Wyrmslayer

A young noble. A ceremonial, rite-of-passage hunt. A draconid quarry with other plans.

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

On the day the hunters arrived, the green ocean turned and the clouds drew lower until the isle’s mountainous peaks vanished about the gray curtain. Beads of chill rain ornamented the dark conifers among the basalt cliffs and promontories birthed by the volcano long ago. The month was Ecchinus and the summer constellations were in their ebb, yet snows remained in the northerly shadows and pockets of roots. The arctic gales would not suffer visitors in any other season. Nor would the wyrms.

Over the waves the ships sliced. Four schooners and two caravels from Accuro, their billowing gaff and lateen canvasses of blue and white bearing the archducal colors of Vilkinia. As they approached, the ships furled sail and hove to at the empty docks. Mooring lines dropped, gangplank lowered. The crew looked askance along the shoreline and trained their swivel guns up and down the barnacle-strewn rocks and beaches for any serpent sign. One man pointed to a sinuous pattern left in the dark sand some hundred paces off.

“You shan’t kill anything with those… not at this range,” the old Huntmaster grumbled. Unlike his garishly clad associates, he wore simple wool and leather attire. His plain costume marked his trade as much as his scars and missing digits, injuries from hunts long past. 

“I thought you said this would be uneventful, old man,” the General chuckled, then pulled at his doublet which was fast absorbing cold rain and ocean spray. “Yet here you are, criticizing my decision to leave these loaded.”

“In the past century, no man has perished during a Vilkinian wyrm hunt.”

“Then why fear them? Look: we’ve brought an army, but we likewise have chefs, tailors, poets, painters.”

“Of course we have an entourage,” said the third man, the Noble Guardsman Lyssak. His warrior’s stature chafed against his tight doublet and ruff. “This is the Archduke’s son, not some peasant’s errand.” He spoke gruffly, but his voice betrayed his misgivings.

“But that is my point, Lyssak,” the General replied, his black mustache curling with his grin. “This hunt is a formality, a mere posture of courage to appease tradition.”

“You might not say so once you see a wyrm up close.”

“Is that what you were thinking when the whale bumped our ship an hour past? You looked a man afeared, Sir.”

Lyssak glared back, but did not contradict. The disturbance the whale had caused had indeed upset his kilter. 

“I dare say, Sir, if these wyrms are as terrifying as you aver, then our young leader shan’t survive the month.”

Lyssak nearly shot back, but by then the guards had cleared the embankment on shore and a solemn horn was announcing the noble’s advent. All eyes turned to the main deck where a diminutive lad ascended the steps in opulent costume. He squinted up at the looming mountain as the rain made grooves on his powdered cheeks.

“All hail,” barked a herald, “the most noble son of the Archduke Folke, Aarik of Vilkinia, and in God’s name we pray that this wyrm hunt inaugurating his passage into manhood be…”

As the herald made his cry, young Aarik made a shivering convulsion, then suddenly ran across the deck, down the gangplank, and onto the dock where he braced himself against a post and purged his stomach into the waters. 

The General made a noise. The Huntmaster’s eyes fell. Lyssak ran to Aarik’s side and placed a large hand on his shoulder. “My Lord, are you alright? Here.” He produced a silk kerchief to wipe the poor lad’s chin, but Aarik was staring into the waters past the floating yellow chunks. Some four feet below the surface, jaundiced sacs the size of fists undulated with the waves, tethered to the rocks below by strands of mucus. As he looked, Aarik could see the unborn serpents squirming within. 

***

Unlike draconids of legend, the wyrms can neither breathe fire nor fly, although they have wings. They are amphibious, and every one on the island is female. Males are never seen, as they fight and kill one another immediately upon hatching until the end of the spawning season when the victors recede into the ocean depths where sunlight will not transgress, there to grow into bulls. 

All of these natural philosophy lessons rushed through Aarik’s mind as the expedition hiked up the wooded path toward the hunting lodge which had sat empty since last year. Soldiers watched on all sides of the path, including the branches of trees overhead, but saw no sign. Lyssak kept step and whispered reminders and instructions in his ear. The General passed out hooks and pikes. Whaleoil lanterns were lit. The air smelled of pine, precipitation, acidic loam, and some other scent of peril or ruin. A wet gust whispered loose heavy drops from the trees. Aarik thought he might vomit again. 

They reached the lodge, not of wood but stone, a massive structure inscribed by a ten-foot pit and nestled along the slope, lightless and empty, an outsized tombstone. The Huntmaster hobbled to the front and stood before the men. The entrance to the massive lodge yawned open behind him, like a cathedral vestibule without doors. “Mark me, fellows: no man has been within for a year. This place belongs to the wyrms, and we must first reclaim it. Every room, every passage, every mossy grike must be swept. Leave naught unsearched. If you find one longer than your arm, you raise a hue and we take her as a group. No heroism. Aye?” He pointed at each of them, and they could see the spaces in his gloves where he was missing fingers. “And if you see one in repose and think her dead, she lies. She’s dead once her head’s off, and no sooner. Aye?”

They stormed the great hall, hooks and spears raised, breathing the still and clammy air. They did not have to search for long. Serpentine forms, teal and legless, wrapped around the neglected furniture or bent into corner spaces with wings folded upon their backs, still as stone, still as death, torpid and unbreathing. Their earless heads were strangely canine and their gills lay flat. As the men approached, they began to hiss.

Spears thrust. Axes fell. The wyrms convulsed and threw their bodies everywhere, displaying their milk white bellies and speckling the room with dark blood. They hissed and squealed and screamed until the whole space filled with the terrific noise of seething. Heads were removed but the bodies writhed for a minute or longer until all the life had dribbled out upon the flagstones. A fledgling pup scarcely longer than a foot slipped a soldier and slithered for the hallway. Lyssak pinned her wing beneath his boot and lowered his pistol. Her head exploded into pink ribbons. 

“One in here!” cried a man down a hall. “A nag!”

The Huntmaster and a half-dozen others ran down the corridor, including Lyssak and Aarik and a poet to commemorate the moment. Down the passage and to the left they came to a ruined bedroom, where sprawled a wyrm longer than a man. It seethed deeply as they looked in. 

“This one is for the Lord to quell,” said the Huntmaster, handing Aarik a spear. “Now we’ll restrain it.”

In inches they moved about the room, closer and closer to the frozen nag. Her black eyes shone out in the dark with depths so hollow and inky that they seemed to swallow the soldiers’ lanternlights, yet her hiss rose until the Huntmaster had to yell above it to be heard. Then he ordered the strike.

Hooks fell upon her, bearing down on her neck, tail, and around her wings, locking them to her body. She squirmed and twisted. The men pressed harder.

“Now! Now, slay her!”

Aarik assumed the posture he’d been taught, and struck. His heart was not in it and it glanced off her scales.

“Not the hide! The gills! The gills!”

Aarik looked at the nag. Her small teeth gleamed and venom foamed at the corners but in her black eyes was no emotion at all. In Accuro they say that wolves have wisdom, cats have cunning, bears have knowledge, but wyrms in their souls possess the hollow of the world. Aarik looked into the nag’s eyes and saw Hel.

“Strike, lad!” Lyssak screamed. “Strike!”

Aarik struck. The spearpoint entered cleanly between her gills. Ichor burst forth black and hot and screaming. 

***

The great hall glowed from a roaring fire. The gloom receded. Attendants set tables, broached barrels, tuned instruments. Festivities ensued. Aarik was placed in a seat of honor with a mazer of the finest Pachico wine as the poet sauntered forth to recount the events of the day in prose. Men laughed and joked and sang.

Then came the food: wyrm pups fileted and basted in rosemary ale and juniper cones collected from the isle’s slopes. The nag’s innards were prepared with anise and stuffed with pork and hot peppers. The head chef brought Aarik a great pewter tray of wyrm eggs, whitened by gentle heat and washed in sweet mead. The embryos inside quivered though dead. Their flesh, the chef declared, was the most succulent of all game. Aarik took a bite, and the whole hall cheered. The young noble beamed as he never had before. For the wyrm hunt, an auspicious start indeed. 

Partway through the meal Lyssak the Noble Guardsman stood and, flicking his finely cut crystal glass, proposed a speech from the son of Archduke Folke. Aarik stood and recalled the words he’d been practicing with his oratory teacher to deliver on the first night:

“Esteemed subjects and friends,” he began. The hall echoed with cheers. “I thank you for the honor of your presence at this event.” He swallowed to suppress a squeak in his throat. “Verily, my victory here is yours to share, and as I pursue the mature nag that shall ratify my post… so too… shall...”

He faltered as he looked at their faces. Two hundred men stared at him. Among them, he was youngest. He had trained for this hunt for over a year, yet here at the start of his journey he felt not a speck of the brimming virility this whole company seemed to embody. Every step, every toast, every morsel of food on this journey was as choreographed as a court dance, as empty as the nag’s gaze, as shallow as the rain puddles on the flagstones.

He thought of his mother and her smothering affection. He thought of the tears she’d shed when the expedition had cast off from Vilkinia’s quay a few days prior, and the mortification he’d felt at her bawling even as the fleet left port. He thought of his father, who hadn’t even bothered to be there, likely in another town with another of his many mistresses, busily producing more bastards.

Rain tapped on stone. Burning logs popped and spat. Smoke drifted into the young man’s eyes. Surely, it was smoke. Why else would he be smudging away tears? Why else would the Guardsman put an arm around him and mercifully ushered him away? Why else would the lodge’s merriment have ended so soon and so somberly? 

***

He came from the ocean in the starless night. 

It had not been a whale, but he who had bumped against the hull of the flagship caravel earlier that day to test what size it might be. He knew now what they were, and where to find them. 

The guards at the lodge first heard the crash of falling trees, and as the bedlam rose they ran away skirling, possessed of a primal instinct. The ocean beast paused partway up the volcanic slope. Centuries had passed since last he’d felt the wind touch his scales and wings. His gills opened and closed and his tongue knifed in and out. Then his chin drew up and out issued a ululating wail that redounded up to the vault and down to the infernal massif. Fish quit the reefs. Shelled creature receded. Tidepools trembled. Across the island the wyrms roused from their stillness and turned in the direction of the lodge, a thousand puppets on a thousand strings.

The Huntmaster shot up in his cot. He ran to the window and descried their death. “A bull!” he wailed. “A bull has come up from the ocean!”

The lodge was up and men were running to the great hall with weapons where by the dying light of the fire they met a teeming deluge of pups and nags slithering in the door, tumbling into the pit, tangling up with one another in their invasion. The first man fell beneath them and vanished in a writhing ocean of scales. Another’s thigh was seized by a fifteen-foot nag who pulled him down and shook him in every direction until his body was limp and his crown was broken. 

The Huntmaster grabbed a mighty log from the fire and swung it before him, crying defiance against the thousand soulless eyes reflecting the embers and curling away from the angry glow like hair singing before a furnace. The old man turned to those behind him as Arrik and Lyssak rounded the corner. “We cannot fight this!” he wailed. “Our only hope is the ship!”

But he was not looking ahead, where a clap of lightning relieved the form of the bull, coiled just outside the entrance looking in with a head the size of a haycart and eyes like tar buckets. The lightning drew the bull’s visage then went out. Then with another clap the bull’s head was in the lodge and his teeth were around the Huntmaster and the Huntmaster was no more. Aarik had seen the lightning strike, then the Huntmaster dead in the bull’s jaws. There was no inbetween. 

“This way!” cried the General from another corridor. “There is another egress! This way!”

They ran, tearing past men and leaping over fallen goods in the dark and confusion while behind them the hissing and squirming mass came like a wave bringing with it the screams of men and snap of bones. 

Two more turns and they reached the exit which emptied out into the open air; a ten-foot drop into the forest below, a cliff crafted to keep the wyrms from entering here. Men spilled out, jumping and falling in a steady flow to escape the serpents. The hall compressed into a terrible melee, the path fully blocked. “Make way for the Archduke’s son! Make way!” cried Lyssak.

In the long hallway behind, the faint ambient light went out. The bull squeezed toward them like a snake through a mole’s burrow. The men saw it and lost their manhood in the rush. All except the General who, realizing he would not escape, drew his sword and cried one last time unto the glory of Vilkinia before meeting glorious doom.

***

Lyssak and Aarik burst from the treeline and upon the docks with the remaining survivors, lanterns wavering and wits unraveling. One of the schooners had already been unmoored and was sliding away into the waters even as men threw themselves after it or caught the gangplank being drawn. Others who had lost the path in their flight down the mountain were emerging down the beaches or tumbling over the cliffs on either side. From somewhere up the path emanated the seething of the wyrm horde, tearing through the trees and down toward the waters. 

“This way!” Aarik cried from the docks and frantically waved survivors onto the flagship caravel he stood beside. “Aboard my ship! We must–”

“Come Lord, you are first!” Lyssak shouted and nearly picked the noble up off the ground and carried him up the crowded gangplank. They reached the main deck when a thunder of foliage announced the entrance of the wyrm horde spilling down the hill like a living creature itself. They struck the shore and the water turned frothing white. The men who’d fallen in began to howl. 

Down the shoreline, the trees swayed and the bull slid out and into the ocean. Wakes formed and spread in his course and the tips of his wings cut out of the water as he glided sinuously toward the already departing schooner. Aarik tried to shout but was hauled back by the Guardsman. On the other front, the torrent of pups came down the docks and a few wriggled up the flagship caravel’s gangplanks. Men ran to the opposite side to escape and the deck began to heel from the weight.

Fifty yards off, the bull’s head emerged from the water and rose above the fleeing schooner. The men on board screamed. Pistols fizzled and reported from every deck and ratline. The bull stared down at them as a cat would at an unfledged clutch. Passionless. Scant lanternlight played off his milk-white underbelly. 

Then Aarik watched it fall.

Its weight tore down the mainsail gaff and boom and pulled much of the rigging with it. It crushed the deck and the keel cracked with a sound like a cannon. The craft hogged. Main- and foremasts folded toward each other like a closing drawbridge. The bowsprit broke loose from the prow entirely and flew into the air as if making an escape. Lanterns fell and hissed out like the souls of those who’d dropped them. The dark and the ocean enshrouded the broken craft unto only splashing and noises of death remained. 

Now the gangplank was up on the flagship, but scores of pups and a few nags slithered over the deck and made havoc over the surface. Lyssak grabbed Aarik by his ruff and doublet. “Below decks!” he beseeched. “Below decks, Lord!”

“But we are still moored!”

Lyssak looked with horror to the port bow where the thick line still lay across the gunwale next to a swivel cannon. Between him and it, the deck was fast transforming into a squirming melee. He made a quiet prayer and placed a faithful kiss on his young master’s brow. Then he left his lord and ran for the line. 

Over and through the tangle he plunged. Pups struck and hissed and beat their wings and Lyssak’s saber slashed one where it bit his calf and he cried out as he swung at another. Reaching the other side, he collapsed onto the gunwale with limbs afire from venom and grabbed the mooring line, but only then saw the shadow.

The bull rose above the flagship, wings drawn back, ready to fall. 

Tottering, the Guardsman grabbed the nearby swivel cannon for support and drew his pistol, his life’s final salvo. He aimed for the beast’s eye. 

“Lyssak!” cried Aarik, running after him.

“Lord?... Lord no, st—!”

The bull fell. Rigging snapped. Knots popped. Planking shivered. On either side of the leviathan’s fall the deck bucked and Aarik was thrown into the air and landed hard where the busted planks rose to meet him. He clambered forward and reached Lyssak, breathing hard beneath a nose that was squashed like an insect.

“Fly Lord, fly!” Lyssak begged. The venom addled him and turned him weightless. 

The bull rose again for another final drop to sunder the keel. Its gills dilated and flattened with a mighty, fetid exhale. 

“Fly, I implore you!”

“An archduke does not fly!” Aarik cried through his broken face. Then he pulled the pistol from the Guardsman’s weakening fingers, swung the swivel toward the rearing beast, put the pistol’s action sidelong against the cannon’s touchhole, and squeezed the trigger. 

Hammer fell. Flint rasped on frizzen. Sparks bloomed and fell upon the wick. A half-gasp later the night lit with the violent burst of the swivel gun, illuminating the whole baleful scene for a single eyeblink, reflecting over the waves and across the dead and dying men and the horde of serpents in the water and the one great leviathan still rising from the broken deck with its head turning to greet the new threat. To the bull, these creatures were merely prey. The ships he’d claimed over the centuries had never yielded survivors. His ken stretched beyond the transience of this and every diminutive creature he harvested for his spawn that night. What of these toys that cracked like twigs and spat shot like raindrops upon his impregnable hide? What of these rigid, hollow vessels that sundered beneath his weight? What of this trifling pygmy here who stands in defiance?

The monster’s vacuous eyes met Aarik’s just before the black missile punched through his gills. The bull began a howl but the flesh was ruined and his wound sucked and hemorrhaged and all around him his offspring shook and fell into paroxysms as though thunderstruck. 

***

The expedition returned to Vilkinia early — four ships instead of six, fifty-eight men instead of two-hundred. Gone among the dead was the frail boy named Aarik. Instead, the young noble who returned home was then and forevermore known as Wyrmslayer.

***

Thanks for reading! While this is my second post, the first one being Ice & Candlelight, I specifically wrote this tale to be my inaugural story for Substack. It’s more indicative of my style and interests, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!