On Teenagers and Dragons

Another short extract from the first of the Goblin Launderette series. As usual, feel free to share and ignore grammar and typos. This is early draft!

When she’d been about twelve or thirteen, Empathy had been obsessed with dragons. After a number of her classmates at school had boasted about being taken to see them at one of the villages on the edge of the Empire, she’d started begging and pleading with her father to do the same. He’d laughed and refused, declaring that it was all just a sham for tourists.

Em had raged and seethed at the injustice of this refusal, with all the teenage fury she could muster, for months. Why was it that everyone else at school got to do the cool things? Why did she have to be the odd one out, every time? Then, one Saturday just before the Winter Solstice, her father had invited Em to join him on a laundry delivery to the next town over. Normally Em would have refused - the trips were long and boring, just a walk along muddy roads in the cold. To young Em, they were a waste of valuable non-school time. But that day, something in the way he’d asked the question made her say yes.

She was glad that she did.

They’d been about three hours out of town, walking through one of the denser areas of the forests surrounding Gamlinberg, when her father paused and listened.

“You hear that?” He’d asked her, quietly.

Em paused as well. Wrinkling her nose with effort, she listened hard. Whatever it was her father had heard, she couldn’t hear it.

“All I hear is silence.” She eventually confessed.

Her father smiled.

“Exactly.” He tapped her gently on the shoulder and pointed off into the trees. “Follow me. Quietly.”

The pair of them began to push through the trees and bracken, Em’s father moving silently while she did her best to do the same. After a while of this, as the twigs and thorns tugged annoyingly at her clothes, Em began to lose patience. She’d just opened her mouth to complain when her father turned and looked at her again. He held a warning finger up to his lips, and pointed at a clearing just off to their left. Nodding in acknowledgement, Em followed him carefully, and quietly, towards it.

And that was when she saw it.

There, in the clearing, was a dragon.

The dragon was sitting upright and alert, on its haunches, wings folded back. Its scales were an oily mix of black and purple that shifted in colour as the low morning sun, filtered through the gently moving trees, played across them. Plumes of steam, issuing from its long snout, hinted at the fury lurking within. Its head flicked back and forth. It seemed to be watching and waiting.

It was the most incredible thing Em had seen in her entire life. The embodiment of magnificence and nobility.

She knelt down silently next to her father and for a few minutes they lurked on the edge of the clearing, taking in the scene. Then, to Em’s horror, the dragon’s head snapped round, its glowing eyes questing in their direction. The dragon’s gaze swept over where they were hiding and Em felt a primaeval burst of fear and a desperate urge to run away as the dragons eyes seemed to lock onto the section of foliage in which they were crouched. It drew in long breaths as it sniffed at the air then, spreading its vast wings wide, raised its head and unleashed a beam of magic into the sky that made the air around them crackle, and Em’s eyes water. The magical beast followed this up with an ear-splitting roar and Em clamped her eyes tight shut and thrust her hands over her ears. Somehow, the sound remained undimmed. Instead a new, high-pitched scream joined it. It took a split second for Em to realise it was coming from her.

And then the roar stopped just as quickly as it started and Em was almost knocked off her feet by a gust of air. She opened her eyes just in time to see the dragon leap up into the sky and, with powerful thrusts of its wings, soar up into the sky.

For a moment, the silence remained. Then the sounds of the forest began to return.

“And that,” said Em’s father, with a mix of satisfaction and something else - amusement perhaps? - “was a real dragon.”

Like any teen, Em was almost incapable of regarding anything a parent could do as being cool. Her father was the uncoolest person on the planet, simply by definition of being her father. It wasn’t his fault. She still loved him, obviously. It was just the way the world worked.

But at that moment, in that clearing, as the air still crackled with magic and the memory of the dragon embedded itself forever in her mind, Em mentally acknowledged that just this once he might have done something cool.

She didn’t tell him, of course. There was no need to go that far. But she leaned over and gave him a hug. She figured he could work out the rest himself.