FABLES
Written on May 18, 2021 (♉︎︎)
She was there. She'd been there for twelve days, and every morning Beowulf still awoke to fears that he'd been mistaken--that there was no animal body against which he pressed his own--that finding her again had been a dream that must fall away. He lay motionless, watching the morning light highlight all the patterns etched in her scales. Even then, he feared she might vanish. Even then, as he felt the steady rise of her breath and the roar of all the fires within her, he marveled that any of this could be.
As she stirred, he considered that it was--perhaps--the fault of legend and fable. Like all boys eager for the romance of knighthood, he had taken it that dragons--alongside giants, ogres, and wicked kings with pretty daughters--should be one of his natural enemies. Even after a decade of war left him cynical about much that was knightly, it seemed absurd that he should be pledged to a beast. That--he thought--had always been the business of young maidens. A heroine might wed a black boar, might tame a manticore, might pry the prince from out of a monster. All knights seemed to deal with on that front was acquiring the occasional hag--the sort of unfetching woman a man might just as easily obtain outside of a fairy tale--and with a little finessing, they always smoothed themselves out to a young maiden by the story's end.
Beowulf rose slowly as Reis began to stand, feeling all the subtle aches of having slept leaning against her all night. His eyes traced an aimless path through the veins in her wings' webbing as she stretched them, and he had a foolish impulse to whistle or clack his tongue--to try to get her attention as he might call a dog or a bird.
He called her name instead.
She moved, he thought, not quite like a dragon. There was something deliberate in the sweep of her neck, in the craning of her head: something that he told himself still bore the trace of humanity. When she lowered her face towards his--mouth full of daggers and breath full of ashes--he did not flinch at first. He stiffened only a moment when she moved towards the side of his cheek, lapping at tears he had not noticed falling.
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