Draka

“Your hoard has grown!” My own, human voice purred in my ear as I lay down, resting my head on my treasures. I smiled. I had thought that this might happen. “A second minor threshold has been reached. How will you increase your power?”

This was different from what the humans had described. They got only vague sensations. I got a voice spelling things out for me.

“Strength, to overwhelm your enemies. Fortitude, to shrug off harm. Physical Greatness, to increase the power of your body in all ways, at a cost. Stealth, to strike unseen. Cunning, to plot and see through the schemes of others. Choose!”

Huh. Same choices as last time, except Tongues had been replaced with a new one. Knowing that it would only be moments before the pain came, I went with my gut. I had almost died against the gremlin chief. “Fortitude!” I whispered into the darkness. The dragon inside me rumbled with contentment, and as it did I felt a crawling sensation over every part of my body, not only my skin but my eyes and even the inside of my mouth. It lingered, then passed. I guessed my skin must have changed in some way, but I couldn’t tell in the darkness.

“Good,” the dragon whispered with obvious pleasure. “A third minor threshold has been reached. How will you increase your power?”

This was not something I had expected. I must have been very close to the second threshold, and barely made it over the third one. That was great!

“Strength, to overwhelm your enemies. Greater Fortitude, to weather all but the mightiest blows. Physical greatness, to increase the power of your body in all ways, at a cost. Stealth, to strike unseen. Cunning, to plot and see through the schemes of others. Choose!”

Okay, think fast, I told myself. I’d just picked Fortitude. Strength and Greatness? Nice, sure, but not what I needed. Cunning? Plotting and scheming? Not my thing. I needed to stay hidden, and be able to evade detection if anyone came for me.

“Stealth,” I said, and I felt another tingle across my body, not as unpleasant as the first one but still weird. I could feel my wings change a little, and the pads of my hands and feet became more sensitive. Where before I had only felt cold stone, now I felt the dampness in some places, the grit and dust in others. To help choose my footing when moving stealthily, I assumed.

I stayed there for a while longer, luxuriating in the presence of my treasures, but my curiosity grew too strong and I soon returned to the light. With my increased sensitivity my footing was more sure than it had ever been on the damp stone, and when I looked at the backs of my hands in the dim light I could tell that they were not simply a pit of blackness, like they had been before. Instead the edges looked a little fuzzy, the colour more like a deep shadow against the background than a black object. I could easily see how that would help, and I couldn’t wait to try it out.

It just so happened that I was hungry. I had always imagined dragons hunting with fire from the air. Well, I didn’t have any fire, but I did have venom that could choke many creatures to death, or at least blind and confuse them. Now that I knew how to use it reliably, I had thought of two ways to use it. The first was like I’d imagined. Fly in and, instead of fire, spray venom. That seemed tricky. The problem was that in order for the venom to actually take anything out I needed to be pretty accurate, and doing that while flying, against a target that might have seen me coming and was trying to avoid me, would probably need a lot of practice. Like, a lot, a lot.

The other strategy was perhaps how I was supposed to hunt. I was a different kind of dragon than the Lord of the Rings-style ones I was used to. I was pretty small, I could hide well, I had a great sense of smell, and I had venom. I was, pretty much, a mix between a snake and a large cat. That meant that I should stalk and ambush prey, and that was what I was going to try to do.

I had tried before, during my days of starvation, but had failed miserably. I just didn’t have the speed and agility that a cat had, to pounce on prey from hiding. At least I didn’t back then. But I shouldn’t need to. I had my venom spray, and with one good hit from that it was game over. All I needed to do was to find a likely prey animal and wait. When it got close enough it would be “Hiss, spray,” and dinner was served.

At least that was the plan. In practice it took ages. I flew around some, and found a likely place to the north. The forest was less dense there, with many meadows and mostly smaller trees surrounded by thick undergrowth. Landing in the tall grass I listened carefully and breathed deeply, trying to find any sign of a deer, or a pig, or even a rabbit. When I didn’t find anything I started prowling around, sniffing, until finally I smelled something… stinky, to be honest. Whatever it was, it smelled very much like a dirty animal, and that was all I could say.

The smell came on the breeze, so I moved upwind, tracking it as silently as I could. The Stealth advancement made itself useful here. My newly sensitive hands and feet helped greatly, allowing me to feel sticks and the like before I put my weight on them. I had also noticed, while flying, that the beat of my wings made noticeably less noise. When I glided I was almost completely silent, even. Hell, maybe I could have hunted from the air, after all. I’d have to try those smug damned mountain goats in the high passes again sometime.

For now I was focused on the pig, or deer, or whatever it was. I kept creeping closer until I heard a snuffling, and bushes or some other plant being broken. Whatever this was, it sounded pretty big, and I doubted that it was something I wanted to take on. I wasn’t that hungry. But I had gone this far, and I was curious. The smell was strong now, and the sounds loud. I crept into the shadow of a large tree, noting with satisfaction how I blended in. To anything looking at me I would just be a deeper patch of shadow, as long as I stood still. Sure, they’d see my outline if they looked carefully, but this should help hide me from anything that wasn’t actually looking for me.

Keeping low to the ground I snaked my head around the trunk of the tree, and froze. There, in a glade, was a bear. She was bigger than any grizzly, or at least I thought so. I had never seen a grizzly, or a bear at all, but she was, to put it in simple terms, fucking huge. She was calmly tearing into what looked like a blackberry bramble, munching up juicy berries, thorny stems, leaves and all. I wanted nothing to do with her, and would have made myself scarce immediately, but she had cubs! Two adorably fat, fuzzy cubs that were bigger than I was, playing clumsily with each other, occasionally taking a chomp of the bramble before getting distracted by a passing butterfly or each other. They were so cute! I risked life and limb, hiding in the shadow the best I could while suppressing my giggles just to watch them bumble around.

The dragon wanted to try and eat one. The dragon was a heartless idiot, because even if I did lose enough of my soul to hurt one of the fluffballs, the mama bear looked like she could tear my neck from my body with barely any effort, Fortitude or no. And I was pretty sure that I’d heard David Attenborough say that bears can run as fast as a horse. Now maybe that was someone else, or I’d read it. The point stood: don’t fuck with bears unless you’re completely sure that you’ll win.

After some time I reluctantly had to admit that I’d indulged myself for long enough, and I snuck off. I went so far as to fly off to another meadow some kilometres away, on the assumption that anything with half a brain would put a lot of distance between themselves and Mount Teddy. The second meadow was a bust. In the third I found a boar, but it noticed me and fucked right off. In the fourth, though, I caught a new scent, and I followed it back to a lone, small-antlered deer. It was nibbling grass and leaves off small trees and bushes, and I had a good feeling about it. I mean, I felt bad, too, but I suppressed that. I was hungry, and I have always liked venison.

I slid into the shadow of a thick bush, full of young leaves, and waited. It took a while, but sure enough, the deer slowly made its way around the small open space to the bush. It was less than a metre from me, and I could see it clearly through the stems, when it stopped and sniffed the air. It didn’t seem immediately concerned, but leaned in closer, sniffing carefully in my direction.

I gave it a face full of venom. Even through the bush I hit it almost full on, and it reared back with a weird barking noise, then turned and ran blindly. I exploded after it. It was faster than me, but that didn’t matter. It kept hitting things, tripping, then getting up, and it hadn’t made a sound since that first bark. It couldn’t have taken more than twenty seconds before I saw it stumble and fall, far ahead of me. As I closed in it tried to stand, but it couldn’t. It had used up all its oxygen, and when I reached it its mouth was frothing, the tongue sticking out almost obscenely. Except for an occasional twitch, it lay still.

I tore its throat out with my teeth, hoping that I got both veins and arteries. The poor thing was dead in seconds, or at least completely unconscious. Then I dug in. No hesitation. I was still planning to try cooking meat over a fire, but I had learned that, with a dragon’s tongue and nose, hot, raw meat was delicious. I had the tinder box. I’d bring some wood with me home and experiment. But not until I had eaten my own weight in fresh deer meat.

When I had eaten so much that my jaw and throat were exhausted and I was feeling suitably sick and bloated, I decided that returning to the cave was not going to happen. It was only a little into the afternoon, but I was not flying anywhere today in my state. Drawing on my pleasant experience at the mine, I found a huge old broadleaf tree of some kind and climbed it. High in the branches I found a spot where I could securely lay with all four limbs hanging free and no fear of falling. I wrapped my tail around a smaller branch, laid my head on my back, and covered myself with my wings. Moments later, I was out.