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aaronfj77 · 5 months ago

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The Monster Slayer

I remember the day the mighty Monster Slayer arrived at my village.

They had told stories of the fearsome warriors, clad in shimmering Armor. Carrying weapons fit to carve a monster from claw to fang. When the cart began bumbling up the cobblestones of the village, tossing grass and pebbles to the wayside, I had imagined a massive cage to cart the beast away in. Yet it was a simple covered cart that tinkled and clinked as it was pushed forward.

That’s right.

Pushed! It wasn't being pulled by any calamity or foul beast made to bend to the whim of the slayer, but was instead being pushed happily along by an older gentleman. Who when wiping his brow from the steady heat, made a sort of whistling sound. His hair and beard were both white. He wore green suspenders over a simple cotton shirt that had longer sleeves he had rolled up and buttons down the middle. He had shiny metalic frames that enclosed his eyes in an orange shimmered glass.

Far from our towns savior.

The town dragon in the north western caves had become quite rowdy. She had started hissing out steam at all who would pass. She even almost ate one of Mr. Leary’s sheep on one hearding afternoon! Something had to be done about the beast before it devoured the entire town! The village had called on the local lord to send us someone willing to do what needed to be done! Not this, simple old whistling fool. Yet, this “slayer” that had been sent surely wasn’t up to this task.

How wrong I was!

The small white bearded man just kept pushing his cart towards the mouth of the cave and inevitability towards the mouth of the Dragon. His whistling alerted the Dragon immediately. The growls and rumblings could be heard for miles. The very fields quaked as she sensed an approach. The man simply continued to push his cart merrily closer. About thirty paces from the entrance, he began to shout into the cave! I couldn’t hear what he was yelling but he seemed to be arguing with the dragon!

She would grumble and shake houses near by, he would in turn yell right back in a tone that could only be described as petty annoyance. The Dragon ended their verbal fight with a roar that caused boulders and rocks to slide down the mountain side. Once the slide was over, the man huffed and walked over to his cart.

When he removed the cover on the cart, I became briefly blinded. Bits of metal and steel shimmered like beacons under the high sun. Finally! Here was our mighty slayer! The cart had to be filled with sharpened Elorian Steel and thick armor made to withstand a Dragon’s tail spikes! Or at least strong enough that your bones don’t all crack at once when the tail hit you.

When the shimmering died down and I could see the cart again, I quickly became annoyed once more. Yes, there was some metalic objects but much of it was bottles and small steel tubes. The clinking hadn’t been weapons or armors but vials and steel tools that I didn’t quite recognize. I had once met a traveling alchemist that had similar such items but nothing to this caliber.

He pulled from his cart, a single item, so small I couldn’t even see it in his hands. I moved closer to observe and saw as the elderly man planted the item in the ground at his feet like a seed. Much like a seed in fact as seconds later a sprout popped from the ground with such velocity it shot dirt in a few different directions. Then the old man mumbled something about time.

He reached for one of the vials on the cart, pulled a dropper and added a single drop Into the vial. He held it up to the sun and began to swirl the liquid around. Smoke itself began to rise from the vial and once it was billowing quite a bit, he poured its contents onto the sprout.

In the time it had taken him to turn and put the vial back on the cart, a fully grown nymph had grown from the sprout. She was a creature I had only seen rough sketches of. A woman made of tree or a tree made to look like a woman. I could never tell which they were supposed to be.

She immediately smacked him on the back of the head with a whispy one of her branches. He grunted at the injury and began arguing with the nymph! I couldn’t make out many words from the man but it seemed they got into a heated discussion about timing and something called “sedation”. I didn’t fully know the term but I could tell it was quite important.

As the man started working away on his cart, the nymph began to grow things off of her branches. She grew leaves that looked like snowfall mixing with fresh blood, a fruit that curved at its base and cycled between seeming blue or green depending on how the light hit it, and finally she grew from a spot just above her right shoulder, a massive seed.

A hard-shelled seed with long hairs sticking out of it. As she handed them to the man, he would add them slowly to what he was making. For the leaves, he ground them into a pale pink paste which he smeared inside of a jar. He took the fruit, peeled off the exterior using the first weapon I had seen him bring out, a paring knife like the one my mother used on Potatoes. Once it was peeled, he sliced the fruit into thin pieces and dropped them into the jar with the paste.

When she handed him the seed, he took extra care to hold it away from his body. He placed it into a clamp on the cart. As he pulled a lever, the clamp tightened around the seed and a thin stream of liquid started to seep from the bottom. The man, using tongs, picked up the jar and held it under the stream until it was about half full. He released the lever and the clamp stopped juicing the seed.

He placed the seed, now drained, into a tight woven bag that he put back on his cart.

He placed a sealed lid on the glass jar and began to shake it! He shook it up and down and back and forth. When he was done with his spasms, he paused then shook it again. Once he finished that time, the nymph smacked him again and gestured for him to shake it one more time. He shook it a final time, then abruptly stopped.

He walked to the mouth of the cave, and again, he yelled as fiercely as the beast had before. The nymph shook her head and walked away from the cave just as the old man placed the jar down on the ground and walked away to join her. No fighting? No battle? I had thought surely, he was making some kind of strange explosive but no such force came! Instead, the creature itself came forth.

Deli’strua, the golden dragon beneath the Thunderpeak mountains, strolled forth from the maw of the cave.

I… I didn’t think I would get to see her alive.

I don’t know anyone alive in my family who has ever met the great dragon. I figured I would see her being carted away after the fight. That she would be limp and gone. All fire from her eyes and lungs gone.

Instead, for the first time in seven generations of my family, I saw the dragon.

She made the opening the cave, that for my entire life had loomed above everything but the peaks and the sky themselves, seem like such a small space. Like a dog barely fitting through a small opening in a door. She fully stepped out of the entrance and as she did the sun blazed off her golden scales. Over lapping like thicker larger scales of a fish, they shined almost as brilliantly as the sun itself.

Her shimmering form leaned down towards the jar the man had placed. Her mouth opened, and instead of flames hotter than any hearth could ever be shooting out and eviscerating the jar, the dragon’s tongue scooped it into her mouth.

I thought for a moment if the glass would hurt the dragon. If the jar broke inside, would the shards still cut her? Surely not. The heat inside her chest would probably melt the glass back to nothing more than a thought.

So that was how this dragon slayer worked. He was a poisoner who worked his sword from a distance. Concocting strange potions like a coward. Nothing about this man was like the legends had said. Surely enough, the dragon laid down on the ground mere moments later. She curled her massive body around herself like a cat by a fire, shimmering like a pile of breathing gold. She laid there and did not move again.

The man and nymph walked back to their cart and began to argue again. I assumed it was about how to move the carcass away from the village now that the beast was slain. Once the man pulled a large silver tool from his cart, I understood for certain what was happening. This man was going to stab the dragon after he had already killed the beast. The nymph must have been trying to stop this wicked man from disrespecting such a magnificent creature. She couldn’t and he continued to approach the beast.

As I watched, I noticed something else. The Dragon was still breathing! Its body had a steady rise and fall that I had only noticed after watching it for some time. He continued to approach the Dragon, walking directly towards its head! A cruel malevolent man to put a beast to sleep then kill it while it could not defend itself! Much worse than stabbing the body after your kill! Such as the way of this strange man.

Fool’s die heroes in their minds, while only the wicked survive.

When he got to the creature’s head, he began to climb up. Did he intend to stab the beast in the eye? He lifted the creature’s mouth open.

Let me not try to confuse you.

This strange old man, seemed to, with direct intention put himself into the great dragon’s mouth!

He extended a tool from the bottom of the lip to the top holding it in place above his head.

Up until this point, I had been looking from a nearby hill, but I found myself slowly creeping forward to see as much of this strange interaction as I could. I stumbled down the hill and nearly fell completely on my face as I made my way down the slope.

The nymph noticed me now and walked over to help me up. I took her branches in hand and looked upon her in wonder. She seemed to be speaking to me but the only sound I heard was that of winds blowing through an empty wood. I told her as such and she nodded and smiled almost sadly.

We both turned back to the man and the dragon. He at this point was applying some kind of paste onto one of the dragon’s teeth! The fang itself was twice the length as he was but he applied the paste to everywhere he could reach. When he was done, he wiped his hand on a towel and put the paste away again. He grabbed the beam holding open the mouth, removed it, and slowly climbed back down. He then simply walked away from the beast! He didn’t strike it, or stab it! He left the beautiful dragon simply sleeping as if she had just fallen asleep there.

When he saw me, he jumped slightly. It had been a larger reaction from the old man than from when he yelled at the dragon!

He walked right past me to get to his cart without saying a word. He put everything away at double pace. I wished to ask a question of the old man even if it came at risk of argument as it seemed all things did with him. I asked simply what he had done to our dragon. Had he actually poisoned her or had he done something much more benign? He just shook his head and mumbled something without looking at me. I asked him to repeat himself and he said in a much clearer tone than before,

“Just a toothache.”

I asked him further, what exactly he had done to help?

“I gave her some juice from a juliepit seed, it put her to sleep long enough for me to apply some numbing antibacterial paste. It will help with the pain. Will you leave me alone now?”

I asked one final question of him. If the seed and paste on the tooth was the only things necessary to help, then what was everything else he put into that jar? He shrugged and looked at me with annoyance.

“Flavor.”

As quickly as he arrived, he pushed his cart away whistling quietly to himself. The nymph gave me one final wave then ran after the man and walked alongside him and his cart. I watched them leave, utterly perplexed by what had happened. When they were out of sight, I watched the dragon. She slept until just before sunset. When she began to stir, I ran quickly up the hill again and hid behind a tree until she fully woke up. She yawned her massive maw and smacked her lips. I watched as she ran her tongue around the tooth the man had worked on. She sighed in what I know from personal experience regarding toothaches, was relief. I figured she would go back into her cave as she always had, but when she took flight, I was struck by her awesome form. The now distant sun shimmering barely of her scales was fought by the now bright moon turning them into a pale blue as she flew into distant skies.

I don’t think I could ever forget the day the monster Slayer came to our village.

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