There Be Dragons...
...from space. A horror short featuring an OG monster!
"People who do not believe in the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
Dragons have often been depicted as monsters, beasts that must be slain. They have also been depicted as creatures with which to bond to form a formidable fighting unit. I’m not going to do a deep dive into dragon lore today, but I am going to share a story where the dragons are a little bit of both of these different types. Oh yeah, and they’re from space.
In this story, the dragons are indeed kaiju-level destructive creatures. A version of this short fiction piece was first published in the anthology After the Fall put together by indie publisher Blaze Ward. Italian artist Leraynne who did all my Plastic Girl covers illustrated one of the planet-destroying dragons from this story. I haven’t had the chance to share the art with many of you so I am super excited to do so today!
I so love her dragon and the covers she illustrated for the Plastic Girl series, I feel like I need to write another series just so I can have her do some more covers. Since I’m on the subject of Plastic Girl, I want to mention that Wicked Tree Press is having a SPRING CLEANING/SUMMER READING EVENT. The entire trilogy is currently discounted, hardcover or paperback, all signed. They each come with packed with a bookmark and a reusable metal straw. Get ready for the some ecopunk sci-fi by the beach!
Now, back to the short story.
In Dragons Aren't Real, the legendary creatures have reappeared on Earth but they are much more terrifying than what mythology and folktales have promised. An aimless islander must defeat one of these ravenous beasts if there is any hope to stop them from completely consuming all life on Earth like they have done on thousands of other planets.
Dragons Aren’t Real
The glittering green surface of the olivine encrusted egg shimmered as the first rays of the day’s sun appeared from behind the jagged black peak of the volcano. I started my egg watch dutifully at sunrise like I did every day. The gigantic egg I sat before had emerged thirteen months ago during the Great Tectonic Crash, along with twenty others around the crater’s edge, making the opening look like a craggily toothed monster’s maw. These 8-feet tall eggs, along with many others like them, popped out of the earth at every spot a tectonic plate violently hit or pulled apart from another plate right below the Earth’s crust. The eggs were all glitter and glow, covered in rare and varied gems that formed an intricate spiral on their surface.
The people on my small island obsessed over the other 378 eggs and counting that revealed themselves on every continent across the planet. The eggs appeared in groups, and each group was partially encrusted with a different gem. Our island’s eggs were covered in olivine. Preceding the appearance of each group of eggs was a natural disaster—an eruption, a typhoon, an avalanche, an earthquake or hurricane. Ours appeared after a devastating volcanic eruption. Within a month, the entire planet was reduced to rubble. Every system and society safety net collapsed. Left in the wake of this devastation were these beautiful, gigantic eggs covered in gems. The world population fell under 500,000 in the first month and only continued to dwindle.
A few days after the Crash, when we still had a functioning global network, something completely transformative happened to the entire population simultaneously. Off the coast of Japan at the bottom of the ocean where twelve opal encrusted eggs had appeared after a massive underwater earthquake, the first Hatching was telecast from an underground submersible. The whole world watched, holding its breath. Shamans, imans, rabbis, preachers, witches, pastors, brujas—all said it was a sign from the heavens long prophesized in their oral arcane traditions, now claiming the oral traditions were even more sacred than their modern written ones. Every one of them rewrote their mythos to include giant gem-covered eggs, scrambling to be the religion that foresaw the eggs, claiming them for their god no matter what they contained. I watched that Hatching along with the rest of the world, hardly leaving my parents’ one-bedroom house a few miles off the one main road that travelled around our small island where our own tectonic plates had shifted causing a massive eruption. The lava flow had just missed our land. It had taken out a few of our neighbors. Now, our neighbors stand in their yards like stone figures from Pompeii, something tourists will visit one day. Heck, I would have eventually driven them out here if the money was good enough and if there were enough people and world left for tourism to still be a thing again.
A two-person crew had been circling the opal encrusted egg for days in a small submersible deep in the Pacific Ocean, watching and videoing the egg, waiting. The Japanese’s military fleet along with the entire country had been destroyed in the most devastating tsunami the Pacific had ever seen. The crew observing the egg had only survived by pure chance. Their boat had been returning from a months-long deep-sea research mission and just missed the giant waves. On the third day of observation, the submersible decided to approach the egg, get close enough to touch it. When the sub’s metal brushed the opal stone, the egg lit up, like really lit up. The metal of the boat disintegrated. Brief screams were heard and then silenced. The outline of the pilot could be seen floating in the water through the almost blinding light blasting from the egg’s shell. As his limp arm touched the egg… I still don’t know what I saw, not exactly, not in a way I can explain it. I thought that the body disappeared into the light, but what I remembered, was feeling a deeper loneliness than I had ever felt, followed by a strange longing, maybe even a hunger or a need.
The underwater egg cracked many more times over the next few hours. No one could watch and talk about anything else. The water was murky and sandy, but there was definitely something dark and reptilian moving under the pieces of shell, pushing them out. A glimpse of a sharp curled tooth gnawing the shell sent most viewers into a blind panic. The leathery scaled wings expanded, and the clawed feet stepped out, knocking the remainder of the opals and shell to the seafloor. As the sand settled, the terrifying and mythic creature that had hatched was revealed, and the floating body of the pilot was long gone. When I finally started breathing again, I turned to my mom and croaked, “Dragons aren’t real, are they?” She didn’t look at me or speak but flung her hand toward the images on the screen like I was an idiot.
Some writers had predicted these monsters, just not the religious ones. They were written about in the myths that adults labeled as not true, as fairytales, and folktales. They were the myths told to children to fascinate and scare them, not the stories told to them that were labeled true and meant to keep them in line and control them. Modern people believed dragons weren’t real, just like me. Some hoped they were, but most people never gave dragons much thought, not since they were kids or when they watched or read their favorite fantasy series. Now, they believed. Now, there be dragons. Now, I smoked a lot more weed.
Almost every human eyeball was glued to a screen, watching this mammoth baby dragon figure out how to work its webbed wings across the sandy bottom. We held our breath together as it struggled to the surface, dragging its wings as it kicked its powerful legs. By the time it took its first breathe and its ear-piercing call echoed across the surface of the Pacific Ocean, people were already heading for the streets, demanding their governments destroy the eggs before any more of them hatched.
I obsessively watched the only channel still broadcasting on my television screen run by our solar-powered generator. Frozen and memorized, I sat between my mom and pop as the rest of that research team approached the giant baby dragon out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The boat idled its motors about two hundred yards from the floating dragon folded up like a giant pelican. It turned its long-scaly neck, and its shimmering opal eyes flashed. It dove under the surface. It shot out of the water right near the boat and landed on the deck. One claw scratched the railing as it balanced itself. The other foot stepped toward the crew members cowering behind the lifeboats. Its mouth opened, and it released one of the worst sounds I had ever heard, something between a shriek and an explosion. Then, it lunged at the crew, its jagged maw wide. Their blood bathed the deck and splattered across the dragon’s scaly chest as this mere baby crunched the bones of each of the ten crew members one at a time. One woman dove off the boat and swam back toward a homeland that no longer existed. After the dragon finished its meal on the boat, it pushed itself off the ship, capsizing it as it flew into the air. It peered down into the waters, blood dripping from its chin until its glimmering white eyes spotted the woman’s movement. It prepared itself and stooped, scooping her body by the belly and dragging it down into the watery depths.