The warrior-queen stumbled.
It was only a light tremble, a waver in her arm, a quick spin of her arms for balance, but it magnified itself as it worked its way up her body and the blade of her long, shining sword dipped noticeably, which gave Klalmxxydor just enough to bite it off along with a third of her right arm.
She dropped, cursing quietly and ferociously, legs kicking away the smouldering skull of her bodyguard to clatter into some corner of the burned husk that was her throneroom. Her blood was pouring but her eyes were blazing, and as she slumped back against the seared stone of her throne itself she gave him the finger with her spare hand.
Klalmxxydor paused mid-chew and carefully inclined all five-foot-eleven-inches of his skull just a fraction of an inch downward, teeth bared in a mockery even recognizable to humans.
The spark in her face turned cold, but not with death, and she spat something at him in high-pitched gobbledegook.
“M’lady?” he inquired snidely as his claws drew back.
To his surprise she laughed – blood bubbled and it cut off quickly – and then repeated herself, this time in old saurish, accent harsh and thudding.
“May you become as insufferable to yourself as you are to me at this moment, lizard,” she said. And then she smiled, and then she spat.
And then she fell over as Klalmxxydor’s foreclaws penetrated her torso from four angles at once.
The city was burning brightly under the cool crisp evening as he stepped free from the burning rubble of the palace, the city sprawled below like a dead deer just beginning to become temptingly bloated with putrid aromas. Klalmxxydor breathed in soot and screams like a good wine and shook himself, relishing the clank of twenty thousand scales as they slid up and down his body. Then he stretched his wings and…
…and…
If he’d possessed the facial muscles for it, he’d have frowned. His wings…
He craned his neck to stare back over the length of his own body. Yes, there it was, all the same as he’d left it. Upward of seventy feet long, a third of that his tail, plated in armour even a charged knight armed with a lance couldn’t hope to penetrate, standing on four legs strong enough to support a castle and lithe enough to swat gnats out of the sky, with his two broad wings the size of mainsails just now unfurling to catch the sunset air and-
The unfrown would’ve deepened here as his mind caught up. And. And not moved at all.
Klalmxxydor shook his head three times, then snarled to himself. He scanned the sky for reassurance and caught sight of a bird fleeing the flames – a little pigeon.
There, there was his proof.
He looked back up at his own wings, his own body. It was ridiculous. It was moronic. But it was undeniable.
He was just too damned big to fly. He’d need wings big enough to cover half the city just to glide, and the muscles to drive them would be large enough to triple his torso’s width and breadth.
An ill-tempered hiss escaped Klalmxxydor as he stomped inelegantly down the lanes of the burning city, torching fleeing peasantry and merchants alike to lighten his bad mood. It wasn’t every day he got to consume royalty, and now here he was having to walk home owing to the tragic unrealities of his own physical form. There was simply no fun to be had.
Walking was unusual and tiring both, one feeding the other, and unusual was halfway home when he felt a great and ferocious trembling in his gut. Oh, he’d eaten his share of king and queen on his little expedition, but that was a lean meal, and mostly armour – especially the queen. The woman had practically been an armoury with legs.
Still, luck was with him yet. A deer lay in the copse just ahead, paralyzed with fear of the reptile and the faint and stupid hope that its nose wasn’t working properly or its vision clouded.
He breathed in air, and breathed out heat. The air ahead of the dragon turned red and seared itself into white and blue and beyond, shimmering into a heat so pure that it caught fire in self-defence. The copse withered from the temperature just a split instant before the flames erupted from it, the deer screamed like a knight and fell still, and as the fire danced and whirled over the ground around him all that Klalmxxydor could think of was how tremendously ridiculous the whole thing was.
Fire. Not volatile chemicals such as a beetle might spray, not a spark such as might snap from the impact of flint and steel, but pure heat. And produced from his gullet, which was scarcely the most scarred and durable portion of any creature’s anatomy.
What, by cinders, was THAT meant to be?
And why the smoke that issued from his nostrils? What was he burning in there? His own organs? His last meal? If it came from his stomach it could very well be and no wonder he was hungry. If it came from his lungs… then how? How had he not seared his own breath away?
No. He would not be party to this farce. Not anymore. People would sneer at him.
The deer tasted like ashes in his mouth. This was still better than the third through fourth deer, which simply ran away.
Home arrived at dusk, a broken mound of stone and charred trees that had once been a respectable hillside. Klalmxxydor was so tired from walking that he didn’t even bother to round upon the small party of vengeful knights ineptly tailing him some half-mile back. They’d wait ‘till morning, and then he’d finally get some triple-cursed food for breakfast.
Right now all he wanted was sleep.
The bed of Klalmxxydor was gold and gilt, silver and steel, and it was piled in drifts deep enough to nestle his head and broad enough to cradle his body. He’d amassed it since he was barely big enough to spark, and by all rights it should’ve expanded slightly today but he couldn’t carry things and walk at the same time so he hadn’t. What a waste of a long trip. Next time he’d…
Well. He supposed he’d just have to walk AGAIN. But be more prepared next time.
Klalmxxydor sighed and turned himself over in his wealth and shut his eyes and felt the coins drip down his forehead and became so suddenly furious that he nearly breathed fire again in spite of himself.
He was seventy feet long and thirty feet tall and eighteen feet broad even if a third of that was tail and he was lying quite comfortably – not so comfortably now, stiff with ire as he was – on a bed of gold at least twice his diameter when curled and deep enough that he did not simply grind through it into the floor when shifting.
That was probably half as much gold as had ever existed anywhere already, just there in his bed. Even if half or more was silver. And.
And.
Klalmxxydor’s eye twitched uncontrollably.
That was implausible.
The treasury was much smaller now; half its wealth scraped and crushed and mangled into the cracks in the floor so deep that Klalmxxydor’s great thick claws could not get at it. It was not gone, but it was at least out of sight and therefore mind and it soothed him. There. Plausibility.
He sighed and rearranged his wings, curled himself up around his single, tiny treasure-heap, rested his head on his legs and-
Icy dread crept up his spine. That was it. That was it. That was what had been bothering him all along.
No wonder he had nearly gone mad today, with such an atrocity lying underneath his very nose – literally – all this time.
Damnable dukes of ash and smoke, how had he MISSED it? His legs – four of them. His wings – two of them.
SIX limbs? What in the name of all that crackled was that meant to BE? A hawk crossed into a cat? An ant grown scaled? Six limbs. SIX LIMBS!
He’d have to fix that.
It was very painful, lying on his belly with the stumps tucked raw against the ground, but Klalmxxydor bore it in good humour. At last, at long last that filthy uncertainty had drained from his mind. And now he was as he always should have been. Plausible.
He sighed with contentment, and as he noticed this it was as if his happiness had pumped itself out of his lungs with that very breath.
How is it, he thought to himself, that a seventy-foot, narrow-chested body covered in heavy armour does not collapse its lungs under its own mass?
The knights waited for dawn, passed the night coating their faces with the ashes of their homeland and quietly wishing one another goodbye. As the day broke their swords unsheathed and their faces set and they descended, one by one, into the great smoke-fogged pit of the dragon’s lair.
They nearly stumbled over the body.