The Garden of Whimsy {A Growing Short Story Collection}

The Thorn of Innishmore

It was a sunny, summer afternoon when the Princess Caelyn spontaneously and unexpectedly transformed into a dragon. Being that the event was so spontaneous and unexpected, the princess Caelyn was terrified, and rightfully so.

She was not in her room getting ready for the masked ball as she had ought to be. Tucked away in a shadowy corner of the library, she hid under a table. In the company of books, she could escape the dread of the inevitable night where she would yet again be faced with the sting of rejection.

Caelyn found the pickiness of princes quite perplexing. She had a handful of good looks, kindness, and intelligence to boot, and some serious skills with a crossbow. She may have lacked grace and refinement despite the efforts of all the best governesses in the kingdom, but she would never apologize for spending far too much time reading Seelie Tales and sword fighting with her five older brothers.

But princes seemed only interested in princesses with more arbitrary traits like whether she got dressed by birds in the morning and how good she looked in a ballgown. Princely opinion or not, Caelyn surely couldn't dance well enough to catch a prince's particular eye. The night would end as it always did. Several princes would leave with sore toes and she would have not a single prospect for marriage. Who could blame her for the fact that most princes were only looking for a princess with the voice of a songbird and a face that inspired them to write sonnets? Caelyn pondered just this as she huddled in seclusion, a book of Seelie Tales perched on her knees.

She was about to remark to herself on the ridiculousness of it all when she felt a tickle in the back of her throat. That tickle turned into a cough, the cough into a sneeze, and a sneeze into a roar, and before she even understood what had happened, she looked down to find she'd turned into a great scaly dragon.

"Goodness gracious, what has happened?" Caelyn exclaimed, but only a thunderous cry like the sound of twisting metal came out.

The entirety of the castle residents rushed to the library to see what had caused such a sound. The King and Queen might have set the guards on their poor daughter if an observant, and then sufficiently shaken librarian hadn't witnessed the incident. The King noted the man's concern that the fire-breathing princess would destroy his precious books, then sent the librarian home for two weeks of paid vacation to settle his nerves.

Once it was decided that Caelyn, leathery wings, horned tail, taloned feet and all wouldn't fit in her ballgown (and not for lack of trying) the ball was canceled.

This came as quite the relief to Caelyn, but it was short lived.

***

Being turned into a dragon was a rather clumsy experience. Caelyn found her lack of coordination magnified by the added twenty-foot wingspan and a massive tail. For the sake of the castle's structural integrity and after three burnt tapestries and a severely damaged buttress, the princess was confined to her chambers.

"What kind of Seelie book were you reading, Caelyn?" her mother asked, spitting out the word "Seelie" like it was a curse.

Caelyn wanted to reply that she hadn't really been reading, just thinking, but instead she sighed deep in her throat and let her head flop down onto her bed. Anytime she tried to speak all she did was create a horrible roar that sent the servants scurrying away or a stream of fire that left the taste of sulfur on her tongue.

"The court scholars will figure out what sort of curse this is," the king said with confidence.

"And we're just supposed to sit around and wait?" the queen asked.

"What else are we to do?"

"We could call in a wizard. They always seem to have solutions to these sorts of things."