Beauty and the Dragon

Chapter 1

The Mirkwood- one of the most traitorous and dangerous forests in all Middle Earth, home to the great spiders and other creatures spawn from Hell. Once the Necromancer had seized control over the forest, it became an unforgiving wasteland for all those who dared enter. Even the peaceful Elves who resided on the outskirts of the woods feared the surrounding darkness and closed its borders. The Forest River that flowed out of the Gray Mountains Southeast through the Mirkwood and past the Elf Kingdom conjoined with the North-running river of River Running at Lake Esgaroth. The small village of Laketown lay nestled on the North corner of the lake closest to the river that flowed towards the Lonely Mountain. The people of Laketown were recluse and isolated people, desperate and miserable. They lived suppressed by their wariness of the dark forest and of the beast that reside within the Lonely Mountain. They too, like the Elves, closed their borders out of fear. The Lonely Mountain had been home to the King Under the Mountain, Thror, and his kind of dwarves. So it used to be. By the beginning of the Third Ages, it was taken over by the beast that all feared, and the dwarfish kind was pushed to near extinction. Though our story takes place here, it does not begin here.

Farther South, below the Lake of Esgaroth, on the opposite of the Mirkwood side of the River Running, lay another small village called Credondale, where another people lived. They were human folk like their Rivertown brother-in-trade. But unlike them, they did not live in fear of the darkness. Their town was safe from the darkness of the Mirkwood, and safe from the supposed beast that lived as the new King Under the Mountain, but they embraced their world as it was. Tales of destructive beasts, fantastic adventures, great depression, devastating war, and epic heroines-all good and bad-were celebrated in song and in story by these people. They knew what to fear, what to respect, what to celebrate, and what to make play of. Their people were strong, outside the stereotypes of what men, women, and children should do or was allowed to do in other places. Men and women both hunted, both crafted, and so on. Though their people were brought up on the idea the world was beautiful in all ways, they knew to be cautious of its unforgiving attributes.

This is where our story begins. On a midwinter evening, the sun long-gone and the stars shinning extra bright, a baby girl was born in the small riverside town of Credondale; a miracle under the moon. Born to a loving family, she was raised on the many mystical tales of their town handed down from generation to generation. Though all tales were meant for the purpose of teaching young children life-lesson, she was enchanted by them all; the stories, the songs, the readings. She spent her days making stick dolls of her favorite characters, playing like she was on adventures when her mother took her out fishing, and incessantly made her parents tell her the tales over and over again. She never grew out of her love for fantasy, even into her early teens. Then, one day, something went wrong. Both her parents died and she was left on her own to tend the business they left behind. Her mother was a huntress but her father ran a medicinal shop. At the mere age of twelve she was left to take care of the sick in her town as her father did, as well as go on hunting parties with the other townspeople. Everyone pulled their weight in Credondale, it was required of each household to provide one person to hunt or patrol, and another person to craft or provide some aide or service to the town. As she was the only one left in her family, she was required to do both.

But over the years, once the effect of her parent's death had worn off, people began to avoid her, she became an outcast. Thereafter people secretly blamed her for their deaths, and shunned her except for when they needed her. She was forced to move to the outskirts because she could no longer afford her father's shop in center of town. The stories, the songs, and the readings her parents taught her as a child grew even more important to her as they were the only things she had left of them. When she wasn't working, she was reading or inside her own mind imagining her own adventures. But it wasn't often enough. Though she tried to be strong, to make her parents proud, she grew sad and alone. Until eventually she aged to nineteen years where our story really begins.