#prompt:change

[kettlequills]

how the dragon chases his tail

Miraak the Dragon Priest was not always a man haunting the halls of Apocrypha. Once, he was a little boy, and he had a terrible choice to make. On A03 here. For TESFest21, prompt: change.

CW: brief self harm, indoctrination, mention of castration, explicit references to violence and character death. Also, the Dragon Cult.

The boy that would be Miraak thrusts out his chest in pride when he sings. (He has another name, then, one that tastes of sweet snow and young summers. But that name is never written in any book and fades even from its bearer under the press of centuries, so the boy he shall be.)

 He is only young, but he knows he is the best singer in the cult choir, probably in the whole temple. The priest that directs the children always gives the boy solos and arranges the whole choir to compliment his voice. Not every child born in the village below gains the chance to serve out their due to the temple so quickly, and the boy is very sensible of the good fortune his lovely singing wins him.

 He is devastated, therefore, when his voice cracks halfway through a pure high note that should be      easy.  

 “It is natural – quite normal, a maturation process, of sorts,” Frinaar says hurriedly. Frinaar is an absently devoted man, but he lives for his choir pleasing the ear of his dragon master. (In five years, this love will not save him when his master grows bored and rends him chest to groin with one swipe. His organs will fall soft and pink from his belly, and he will be dead before he hits the ground.)

 But for now, the priest cranes his head around the corners before he takes them, ushering the boy along with sweeps of his voluminous, incense-stained robes, like he is quite afraid of anyone with less than perfect control over their voice to be found in the temple. “Quite normal – only so unfortunate – right before our master should return – so unfortunate. The display will not be the same without the lead and that understudy…”

 Frinaar clucks his tongue, ringing praise for the boy’s young rival, Jyric. (Older, and jealous of the boy’s special treatment by the priests, Jyric is resentful and bitter. He will not mourn the fate he hears the boy earns for himself, when the boy is a man. But he will not long outlive it either, for he will be seized with a terrible wasting disease that will take the strength from his bones, and abandoned by his kin, will succumb to it in shivering fever alone.)

 “Master may be displeased – so many of the choristers eaten, at recent, and…”  He pauses, sweeps down to look at the boy beneath one bushy brow. “You do not think – you do not think that you could      delay    it? Your voice breaking?” he asks hopefully.

     “Yes,”    the boy cries at once, desperate for any chance, and his voice cracks.

 Frinaar winces. “Get gone.” He brushes the boy vaguely towards the temple doors, muttering to himself. “I knew that we should fix them when we get them, then this would not happen! Or only permit girlchildren, but it’s ‘ah, Frinaar, how will our village grow, if you prevent our boys from becoming fathers and our girls becoming mothers?’ Well, I should like to see how our village will grow when the choristers are all off and the master is displeased!”

 Disappearing in a whirl of mumbling and swishing robes, Frinaar leaves the boy to it. For a moment, the boy stands there, hoping against hope that there is some mistake, and that Frinaar will come back to fetch him.

 The iron doors, carved with beautiful depictions of the dragons the temple serves, remain stubbornly closed. And the boy that would be Miraak is brave, and he is strong, but he is only a boy, and he is suffering the bitterest disappointment of his life.

 He bursts into tears, and the shame of it is enough to send him to his knees.

 Sat on the steps, knobbly knees drawn up to his forehead, he cries silently with the experience of any child who has lived every night of his life since his sixth winter in a crowded dormitory. He is lucky, he knows, because the boy has family in the village. A mother, and siblings; he sees them sometimes when the temple children are allowed to go down to the village to celebrate festivals. They are good people. His mother will be coming to get him.

 Not everyone has a mother to fetch them when their temple years are served. Some go to beg for an apprenticeship, a trade, or remain at the temple to join the ranks of warriors destined to guard the temple and barrows beyond. But the boy does not feel like it is luck now.

 Anything that takes him further from the temple and all that he has come to know feels like a curse.

 Eventually, though, he runs out of tears and instead dips his fingers in the snow, rubbing the cold water under his eyes to reduce the swelling. This too, he has practiced, how to look as if he has not just been crying. He straightens his spine and assumes a bored posture, like he has never been more confident and calm in his life. He is aware, after all, of the slits cut into the walls of the temple, for the guards to see approaching intruders on the temple steps where he sits.

 This is how his mother sees him, when she, huffing, reaches the top of the temple steps. She glances around, a little uncertainly, her smile tentative. (Her name is Sinawen, but the boy will not remember it all, when he is a man looking back through muddled memories. So, we will call her Sina, because her story is sad enough without the grief of eroded memory. She will burn in agony for the crimes of her son, having outlived all of her children save one, whose fate is murky to her on her deathbed, but whose suffering is assured.)

 “My son?” Sina says, and calls him by that name, that name that the boy would forget.

 “Mother,” he says back, determinedly keeping his voice at a low, even tone, and her whole face crinkles into a sunbeam of joy.

 “My boy!” she says, and rushes towards him, and quite before the boy can do anything at all he is enfolded into a huge hairy hug. She smells like peppermint and the winter trees she tends in their beds of snow and ice for the village. (It is important work. It is why she has only had to give one child to the temple, her lastborn, who takes most after his long-distant father.)

 The boy that would be Miraak hangs there in his mother’s arms and wishes that the ground would swallow him up on the spot. He hopes his rival Jyric has not found a slit to watch through, and laugh at the boy being coddled by his mother like a child. Humiliation makes rosy apples of his cheeks, and he pushes at her.

 (He is a child, still. How quickly do they wish for what they do not understand. Does he know that this will be the last time he gets such an embrace, steeped in a mother’s love, uncomplicated and clear as ice? Of course he doesn’t.)

 She releases him, used to the pride of the young, but she holds his hand when they go down the temple steps, and he lets her. Her black claws are like his, though the boy’s are clipped short so he will not tear the papers he works with, and when he looks up he sees her cloud of hair swaying in the breeze, salt-flecked cream, and this is the image he will hold of her in his heart, looking off towards the home the boy had been born in with a smile on her lips and tear-tracks on her cheeks.

 (Would it change anything, if he did know?)

 “I am so glad you are coming home, my son,” she says, “We have all missed you.”

 The boy says nothing at all at this, because there is a flicker of shame in his heart. Of all the children in the dormitory, he has been the quickest to scorn the homesick, the swiftest to pledge every thought in his mind to devouring whatever scraps of knowledge the priests have seen fit to grant their charges. He has not thought of coming      back,    in that vague way of inexperience, thought then that this heady time of learning would last forever.

 (He will learn, unfortunately, that there can be too much of such a good thing.)

 The village is not far from the temple, and Sina’s home not far from the village, nestled between cold white stands of frosty trees. A small shrine waits off the path, devoted to the owl-god Jhunal and the whale-god Stuhn, warding against demons drawn by the misty woods. It is well tended, but the boy still spots, hidden on the bark of a tree, a watchful carved eye that does not seem like it belongs with the rest of the shrine.

 The boy does not think anything of it.

 (Do you?)

 “Better things than that temple out there,” says the boy’s eldest brother, after they have eaten, and the misery on the boy’s face can no longer be attributed to hunger. He is wild and tangle-haired, spends his whole life to date out in the snows, and still feels constrained.

 (His name is Terren, and he will not survive a chance stumble into a bear trap, not far from the hunter’s path he had strayed from. A summer from this day, he will be a frozen corpse, found only the following spring when a lost hound tracks the wrong kill. The boy will remember him unnamed, as only as his shredded blue face, gnawed by animals, exposed bone pointing to the sky, and forget their relation, any sense of why this face hurts more than any other he has seen.)

 (It will be the kindest fate those with this boy’s blood meet.)

 “Yes!” pipes his second sibling, Minwen, a sister whose quick fingers at the distaff has won her valued approval, whose bright eyes look at the temple on the hill that swallows her brother with as much trepidation as curiosity. (She will die choking, and her quick fingers will not be enough to stem the blood warm and wet that will gush from her cut throat. The boy’s memory of her kindness will be taken from him, and of her all he will recall is blood-soaked snow and deep dragon-laughter.) “You could learn magic, at home with us.”

 “That’s stupid,” the boy snaps. His voice cracks and he sinks his head into his arms. “I’m      supposed    to be there now. I’m the best singer they have.      I,    ” he adds, venomously, thinking of Jyric, “      never    lose the beat.”

 It is true. The boy has a sense of timing that is as innate as it is perfect.

 (Any skill can be a torment, when cultivated by the right gardener.)

 “When you are a man,” his mother offers, quietly, mouth pinched around the edges, “couldn’t you go back?”

 “They don’t need any more apprentices,” the boy says glumly. “They have too many. Frinaar always complains. And that’s years, and      years    away. I’d rather die.”

 His siblings exchange glances. A depressing silence has settled over the table. The boy takes this as his due, too young to realise his selfishness.

 (I would love to tell you that he learns.)

 Sina sighs. “It may not be what you want, my son, but we are very happy to have you home.”

 (But you know better, don't you?)

 The boy’s brother Terren scoffs, a little, muttering something about ungratefulness. Minwen next to him elbows him sharply in the ribs, hissing      “Think of mother!”  

 (Please do think of her. Sinawen’s suffering will be eaten by her god. Someone could at least remember she existed. Eventually, her son won’t.)

 The boy says nothing, grinding his forehead into the wood of the table. He is consumed in his own misery, everything he has worked for in his young life ripped away from him. It isn’t      fair,    he thinks jealously. He doesn’t      want    to be a wood-grower like his mother, or a spinner, or a scout, or to join the everlasting battle against the beasts and bandits beyond the bounds of the village that has taken his father from the guards.

 (It isn’t about what the boy wants.)

 He wants… he wants the feeling he gets, when he is tasked to sweep the courtyard and lingers close to the wall where the master roosts, eyes running over dragon-words scratched with dragon-claws. The feeling that swells, hot and bright, when he sees dragons overhead, chasing each other’s tails and immense in their majesty. The power that he feels, somewhere just out of reach, when he sings out strong and brave and the whole of the choir rises up around him like a voice of thunder. He feels – he feels alone, in the warmth of his mother’s house, the people that are his family all around him.

 He feels alone when he squeezes a carefully-rescued scale no one misses in his hand, so hard that it draws blood. And something in him looks at the blood that wells around his skin, warm and red, and is disappointed that it doesn’t burn like acid dragonblood. He feels alone then, too. But it is a different      aloneness,    something that feels like a secret whispered in a language he doesn’t know.      Set apart,    instead of      left behind.  

 But, the boy thinks mulishly, he could learn another language. He can’t fill the gap that has grown after years away.

 (See how proud and foolish he is! Can you imagine yet how much the boy will regret this?)

 Dinner is eaten quickly, and Terren is out the door to roam the stands of ice-trees, trail hard claws over the bark. Minwen braids her mane around her fox-ears with ribbons. And his mother draws the boy outside, and takes him to stand beneath the tree with the watchful eye. Sina goes to her knees in the snow and holds her son’s face. Her eyes are deep and warm, crinkled with laugh lines at the edges.

 “You have the look of your father,” she tells him, “And his spirit, apparently.” She clucks her tongue. “He was insistent that we go to a temple village, for the winged ones. I see Kyne in his hawk-eyes like yours.”

 (Do you think that Kyne cares?)

 The boy is watching the sky, not paying attention. Something in him is itching. “You’re not supposed to say that,” he says. “You’re supposed to call them masters.”

 “When the priests can grow wood from ice alone, they can correct how I speak,” Sinawen says firmly. “You are not in the temple, any longer. I can teach you my art. How often did they even let you out? You were not made for stone tombs, my son.”

     “I    am a priest,” says the boy.

 “There are other gods,” Sina says, but his mother’s reply is drowned by the sweep of mighty wings overhead. Sina grabs her son as he lurches towards the temple, eyes tracing the shimmering, bluer-than-blue shape, the joyful roar of frost. It shakes his bones. He knows, without knowing, that the dragon is greeting its roost, crowing its mastery over the mortals that serve it.

 Something in the boy that will be Miraak aches to roar back.

 His mother’s amulet brushes his cheek, freed from the neckline of her shirt. It is carved of a single emerald, one eye half-hidden between two branching leaves. The eye looks at him steadily. (How soon a seed is planted.)

 The boy tugs impatiently against his mother’s arms.

 “I need to go,” he says, “I need –”

 He is aware of a distant, enormous sensation, somewhere in the place that knows without looking at the sun where the planets are, and how long it has been since he last looked. He is aware that something about this is important, terribly important, as if the world itself is waiting, waiting to see what he will do.

 Sina’s shoulders slump. (She has her own choice to make here. How she will pray that she did not.)

 “May the Woodland Man reveal the answers you seek,” his mother says, face buried in the loose tumble of the boy’s hair, “and when you are satisfied, She-Wolf guide you home.”

 (The boy will not remember this, but the eye of the gods opens on him.)

 Her arms loosen, just a little, and the boy tears himself free. He races up the path nimble as a mountain goat without a backward glance. The enormous feeling only grows stronger as the boy runs, until it begins to feel like he is being crushed under the soulful, silent weight of monumental purpose. He gasps for breath, but doesn’t stop, doesn’t stop even as he flies up the vast stone steps and into the thick iron doors. They creak open, only a little, and the boy throws the entire impatient weight of his child body against them again, and again, causing hollow booms to reverberate through the temple.

 (This temple will not even survive as a ruin. Its rocks will be torn apart, its iron doors melted down, its servants slaughtered. Nothing lasts forever. Bormahu-that-is-Alduin is always hungry.)

 “Who dares –      You?”    It is Frinaar who pulls the temple doors open, his face furrowing angrily into confusion, but the boy does not stop.

 He bowls past Frinaar, following the inexorable drumbeat of his soul, hardly knowing where he is going but not needing to as his feet follow the halls he has lived half his young life traversing. Frinaar is shouting behind him, at first loudly, then with increasing urgency, his robes flapping like dragon wings.

 Dragon wings. The boy sees them again, white as snowfall against the curve of the sky, and pivots on his foot, crashing out the door into the open courtyard where the dragon of the temple holds reign.

 The singing breaks off as the boy bursts in, and sudden silence drops sharp as a death-knell. Snow swirls about his eyes, but the boy can still see the great icy-blue form of a dragon crouching on the Wall that commemorates its greatness, a vast treasure of gold and gems spread out beneath its shading wings. The tribute of the temple.

 (How many fingers bled and bellies cramped for a master’s vanity this year? How little things change.)

 The boy has interrupted the ceremony.

 The dragon roars. “Why have you stopped?”

 Its voice is huge and rumbling, shaking the boy’s bones. (I won’t tell its name. The fate of this dragon is whispered in soft horror even amongst its scaled, cold-hearted brethren. There are some things simply too brutal to record, some fights too desperate to be remembered in the mind. The boy’s body will remember, though, and he will carry the scars of this dragon to his grave.)

 The choir looks at each other. (None of them will make it out alive.) The boy can see Jyric, moon-faced and trembling, staring at him like he is a daedra. (Maybe he is.) The dragon swings its great head and catches sight of the boy, a lone figure at the door. It leaps and lands with a crash that shakes the earth.

 (Is Bormahu-that-is-Akatosh even looking?)

 “Fool!” the dragon cries, “This is my temple! You will find no nest here!”

 The boy says nothing, seized in the grip of enormity. A choice is happening, vast and terrible, and he can feel it resounding down into his earbones, blocking out the dragon’s threat.

 (Is it his? Was any of it ever his choice at all?)

 Its head rears back as it draws in breath, and the choir scatters, diving nimbly out the way. The boy watches numbly, mind screaming to follow their suit as they have all practiced, but his body is still and firm. It knows, with granite certainty, that the boy can withstand the dragon’s Shout.

     “IIZ!”    The dragon roars, and ice barrels towards him. It strikes with the weight of a warhammer, and the boy staggers. But he remains standing, instinctively protecting his face with his arms. His hair is crusted into crystals, and ice cracks down his arms when he lowers them. They burn, distantly, with horrible pain.

 (Did it always have to end this way?)

 The dragon looks bewildered that the boy is not dead. The choir rustles as they slowly raise their heads. A shocked murmur runs through the courtyard. Some have frozen solid, unmoving lumps that quickly become dusted with the light snowfall, those that were huddling too close to the boy where he stands, garlanded with frost like a princeling at the epicentre of the blast.

 “I have to be here,” the boy says, “I-“ He struggles, wordless, for a way to convey the inexorable exhortations of his soul. “Take me with you. Burn me – claw me – but let me with you!”

 (We can’t stop this. It’s already happened.)

 He thinks of Sinawen, her hand tugging his, as if nothing is more natural in the world.  The strange pull – it has to be like what he has seen in his brother and sister. In the other children, who weep for their families, when the boy pretends he does not. He thinks of the words of his mother, how easily she folds him into her, as if there has been a place for him all this time, as if she has been waiting for him.

 The boy cries, helplessly, unable to name what he is feeling, the strange and intense kinship he feels to the dragon, the unbearable sense of loss when he thinks of that scar around that family table where a boy with a name like summer snows had once lived. Claw to claw, ice to ice, eye to sky. Is it love?

 (Maybe it even is, then. Is a boy a son because of flesh, or spirit? What about a boy whose heart is kissed by the dreadful Wheel of the Creator-Destroyer of Time? This boy has always had the look of his Bormah. He has the hunger, too.)

 The dragon pulls its head back again, but not to Shout, the boy knows, does not know how he knows. For a moment, there is no sound but the snow, soft as sighs on his shoulders. And then the dragon laughs, low and gravelly.

     “Geh,”    says the dragon. “Would that all took you as a guide for their service.”

 (Oh, they will. The boy will learn how little choice matters, will learn how to take it from his masters. He will teach this lesson on a firm Voice, and when they listen, and when they see, they will remember, because the boy is the son of his father, and there is no choice in orderly, eternal grind of the doom-driven.)

 The dragon lowers its head, amused, to regard the boy with one gleaming blue eye. Deep in its chest, it makes a strange clicking sound, ticking like a Dwemer time-piece. Then it snorts, and turns its great scaly body. Making for a tunnel cut into the cliff, its tail sweeps carelessly, nearly bowling over a dumbstruck Frinaar.

 “Come along, Miraak mal-sonaaki,” says the dragon, not looking back.

 (What is will, fate, if not another prison? This is a farce.)

 The boy hesitates for a moment, and then realises all at once that the dragon means      him.    He blinks, feels a small smile stretch his lips, wreathed in the warm glow of burgeoning confidence.

 (The mask this name gives him will become as part of him as his skin. It’s too late now. Fate has decreed that this boy’s hope must die to win his service.)

 Miraak runs after his master and feels each step ring with the hollow promise of fate. And though nothing simple has changed, for he is back in the temple and everything is right in his young world, he knows, blood-and-soul deep, that nothing is ever going to be the same again.

 (The gods are watching. Do you think they laugh?)

Gloss:

Bormahu - Our father. Dovahzul that when used by dragons means Akatosh, father of dragons. Also the Creator (Akatosh) and Destroyer (Alduin) of Time.

Woodland Man - Hermaeus Mora.

She-Wolf - Mara. God of love, handmaid to Kyne. 

Hawk-eyed Kyne - God of storms and sky. Compared to Kynareth. 

Whale god Stuhn - Warrior god of ransom, brother of Tsun. Compared to Stendar.

Owl-god Jhunal - God of wisdom, runes and mathematics. Compared to Julianos.

Frinaar - Eager Servant.

Miraak - Allegiance Guide. 

Mal - little or small. 

Sonaaki - my priest. 

Iiz - Ice.