This is actually from lunch a few days ago. Very rough, very ‘I’ve read that somewhere before’, but I’m practicing on finishing things…

Rough, rough, rough…

Serif and the Dragon

There is a boy who goes hunting, only he’s not going hunting, he’s going off to die. There is a shortage of food and knows it is more important for other people to survive. He sits down in the snow and waits to die.

A snow dragon comes along and asks him why he is sitting in the forest all alone. The boy tells him about the lack of food and of his family and why it’s best that other people live instead. The dragon listens without comment and when the boy is finished he offers the boy a chance to serve him in return for supplying his family with food. The boy is wary, but agrees after the dragon swears a blood oath.

The dragon kills a small deer-like critter and gives it to the boy, telling him to return to the village and give them the food. He must not speak to anyone in the village and cannot tell them about the dragon.

The boy does so, as his family is astonished as they had assumed he had gone off to die. They try to get him to talk, but the boy keeps his word. The next morning he heads back into the forest to work for the dragon.

The dragon puts him on his back and flies him to it’s warren. There it has the boy do work that the dragons hands are too large to do. At the end of the day, the dragon catches him seven fish and sends him back to the village.

The boy returns and is warmly greeted again, but his family is suspicious. This time when he leaves in the morning his sisters try to stop him, but he leaves anyways.

He returns to the warren and the dragon shows him a vast library, but the boy cannot read. All things in time. This time the dragon catches him five fat rabbits and sends him home.

The family is less enthused this time, and the next morning his parents try and trap him in the building, but he manages to escape.

He returns to the warrens and begs the dragon to let him tell his parents what is going on, but the dragon refuses. All things in time. The boy is very grumpy and works in grumpiness. This time the dragon sends him home with even less food and the family is upset.

They lock him in the building and refuse to let him out until he tells them what is going on. The next morning he cannot escape and he watches the shadows creep under the door. That evening the dragon arrives in the village, Do you break your oath son of man?

I do not! He cries from the house then stand back and the house is ripped asunder by the winds. The boy frees himself and runs to the dragon while his family cowers in fear but his mother objects, he is not yours daughter of storms, give him back to me he died, the dragon answers, long ago in the shadow of a beach tree. I sung him awake again that he might fulfill the hunting’s geas and the boy realizes that his family is older, that the things that felt out of place are due to the three years that have passed which is why he couldn’t talk, lest he lure them into death after him and why he couldn’t eat, lest he poison the meat and now he has died again, and the dragon took him back to the warrens where he was never seen again.