Some more new fiction--dramedic fantasy.

If "dramedy" is drama-comedy, then obviously "dramedic" is the adjective form. Right? Anyway, I've been working on a longer work than normal (though honestly, I still haven't built up the attention span to write even a novella). Right now it's going to be in its rough stages, because I have not given it the rigorous editing I tend to give my other work. So if it's awkward in places, feel free to tell me. I am more doing this for fun than anything else, and letting the story guide itself a little bit rather than planning it out beforehand. So, with that all side, welcome to PART ONE of
Maggie and the Dragon


The castle was grim. Very grim. It was all in greys and dusty blacks with only dots of color, lichen-swallowed stone and rusting iron. Though it was partially rubble, the part that was still standing looked as if it could survive sieges, mortar blasts, perhaps even meteor strikes. Its moat was fetid and looked as if it housed vicious crocodiles and man-eating kraken, though in truth it was merely a home to several kinds of algae and turtle. There was even a high tower with a trellis, though the trellis was booby-trapped, evidenced by the rather crushed rose bushes just beneath.

And, like many ruined castles, it had a dragon in residence. It also had, strangely, a captive princess. Princess Maggie, to be exact.

The dragon was a proper dragon, not one of these jolly Eastern dragons that enjoy celebrating New Years, or cute little dragons that strange pre-teen girls like to collect. This dragon was huge, and was a brilliant red-gold, with scales that gleamed like embers in the sun. His tail ended in a mass of darkly metallic spikes. When he slept or spoke, streams of vapor billowed from his mouth and nostrils as if he were some kind of reptilian hookah, and when he was speaking, his voice was deep and pleasant, like a master hypnotist's. His fire-breath could melt stone, his talons could tear trees in half, and his rage was terrible to behold. He called himself Claudius, on the rare occasions that he addressed humans. It was not, of course, his real name. His real name was several syllables longer and used a few consonant sounds that human mouths and throats were incapable of making.

And Princess Maggie? She was not originally a princess, at least not by birth. Her father was a rather unsuccessful bean merchant with four daughters and a wife to feed. He was not very clever, and on the whole, rather desperate, so he willingly sold his oldest daughter to be a dragon's prisoner.

Let me explain. The Castle Ack (for so it was called by its enemies back in the days when the moat teemed with alligators and piranhas and the corridors of the keep itself overflowed with boiling oil, and weren't those huge expenses, what with feed and the price of fat and cleaning invoices and hazard pay) had been abandoned by the Kings of Kiseog many generations before, on account of it being ancient and ugly and crumbling and old-fashioned (with corridors everyone fell down in). They built another, grander castle, moved everything there, and tried to forget about Ack.

That worked, for awhile, until the dragon Claudius came. He had spent a century of so knocking about the temperate southland country of Liguria, knocking everything above one story high down and setting fire to the rest of it. In general, he made a nuisance of himself by eating maidens and claiming hoards and destroying villages, until he got bored. (The inhabitants of Liguria, by this point, had either been devoured, found a good hiding place, or moved away.) Claudius thought it would be best if he took a little holiday, maybe a bit of light knight-slaying, something like that. The remaining Ligurians breathed a sigh of relief when he dwindled to nothing more than a speck on the horizon, and then was gone.

He flew for days. Hee flew across many national borders, from Liguria into Carlinge, west into Madregal, and then up the coast all the way to Ingil, where a Carlinger king sat on the throne. He passed it by. He flew over the mountainous, mostly-snowy country of Kilbern and shook his head. Some of his brethren liked the severe, austere, snow-lands of the north (of which Kilbern was the southermost), but he had warmer blood, did Claudius. When he reached Kilbern's sister country, Kiseog, he felt more at home. After a few minutes he saw a dark dot marring the green rolling hills of the countryside. He smiled. This is what I have been looking for, he thought as he kicked himself into a tailspin, circling ever downward, like an improbably huge, shiny bird of prey. And so he finally landed near the Castle Ack.

Claudius looked at the Castle Ack with great approval. In his many travels, he had found that the more decrepit and dangerous any ruins seemed to be, the more treasure they tended to contain. The Castle Ack surely housed the Hoard of All Hoards. He moved nearer, rummaging through the rubble, poking his huge head into abandoned ballrooms and staterooms and bedrooms. He began to grow very vexed. After awhile, he sat back and bellowed, causing every living thing in a ten-mile radius to take cover.

There wasn't so much as a gold ring in the ruins. There was not so much as a silver penny Claudius considered. Should he burn down a few villages, maybe find a dwarven fortress or two? No, come to think of it...dwarves lived north of here.

No, he decided. No. I will try something different this time. He took to wing, following the scent of gold and other precious materials that had been removed from Castle Ack. He was off to use the most dangerous weapon in a dragon's arsenal, more dangerous than tail or talons, fangs or fiery breath: Diplomacy.