The First Dragon

Part Three

Ena almost asked if helping him would take some more time off her sentence. She refrained. She was no fool; she knew the temptation to be witty could cause her more problems. She already had enough to manage. "Certainly. Which one would you like to start with? Least violent or most violent?"

Anwar chuckled. "That's an interesting criteria for choosing a story." He adjusted his seat on the ground and considered his options. "Least violent. We can work our way up from there."

Deep in his soul, he felt he'd had quite enough violence in his life of late. But he would never admit to that aloud.

"All right. In that case..."

Ena began her retelling of the drunkard, the man who stumbled through life with little focus, living only for the next drink. He was known far and wide for his foolishness, his recklessness, his emotional outbursts when drinking. It was said that his endless chatter reached even the highest heavens, where Taran liked to rest among the clouds. The god, his rest having been disturbed, came down to investigate.

("So, he intervened because his nap was interrupted?" Anwar asked.

"True, but wouldn't you do the same? I know that I would."

"Fair enough." )

When he saw the drunkard wandering around the town, yelling at what was either a pig or a goat (depending on who told the story), Taran was disappointed to see a life left unlived. The man had great potential, left squandered at the bottom of several bottles. Taran spent the rest of the day following the man, confirming his suspicions, and learning where he lived.

Once the man had finally slunk back into his own home and crawled back into his bed, Taran acted. He took the form of the summer wind and drifted under the door, creeping into the man's room to whisper in his ear.

This form you will keep, until you come to see the beauty in life that you have ignored.

The man heard these words, though he was asleep. Any other time, perhaps he would have thought it was a dream. But when he awoke, he was a toad, small and squat and unable to communicate in any way but croaking.

His thoughts, for the first few days, were a combination of panic over his situation and a desperate need for the drink that had helped him drift through life for so long. He attempted to access some of the bottles in his home, but being a toad, had not the strength to open them. He was reduced to hopping—very slowly—to a drinking hall, in the hopes that he might be able to lick some of the drink from the floor. It was there that he spent the first several weeks of his transformation, imbibing only what was accidentally spilled to the floor and eating whatever insects came in or around the hall.

Over time, a strange thing began to happen. While he was still drinking, it was far less than he had before. The lack of drink clouding his mind led his vision to become sharper, his awareness more acute. He saw the people he had once considered friends—drinking acquaintances, at the very least—come and go in the hall, just as drunk as he once had been. There was a time when their behavior would not have registered with him, but now, with the shroud lifted from his mind, he saw how truly boorish their behavior was. They spoke loudly, crudely, cruelly, and nearly stepped on him several times to boot, too lost in their drink to pay any heed to a creature as small as himself. He began to question why he was friends with them to begin with.

Over time, the men around him became grating, too loud, too rambunctious. He started spending less and less time inside the building—still coming back for drink and food, sometimes, but beginning to take refuge in the garden outside the hall whenever he felt too disturbed by the drunkards within.