7.1 A very cunning man
Chapter 16 *
(If you’re new here, don’t be confused by the chapter numbers. They jump about. Think of it as a way that Deleiri expresses her time passing by.)
THE CIRCUS DRAGON lowered her head to the ground, and spread her jaws wide open like her Keepers wanted her to.
What they probably did not expect was the large gout of flame that came spewing out from her maw, like water that had been trapped behind the floodgates for too long, finally breaking through.
Her fire was always like this. Explosive. Out of control. Most of the time she hated the way that it burned and destroyed.
Not this time.
The clearing came alive with the screams of elves and men. The wave of fire roared on ahead, decimating row upon row of pine trees in an instant, and setting the rest aflame, consuming the woods with abandon. The dragon had not a clue how far this blast had spread—neither did she care, she told herself—but the Circus Master made sure that she heard about it some time later, when the damage had been tallied. The area of destruction was measured to be two hundred or so meters in length, and fifty to a hundred metres wide. Twelve buildings had caught her flame and, since they were made of flimsy wood and plastic sheets, rapidly burned to the ground. Eighteen Keepers injured…
But don’t they deserve it? After all they had done? The dragon smothered her guilt. She told herself that she did it for the boy. Yes. The boy. They had to find his mother. She could waste no time. There. That was where she needed to go. In the distance rose the crown of the Decagon, black flag flying high, marking the centre of the Circus.
A wail split the air. Don’t they deserve it? The Circus Dragon spared a glance for the Keeper who had pierced her hide earlier, writhing and rolling in the sand, then diving into the river. To be honest, she had been wanting to torch a number of them for the longest time. She might have already done so if it had not been for that stupid conscience of hers.
Don’t they deserve it… No time to feel bad for the people who held her captive. Who mistreated her. She tried to shrug off her thoughts. Anyway, she was certain that her Keepers were wearing protective Shards. These shielded them from the deathly effects of dragon-fire. Burn, but not die, essentially. At least not as a direct result of her flames.
She checked that her mental connection with the Noah-boy was broken. She was going to wrench herself free of her chains and…This pain that was to come… It was too immense for the Hatchling’s tiny mind to fathom. She took a deep breath, and steeled her heart.
She began to strain against her shackles, moving fast as she could while her Keepers were busy with their fire-fighting. The moment her chains went taught, wave upon wave of electricity struck her. Her muscles spasmed and refused to move further, but she resisted. Her body seized, curled, contorted, but she resisted. Her entire being screeched and moaned. Tears leapt from her eyes into the air as steam. Even for a dragon her size, it was agony.
But she resisted. She resisted. She resisted.
And pulled.
With a groan and a metallic snap, her chains came loose. The shackles about her fore- and hind-feet crackled and sizzled out, having lost its connection with the source of its power. Her forward movement stuttered with relief at the sudden give. Just for a moment, she stopped to catch her breath. Reign in her focus.
Run, urged the Wind.
How she ran, manic, crashing through the streets, turning over stalls. Tents were up-ended with a sweep of her tail. Humans and elves alike were sent scurrying, letting loose shouts of terror as though the world was at an end.
“Dragon!! Run for your life!!”
She saw them flee from her, and she had to laugh. Silly humans. Pathetic elves.
A young Keeper tried to stop the dragon, stepping in front of her path of havoc and destruction with a poisoned spear in hand. She jumped, sailed over him easily, but felt the tip of the spear glance over her right wing-stub with a light plink across her scales. A miss. She landed with a crow of triumph, but found that she celebrated too early. Another Keeper stepped out, and firmly lodged a poisoned spear between her scales, over the tip of her tail.
Her body jolted with the shock. Her blood swallowed the poison. She balked, turned, and ran from him, and from the other Keepers who were gathering from his direction. The mother. Where is the boy’s mother? Her thoughts were growing panicked. And that first spear… It might not have been a miss after all. She could feel the burn of poison over her grazed wing-stub, and the slowing of her body.
The dragon swung her head this way and that, frantic in her search, desperately trying to detect the Noah-boy’s shard, and through that, his mother. She snarled. The idiot woman had run off somewhere else… There! She began the chase again, her footfalls like thunder.
More shrieks. More elves, more humans, scrambling away from her. The dragon would have basked in the sheer pleasure of watching those who had been nothing but horrid, abusive, and blind to her plight flee from her in terror now. Yet her body did not feel so good. She pushed onward, coming to stop in front of a blue shed. The Noah-boy’s mother was somewhere in there.
The Circus Dragon hesitated. She did not have time to knock and wait. Who was going to answer, anyway? Although, if the boy himself called to her…
She opened her maw and spat him out, and he tumbled forwards in the dirt in a mess of saliva and mucus. She tried to reach him with her mind, to tell him what to do, but it only came out as a frustrated yowl. She growled, and scratched at her face.
“Dragon?” Came the boy’s voice. “No, Dragon, stop! Stop scratching! You’re hurting yourself!”
Her eyes blurred, refocused. Blurred, and refocused. Briefly she saw her own blood upon her claws. She stopped scratching. Her eyes fell upon the boy. He looked terrible, and frightened. His hair matted upon his head, his arms and legs covered in bruises and scratches from being thrown about in her mouth while she ran. The boy. Get the boy… to his mother.
She tried again. “Your mother.” The dragon gestured at the shed with a twitch of her tail. “Dragon is… with you,” she slurred, “bad men… won’t… touch… you.”
Her vision began to flash, a kaleidoscope of colours dancing across the edges, followed by a tell-tale creeping darkness, closing in from the peripheries toward the center. “Quick.”
The Hatchling obeyed, pounding frantically at the door and shouting, “Na-na!! Na-na!!!”
There was the sound of a struggle from within the shed. For the longest minute of her life, the dragon waited, wondering at what point she ought to just dig her claws under the foundations of the wooden building and just lift it off from the earth.
The door finally opened—a poisoned spear shot out from within and buried itself deep in the dragon’s soft snout.
She thrashed. Pain, blinding. Numbing her. Her writhing body leveled out the other tents and sheds in the area. Her talons clawed and raked across her face, breaking the shaft of the spear. Through her blurred vision she saw the Noah-boy try to approach her to remove the spear-point embedded within her muzzle, but a woman had grabbed him from behind, fighting to bring him into the shelter of the shed. The man who had thrown the spear was beside her.
From this woman emanated the resonance of the shard the dragon had been following. His mother. The Hatchling has found his mother. The Circus Dragon tried to cling to that thought to calm herself, while she slowly lost control of her senses.
Strange… She tried to reach for clarity, but it eluded her. Why does the Noah-boy still… shout? Why does he still struggle… Had he not found his mother? Was he not safe? The gears of her mind spun slowly. She watched stupidly as the man who had thrown the spear hefted another one.
And a lone thought, desperate, pierced through the cloud of her mind.
“It’s the Circus Master!!” screamed Noah through thought and word. “RUN, DRAGON, RUN!!!”
Run? Her mind shifted sluggishly through the muck. Yes. She could run. She should. Escape this wretched place. No one moved faster than she did, not here. She could do it. She could feel it, the freedom behind her.
The Wind tugged at her back. Run to the Kingslands. Follow Me. Hurry! She pulled herself to her feet, grunting from the effort. She turned—
“You know, I heard a little rumour,” called the Circus Master. The velvet baritone of his voice cut through the fog in her mind.
“It’s just a rumour mind you. I heard that you wanted a certain man dead.”
There was a flutter of wings as one of his ravens flew past her. It drew her gaze back, and she watched it disdainfully as it landed upon his shoulder.
“I wonder, where could he be?” The Circus Master laughed, and the sound of it taunted her, caressed her heart-strings, gripped them, and pulled. “Standing right before you, perhaps,” he purred, “Watching you scurry on off after all that talk about humiliation and revenge and so on and so forth?”
How dare you… The growl escaped her throat before she could stop it. Fury bloomed. The Circus Dragon let it engulf her, the molten rage dripping from her hanging maw. I shall end this. Once and for all.
The crowd screamed as she swung her head around fully to face the Circus Master, bits of spit and liquid fire splattering across in an arc. The ground sizzled and the wood charred. She faced him, the man who had reduced her to nothing more than a chained animal. She faced all the humiliation, all the days that she had been locked in a cage too small, and fed meats that had gone rancid, or had to chew down bone to sate her hunger. Remembered all the words and rocks and spears that she had endured by telling herself that she was bigger than they were. All the acts of madness that she was made to do. She had danced to his music for long enough.
Now. Now she would show him that she was more than some wretched creature.
She would burn this circus to the ground. She would burn them all.
Today, you die. She breathed in deep, and stoked the furnace within. The gaps between her scales glowed.
© July 2026, Leira Loong AKA the Circus Dragon. All rights reserved.