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    The Dragon's Teeth
    The Dragon's Teeth
    The Dragon's Teeth
    Ebook44 pages55 minutes

    The Dragon's Teeth

    By Sylvia Volk

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    About this ebook

    Wenceslaus the clumsy apprentice despairs of ever mastering smith-magic. His teacher, wicked Black Kaspar, mocks him, but Kaspar’s lonely young wife Kalyna breaks into a smile full of dimples whenever Wenceslaus is about.
    None of them know that their mountain harbours a dragon—or that the gold of its tears, overspilling to surface on the mountain as raw nuggets and fragments, will wake a magic wild enough to destroy all three of them.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSylvia Volk
    Release dateDec 23, 2011
    ISBN9780987767998
    The Dragon's Teeth
    Author

    Sylvia Volk

    Sylvia Volk was born in western Canada to a family of readers; fiction followed. First she read it, and then (starting in elementary school) began making up her own. Somewhere along the way she ran out of available fiction and started reading nonfiction as well, and ended up learning about esoteric things - Arab horses, fractal structure of story, ancient-world military history, the mythology of beekeeping, the vanished kingdoms of the Himalayas and other such trivia. She writes esoteric books, and is beginning to suspect she's wrecked her eyes with too much reading.

    Read more from Sylvia Volk

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      Book preview

      The Dragon's Teeth - Sylvia Volk

      The Dragon’s Teeth

      By Sylvia Volk

      Published via Smashwords by Unexpected Books

      Copyright Sylvia Volk 2011

      License notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; it may not be re-sold or given away.

      ISBN 978-0-9877679-9-8

      The dragon lay along a vein of air, imprisoned in the heart of the mountain. The bedrock was thicker above her than she was long—and she was very long, her twist of tail and iron-scaled neck having grown until they filled the length of the crevice, which had been a stream eating through limestone, once. The unrelenting rock forced her head back, and splayed one taloned foot at an angle. She had wings, but could never spread them; she had a voice to cry out with, a wild music in the earth, but no answer ever came.

      She grew old, old, a ribbon of desire in a mountain veined with precious iron and precious silver and precious, buried gems. Always, helplessly, she yearned. Men mined the depths above her, but they never dug down to her hungry jaws, and though she heard their footsteps, she could not reach them.

      Such was the life of dragons.

      Centuries passed, and tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes, pinned forever shut in the dark.

      The tears welled upward to the mountain’s surface. They washed down along its springs and waterfalls, becoming flakes and nuggets of gold.

      I found gold in the mountain stream, the smith’s wife said.

      They lay together in the darkness of the smithy, on a bed of sheepskins and straw. For light, they had the glow from the forge-box; it lit Wenceslaus’ awkward sooty hand between her breasts, and the long, bare slump of his back. Gold? he said, indistinctly, into her shoulder.

      Kalyna tugged his head up by the hair, and gave it a shake. It’s in my kerchief. Do you want it?

      There’s no gold on that mountain, he mumbled, and never has been.

      She poured it out of her kerchief into his palm: irregular pebbles and finger-long wires of gold, enough to weigh heavy and make his jaw drop. See? I would never give it to anyone but you.

      I’ll make you a gold chain, Wenceslaus said at once. He rubbed a nugget against her lower lip. Fine enough for a princess in an enchanted prison. The finest you ever saw. His voice deepened. His gaze fixed on her mouth, not the gold. Fine as magic—

      He kissed her, and the gold fell, forgotten. But they couldn’t stay longer in bed; they had to set the forge to rights before her husband, the smith, came home.

      When first the forge had been built, there had been a town around it, and a silver mine delving into the mountain. But life grew hard. Snow closed the valley off half the year. Avalanches swallowed the roads, and the busy miners could not be forever rebuilding them. Besides, the vein of silver ran out. So the miners went away to the Salt Mountain, three days south, and because they were very frugal, they took with them the lintel-stones of their houses, the hearth-stones, the corner-stones and the frames of the windows. Within three years, nothing remained

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