TEARS

Written on October 21, 2024 (♏︎)

Author's Notes: Written for Whumptober 2024 for prompt No. 21: Body Horror ("Let the bedsheet soak up my tears").

Beowulf, awakened to where he lay atop a blanket-covered palette of hay, thought at first that the bedding he lay in was damp with his own sweat–that his wounds had given way to infection and thereafter to fever. He moaned a little, thinking that it would be an awful botheration to die after making it out of the colliery, and this action alerted him to the hard, iridescent mess of scales and horns lying beside him.

A tongue lapped at his face as he started awake. He realized soon that he was not feverish–that he was hale and whole and very much awake in Golland farmhouse. Looking to the holy dragon’s head, which lay alongside his own, he saw its eyes were open.

Beowulf imagined expressions in them that he did not know a dragon’s eyes could carry. He watched as the dark slits of each gold-flecked orb grew wide. Did dragons weep? If they did, it had not been mentioned in legend or song, where they were not oft the subject of sympathy.

She craned her head, and Beowulf took it in his hands as he bowed his own, his own tears fading fast into the cloth beneath them.

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