Dragon Gold: A Tale Untold

1

AUSTIN

He woke, bolting upright in bed and gasping for breath.

A sheen of sweat covered his body. His head and body felt hot, despite the coolness of the bedroom. Silver moonlight poured in from the skylight overhead, framing the bed. He looked out the windowed walls at the thousands of bright sparkles of light from the city below. 

His fists had balled the sheets, fine Egyptian cotton, normally smooth and cool, but now hot and damp under his skin. He took a deep breath, remembering where he was. Home, of course. The modern house he’d commissioned just two years ago, sharp angles of steel and glass jutting out of a hillside in Orinda, facing San Francisco. 

Now that he knew where he was, the question was: Where had he been? In a dream. That was the answer. Or more accurately, a nightmare. But it had felt so real. Dreams normally seemed distant and diffuse. This one was crisp in his mind, as if he had really been there.

None of it made any sense, though. He'd been standing at the base of a giant tree, bigger than any he'd ever seen. He’d been to Muir Woods just the year before and walked among the old-growth redwoods that towered up into the sky. But the tree in his dream dwarfed those, the base like a massive wall of bark. The tree didn’t just stretch up into the sky. It filled it, with some of the lower branches as big around as some of those redwoods he’d marveled at.  

And it was on fire. 

He stood naked before it, the tall grass tickling his ankles. The light and heat washed over him. He felt rivulets of sweat streaming down his back, his chest, and his legs. 

He could still remember the smell. There was burning wood, of course. But there was also the stench of roasting meat. Someone or something inside the tree was burning along with it. The tree was so huge that perhaps hundreds or thousands of bodies burned inside.

Another hot gust rolled over him, and he heard faint screams, carried on the scalding wind. This all felt wrong. It felt like he was watching his own house burn to the ground. No, that wasn’t right. This was like watching an entire city burn, the people trapped inside their houses, pounding their fists against doors that wouldn’t open. Even though he couldn’t see them, he knew they were inside, and that knowledge was horrifying.

But then he had felt a tickle at the base of his neck, as if a fat black spider that had been sitting there this whole time had finally decided to move. Only there was no spider, and the tickle was inside his mind, compelling him to turn around.

As he did, Austin looked out upon hills that rolled away from the base of the tree. What he saw there made even less sense than the skyscraper of a tree consumed by flames.

A battle was being waged. At first his mind couldn’t make sense of what his eyes were seeing. He saw dragons, each a different color. Austin thought they might be fighting one another, but soon it became clear they were on the same team. The grass upon the hills had turned black, not from the flames of the tree, but from some kind of dark corruption. Hundreds, maybe thousands of other creatures filled the fields. A red dragon was covered with huge rats, bellowing as it let loose a torrent of fire. The army opposing the dragons consisted of small animals: possums, snakes, and others he couldn’t make out. 

And floating high above the field battle was what looked like a man. He was naked, his skin as black as midnight. Austin realized he was the one controlling the vermin hordes. He was the one who had turned the ground dark and sour. He looked like a man, but he definitely wasn’t. And though he couldn’t say how, Austin also knew that the thing was responsible for the burning tree.

That was what the dragons were fighting, the malevolent creature in human form suspended high in the air, his arms outstretched. They were fighting him, and they were losing. 

Austin saw a blue dragon circling the black figure. He saw the dragon take in a deep breath, then let loose a white shower of ice and snow from its gaping maw, directed at the floating man. The blast hit some invisible wall well before it reached its target, harmlessly solidifying into a giant clump of ice before falling to the ground. 

The blue dragon roared, the sound filled with rage and frustration. His comrades had all fallen. The red dragon was overwhelmed by the sea of rats, toppling over to crash against the earth. Austin saw the scaly heaps of three others bodies: black, white, and green. He couldn’t tell if they were dead, but they were definitely out of the fight.

As he watched the end of the battle unfold, Austin thought of fairy tales, where the dragons were usually the villains. But they didn’t seem to be the bad guys here. That thing in the sky above the battlefield was the bad guy. It was undeniably evil. Austin could feel the rot and corruption emanating from it in waves.

It raised a hand towards the blue dragon, who was circling for what looked like another attack. The black thing’s hand curled, extending a single finger to point at the dragon. A single black thread shot from its fingertip. Austin thought of Spider-Man, shooting from his wrists, and even above the fray the sound it made seemed exactly like what he imagined in the comic books. Thwip!

The dragon spun and rolled, trying to dodge the shot, but the black thread struck his left wing. The figure jerked his wrist, like a fly fisherman hooking a trout in a stream, and the blue dragon roared again as he spun and tumbled out of the sky.

The dragon tried to recover as it fell, wildly beating its giant wings. But it was no use. Austin flinched as it hit the ground. He felt the tremors of impact ripple through his feet and up his legs. 

This was no fairy tale, and it also didn’t feel at all like a dream. The sights and sounds were clear and vivid. The smell of smoke and burning wood filled his nostrils, and just beneath it was a rotting smell, like fresh meat left in a dark, warm place, the eggs laid by flies just beginning to hatch. 

The dragons were all out of the fight now, and a squealing cheer went up from the vermin horde. The sound hurt Austin’s ears.

Then the black figure turned its head, and for the first time it looked directly at Austin. Of all the sights and smells in this nightmare so far, that gaze was by far the worst. There were no whites, just two glistening black orbs filled with ancient intelligence and hate. 

Until that moment, Austin thought he was simply a spectator, watching the events unfold. But as the thing’s face turned, its eyes locked onto his. It didn’t just see him, it looked into him. He felt the skin across his naked body go clammy. His stomach soured, and he tasted the bitter pang of bile at the back of his throat. 

It’s a demon, he thought, with no doubt in his mind. That’s what it is. And it sees me.

The demon smiled, and now its body was pivoting to face him as well. The cheers of the horde grew eerily silent, and a sea of beady black eyes turned to fix on him.

Wake up! he screamed at himself. He tried to raise his hand to slap his own face, but he couldn’t move. The demon had frozen him in place. Then the rats and possums began to chitter excitedly. They moved towards him, a swarming ocean of dirty black fur and sharp white teeth.

They’re going to eat me, Austin thought. They’re going to shred me to pieces.

He realized he could move his head, even though the rest of his body felt encased in stone. He looked down at the horde of creatures crawling towards him, and he knew he was going to die. An ice-water trail of fear trickled up his spine. This wasn’t a dream. He had been transported to this crazy world, in the middle of some war he didn’t understand, and he was about to actually be torn to pieces.

But then he felt a warm glow in the center of his chest, and a light began to form there. The encroaching vermin paused, their eyes now reflecting a bright gold. 

Austin looked up at the demon again. He didn’t want to. Those eyes were the most horrible thing he had ever seen. But he couldn’t help himself. And now he was reassured at the sight of doubt in those eyes. The demon’s smile faltered. The creature opened its mouth.

Kill him, it said, the words slick and deep, like oily sludge being poured from a spout.

But the glow was growing, filling Austin’s entire field of view. Everything was disappearing in a bright flare of golden white light.

And then he had awoken in his bed, sitting upright and gasping for air. 

What the hell was that? he thought. A nightmare about demons, dragons, and a giant burning tree. Still, some part of his mind told him it wasn’t a nightmare at all. It was real. 

Ridiculous, he thought, letting out a little snort of laughter. Something stirred in the bed beside him, the crumpled heap of crisp, white sheets shifting. 

He flinched away, nearly falling out of the bed. His heart, which had begun to return to a normal beat, leapt up into his throat and began pounding all over again. 

Then he saw the tousled head of black hair on the pillow. The sheets stopped moving, while Austin heard a light feminine sound, half-sigh, half-snore.

Someone was in bed next to him, a woman. He remembered, through the haze of bubbly flutes of champagne, the night before. He’d attended the symphony, one of the many organizations he had donated money to over the last couple of years. They’d had a guest cellist, a lithe, beautiful young woman with short black hair and high cheekbones. She was from Bulgaria. Or was it Romania? Either way, it was one of those Eastern European countries he’d lazily lumped into a single mental bin, though he was embarrassed to admit it.

He was doubly embarrassed to realize he didn’t remember her name. Katarinka? Tatiana? It was something like that. All he could remember was a single sharp image. She was sitting there at the edge of the dais in a gauzy black dress, the huge bulk of the cello tucked between her knees. The full symphony had been playing a piece by some Romanian composer he didn’t know. Or was it Bulgarian? An homage to their guest cellist. And the music had built and built to a near-deafening crescendo before the hall had fallen silent. 

And then she had begun to play, gliding the bow across the strings as if it were a natural extension of her arm, hugging the cello as if cradling a lover. The sounds that came from the strings were deep and lonely. The woman’s face was placid, her eyes staring into some far-off void. But in the middle of her solo, she had turned her head to look at him. Their eyes locked, and the hint of a smile formed at the corner of her mouth. 

That was what he remembered clearly. Not what he might have said to her at the reception and not how she had gotten back to his house. He’d probably praised her lovely play and complimented her beauty. And he’d probably had the car service drive them both back. But he couldn’t remember. 

He sighed. A shame. The sex had probably been great, if she expressed half the sensuality in the bed that she had with her instrument. The sheets stirred again, the top of the heap falling away to reveal a bare white shoulder. 

Austin had brought many beautiful women back to his house. His normal instinct might have been to lean over and wake her with a gentle kiss on the throat, to slide his hand around to cup her breast. They could make love again, bathed in the moonlight from the window up above. Or he might pad into the kitchen and make her a goat cheese omelet, surprising her with an early breakfast. That would invariably lead to another round of sex.

But after the nightmare, he didn’t feel like doing any of those things. In fact, he didn’t want her in his house at all. That thing had looked into his eyes, and there was recognition mixed with a hatred he had never seen directed at him in his life. The demon wanted to kill him. He felt as if he were suddenly exposed and at risk, like a small forest animal caught by a spotlight in an open field, a pack of hungry dogs surrounding him, ready to tear him apart. 

Austin climbed out of bed, goosebumps breaking out across his body as the cool air began to evaporate the sweat. Normally, if he had woken like this and hadn’t felt like a second round of sex, he might have gotten on the computer. He might have slipped on his Bluetooth earpiece and began to make some calls. He might have made a few trades, or seen how the markets were moving. 

That’s how he’d made his money. In his early twenties, he’d hung out a shingle as a financial advisor, starting with a small stable of clients. But as their portfolios grew faster and more impressively than any others in the firm, top management quickly began to notice. Austin’s stable of clients exploded, and soon he was a rising star. Every choice he made for his clients seemed like financial genius. Every investment grew beyond expectation and common sense. Everything he touched, it seemed, turned to gold.

They offered to make him a partner, at the ripe old age of twenty-seven. Not only did he turn the offer down, he quit. He wasn’t just on a hot streak. There had been rumors and jealousy in the firm, water-cooler accusations of insider trading, hacking, or some other shady practices. Nobody could know that much. Nobody could be that good.

And nobody had been more surprised than Austin. There was no inside knowledge. He just seemed to know what to buy and sell, and exactly when to buy and sell it. And why squander that golden touch making other people rich? He had made his own investments, of course. But he quit to devote his efforts to his own holdings full-time. It had most definitely paid off. Now, at twenty-nine years of age, Austin found himself approaching the hundred-million mark. 

Not bad for a kid who’d been kicked around foster homes for as long as he could remember, who didn’t have a college degree or any real formal education at all. Everything he knew, he’d taught himself. And yet, he was lucky, unbelievably so. He was young, rich, and healthy. He had a fabulous house and three incredibly expensive cars he almost never drove. And women like the one nestled in his bed nearly threw themselves at him. It was all so easy. Too easy, maybe. 

Austin picked up the black pair of silk boxers from the white carpet, now a dreamy blue in the moonlight, and slid them on. He walked silently to the living room, where a great pair of sliding glass doors opened onto a cedar balcony. 

He walked out into the moonlight, feeling the cool smoothness of the wood on his bare feet. He put his hands on the railing and looked down. The drop was at least fifty feet. Probably more like a hundred. Trees covered the slope of the hill, and farther out were the sparkling lights of civilization. 

He took another deep breath. He didn’t feel like sex, and he didn’t feel like work. He briefly considered heading to his home gym and working off some of the nervous energy from the nightmare. He lifted his hand from the railing and felt the slight shaking. No, he didn’t feel like exercise, either. 

Austin didn’t know what he felt like. All his life, he’d known he wanted to be successful. He’d had nothing. No home, no real family, no past. And he’d bucked the odds to become incredibly successful. That’s what he’d wanted all along, right? 

But the dream that wasn’t a dream had rattled him. As he looked out at the thousands of homes below, he felt uncertainty and fear like he’d never felt before. 

It was just a nightmare, he said out loud to the night, hoping that saying it would make the words more real. They would drive away the deep sense of doubt he was feeling right now. What did he have to worry about? He was on top of the world. Wasn’t he?

If that were true, though, then why did he feel as if everything had changed? Why did he feel like he was suddenly in some kind of indescribable danger? And why did it seem like not only him, but his entire world was in jeopardy?

You’re being stupid, he said, a little louder this time. He rolled his neck and stretched, raising his arms up over his head. The demon wasn’t real, and there were no such things as dragons. 

You’re going to go back inside, snuggle up next to that beautiful Romanian cellist, and sleep this off. And in the morning the sun will come up, and you’ll tease apart those slender white legs of hers and slide yourself into her just like she slid that bow across those strings. 

He smiled at the thought, but the expression felt false on his lips. Still, he hadn’t gotten to where he was today by wallowing in doubt, and certainly not by letting stupid dreams bog him down.

Austin turned to head back inside. But as his foot crossed the threshold, stepping on the carpet inside, he froze.

A sound echoed over the treetops and up the side of the mountain, a sound even more lonely and haunting than that of the cello from the night before. He’d never heard such a thing in the two years that he’d lived here. 

Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled.

2

FIORA

She sat in the tree overlooking the peacock’s house. Her job was to guard him, to protect his very life. But that’s what she thought of him, and that’s what she called him.

A peacock.

How else could you describe the man? He was beautiful. She had watched him for hours sculpting his body in the gym in his home. She had followed him on his morning runs. His body was muscular. The lines of his face were sharp and clean, the look of nobility. And there was good reason for that. He came from a long line of kings, didn't he?

He was also fabulously rich, by the standards of any world. What did he do with all that he had? He strutted about, dressing in rich silks, driving flashy cars, and bedding whatever hapless wench happen to fall into the crossbeams of his charming gaze. Tonight it was the skinny foreign woman who played a fiddle so huge she had to tuck it between her legs. No doubt the sight of her straddling a giant piece of wood was part of the attraction.

She knew of no other creature to compare him to. He looked, talked, and walked like a man, but he was most definitely a peacock. 

And she had been charged, as the sole duty of her life, to watch over him. What a waste, she thought. Not just of one life, but of two.

She sat nestled in the crook of the limbs, the light of the full, bright moon coming through the sparse leaves overhead. She wore a black suit of light body armor. Her quiver and bow lay in the crook of limbs beside her.

She felt for the coin in the pocket at her belt. Her fingers slid in and felt the cool ridges, then plucked it out. The coin was bigger than any the humans here used, taking up most of the space of her palm. The gold gleamed a strange red tint in the moonlight.

The side face-up in her palm bore the clear etching of a dragon, its wings outstretched in flight. Fiora snorted at this. I should take it to a metalcrafter, she thought. I could probably find one somewhere in the city to do the job. Melt away this side of the coin and etch me a nice rendering of a beautiful, useless bird. 

She turned the coin over to look at the writing on the other side. It was in the old language of Xandakar, a form of speech that no one even in that world understood. But she knew what it said. Or at least what Haygar had told her it was supposed to say. 

The Brotherhood of the Gilded Guard. That’s what the raised lettering across the top was supposed to read. And then there was a quote around the edge at the bottom. Only our light keeps the darkness at bay.

She snorted at that as well. How far had the brotherhood lowered its standards when it would take the likes of her? An outcast wolf, and a girl to boot. Haygar had found her. He had trained her. And he had advocated on her behalf to become his successor. All her life she had considered it an honor. Haygar had been the strongest, fiercest warrior she had ever known, and he had sworn his life to this cause. He had convinced her she was worthy of the job, but now she wondered if the job was worthy of her. 

She had trained her whole life for this, with every fiber in her being. She could track a sparrow in a rainstorm. She could snip the wings from a fly at a hundred paces with her bow. And yet, here she was, sitting in a tree in the middle of the night watching over a spoiled, preening man who had dedicated his life to spinning coins and humping ladies. And how long had she been doing this? 

That reminded her. She slid the coin back into its tight home and reached down to slide the knife from her boot. The blade was black, sharpened to a razor's edge. She climbed to the branch just above her and hunched there, reviewing the marks.

The bark had been scraped away, leaving a wide space to place the notches. She sunk the tip of the blade into the wood next to the others and made yet another mark. She grouped them in fives, and the fives into fifties. So it was easy to count five hundred and fifty-two days. And that was just how long he had been in this house. She had watched over him for three more years before that, when she had taken over the supposedly sacred duty from her mentor.

Fiora climbed back down to her perch and slid the knife back into the scabbard in her boot. She sighed. She hadn’t brought anything to read tonight. She had her phone, but she wasn’t supposed to listen to music. Haygar had