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Katal's reckoning is upon him. Will he survive?

This is the second and final part of this story, which is a sequel to The Dragon and the Steed. It is a more unusual sort of story for me, but I hope it is enjoyable all the same.

The Dragon and His Reckoning – Part 2

‘Why did you do it?’ Ardalane said. ‘Katal, are you listening to me? Don’t make me take the food away again.’

Katal was not listening but raised his head in interest upon hearing the word ‘food’. He huffed when he realised that Ardalane had not brought any more and resumed gorging on the pastries that he already had. He had been confined to the clearing for a few weeks now. At first, he had played Ardalane’s mind games, answering pointless questions while trying to ignore the gnawing feelings at the back of his mind, until one day he was overcome and lashed out, only to meet the same response as the first time.

With his pride damaged, his spirit broken, and his body defeated, he engaged as little as his captor would allow, and tried his best to fight back the overwhelming emotions that the inquisition brought up, coping only by binge eating on the endless carts of food that Ardalane provided. And then there was the manner of why he was now confined only to the clearing. He had gotten fat, very fat, fatter than he had ever been when alive. At first, he had merely been amused to find that, upon attempting to get another look at the ocean that had caused him so much grief, he could no longer fit through the dense woods to get there, and, not having the energy to knock down the dozens of trees needed to reach it, he returned to his crates of food.

It was not long before walking became difficult, and shortly after, the act of standing up became an overwhelming strain, until finally, he gave up and stayed where he lay. Here, he grew enormous, his flesh spreading across the ground in great folds, the weight of his body anchoring him there, permanently.

‘I mean it, Katal, I need an answer, now, or I will starve you. My client has waited long enough for it, and she deserves it more than you need this food,’ Ardalane said.

He did not look up, though he could feel her cold stare on him all the same. They had spent a lot of time together since he had arrived, and yet there was no bond between them. If anything, their relationship had deteriorated since they had first met, and Katal did not doubt in his mind for a second that she would starve him for information.

‘I do not know why I did any of the things that I did,’ he sighed, and then lifted his head and looked her in the eyes. ‘Truly, I do not know. I never felt this way while I was alive, I felt no-, what is a word for when you care about a bad thing you have done?’

‘Remorse?’

‘Yes, I never felt remorse while I was alive. Everything was about survival, about being the strongest, about dominating everyone and everything else.’

‘And?’ Ardalane said, tapping her talons on the ground.

‘And what?’ Katal looked back down at his crate of pastries, which was almost empty. ‘That is the entirety of it. I did what I did because I could do it, and because I felt nothing for doing it.’

Ardalane seemed to consider him for a while before she spoke. ‘You think that you did every that you did because you had some deficit in what, empathy? Remorse?’

‘Who said anything about a deficit?’ Katal snapped. ‘I was the strongest, I did dominate all before me. What else is the purpose of a dragon if not for that? I lived up to that purpose, and I did it better than anyone else. What is the use of this pathetic ‘remorse’ if all it achieves is making a great dragon feel sadness and regret?’

‘To bring some closure to those that you hurt, Katal. To help them, and to make their lives a bit better.’

Katal spat embers onto the ground. ‘To hell with it. Why not just leave me to my long rest? Why did you have to bring me back, only to make me suffer when I did not need to? To hell with your… with your, ‘clients’. I do not care for them, or you, for that matter. What are they to me? They are nothing, they mean nothing, just insignificant obstacles on my path to greatness. To hell with them all, and to you!’

‘You disappoint me, after all the progress that we made,’ Ardalane paused, looking like she wanted to say more, but did not. ‘We are finished here. I will see you on the other side, Katal.’ And with that, she opened a tear and began to walk through it.

‘We are not done here, come back this instance!’ Katal tried to stand, his legs straining against his weight. Even with his legs at full extension, his belly still spilt across the ground, and despite the greatest of effort, he did not move an inch. ‘Ardalane, come back here at once. I demand to be released! Ardalane?’

Eventually, he calmed down and slumped back, rocking and sloshing briefly before coming to rest. He sat for a while in the silence that covered the clearing before he spoke. ‘Ardalane, what did you mean, ‘on the other side’?’

He was left alone like that for a long time, and after sulking for a while he felt the familiar pang of hunger deep in his belly. The crate before him was nearly empty, and it took no time at all for him to finish the pastries within. Still hungry, he eyed up the crates that were stacked together at the edge of the clearing where they had been delivered by the giant, horseless cart, but they were completely out of reach.

Katal knew that trying to stand was futile; even with his legs at full extension, his paunch not only touched the ground but spilt across it. Using his back legs, he tried pushing himself slowly forwards but found that he only rolled onto his chest, his rear-end sticking up in the air in a rather undignified manner. However, this gave him an idea. After righting himself, he tipped himself sideways and positioned his left wing and legs so that they formed a sort of spring and level under his bulk, and then he pushed with all of this might.

He immediately rolled over onto his back, and then stopped there. The enormous effort left his wing and legs feeling like they were filled with lead, and now he was lying upside down like some sort of giant, obese (and very much stuck) tortoise. Struggling for breath, with the bulk of his abdomen pressing down heavily on his lungs, he flailed and rocked himself back and forth, until at last, he lay on his side, and then he stopped to rest.

It took a full hour to roll himself back onto his belly, and all the while the hunger pangs grew. After recovering, he once more looked over to the crates. They were stacked in a small pyramid shape at the edge of the woodland and were less than 150 feet from where he lay, but they may as well have been a mile away, so limited was his mobility. He studied them intently, and an idea formed in his mind, a dangerous one.

The trees. His breath. If only he could create a strong enough blast in the woods and either knock a tree onto the crates or at least create a pressure wave to tip them in his direction. It risked starting a forest fire around him, one that he would not be able to escape from, his bloated body trapping him there to burn. However, the greenery was lush and in all the time he had been there not a drop of rain had fallen, and yet the grass and foliage around him perpetually looked as though it was freshly soaked in by morning rain.

‘To hell with his,’ he said, and aimed his muzzle above the crates and into the trees and drew breath. Creating the fireball that he needed involved some complex chemistry within the crop above his lower neck, just above his chest, that drew a mixture of fats, oils, and gasses, together into a kind of gooey cannonball. He released this into his trachea and forced out the air that he held in his lungs, pushing it rapidly up and into his mouth, where a flint embedding in his molars created a spark that ignited the ball.

This was fired from his muzzle across the clearing, glowing a dim electric-blue, almost like ball lightning, before disappearing into the woods and erupting in a massive blast the flattened the trees around it like matchsticks, and mercifully sent a heap of crates crashing in his direction. Katal lowered his head to shield himself as wood splinters and planks showered all around.

After a few minutes, the smoke cleared and Katal found himself surrounded by half-smashed crates, their delicious contents spilt onto the grass around him. A few crates had even rolled, fully intact, within a short distance of him, fully in reach with a bit of complicated manoeuvring. And, fortunately, the fire that burned in the remains of the trees quickly burnt itself out.

Using his tail, wings, and talons, Katal gathered what he could from the carnage around him into a heap and set to work gorging himself. He had gotten through three crates worth before a tear opened across from him and Ardalane stepped through.

‘Well-,’ he said, stifling a belch, ‘well, look who has returned for more. So, what would you like to hear now? How about how terrible I felt about burning a monastery to the ground?’

‘No, Katal, we are done here,’ she said. ‘It is clear that we’re not going to get anything more that we need from you this way, so I’m here to explain the procedure that you’re about to go through. This might be difficult for your primitive brain to grasp, though I will try regardless.’

‘My primitive brain?’ Katal growled.

‘You may have noticed that you are residing on an island of sorts; this is useful because it is not far from the truth of the matter,’ Ardalane said. ‘I am from a time far in your future, from a different world, where we have mastered a sort of magic, you might call it. As you know, we pinpointed your time and location of death and managed to retrieve your… Let us say ‘soul’, for explanatory purposes. It turns out that creating an island like this is expensive, very expensive; however, your soul is sort of like a battery.’

‘I can believe that. Ha! Only my soul would be good for battering down castle gates.’

Ardalane sighed loudly. ‘Ah, no, not so much. Your soul is much like any other. It is no better at ‘battering’ anything down than any other dragon soul – or human soul for that matter.’


‘What-,’ Katal said but was immediately interrupted.

‘Imagine that your soul is like a lake: you drain a bit of it every day to feed things like your perception, such as eyesight and hearing, and to work out problems like how to widen your cave without it collapsing. After using that water, it returns to the lake as rain and the lake fills back up,’ Ardalane said. ‘So, it turns out that the lake water can be repurposed to pay for a lot of things, and in this case, we are using a bit of it to pay for this island, so to speak.’

‘That is as incoherent as anything I have ever heard,’ Katal said. ‘I have a soul lake and it is paying for this island? What rot!’

‘No matter, you can keep the water in your soul lake, but we are taking the island back in the next few minutes.’

‘Wait, what will happen to me?’

‘Furthermore, you will not be keeping your current, former, body. We will be dumping you in an entirely new body, on my world no less.’

‘I do not understand,’ Katal said.

Ardalane grinned ever so briefly before she stopped herself, long enough for Katal to see it, and it made him shudder.

‘See you on the other side, Katal,’ Ardalane said, and then backed into a tear and disappeared.

Katal lay in silence for a while, trying to comprehend just what had been said, and what was about to happen. And what was about to happen? He looked around the clearing, craning his head this way and that, and everything looked normal as if it were the day he had arrived.

The day he had arrived.

‘Oh no,’ he said. The crates had gone, the damaged and burnt trees had returned to their former position. Something else felt wrong, too. ‘Oh no,’ he said again when he noticed that the sky was gone, leaving not so much a blackness behind as nothingness; and then, the trees were gone, leaving only the ground, the island, and the ocean around him.

He panicked and tried to spring to his feet, but he was glued to the ground by his weight. Then there was no ground, and no ocean, only Katal, an amorphous form in the void. And then his body was gone, leaving only his thoughts.

‘What happens now?’

*

‘He’s waking up.’

‘Hey there, wakey wakey!’

‘You better call her.’

‘Right, will do.’

A pinprick on his shoulder, and then Katal was fully awake. The first thing he felt was fear, which coursed through him; instinctual and powerful, it literally drove him backwards, limbs scrabbling for grip on the strange floor until he was in the corner of the room. And what a huge room it was, complete with a giant creature that watched him intently.

‘Well, hello there!’ the giant creature said.

Katal’s heart pounded so hard in his chest that he could feel it in his throat. Then, to his horror, a door in the other corner of the room opened and another giant came through, this one human in form.

‘Ah, I see he’s awake. Do you want to grab him, and we’ll take him through?’ the newcomer said.

‘Sure, just give me a moment,’ the creature said. ‘Come here, little guy.’

The giant leaned down, arms outstretched, like a great bird coming from above, ready to carry him off and eat him. He was frozen, unable to move or do anything, and when the big, cold hands grabbed him around the waist, Katal screamed a scream that was totally alien to his ears, ‘EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!’

‘Sorry, little guy, we have to do this.’

Feeling deeply ashamed of crying out in such a way, Katal tried to lower his head into the chest of the creature that was holding him, but he could not bring himself to close his eyes: the need to stay alert overpowered such urges.

‘Awwww, he’s sort of cute, in an ugly way,’ the human giant said.

‘He sure is,’ said the creature.

The giant carried him out of the room and down a long tunnel. Katal tried to get away, only for the giant’s grip to tighten around him. Being carried was a strange, alien, and frightening experience. It felt wrong at a cellular level as if his very soul knew his death was coming, and even though there was no evidence to suggest this, he simply could not shake that feeling.

It was when they finally left the tunnel and entered into a truly enormous space, with Ardalane standing on a dais, facing a steep, terraced hill on which dozens of creatures, humans, and dragons sat, watching intently, that Katal realised it was not they who were giant, but he who was small.

‘Ah, welcome Katal,’ Ardalane said, her figure towering over him (and even the giant creature holding him). ‘I have to apologise that you have not had time to acclimatize. This was a rather spur of the moment sort of thing, I’m afraid. Place him there, if you will,’ she said, pointing at a Katal-sized cage on the surface of a bench before her.

And it was from this vantage point, in the cage, looked upon by dozens of individuals, that the situation began to dawn on Katal.

‘And this is Katal, right here,’ Ardalane said with a tap on top of his cage. ‘He is our fortieth specimen. And I am afraid to say, one of twenty or so who required this rather interesting measure. I can assure you all that, like the other specimens, it is through life in this body – that of the somewhat inglorious rock hyrax – that we will make serious progress in deconstructing his unpleasant psyche and turning him into a more… shall we say, friendly critter?’

‘That, or we will give him to some spacer to keep as a pet,’ she said, and the audience laughed. ‘But hopefully, it won’t come to that!’

*

‘Oh, come now, Katal, don’t look at me like that. You may be a hyrax, but a thousand years as a neuroscientist has given me a sixth sense for expressions like that. Surely this is not worth killing me over?’

The lecture had ended, and Ardalane had taken Katal into a back room where she set about explaining his situation, which included holding him up to a sort of mirror while he retched. He was no longer a dragon. Now, he was the smallest, ugliest, most pathetic thing he had ever seen in his life. Ardalane insisted that he now inhabited the body of (with minor alterations) a small, rock-dwelling creature that had lived and flourished on the mountain where he had lived near Askolov. And yet, such was the creature’s insignificance that despite living there for decades, he had never even noticed it living alongside him. What an insult to his greatness this was. What horror.

‘I think that, once you gain a new perspective on life, one from the point of view of one who is vulnerable, helpless, one who needs others and must work with them for the common benefit of all, you will start to see things differently. Although,’ she said, watching him scowl, ‘it takes longer for some than others.’

‘What will happen to me now, witch?’ Katal said, his squeaky voice would take some getting used to.

‘Well, I suppose that is partially up to you,’ she said. ‘We will start by introducing you to the people who work here, and then we will teach you about the world that you now live in, which may seem strange to you at first, though I am sure you will get used to it. Once you have settled into your new body, and you understand how things work here, we will see then what comes next.’

‘Although,’ she added, ‘I hope that you will choose to integrate yourself somewhere in our society, and in the process learn from others and grow as a person.’

‘As hyrax?’ he said.

‘As a hyrax.’

Ardalane was right about one thing, he would kill her for this. Somehow.

The end.