Kristin - Chapter 4 - Dragon

“WHAT?” was all she could manage. Dragon-keeper??  Dragons aren’t real!

“Yes, dragon-keeper.” Cook droned in a rather bored voice. “Your duties will include feeding, grooming, and humoring Her Majesty Kimbers dragon. Every day at this time you will take a cow, pig, sheep, or chicken, depending on Her Majesty’s wishes, down to his room...”

“His?” Kristin squeaked.

“Well what did you expect? Its?” Cook continued. “You will take it down to his room and present it to him. When he has finished eating, you will groom him par his direction…”

Again, Kristin interrupted. “His direction? It can TALK?”

“HE can talk. You had better learn some respect girlie, or you might end up like the last dragon-keeper. Now…”

Kristin’s face had turned a pale and sickly shade of white. “Wha-what happened to the last dragon keeper?”

Cook ignored her question. “…after you have groomed him, if he has taken a liking to you, there is a chance he will tell you to stay and converse with him. I suggest you comply with everything he says.”

“What if he doesn’t take a liking to me?”

“Then I suggest you get yourself out of there before he decides that he’s still hungry. Now, follow me.”

Cook led her around to an iron door on the side of the castle. Taking a ring of keys out of her pocket, Cook unlocked the door and led Kristin down into a wide passageway, sufficient for the cow, and maybe a few cows, to pass through. Kristin was still leading the docile animal along by her rope.

After about five minutes they came to another iron door. Cook unlocked this one and they stepped through it. Kristin gasped.

It was the hallway of iron doors! She almost screamed, but then caught herself. This was not her dream. There was not going to be a flood of red or a man with an eye-patch. Or the scream of a small helpless girl. Just a hall lined with iron doors.

And a dragon behind one of them.

She silently debated which was worse, dream or reality.  Neither, it seemed.

After about ten minutes, they reached the end of the hall. Before them stood the last and largest iron door. It was big enough to allow a 100-foot giant to pass comfortably through. Kristin quaked at the thought of the monster that lay behind it.

“Well, here’s where I leave you.” Cook said brusquely.

“You…Your LEAVING?” Kristin’s panic level shot up.

“Yes. This isn’t my job. The door should open in a few minutes. If you want to open it from the inside just say, ‘I serve an almighty sorceress.’ ” She quickly turned on her heel and left, leaving Kristin alone with the cow.

She stood there uncertainly. The door remained solidly shut. Just as she was beginning to think that it was all some sort of sick joke, and she could go back up to the kitchens, the door flew open, inwards. It led into a tunnel so big that, even with the torches lining the walls, she couldn’t see the roof. She, slowly and fearfully, led the cow down the tunnel. It seemed to stretch on and on. Any second, she expected to see a dragon come roaring out of the shadows, fire blazing, teeth and claws bared.

Nothing happened. She continued to plod down the foreboding tunnel, the only sound the echo of her and the cow’s footsteps ricocheting around the cavern. Up ahead was a sharp bend. Gathering her courage, Kristin turned the corner and found herself standing on the edge of an enormous cave, staring into the glowing golden eyes of the most magnificent and terrifying animal she had ever seen or heard of.

The dragon’s black, scaly hide shone with a subtle inner light. Every one of his razor- sharp, serrated claws was nearly twice long as she was. He towered above her, nostrils glowing ember-red, leathery wings folded at his sides, snake-like tail thrashing about the floor in front of her, then beside her, then behind and in front of her again, and then she was being lifted off the floor and held in front of his face. With fright, she stared into his eyes. They were each bigger than her head, golden with flecks of green. Ebony horns, six feet long and wickedly sharp, framed his intimidating face.

“Welcome, little human.” His voice was whisper-quiet, and soothing. It calmed her, and for some unfathomable reason she felt like falling asleep in the coils of the great beasts tail.

Then he gently set her down next to him and looked to the cow, which, unexplainably, had not bolted but was standing in front of the dragon as docile as ever. He leaned down, whispered a few words in its ear, and watched as it trotted off down the tunnel, as if on some urgent mission.

As soon as his tail had lost contact with her, Kristin’s calm had evaporated and she was again paralyzed with a cold, dreading fear of this animal (or could you call it an animal?) that was crouching before her. He turned to her and, again in a calming, whispering voice, asked, “What is your name, little one?”

“Kristin.” Her name came out as a squeak.

“I am Alejandro Rodríguez Quintana the Sixth.”

 “Oh.”

Then she nervously asked, “Wer-weren’t you going to eat the cow?”

The dragon’s laugh was more of a rumble, like rocks falling down a mountainside, but far away.  “I do not need to eat meat like many other creatures. The fact that the foolish conjurer who lives here thinks that I need meat to live reveals her ignorance of my kind.”

“Then what did you do with it? Th-the cow?”

“I told it how to leave the palace undetected and where to find others of its kind.”

“Leave the palace undetected?” Kristin grew exited. “Could I do that?”

Alejandro’s eyes dimmed, though only for a second. “It is an easier thing for a cow to leave this place than a human girl. Besides, out in the world it is very dangerous for humans. You are safer here at the house of Kimber, on the very doorstep of the devil, than anywhere else you could possibly be.”

Kristin silently doubted this, but it does not bode well to argue with a dragon, even one who doesn’t seem interested in eating you. “If you don’t eat cows, what do you live off of?”

Again the dragon laughed. “You have many questions for such a little human. I will tell you, and then you will answer a few of my questions. I live off of the undercurrent of energy that radiates from the earth. It is called Domhan-Saol, and comes from the rivers of magma that flow near the earth’s core. Dragons absorb it naturally, and it gives us not only the ability to live almost forever, but our magical talents and fire-breath as well.”

“Really?” Kristin had never heard anything so interesting in her life. Her head was filled with questions. “Why…”

Alejandro interrupted her, this time in a voice slightly louder and more firm. “No more. I have a few questions for you. What is your surname?”

“Basolc.”

“WHAT?” He roared, his voice piercing every fiber of her being, overpowering her until she crumpled to the ground and knew nothing but fear at the rage of a dragon.

Kristin, Chapter 3 - Kitchens

They remained in the throne room for a few more minutes, silent and unmoving. Then Finabard commanded, “Let her go.” The guards stepped away from her. Kristin collapsed onto her side. The woman, or, really, the sorceress Kimber, was gone.

“Can you stand up?” Finabard inquired. If Kristin had not been in the present circumstances, she might have called his tone kind and his face handsome. But she was here, in the throne room of the Sorceress Kimber, crumpled on the ground in front of the newly appointed Captain of the Guard. This was not a place to grasp at kindness or handsomeness.

In response to his question, she carefully picked herself up off the ground and struggled shakily to her feet. He nodded briskly, and then turned to the guards. “You are dismissed. Return to the barracks and await further orders.” In unison, they chanted “Yes Sir,” turned, and marched out the golden door.

“Follow me,” he told her, and made his way towards another great door, this one silver. Kristin struggled to keep up, even though Finabard adjusted his pace to compensate for her condition. Halfway across the throne room, she collapsed. She just couldn’t do it. She wasn’t useful for anything. She could barely walk across the room. He would kill her, and she would be with Clara again. That was all she wanted. Tears started streaming down her face.

Without a word, Finabard came over and looked down at her. Without a word, he lifted her gently off the floor and carried her through the silver door. This led into a bright dining room, all made of white marble. From here he turned, and carried her through a small wooden door into what she could only describe as heaven.

Food. The room was filled with food. Food being chopped, food being baked, food being tossed into salads. Food cooking, food cooling, food hanging from the ceiling. An old, chubby woman was overseeing it all, and her assistants scuttled back and forth, stirring, adding, popping things into ovens, taking things out of ovens, putting more wood on the fire, peeling, mincing, trying, adding a pinch of salt, trying again, and doing all the things generally associated with food and its preparation.

Finabard crossed to a cot in the far corner of the room and laid Kristen gingerly down on it. He covered her with a warm blanket, crossed to the chubby woman, said something to her, and left.

Kristin just laid there. She didn’t try to move, or think, or even sleep. She just let the room take her in and surround her in its warmth and comfort. After a while, the chubby woman came and set a tray of something down by her bed. Kristin slowly summoned her strength a got up to look at it.

Mushroom stew, a warm, fresh, quarter-loaf of bread, and a blue-colored fizzing drink. Kristin wolfed it down eagerly. The drink was sweet, yet sour as well. When she finished, she felt content to lay down and sleep.

Shadows haunted her dreams. Laughing sadistically, men with eye-patches chased her down never-ending passageways lined with giant iron doors. Every time she tried to open a door, it was locked. Finally, a door opened, and out rushed a red, sticky liquid. It seeped into her mouth, nose, eyes and ears, and as she drowned in it, she heard a little girl screaming her name.

Kristin awoke tangled in her blanket and thrashing around on the floor. Most of the kitchen staff was staring down at her with wide, frightened eyes. The chubby woman looked up form kneading bread dough.

“Good, you’re up. All of you, back to work. She’s not going to explode.” The staff scattered back to their business. Kristin stood up. She still felt weak, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been. That blue fizzy drink must’ve been some type of tonic.  She made her little cot, then sat on it, at a loss as to what she should do.

The chubby woman noticed her dilemma. “My name is Gretel. Call me Cook. You’ll have something to do soon enough. Right now, eat.” Gretel gestured toward a bubbling pot of porridge hanging over the fire. Kristin found a bowl and liberally spooned hot porridge into it. She slurped it down quickly. It was bland and tasteless, but warm in her stomach and quietly bracing.

She took her bowl to the washbasin and started to wash dishes. Every so often, she thought she felt Cook’s eyes drift over to her, yet whenever Kristin turned, Cook quickly looked down at her bread or her soup or whatever she was working on at the moment. Once Kristin thought she saw her shake her head, almost in pity.

The morning passed this way, rather uneventfully. Lunch came and went, and the afternoon wore on. Kristin spent her time helping out any way she could, though cooking had never been her strong suit. Around three o’clock, Cook came up to her.

“Now it is time to do what you were brought here for. Come with me.” Kristin followed her out the side kitchen door and into the area where the livestock where kept. Cook went straight to the cattle and picked out a rather fat, sleepy-looking cow. She led it out of the pen and handed the rope to Kristin.

“You,” she stated matter-of-factly, as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, “Are going to be the new dragon-keeper.”

Essay

I wrote this as a school assignment. It's a half-joke. I admit, I'm rather proud of this little piece of work...

 Sometime soon, someone will be saved from a definitely devastating death by that mighty man-made marvel, the internet. This amazingly astounding invention is indubitably one of our outstanding accomplishments achieved in this apex of human history.  Many misinformed men think that the internet is an illusion, something shamefully scummy. Actually, anybody accusing the internet is ignoring its innumerable intrinsic values. The internet is incredibly informative, hugely helpful, and amazingly accessible.

The internet is indispensable. Without it, we would wallow wearily in timeworn tomes, sadly searching for some finicky fact. Now, instead of overusing outdated octavos, we can quickly quest for questions using useful websites such as Google and Wikipedia.  Anything you ingest from the internet is incontestable, so don’t doubt decency. This timeless treasure, astoundingly accurate, helps herald hundreds of halleluiahs, primarily from poor people perusing perfection. Yet being infinitely informative is not everything the internet insures.

Communication creates countless comforts. We seek solace sacrilegiously sometimes, so solitude seems torturous. The internet incurs an influx of interesting friends, so we need never have neurosis of being neglected. Some men find matches using match.com, many marry on the internet. Facebook feels fabulous, sharing our shining, sterile souls with other perfect people. Identity is irrelevant on the internet, you can create yourself completely!  Flaws fade away into fakeness, perfection presides, and since the internet is so amazingly accessible, self-annihilation is entirely easy.

The internet enables everyone to easily encounter everything. Everything on the internet is extraordinarily easy to do, even if it’s illegal. This tugs us toward it, because we want to save our energy. Accessibility accounts for all of the awesome influx of information on the internet. Amazingly, all of us access the internet nearly daily. Computers create comfortable centers to enjoy it. Without this wonderful way of easily entering the internet, we would not wear it so often.

Though, sorrowfully, some say the internet is immoral, it’s really a beautiful benefit to our bountiful society. Its innate values are indisputable, and the numerous needs it fulfills would find no filler without the web. Whatever way you look at it, the internet is astoundingly amazingly awesome!

Kristin, Chapter 2- Kimber

        The first thing she noticed was the cold. It was an irrepressible, undeniable, unavoidable cold. As her consciousness began to return to her, she found that she was lying on a hard stone floor in the middle of a rather large room. Slowly, slowly, she pried apart her heavy eyes.

      Around her, four unadorned stone walls loomed up to a ceiling that was too high to make out. There were no windows, and the darkness threw a thick, foggy blanket over everything. Painstakingly, she rose to her feet and began to grope around for some sort of door. She found it in the middle of the third wall. From the feel of it, the door seemed to be made entirely out of iron or some other heavy metal. There was no knob or handle to speak of.

Kristin finished her inspection and sat down in the middle of her room, unsuccessfully trying to process just what exactly had happened to her.

Clara was dead. That was all she could think about. The little bright-eyed child, whom Kristin had spent many nights holding and many days scolding, was gone. The pain in her heart grew until she could not contain it and it ripped out of her in a great, soul-piercing wail.

      She couldn't remember when she quit screaming. She lay in a heap on the floor sobbing, with tears streaming down her nose, off her chin and onto the floor. Her weeping was rudely and quickly cut off by the large iron door banging suddenly open. The man with the scar and half a score of guards strode into the room.

“I wish to politely enquire as to how you are enjoying your lodgings, and humbly request your presence in the throne room,” jeered scar-face with a malicious smile and a low, sweeping bow. He smiled all the more when two of the guards lifted her off the floor by her arms and he could see her messy, tear-streaked face. They carried her out the door of her room and into a bleak, sparse hallway, lined with other iron doors similar to hers. These doors had one very noticeable difference, though. Some were much, much bigger, as if they housed monsters or giants behind them, and some were much, much smaller, as if to imprison fairies or gnomes.

“What,” Kristin thought to herself, “Could they possibly be keeping here?” They turned left and continued to the end of the hall, where there was yet another iron door. This one opened to stairs behind it. Up, up, up they went, never stopping, never talking, with Kristin sagging in their grip.  After what seemed an age, they reached the top of the stairs, opened the (iron) door leading out, and marched into the most opulent room Kristin had ever seen in her life.

The room was a perfect circle. Everywhere, there was gold and diamonds, marble and velvet, any and every type of extravagance that could possibly be imagined. The floor had great pillars rising up to a domed roof. In the center rose a tall platform, with an imposing throne rising over that. All of it, the floor, pillars, roof, platform, and throne, was one gargantuan carved slab of black marble. Kristin stared in awe. The pillars were draped with blood-red velvet and gold tassels. Diamond chandeliers, lit with a strange inner blue light, hung from the ceiling by a gold rope ten feet in front of every pillar. The throne was carved with strange runes and draped with a gold-fringed velvet sheet. Above the throne, a bright, sun-like sphere hung, seeming to float on its own.

The door they had come through was on the far left of the throne. The guards hauled her around to the front, dropped her on her knees and forced her forehead down onto the cold, unyielding floor. Two of them stood at her sides and the rest lined up in two ranks of four behind her, at attention. Scar-face knelt on one knee before the throne.

There they stood. Nothing happened. Time passed slowly, it seemed to Kristin, whose knees and forehead were beginning to hurt. Why were they kneeling in front of an empty throne? Her question was soon answered. A feminine voice, as dark, unyielding, and cold as the marble on which Kristin was kneeling, cut through the silence.

“Rise, Lucifer, and tell me what you have taken from the far desert foothills.”

Scar-face rose and, in a voice with a subtle mixture of pride, awe, and envy, gave his report. “Fifteen small farms, twenty head of cattle, thirty pounds of potatoes, assorted farming and cooking tools, sixteen pounds of strawberries, ten horses, seven pigs, and one very old mule.”

“Hardly anything,” the voice remarked sharply. “Unless you wish to be promoted to the honorable position of head swineherd, or perhaps spend a day or three in the courtyard as entertainment for my soldiers, I suggest you work very, very, VERY hard at boosting your numbers.”

Kristin tilted her head, almost imperceptibly, and caught a glimpse of the being behind the voice. It was a woman, beautiful in face and form, with long, blond, curling hair, unnaturally long eyelashes, and blood-red lips. She was dressed in a gown of black silk rimmed with silver lace, and lounged on the throne as if born in it.

“Yes, Milady, of course, Milady,” Scar-face groveled. “Milady, I have also retained this young girl to serve you.”

The voice gave a harsh, eerily beautiful laugh. “What do I need this pathetic creature for? You have seriously botched your assignment this time, Lucifer. Getting me nothing I need and everything I don’t. Perhaps I shall move you residency to the courtyard for a few days, simply to remind you who’s in charge.”

The tremor of fear in Scar-face’s voice was audible. “M-mi- milady, I-I thogh-thought that sh-she…”

“You thought? You are not here to think. You are here to execute my will. Thinking is reserved only for the intelligent, and you, Lucifer, are most certainly not intelligent. As of right now you are demoted to the rank of soldier, until perhaps you can learn to follow orders and not think so much. You will be taken out into the courtyard, tied to the post and whipped until unconscious at noon every day for the next three days. Remove him.”

Two soldiers stepped out of the ranks and grabbed a stunned Lucifer. He was marched out of the room through a large golden door behind them.

“Now,” said the voice, this time silky smooth, “Finabard, step forward.” One of the soldiers in the front rank stepped out in front of the throne. “You are replacing Lucifer. You may take up residency in the upper floor of the barracks.”

“Yes, Milady,” he answered, in an impressively impassive voice.

“Very good,” she remarked. “Your first assignment is to find something to do with this girl. If you can find no use for her, you may kill her.”

“Yes, Milady.”

“Oh, and Finabard, when you have finished with that, come up to my chamber, I wish to talk with you.” The coy sweetness was practically dripping from her words. It made Kristin want to throw up.

“Yes, Milady.”