Short Stories from Yours Truly

The Return of Princess Althya

Once upon a time, long before the medival ages but long after cavemen discovered fire,  there was a dragon princess by the name of Althya. She was smart and beautiful and everything that is needed in a princess, but she was also an orphan. The humans, tired of being confined to their caves for fear of the carniverous dragons residing in the mountains, had murdered her parents and her only sibling. Now the dragons lay in hibernation, as was usual in the winter, and the humans were preparing a way to rid themselves of the problem of dragons once and for all.

They recognized (finally) that they could not simply kill every dragon over the course of the winter. And if they murdered the princess, the dragons would rise from the hills as one glittering fleet and murder every single one of them, and their children, right down to the babe born yesterday. Dragons do not forgive and live longer than one would expect, even a person like me who is versed well in fairy tales and grew steeped in them. So the humans, as clever as they were brutal, had found another solution. They called from every point on the compass rose the great Fae-Sorcerers, and trekked many miles into the mountains to find the golden-walled lair of the Princess Althya. Here the sorcerers encircled the young dragoness and began to chant softly.

The young princess felt the tickle of the magic and awoke, emerald-eyes bigger than dinner plates and soft with drowsiness. Looking around, Althya woke up more fully and roared, trying to lash out, but it was too late. The wretched spell the Fae-Sorcerers were casting was doing its work. Althya's scales began to melt, her tail dissolving, her beautiful wings vanishing like cotton cany in a child's mouth. She shrank, naked, tailless, wingless, until there was nothing left but a human teenaged girl, screaming, feral, and wonderfully insane. Even in her weakened form, it took ten men to subdue her and force some clothes on her bare back. She continued to fight until she was very nearly unconcious, those same emerald eyes, smaller and rounder now, rolling up into her human skull.

The humans looted the vast cavern, staying for however long they pleased. They knew that as long as the princess was human, the dragons would be weak and powerless, reduced to theivery and preying upon local cows and sheep. They would not dare kill a human for fear it  was their princess; humans look very much the same to dragons, as dragons do to humans.

Years passed. Althya, trapped, immortal in human form, soon learned to be a servant and to take orders. She passed from master to master, each regarding her legacy with more and more skeptism, until it was simply a legend and she simply a freak. She was made to do the lowliest jobs, thought of as cursed and dangerous.

And indeed, she was dangerous. Beneath the subordinate exterior, Althya burned with dragon-rage, which is one of two things capable of fueling a dragon's flame that they are so famous for. Althya raged at every one of her masters, and no wonder they said she was cursed- the rage that consumed her was so great it could be felt by alll those near her- a few masters had died of the pain they felt at Althya the Dragon Princess' hatred of all humankind.

However, her five hundredth year of service to the despised humans marked an era of hope to come for the few dragons that remained skulking in the far corners of the earth, and their princess, as well. Her current owner was Sithad the Terrible, a particularly cruel and greedy man-even for a human- incapable of loving anything but gold and wine.

She had been acting as wine-taster at one of Sithad's many sumptous feasts (held largely when the rest of the country was starving of famine and dying of thirst), when her human name ("Jun" was it? Althya does not remember. It does not matter.) floated into the strange, round thing that humans called "ears." Across the room, Sithad beckoned to the dragon princess. Dutifully, Althya walked over to her new master.

Her years as a dragon had left her with a sinewy grace hard to reproduce. Even though her clothes were the ugliest possible, it was clear to all in the room that she was the most beautiful girl there.