A New Saga Begins: The Adventures of Wyatt Narr, Hero of Dragons

See previous blog posts and Peter M. Last's blog, http://www.peterlast.com/blog for the previous installments of the story!

Wyatt scowled at the old man but recognized the truth of his words. “Fine, I’ll be quiet,” he growled. “But how am I going to keep from starving to death?”

                Jim sighed and rubbed a hand over his grizzled chin. “You’ll wait till we’re walking in the sun to eat, just like you’ve been doing for the past three days,” he said with magnificent patience. He looked at the young man, or rather through him. This boy has got a lot of growing up to do.

                Oblivious to Jim’s long-suffering thoughts, Wyatt nodded absently, swinging his sword as he looked around the tavern. “Maybe some of these people know where the Sea of Thrack is,” he said.

                Jim just grunted, accepting a bowl of soup from the barkeep. “I’ll ask,” he mumbled around the spoon, once the barkeep had moved back out of hearing range.

                While Jim devoted his attention to his supper, Wyatt began to wander around the room. There were a sad, moth-eaten collection of stuffed animal heads mounted on one wall. Wyatt reached out to touch the bristly snout of a boar, his hand sliding through the creature’s head. “They don’t have a dragon’s head,” he muttered, remembering his own plans to slay the dragon. He sighed; killing the beast would have won him glory for sure, but instead here he was on a quest, sent by the very same dragon he had planned to kill.

                Rubbing his eyes, Wyatt started to sit down in an empty chair. He was already off-balance by the time he remembered that he would fall through it, and he came to a rest with his chest even with the floorboards. Too tired to get up and sit somewhere else, Wyatt drew his knees up, propped his crossed arms on his knees, and rested his chin on his arms. Insubstantial he might be, but walking all day was still tiring.

                Some time later, Jim glanced around for Wyatt’s ethereal form. He spotted the boy’s head and shoulders on the floor, the rest of Wyatt’s body out of sight below the floorboards. Mouth hanging open, Wyatt was emitting an occasional snore. Shrugging, Jim followed the barkeep’s direction to his room.

******

                Wyatt woke with a crick in his neck and an ache in his back. Groaning, he raised his arms above his head and stretched, arching his back. Then he sat up with a startled, “Hey!” He was sitting on the bare dirt below the tavern’s floor, and his head and shoulders now poked above the floorboards.  He scowled. “That rotten gypsy.”

                “What are you complaining about?” Jim asked from the bar, where he was sitting alone, breakfasting on a bowl of porridge. “If I’d woken you to come into the room, you’d still have slept on the floor.”

                “This being blinked out is really annoying,” Wyatt grumbled, running a hand through his rumpled hair. “What wouldn’t I give for a hot bath.”

                “I bet that’s the first time you’ve said those words,” Jim chuckled.

                Wyatt glared.

                “You might want to move before that sunbeam hits you,” the old gypsy said conversationally. “It might be kind of painful to suddenly turn substantial while you’re stuck in the floor.”

                Wyatt hastily leaped to his feet and backed away from the cheery yellow sunbeam stretching from the tavern’s front window.

                A half hour later, Jim having finished his breakfast and bought some biscuits and ham for Wyatt, the unlikely duo were making their way down the main street of the small town. Now substantial in the early morning sunlight, Wyatt hungrily wolfed down the food.

                “It seems we’re still about a month’s travel from the Sea of Thrack,” Jim said, leaning on his gnarled staff as he walked. “The shortest route is overland to the Shay River, which’ll run right into the Sea.”

                “A month?!” Wyatt yelped, spewing biscuit crumbs. He inhaled a couple of crumbs and coughed to clear his windpipe.

                “What, did you think the dragon was joking?” Jim said dryly, speaking above the sound of Wyatt’s coughing. “I told you this was Peddler’s Pond.” He waved an arm toward the body of water to their left.

                “But I don’t have a month to waste traveling,” Wyatt protested. “I’ve got to get unblinked-out so that I can find another way to get famous.”

                Jim rolled his eyes. “What do you want me to do, change the geography of the land? Besides, why are you so worried about getting famous, anyway?”

                Wyatt shoved half a slice of ham in his mouth, glancing sideways at the old gypsy. He wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably, not wanting to share his dreams with the sarcastic man. “Just because,” he mumbled around the ham.

                Jim looked at Wyatt with a knowing expression. “You know, what other people think of you isn’t as important as what sort of person you actually are.”

                Wyatt ignored the other man, feigning absorption in his breakfast.

                At that moment, a man with the filthiest beard Wyatt had ever seen leapt out from behind a tree. “All right, fork over your valuables!” he hollered, brandishing a six-foot claymore that was clearly too large for him. The point of the massive sword kept dipping toward the earth.

                Wyatt and Jim both started at the man’s sudden appearance, and Wyatt whipped out his own sword. It looked pathetic next to the claymore. “Stand forth and do battle!” Wyatt hollered in his best heroic voice.

                Old Jim sighed and rolled his eyes as he leaned on his staff. “Is this really necessary?” he asked plaintively, as the other two men began to circle each other.

                After clumsily thrusting at Wyatt with the claymore, a move the younger man easily dodged, the bandit stopped and shoved two fingers in his mouth, whistling shrilly. A shadow suddenly obscured the early morning sun, and Wyatt and Jim looked up to see a dragon dropping out of the sky.

                The dragon landed with a whump that threw up a cloud of dust, causing all three men to rub their eyes and cough. Throwing back its head, the dragon roared, a stream of fire flicking from its open maw.

                Wyatt snorted. The dragon was barely three feet tall. “You’re using a baby to do your dirty work?” he sneered at the bandit.

Part Eight: The Adventures of Wyatt Narr, Attempted Dragonslayer

See Peter Last's blog, http://www.peterlast.com/blog for the odd-numbered parts of this story...        

                “So where can I find her?” Wyatt asked.

                The dragon, who had been lounging in a loose semicircle of scaled flesh, straightened. Huge muscles rippled sinuously as he pulled his haunches under himself. Now sitting upright, tail curled around his feet like cat, the dragon looked far more menacing than a furry feline. Though his head, on a long neck, was lowered toward Wyatt, the ridge of the beast’s shoulders was still fifteen feet off the ground.

                Wyatt swallowed convulsively, unconsciously scooting slightly backward from the dragon.

                “She dwells in a far land,” the dragon began dreamily. His voice had deepened and become almost melodic. “Across the Sea of Thrack, on a small island in the Bay of Barmus. There is a high mountain on the island there, and she lives in a cottage on the north side of the mountain, overlooking the sea.”

                Wyatt blinked. “That…sounds far,” he said cautiously. He knew the Sea of Thrace; his village was about fifty miles from the coast. But he had never heard of this Bay of Barmus.

                “It is many days’ journey,” the dragon agreed. “Longer, if one has no wings.” His own wings rattled faintly as he refolded them along his back. The dragon bared many long, sharp teeth in a terrifying smile. “I suggest you start on your journey soon.”

                “But…but…” Wyatt sputtered. “How am I supposed to get across the Sea? Much less find this island? And how will I know who this woman is, to find her?”

                The tip of the dragon’s tale flicked up and then banged into the cave floor with impressive force, sending a cloud of dust billowing upward. “That,” he growled, a hint of fire flickering in the back of his throat as he spoke, “is not my problem.”

                “But that’s not fair,” Wyatt protested, ignoring the wild gesticulations Jim was making.

                The dragon lunged. Wyatt scrambled backward until he ran into the wall. With nowhere to go, he was forced to stare into one of the dragon’s deep golden eyes, the beast’s nose a scant inch from his own. “Fair?” the dragon growled, his breath painfully hot on Wyatt’s face. “Did you not come to this cave to kill me, human? If it would be less trouble, I could eat you instead.”

                Wyatt couldn’t breathe, and he was fairly certain his heart had actually stopped beating altogether.

                “Well?” the dragon roared, his voice beating against Wyatt’s body with the force of a hammer. “What shall it be, human?”

                “I…,” Wyatt’s voice broke off in a cough, and he tried again. “I will find this woman for you.”

                As suddenly as he had lunged, the dragon returned to his sitting position, tail once again curling around his great, clawed feet. “Excellent choice,” he rumbled. “Now get out of my sight.”

                Without turning his back on the dragon, Wyatt eased along the wall until he felt the emptiness of the tunnel mouth behind them. Only then did he turn, scurrying up the tunnel with impressive haste. He barely even noticed when he banged his shins several times on rocks. Bursting out into the open night air, Wyatt slumped against the cliff wall and gasped for breath.

                “You really need to work on your conversational skills,” Jim said by his elbow, and Wyatt jumped about four feet in the air. The old gypsy regarded him mildly. “With a little politeness, you could have gotten a lot more information from the dragon.”

                “Sorry, I guess my mother never taught me to be polite to dragons,” Wyatt spat, fear and tension making him snappish.

                “Clearly,” Jim said dryly. “Look, you’d better put some distance between you and the dragon for now. Here, use this rope to climb down,” he said, rummaging in a large satchel hanging from his shoulder.

                Wyatt took the rope, his head tipping to the side. “Why are you helping me?” he asked.

                Jim looked at him, old eyes sharp in the moonlight. “Just be glad I am,” he said shortly.

Part Six: The Adventures of Wyatt Narr, Attempted Dragonslayer

PART SIX 

(See Peter M. Last's blog (http://www.peterlast.com/blog) for the odd-numbered parts of the story. See previous posts for the even-numbered sections.)

Shaking himself, Wyatt took another deep breath and walked through the wall of the shop.  So he was insubstantial, was he? Well, this was unexpected, but it certainly had its uses… Emerging from the front wall of the shop, Wyatt marched down the street, keeping to the shade thrown by the buildings so as not to be trapped into useless conversations with people.

After the shock of being told he was insubstantial had started to fade, Wyatt’s mind had instantly flitted to the use he could make of his condition. Briefly, he had considered the possibilities of sneaking around town to steal, but that would hardly be glorious or heroic.

Glory. That was why he had climbed up to the dragon’s cave today. To the people in this town, he was just Narr’s boy, a scrawny kid who wouldn’t ever amount to much. Well, all that would change, now that he had faced a dragon!

Wyatt’s shoulders slumped. “Except I didn’t do so good.” I got burned up by the dragon before I even saw it, he thought morosely. Hardly the stuff of legends.

There was a kernel of an idea forming in his brain, though, a glimmer of a plan. There must be some way he could use this invisibility thing against the dragon. Sure, he couldn’t kill the beast in that form, but all he needed was the right weapon and perfectly timed sunlight.

If I could sneak up on it… But that was the limit of his plan at the moment. Wyatt pulled his sword off his back, swinging it a couple times. He accidentally chopped through a pile of boxes in the alley. Since the sword was insubstantial, though, it passed right through.

“Weird,” Wyatt muttered, looking down at his sword hand. Or rather, through it, because he couldn’t see his hand or the sword. Yet he could feel the weight of the weapon. He shook his invisible head. He could feel his clothing against his skin, the unkempt hair brushing his forehead, the sweat trickling down his back from the heat of the day, but he could not see so much as a single thread. “This Dragon’s Curse business is peculiar, and no mistake.”

Wyatt slid the sword through the loop of twine holding it on his back, emerging from the alley on the outskirts of town. Before him, the countryside opened up into the rolling foothills of the mountain. Wyatt paused for a moment, bracing his hands on his hips as he tilted his head back to squint at dark scar high on the mountain that was the dragon’s cave. Then he set his jaw and marched forward.

After a half hour’s walking, it occurred to Wyatt that perhaps he should have waited till the sun cooled off a little. The direct sunlight had turned his body substantial again, so he could now see the dark sweat stains covering his tunic. He had forgotten that he had already made the trek to the dragon’s cave and back once today, but his muscles did; they burned and ached as he forced them onward.

But Wyatt was nothing if not stubborn; cast iron armor clanking, he patted around his belt for the water skin he had tied there that morning. Finding it, he took a long drink, grimacing at the warm, leathery taste. The skin was almost empty, and he started looking for one of the many small streamlets that coursed down from the mountain.

Then a thought occurred to him, and he paused, frowning at the water skin. “You’re not insubstantial,” he said to it. “But you were before, or those people would have seen you hanging from my belt. Weird,” he muttered again. Apparently, everything he had been wearing had also been affected by the Dragon’s Curse. “I wonder if I could make something else insubstantial by touching it,” he mused aloud.

Stooping, Wyatt pulled up a blade of grass and then stepped over into the shade of a large oak. He put his back to the trunk, the many branches forming an effective barrier from the sun. In a matter of moments, his body began to fade; Wyatt drew in a sharp breath, still unnerved by being able to see the grass he was standing on through his boots.

Then the blade of grass he was holding began to sink through his skin. As his hand faded more and more, the grass slowly moved down through his palm until it finally fluttered free, falling to the ground. Wyatt shook his hand, frowning. Then he looked at his other hand, still holding the water skin. He could barely see the outline of the water skin as it, too, faded into invisibility. He raised it to his mouth and drank.

Wyatt spat, grimacing. Still warm and leathery. “Huh,” he muttered. “Too bad. But,” he added thoughtfully, “if I could find a better weapon and get the dragon mad enough to breathe fire at me at high noon again…” He frowned in deep thought for a moment. Then he massaged his temple; he wasn’t used to such strenuous mental exercise.

“Right now, I need to get up there and scout around,” he decided.

Finding a small stream, he refilled his water skin and marched on. Remembering a small pouch hanging off the back of his belt, he retrieved it and rummaged around inside, finding the remains of his lunch. Munching on the crusts of bread, Wyatt followed the streamlet higher into the hills.

By the time he had reached the narrow, switch-backing goat track that led partway toward the dragon’s lair, Wyatt was worn out. He stopped to rest on a rock, panting; using both hands, he pushed his sweaty hair off his forehead as he tipped his head back, sizing up how much farther he had to go. He sighed wearily.

“Maybe I should go back home, get some more supplies, and start again tomorrow,” Wyatt said. Then he thought about explaining to his mother where he had been all day and why his body kept fading in and out. Not to mention facing her wrath over the remaking of her pots into armor…

Wyatt stood up and resolutely marched onward.

When at last he began the climb up to the ledge that was the front doorstep of the dragon’s lair, the sun was sinking, coloring the sky in fiery streaks of red and orange. Tired though he was, the exhilaration at being so close to his goal fueled his aching limbs. Grimly, Wyatt jammed his hand into a crevasse in the rock face, putting his boot on a small, jutting ridge.

As the sun slowly disappeared beyond the horizon, Wyatt’s body began to fade. It was unnerving, climbing while his hands and feet grew less and less distinct. After a few almost-falls, Wyatt stopped trying to see his way and concentrated on feel alone. He was spurred on by the thought that once his body became completely insubstantial, he would fall off the cliff face, unable to hold on.

This, however, did not happen; a crescent moon was rising in the darkening sky as he was about five feet below the ledge. Wyatt could no longer make out his hands at all, but here he was, still clinging to the rock face. “Weird,” he muttered to himself for the umpteenth time that day.

Wyatt thought about this oddity for a moment, hanging from two handholds with one foot braced in a crevasse. He had fallen through the shopkeeper’s chair when he had tried to sit, and he had walked through walls and even people. But, come to think of it, he hadn’t sunk through the ground when he was walking. “Huh.”

This was probably important, but his arms were beginning to burn from holding him in a static position, and he continued the climb. Minutes later, he was pulling himself onto the ledge, wriggling on his belly to haul his body up. The small pebbles on the ledge, he noted, dug into his insubstantial skin. He stowed this observation away for later consideration.

Wyatt had come up about twenty yards from the mouth of the dragon’s lair. Being insubstantial, he had taken it for granted that he would make no noise, but as he strode toward the yawning opening, his cast iron armor clanked. Wyatt froze, heart in his mouth, but when there was no growl or other sound from the lair, he continued forward, though with more caution.

After stealthily picking his way along the wide ledge in the faint light of the crescent moon, Wyatt crouched by the cave mouth. Taking a deep breath, he then stepped inside.

The moonlight outside quickly faded as he moved inward, and he had to feel the way with his hands. Barking his shin on a large rock, Wyatt swallowed his pained exclamation. He frowned; he didn’t see the point of being insubstantial if he could still hurt himself on rock.

He crept for a long time through the wide passageway, moving carefully to avoid making any noise. Presently, he could make out a red glow ahead, and he slowed even more. He could hear something, too, a steady, low rumble that quivered through the rock beneath his boots.  His heart was pounding like a drum, his breathing shallow. For the first time, it occurred to him that this was a dragon he was sneaking up on.

At last, Wyatt crouched behind a boulder, just to the side of a huge cave that opened up from the passageway. The red glow emanated from the cave, casting a lurid light into the tunnel. Gathering his courage, Wyatt slowly, slowly, shifted to his knees and began to edge around the boulder.

The steady rumble suddenly changed, and Wyatt froze. He heard a gusty inhalation, something huge taking a breath. Then a voice spoke.

It was a dreadful voice, one that shook the tunnel where Wyatt hid. It sounded like boulders being crushed to gravel, and it echoed around the cave with magnificent resonance. Deep and loud, the voice spoke four words that glued Wyatt to the spot.

“What? You back again?”