Cursed: The Legend of Sleeping Beauty

Chapter Two - Tale From The Heir

Copyright Ⓒ 2019 by B. R. Bailey All Rights Reserved 

Gustav wasn't sure the dragon woman would survive. It took two weeks of feeding her broth before she woke up. Resting on a bed of hay in his barn, he had been so startled when her eyes opened that he jumped over the edge of the stall, hiding behind it for a moment until his nerves settled.

Then he slowly lifted his head over the edge, daring a glance down to the still form under the mass of blankets and bandages.

A whiny from Prim made him lookup. She was slowly approaching the figure from her stall, sticking her head over the wall to sniff the dragon woman.

Wrapped up tighter than a butcher's fresh-cut, the dragon woman's right hand rose to meet Prim's nose, stroking it lightly.

Not dangerous then. Prim and Rose were sensible horses when it came to magical creatures and humans alike.

Slowly, so as not to startle the dragon woman and provoke an attack, Gustav walked around the edge of the stall, opening the door to it. Clearing his throat, he walked two steps out, into the center of the aisle in his barn.

"Pardon me, dragon woman," Gustav stated, wringing his hands together. "I couldn't help but notice your fight and fall from the sky above. I took you here so that you could recover."

"Thank you mortal. Your act of kindness is truly a miracle. It seems all that I have seen lately is treachery and betrayal." the dragon woman breathed, her voice barely caring past Prim.

So they could speak any language! The Miller had heard it told some spells could allow someone to do as such and that dragons did so naturally. This was the first he had seen of that magic.

"To what betrayal do you speak dragon woman? It sounds like you have a fine tale to tell."

"That I do mortal. That I do. Have you any water sir?"

After fetching his water pail and ladle, Gustav came to her side once again, helping her until her thirst was sated.

Then, as she cleared her throat, her voice was stronger and carried more power.

"That I do mortal. That I do. Have you anything to write with perchance? I do not know if I will wake again and I wish for my people to know what treachery is in the kingdom."

Gustav was a man of words, who knew his letters well. He spent the whole night listening, enraptured as the dragon woman told him of who she was and how she ended up in the land of Mortals.

In the sky was a great civilization, spread out over many cliffsides, where the Dragons made their home.

Three great kingdoms made up this realm. Fee sat at the lowest edge, where there were more caves and tunnels to make homes. It was where the smallest dragons lived. Over them sat the middle realm of Fi, where a race of larger dragons presided, living in the damper mists. Above them all, in the bright sunlight and coldest of winds was Fo, where the largest and most powerful of the Dragons lived, ruling over all of the others.

Fo was were Galadriel, the dragon woman Gustav had found and rescued, hailed from. In fact, she was the Queen of the Dragons in the Royal Court of Wings!

Her parents had recently passed away in the war between the Dragon Kingdoms and a group of rogues who had shown up 5 years ago.

She had been set to be Queen, until Rumpelstiltskin, a member of her own Royal Court, had betrayed her.

For an entire month before a royal could be crowned, they had to fast to purify their body and prove their willpower to their subjects. All the new ruler could have was water.

Rumpelstiltskin had brought water to her tower, as usual, a task the Royal Court shared so each member could show their support. After she had her fill, her stomach began to ache.

As she was double over, she started to call for help. He had stuffed a gag in her mouth, silencing her pleas, before binding her wings with a cord from dragon tendons.

Then he had picked her up and threw her from the chapels eastern window, dropping her off of the steepest cliffside in all of Fo.

Tumbling through open air and bouncing off of rocky edges, she fell, all the past Fee before managing to slip out of the rope, having stuck out her wings and stomach out enough to have some wiggle room in the bindings.

Injured from the rocks she had hit on the way down on top of the poison sapping her strength, she landed to catch her breath.

It was then that Rumpelstiltskin had set upon her, having been tailing her descent to make sure she perished.

Trained to be the ruler of her land, Galadriel was a fiercesome warrior in her own right, recognized and feared by everyone in the Royal Court of Wings.

She had to take to the air and evade his attacks, going lower than Dragons had flown in over a millennium, risking being attacked by mages and bolt arrows alike as she flew into the Mortal world, thinking her enemy would never follow her.

Except he did follow, to make sure she died. She had been left in the Enchanted Forest because he thought she was dead.

After she had finished, she transformed one hand, breaking off a talon, which she gave to the Miller.

"Use it to seal the wax of those papers and the magic of my blood will make the documents unbreakable. Nothing shall hurt them, not even the strongest fire. Let me see those papers for a moment. I must do something to prove the truth of these words."

At the touch of her hand, the papers turned to gold, dropping from the Millers numb fingers.

"Gold?" He breathed, not believing what he had just seen even as his fingers probed the rolled bundle of glittering papers.

"As a Dragon, I can turn anything that I touch to gold, with a little bit of magic. That was all that I could spare. Please deliver these papers to the bottom of the mountain. The claw will call to Court of Royal Wing's courtier. They'll pick it up, wheresoever you leave it."

With that, her eyes closed and she drifted off to sleep.

The Miller was in quite the dilemma. He was suddenly entrusted with a huge task for two whole kingdoms!

Galadriel had said the Dragons would never return to the Mortal World, not after everything that had happened so long past but was too tired to explain what caused the split.

In any event, Gustav felt the King, and all of the people of Alagil, ought to know what was going on. Naturally, the Dragons needed to know all of these dark deeds from their court.

But what good would the news do if the only Royal were deceased? He couldn't ask anyone to look after Galadriel. As a Dragon, she would find very few people to trust her in the rural countryside.

Besides that fact, if she did survive, she could make gold. That was tempting enough to make good men do dark deeds in the best of circumstances.

Warfare is not the best of circumstances. Right now the kingdom needed gold. It was no secret that the kingdom with the deepest pockets usually emerged victorious in battle. They could afford to keep weapons and food running along the front lines while the poorer nation would have low stock.

Deciding it best to keep an eye on her, he took her and placed her in the back of his carriage, setting out to the land she described with the gold he had left after buying new seed to be planted. Then he went to his closest neighbor and asked him to tend his farm, paying him for his labor, and set off on his urgent business.