Tales from Thaladia

On Summoning Dragons

It's not easy being a mage. I often wondered if it might be easier to be a blacksmith. Sure, there was the problem of burns from hot iron and bruises from being kicked by some spirited animal you were trying to shoe, but about the most complicated thing blacksmiths had to do was make chain mail. I'm sure blacksmiths might deign to disagree, but then again, I never knew a blacksmith that would even contemplate what I was about to attempt.

I needed to summon a dragon.

Why I needed to summon a dragon was almost as long a story as any I could tell, but it all boiled down to the fact that magic is hard. It's meant to be hard. Even the ingredients for making salves and potions are difficult. Take a simple potion of health. I have to go out at midnight during a new moon and collect whole bouquets of the right white flower that's so tiny that it's just about impossible to see with no light, all the while dodging the irritating little pixies who make it their job to keep me from picking flowers at midnight.

This time it was a bit more complex than that, but suffice it to say I needed a dragon scale or two. Easy, right? Dragons grow just like any other creature, and they shed scales by the dozens when a growth spurt hits. The average dragon's home was absolutely coated in shed scales, unless you happened upon a dragon who was particularly fastidious. Now, I could go on a week-long trek to the mountains with nothing but my wits and venture into a dragon's lair to find some, and on the whole that doesn't sound that difficult to the average adventurer. But I'm not the average adventurer, and I happen to know that dragons don't like waking up or coming home to find a strange person poking around in their belongings. I quite sympathize. It's often easier to just ask.

Now, most dragons I have met don't answer messages, won't engage in a bit of spirited banter in letters, won't appear at a royal summons. In fact, sending a messenger to a dragon is often mistakenly viewed by the great one as a sign of friendship, as the dragon then wonders who is on the dessert menu. So that meant summoning one to me.

I had a summoning circle permanently inscribed in my solarium, but I drew a second outer circle just as carefully as any scribe, making sure to make the lines double thick because I, sure as the sky above, didn't want this thing getting out. He was a big dragon even when he was a little dragon, and like most dragons in this region, blew a lovely amber flame that could roast a sheep on the spot. I had no desire to be on the menu.

Summoning, you ask? Isn't that just for demons and spirits and things that live in the shadowy mist of half-life? Really, now. You can summon anything. No, that's not quite right. You can't summon the stupid flowers that I have to gather at midnight. But you can summon anything sentient. It just has to have a name, and you have to know what that name is, and include it in your basic summoning spell.

Let me expound for a moment on the idea of names. You can't summon your irritating neighbor Bob from next door by using the name Bob, or even Robert, or even Robert Townsend Williams III. You have to use his True Name. It's not necessarily even his name, per se, but what he calls himself in his mind when he thinks of himself. In the case of dragons, it's usually what they were called by their mothers when they were hatchlings. Since dragon mothers are particularly fond of wanting their offspring to be big, strong dragons when they grow up, you usually get something like "Raggardarram the Magnificent" or "the Mighty" or "the Terrible" because that all sounds terribly cute to dragon mothers.

But this dragon was different. It took me weeks of research and scrying and interviewing the hillfolk to discover his True Name. His mother was killed by an adventuring party, but they didn't discover the hatchling when they raided her lair. He was found by a kind-hearted gardener who could hear the little dragonet's cries for food and came looking. The little man took him home and raised him on goats' milk and turnips until he could fend for himself, all the while letting the dragonet play on the floor with his own little daughter. To reassure you that this man was not wholly out of his mind, there was no danger of fire, because dragonets can't breathe flame until their fire stomachs develop at puberty, and just like any other house-bound animal, the family filed his talons and taught him where to relieve himself, and cautioned him to play nicely. Of course, when the dragon hit his second growth spurt, he had to be freed to the wild, because the family could no longer afford to feed and house him.

The story ends just as stories do, with the dragon growing large and old and earning his own name of "Grrackvard the Cheese Eater" for his undeterrable exploits raiding farms for wheels of cheese, as much as his dragon name describes the habit of trying to land in trees that were much too small to support his growing weight. But his early days left a much more indelible mark on him, leaving his True Name up to speculation by scholars until I stumbled upon the answer when I interviewed the gardener's grandchildren.

I meditated for an hour, clearing all thoughts from my mind but my task at hand, then began to sing the summoning spell. It was simple, really, compared to the months of planning and research that had gone into the preparation. The circle began to glow amber and red, the protective field around it white and glimmering. Within moments, the dragon appeared, then glared at me with whirling eyes and let loose a blast of flame that was well absorbed by the protection I had set up. This wasn't my first summoning.

Upon seeing that the flame did no good, the dragon looked down at the circle and narrowed his eyes at me. It was time to strike a deal.

"Hello, Poofy," I began.