibrations coming through the rock, but felt he could only hear running water near one of the walls, probably an inner wall as he was sure these dungeons were well below the foot of the outer castle walls, the original mountain having a crater at the top rather than a peak, according to the stories he remembered from his adoring grandfather, once the King of this ancient castle.

Moving a couple of strides away from the wall, he concentrated his focused attention in his mind on a fixed point in the floor, even though he couldn’t see it. Then he cast Queen Urmah’s spell to provide enough heat for heating up the food for 1000 men, concentrated on that one singular spot.

Soon, he could feel the heat haze emanating from the floor, gradually the rocky floor began to glow with a red heat, helping to eerily illuminate the walls and roof of his subterranean dungeon, and he tried to focus his attention even harder on that central point. The floor eventually changed colour to white hot heat and the floor began to spit hot molten rock, splashing liquid onto his heatproof dragonskin trews, and a puddle formed on the floor that bubbled and boiled like the lava in a volcano, the roof of the dungeon filling with smoke, although the smoke was contained above the level of the door, so no alarm was yet raised.

He was melting the floor of the dungeon, hoping to find a tunnel containing a water course within the mountain below his cell. Suddenly, a hole in the floor, ringed with molten rock, wide enough for a man to fit down easily, and several feet deep, appeared as the molten rock gave way and Korwyn was able to peer down.

Instead of a stream flowing through a channel below, he found instead the floor of a cave about twelve feet below him. The molten rock had set light to some ancient tricks and sticks lying on the floor of the cave, the flickering light revealing a sight he found almost beyond belief so he hardly believed his eyes.

Even in his limited field of vision he could see what he could only describe as a nest, thickly made of sticks and twigs and lined with dried moss and straw. blackened with age. The nest completely filled the range of his vision from ten or twelve feet above and he could see a couple of huge eggs, each one of which was around half his height, he gauged.

‘Damn,’ he thought, ‘it looks like the castle was built on top of a worn out mountain, over what must’ve been an ancient dragon’s nest.’

Wrapping the heat proof Dragonskin cloak tightly around him, Korwyn dropped down through the hole into the chamber below, not knowing if there was any way out from there or not.

He landed on the molten rock in his Dragonskin boots, which splashed lava this way and that, but without burning Korwyn’s fireproof clothes. He stepped off the molten rock onto what must’ve been an ancient dragon’s nest, a huge nest, the eggs probably been lying there abandoned by their mother dragon, or possibly a tribe of mother dragons, for a thousand years or more.

But what really made Korwyn absolutely speechless, was that almost the whole vast cavern was covered with one huge nest, pile perhaps half a man high in nest material and, poking above in diagonal lines running in all directions were the tops of eggs poking up half as high again. Here and there were many constructed columns and arches which were holding up the weight of the Royal Castle of Llandoryn above. And those ancient builders carefully built the castle around the eggs.

The heat from the molten lava, which had dripped down from the dungeon above, started to hatch one of the eggs, one that was almost immediately below the hole, and Korwyn watched the egg in fascination as first a sharp beak appeared, and then a baby red dragon poked its scarlet head out of the top and regarded him with its cold black eyes as it tilted its head to focus one eye on him all the better. Slowly, the beak opened and a black tongue flicked out and wiped all along the upper, then the lower beak, its beady eye looking him up and down, with firelight dancing in the moist surface of the eyeball. To Korwyn, the act looked as though the dragon was ... hungry and not going to be satisfied with dried out twigs and blackened straw. The dragon chirped at him plaintively, with a high pitched begging cry.

Korwyn automatically felt behind his right with his hand, feeling for his battle-axe, where it should be across his back, nestling comfortably between his shoulder blades, but he had no weapon, no Dwarf sword or dagger either, to defend himself. He was unarmed and at the mercy of the newly hatched and hungry creature.

He stepped back and as he did so, the baby dragon’s thin, almost transparent wings opened and flapped. This raised the tiny creature, about the size of a half-grown wolf, Korwyn thought, until its fearsome talons gripped the broken edge of the egg, the grip causing a crazy cracking of the egg shell surface and making it unstable. Korwyn noticed these details because the molten rock, which had fallen on the very edge of the Dragon’s Nest, had started to set some the ancient dry twigs of the nest alight and flooding the vast chamber with dancing light.

Fearful of the consequences of the heat hatching out more eggs, Korwyn stepped forward to kick the flames out and kick the burning embers away from the hungry edge of the nest. At the same time, the glow from the molten rock and the hole in the ceiling dimmed and the room darkened.

By stepping closer to the baby dragon to kick the flaming sticks, it gave the new-born creature the opportunity to flap its wings and launch itself from the crumbling dragon’s egg and land with its talons first into Korwyn’s chest. The dragon clung on with all four taloned feet, though Korwyn staggered back, wondering why the talons hadn’t mortally pierced his chest. He put his arms down and, as they circled the baby dragon, it released its grip one talon by one talon and settled comfortably into his embracing arms. Korwyn automatically held it without thinking, so it released its other talons and nuzzled its head into Korwyn’s chest with a contented sigh, making tiny adjustments of its position thereupon to improve its level of comfort.

Korwyn clung onto it, not wanting to invoke any upset to the powerful and dangerous infant. Korwyn was surprised at how light in weight it was, but then he reasoned it was a creature of the air and the smallest effort to keep it in the motion of flight was clearly a design imperative. Holding it balanced in one hand, he stroked its head, from which it began to emit a gentle purr. He felt around the creature by stroking, finding its black as coal beak was hard and sharp, no doubt required to punch through the egg shell for release and therefore birth, yet its talons were soft, including the sharp-pointed claws on the end, which were soft and pliable, so while they were strong enough to grip and hold on with a firm grip, they wouldn’t necessarily hurt the nursing mother, if such creatures needed to nurse.

Korwyn had no experience at all of the requirements of baby dragons. Human legends always showed them to be merciless hunters of almost exclusively nubile female virgins of noble birth and keeping them as bait for their preferred diet of young male knights errant.

Korwyn’s only real experience of dragons was the White Dragon who attacked him at Blearn Mountain and the Black Dragon he had tracked down and killed. Only recently he found out that the two dragons were one and the same dragon, but not a real dragon in fact but a Sorceror, disguised in the shape of a dragon of either hue in turn. Korwyn had known enough about dragons to track, kill and skin it, but in fact he knew very little of the life cycle and diets of real dragons.

‘The mother dragon, of course!’ thought Korwyn, ‘I am covered in Dragonskin, I’m the first creature this baby dragon has ever seen, so it thinks I’m its mother!’

As he shook his head from side to side, another thought entered his reasoning, ‘Once a hatchling has found its mother, and satisfied that it is is safe from harm and warm, what it wants next is ... food.’

As if on cue, the tiny dragon lifted its red head and opened its black beak and let out a cry that, in any universal language, meant that now it was safe and warm, it was time for satisfying that other need, hunger.

Korwyn had been given spells another than the spell of fire by the half-Witch, half-Dwarf Queen Grand Mother Urmah, a spell to provide enough food and drink to feed a marching army of a thousand soldiers. He carefully recited the spell, noting the required quantities adjusted to one barrel of milk, one of bread, another of salt beef and a final one of ale, each of which magically appeared before him. He thought of the term magic but Korwyn knew that there was a logic that transcended magic. Korwyn was aware that the barrels were all supplies from a Dwarf wholesaler’s warehouse in Dharibia, purchased and set aside for his army, that could be transported here via the spell and through a portal projected from a device disguised as a button that the Queen Grand Mother had stitched inside his Dragonskin tunic.

The dragon sniffed the air and launched itself off Korwyn’s chest and onto the top of the barrel of milk. It pecked at the lid fairly ineffectively as if uncertain of harming itself. Conditioned to chip at shell, the wooden barrel looked impervious. Korwyn stepped forward to take parental responsibility for the hungry creature and held out a Dragonskin-covered arm. The dragon hopped onto it without a further thought and affectionately nuzzled Korwyn’s neck once more with its head. With the other arm Korwyn punched down through the wooden staves at the butt end and opened up the end with a fountain of milk shooting in the air. With a cry which Korwyn sensed was one of joy, the baby dragon flapped and flew to the rim of the cask and dipped in its beak and drank greedily at the liquid, lifting its head occasionally for breath and a look around of reassurance that it had not been abandoned by its adopted ‘parent’.

In a very short period, the baby dragon leaned over so much to reach the bottom, that it fell in. Korwyn rushed back from where he had been holding a burning brand made from the sticks and straw for light and checking the edges of the chamber, but had found no way out of this nest chamber. The baby red dragon, which Korwyn now called ‘Red’, was sitting in a puddle at the bottom of the cask but finding it difficult to get its beak deep enough to drink any more. It looked up at Korwyn and whimpered, which appeared to be a plea to him to help it out, there not being enough room to open up its wings.

“What am I going to do with you, Red?” Korwyn shook his head and spoke aloud even though there was no-one to answer. “I’ve had a couple of dogs and even a litter of kittens once, but was never into falconry so I’ve never had a flying pet before.”

With a chuckle, which the baby immediately attempted to imitate, Korwyn pulled the baby creature out and sat it on its four legs on the rim of the cask, straddling the nearly empty vessel. Korwyn noticed the creature was much heavier and, where it sat on the cask, looked bigger than it was the last time it sat there only half a dozen minutes earlier.

After another nuzzle into the chest of Korwyn for a moment, it hopped to the next cask and waited there patiently for Korwyn to open it. Korwyn obliged and this one was full of bread in the form of dry biscuit. The baby dragon consumed as much bread as it could manage, Korwyn estimated it had eaten about a fifth of a barrel. Still not satisfied, the dragon hopped to the next and then the last. It opened its beak and cried begging for each barrel in turn to be opened. This one did contain the meat, most of it unidentifiable as to species, but boiled to reduce the fat and salted down so that it would last for months sealed up within the cask. Korwyn once more did its bidding and opened it up, and the Dragon tucked in. Now in a playful mood, the baby dragon tossed meaty morsels in the air and caught them before they landed. Even though the light from the rough torch that Korwyn has fashioned wasn’t that bright, the dragon could clearly see well in the gloom.

Korwyn chucked, and Red again chuckled in response with a throaty chuckle, imitating Korwyn as best it could. Korwyn, dragon killer and slayer of the Black Dragon of Hawkshart, felt a twinge of affection for the friendly and gentle baby dragon. Inevitably it wanted the ale butt stove in and it happily washed down about a fifth or so of the contents of the salted meat cask with a few mouthfuls of ale.

By now, the dragon had grown from the size of a small wolf to the size of a small horse, similar in size to one of the ponies that the Dwarves ride. It was too big to perch on Korwyn’s arm.

Korwyn wondered, if Red kept on growing, he’d be trapped down here in this sealed chamber forever. Clearly the only way out was the way they came in, but it was too far to jump for Korwyn, even precariously piling the four barrels one on top of the other, they would still not be high enough for him to reach, but could Red fly through that hole on his own? If so, he needed to do it soon before he outgrew the size of the hole. After that, Red would still be trapped in the dungeon, but Korwyn thought, what would a gaoler do faced with an unexpected dragon?

Korwyn tried to communicate through mime that Red was to fly through the hole, but it just looked at him as if he was trying to amuse it by flapping his wingless arms about. In the end, Korwyn grabbed a hunk of meat from the meat cask and threw it up through the hole.

The Red Dragon, perfectly gracefully, flew through the hole and flew straight back down again with the meat in its talons.

“Ha! Ha!” echoed an eerie voice in the nest, coming from behind Korwyn.

Korwyn whirled around, but there was no-one there. He thought he saw a movement in his peripheral vision, but as he turned whatever it was turned with him.

The laughter returned, deep and echoey, “Ha! Ha! Mortal Man, you are so funny, but stop spinning or you’ll be too dizzy to appreciate what I can do for you!”

“What will you do for me and ... why?”

“Ah, Man. So typical of your species, always wants to know the why and the how and the reason for everything but can never recognise what simply ‘is’ or the possibilities of working with or alongside whatever simply ‘is’.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“I know, but you are not alone among Men in that!” the echo continued to chuckle.

The direction of the voice was indeterminate, Korwyn realised.

“What are you?” Korwyn asked the voice.

“You mean ‘Whom are you?’ don’t you?”

“I know what I mean, Stranger. Who, what and where are you, why and how are you talking to me?”

“My name is unimportant, it doesn’t even translate at all well to your language. I am a Spirit, and my bones were decayed to dust long, long ago. How I am speaking to you is not sound through your ears but my translated words forming in your brain just as if you have ‘heard’ me through your ears. As for where I am, it is where you don’t want to be yet and why would you? Only the Dead live alongside me in a world all of our own. And your question ‘Why you?’ is, actually quite an interesting one, I admit, for three reasons. The first and second reasons are because my granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter together have requested me to help you, and third, I feel inclined to do so myself because of the rather regrettable behaviour of my only begotten son.”

“Do I know your granddaughter or your other two relatives, Spirit?”

“You do indeed, and my granddaughter and great-great-granddaughter do hold you in very high esteem, Lord Korwyn, at least all of those of my relatives that yet live do.”

“And your son, your only son, he was from Yandor?” asked Korwyn.

“That was his original Manor, Lord of Man, a humble but comfortable place where I found much happiness for all the many years I lived there minding my own business, but he was greedy, my son wanted more, the whole world if he could get his hands on it, but he was stopped in his ambitions by, of all peoples, a Man ... you.”

“So, I assume then that you know what happened to your son at my hand?”

“Indeed I do, and I recognise too that you were quite justified in what you did to him. By any rules of war, it was a fair fight, his overwhelming size and power being more than matched by your guile and epic perseverance. The Spirit of my son is being punished for his abominable transgressions, even now as we speak, and probably will be for the rest of eternity, except, considering he transformed into a dragon and slept in a river of molten lava for five years below Blearn Mount, I’m not sure the punishment he receives in the Afterlife quite falls within the category of punishment, but no matter, I am here for you, not my son’s paying for his abominable crimes.”

“I can imagine not, Spirit!” Korwyn agreed, “So, how can I get this playful red dragon to take me up through to the dungeon? I feel it is my only way out.”

“You are right Korwyn, this nest is completely sealed off by the castle above. The only way out is up. But then you have already declared to yourself how you are going to get out.”

“I have?” Korwyn was puzzled, but then the Red Dragon baby nudged him strongly, almost knocking him off his feet, and flapped his wings around the Man the dragon now considered was its parent, wanting to play more games.

Realisation set in, “Of course!” Korwyn exclaimed, “he wants to play!”

Korwyn fetched another hunk of meat from the barrel and walked over to a point directly under the hole in the ceiling above. The Red Dragon followed him like a puppy. Crouching down, Korwyn grabbed one of the dragon’s feet and then tossed the hunk of meat up through the hole. Then Red spread its wings and, with a couple of flaps of those leathery wings, as well as pushing up with its four powerful legs against the rocky floor, Red flew up, through the hole into the dungeon from which Korwyn came, taking Korwyn with him, almost effortlessly.