my creative writing coursework

The Story of a Young Dragon

***
If you are a fire breathing dragon, you have to be careful. Even when you are young and haven’t yet grown to your full size. Especially when you are young. Gildaran was both young and careful. He was proud of his carefulness and preferred not to think about his size, which was, maybe, just a little bit smaller than average for his age. He had left his parents’ cave at a relatively early age, and managed to avoid all the trouble and bad habits that other teenage dragons were so prone to. Gildaran was different: he was never fond of burning villages for fun, or snatching royal treasures, or flying over city capitals in the moonlight casting a horrible enormous shadow on the streets below. This was the sort of behaviour which attracted the attention of knights, who, having nothing better to do, would search out a poor dragon’s lair and start besieging it. Instead, Gildaran had built a beautiful home on a mountain, with wonderful views of the king’s land on one side and enchanted forests on the other. He did his best to keep his presence hidden, hunted only at night and never went too close to human villages.
Such were the thoughts of young Gildaran as he was returning from the forest, having collected fresh leaves and flowers for his bedding. As always he was moving carefully, lost in his thoughts about how fortunate his existence was. Gildaran, being a dragon, was quite fond of boasting about his personal achievements. The fact that there were no listeners did not discourage our young hero and he was quietly mumbling to himself as he climbed back to his cave, using wings to cling to rocks while carrying his new bedding in his hands.
And because Gildaran was so busy thinking about how careful he was, it was too late when he finally heard a human voice coming from his cave. He was standing on his sunbathing plateau just outside the entrance and inside was a human female in a very pretty dress arranging flowers and cloths on his bed. His own old bedding was nowhere to be seen. As the dragon stopped, the female turned to face him.
‘Ah, there you finally are. I was wondering when you would show up.’ She said, coming out of the cave and staring at Gildaran in a most embarrassing way. ‘I thought you would be bigger,’ She added.
‘I am only young.’ Gildaran felt himself blushing as his eyes started to change colour, so he started to blink furiously. ‘I am quite a normal size for my age… just within the approximate parameters…’
The female wasn’t listening. She circled Gildaran staring at him insolently, came back to face him and stated:
‘From today I am going to live with you!’
‘What!?’ Gildaran felt his world shattering all around him and he tried desperately to cling to little pieces of it. ‘You can’t. You are a human. I am a dragon. It’s my home. It’s… I won’t allow it!’ he stated firmly, ruffling up his wings and breathing dark smoke out of his nostrils. Too late he realised that he was still holding a bunch of flowers in his arms which made him look rather ridiculous.
The girl wasn’t impressed in the least.
‘I am the princess of this country, and everybody must do what I say. I can live where I want, and since I said that I will live here, here I will stay!’
‘But…’ The world was shattered. The last pieces of normal safe life were slipping through Gildaran’s fingers and there was nothing he could do. ‘Why?’ he asked finally, not sure whether he was addressing the fate or the princess.
The fate stayed quiet, as she always did. The girl, on the other hand, readily answered the question, making Gildaran feel more and more miserable with every word.
‘Because, I won’t put up with it anymore! All my life I have listened to my beloved father the king, attended all the balls, talked and played with nobles, learned to play the piano, and even studied maths. But from today this all is going to stop. Today my father has pushed me over the limits of my tolerance. He wants me to marry Lawrence, prince of the neighbouring country. Have you seen this Lawrence? He is like half a year younger than me, and he is fat and stupid and has spots on his face!’
Among all the dawning insanity Gildaran suddenly had one encouraging thought: he didn’t have any spots whatsoever.
‘Well, father dearest was shouting his lungs out telling me how it’s my duty to follow his orders and how ungrateful I am and how the nations will benefit from our union, so my head started to hurt from all this noise and politics and I decided to run away.’
‘This is certainly very thoughtless…’ Seeing the look on the girl’s face Gildaran quickly corrected himself:
‘I mean brave. You are a very brave young human. But why here? And how do you know I live here anyway?’
‘You’re kidding? Everybody knows there is a dragon living on this mountain. That’s why they made it a nature reserve. It’s in all our tourist books too. It is very fashionable to have a dragon.’
‘You mean those people down there know I live here? But how?’
‘Oh, come on. It’s not like it’s possible to hide the whereabouts of a dragon. Even though you might not be as big as people say.’
‘I am within my age group size parameters.’ Gildaran was determined to win at least one argument, but it was really hard because the girl never listened to what he said.
‘So I thought: where is the one place my father will never expect me to go? And I figured it’s here. You have to agree it’s really smart of me.’
The girl was genuinely proud of her actions and immune to the voice of reason. So Gildaran sighed, mentally prepared himself for the inevitable siege by the knights, thought that it was actually very brave of him to be so calm about his extreme situation, and followed the girl into the cave.

***
She was unbearable. She turned Gildaran’s cosy home into an infernal battleground and his life into a never ending nightmare. When outside, Gildaran was always terrified of knights charging up the mountain to get him; when inside he was forced to listen to her singing and to endure her innovations to his cave. She removed all spider webs along with the spiders, so Gildaran was left without his only company. She turned his bed into a table and insisted on cloths covering it. She washed all the furs and sprinkled them with her perfume, which made Gildaran sneeze. The amount of clothes she had seemed to increase every day and she demanded that Gildaran creates a special niche in the wall, so that she could keep her dresses there. He threatened to take her back to her father. She reasoned that the dragon wouldn’t be allowed to appear anywhere near the capital. The dragon was fighting a desperate battle to keep his private quarters private, however the only reason the princess hadn’t refurnished it was because he hid the entrance behind a huge boulder.
But the worst was yet to come. After about a week of constant terror Gildaran was finally calming down. Nothing seemed to have changed in the human lands. Life was quiet, trade was busy and no knights or other wannabe heroes were interested in looking for a missing princess. In fact, he finally gathered that no one actually knew the princess had gone missing. For political reasons this information hadn’t been revealed to general population and the king had suggested that the princess would return herself, once she got bored with her new fancy. Gildaran felt like a great weight had come off his shoulders. He started to enjoy the simple pleasures of life again and even the princess’s singing and perfumes didn’t seem to him so terrible after all.
The princess didn’t share Gildaran’s joy. She was fuming. It seemed to Gildaran ironic that she should be a small frail girl and he a fire breathing monster, as she certainly had a much more furious nature. After days of tears, screaming and broken tableware (those wonderful plates and tea set the princess had brought with her) she decided to act. When Gildaran returned from his hunting trip she was waiting for him outside.
‘I know what I’ll do. I will marry you! That will teach my father to ignore his daughter’s wishes!’ Her eyes were finally dry, but her nose was still red after too much crying and shouting. She had that look of iron determination on her face so typical of royalty. Gildaran felt panic rising in him, although he was fairly sure that this plan of the princess wouldn’t work.
‘You can’t marry me.’ He tried hard to think of a polite way of refusing a marriage proposal. ‘This is quite impossible. You see, I am a dragon…’
‘Don’t be a fool! Of course, I can see you are a dragon. But I have found a solution! I am prepared to kiss you!’
‘What!?’ Gildaran felt an almost irresistible urge to spread his wings and fly away and never come back. He shut his eyes tightly to gather all his will and persuade himself that running away from a frail human female would be improper for a respectable dragon.
‘I will kiss you, and then your evil enchantments will be broken and you will turn back into a human. And then we will marry, because I saved your life. I hope you are good looking. Anyway, you can’t be worse than Lawrence. At least you don’t have spots. And then the king will have to give you half of his kingdom and we can move far away from here and you can rule your half of the kingdom and no one will be able to tell me what to do.’ The princess went on and on about life after their marriage, and went as far as telling Gildaran how she would get herself a little white dog and call her Tutsi.
‘Do you like the name?’
Gildaran was patiently waiting for just this kind of break in her monologue.
‘No. I mean the name is fine, that is not what I’m talking about. I mean that we can’t marry. I am only an adolescent dragon, I mean this is irrelevant of course, because I won’t turn into a human. You can’t kiss me. I mean, you could, I suppose, but you shouldn’t because it won’t do anything.’
He looked at the princess desperately. She had a puzzled look on her face but at least she was silent and he had a chance to gather together his thoughts and continue.
‘I am a dragon. I am not under any sort of enchantment spells. I was born a dragon. My mother is a dragon and my father is a dragon. My brothers and sisters are all dragons. You can’t break my enchantments because there aren’t any!’
‘But I read in this book that monsters who can talk human languages are all good looking princes of far off lands who were enchanted by evil witches to look horrible. I don’t mean that you are ugly, the way you are, but you are certainly quite scary, if not as big as one would have thought.’ The princess was holding a book with lots of colourful pictures. On the cover Gildaran saw the word “Fairytales” and some human name beginning with “G”. The “G” was coloured golden and there were leaf vines drawn all around it. He wondered how humans managed to collect tales told by fairies. As far as he knew the little folk were very protective of their knowledge. He had to keep his investigation into the nature of the book short because he saw from the princess’s expression that she was not convinced by his story and while he was leaning forward to take a good look at the book she was preparing her dreadful kiss.
‘Wait!’ Gildaran jerked his head up. ‘I suppose, if you still don’t believe me I will show you my proof of identity. Come.’
He took her to see his most valuable treasure. Carefully he moved the boulder hiding the entrance to his private chamber out of the way and took the princess inside. There, in the furthest corner of the cave, was a curtain made out of thin vines, protecting his most sacred possession. He remembered how he had spent weeks making this curtain: gathering all the materials, soaking the vines in water, arranging it outside his cave to dry. It was a wonderful piece with gems and shining shells weaved into it. Yet, it was nowhere as beautiful as the treasure that lay behind it. The curtain made lovely tinkle noises as the dragon held his breath and drew it open.
‘It’s an eggshell.’ The princess, who had thought she would finally see one of the famous dragon hoards, was disappointed. The eggshell was thick and pimply and had red spots all over it. More than that, some pieces of it were covered in old dried slime. Then she finally realised what it was.
‘Wait, is that your egg? The egg you were born from?’
Gildaran had the widest smile on his face. Looking at his own eggshell always made him feel small again. He remembered the games he played with his siblings and the smell of his father’s scales, and the voices of the trees which grew outside their cave. His eyes narrowed and his tail was twiddling with excitement. He grinned and nodded to the princess.
‘Interesting,’ she said, now looking at the shell more closely. ‘I guess you are a dragon after all. That means I have to think of something else.’
To the great distress of Gildaran, the princess spent the next evenings reading the fairy book.

***
It all came to a sudden end one not so sunny day. Two months had passed since the princess came to live in Gildaran’s cave, summer was inevitably coming to its end, the nights got colder and colder and the princess got more and more uncomfortable. Gildaran spent his days collecting wood for fire, soft leaves and flowers for bedding, making furs for the princess and gathering her fruits, because she got tired of eating meat all the time. She even insisted on Gildaran eating apples for dinner. She talked at length, as she always did, about someone called Vegetarianism who said that it was immoral to kill animals for food. Gildaran didn’t agree with this idea, but didn’t want to upset the princess, so he would have a hearty breakfast in the forest while the princess couldn’t see him and then share an apple pie with her in the evening.
He was returning from one of his gathering trips, holding a big basket full of apples, when he saw his princess tying herself to a nearby tree. Despite the cold she was wearing only a see through nightgown and was barefoot. As always, the princess noticed him before he could react.
‘What are you staring at? Help me!’
‘What are you doing?’ he enquired carefully.
‘Can’t you see? I am putting an end to all this! I am going home!’
‘Are you sure that tying yourself to a tree is the best way of getting home?’
‘Well, I can’t just walk down the mountain, can I? That would mean that my father was right and I had wasted two months living in this dirty hole.’
Gildaran wanted to argue that his cosy cave wasn’t dirty at all, but the very opposite, quite nice and spacious. It even had a sunbathing plateau and wonderful views. But something at the back of his mind buzzed that it wasn’t the right time for arguments.
‘So what is your plan?’ he asked, knowing that whatever it was, he wouldn’t like it.
‘I am going to be saved! Like a proper princess should!’
‘But no one knows you are here.’
‘Oh yes, they do now. I told them!’
Gildaran heard himself asking her more questions about how and why she did it, but he couldn’t clearly hear the answers. The land was going from under his feet, he thought he heard the clanging of armor and he imagined knights charging up the mountains, swords drawn.
‘This morning I went down to the village and I told them that a terrible fire breathing dragon stole me from the palace. And that I only had this one chance to come and tell people where I was, before you came back. Once this news gets around, my father won’t be able to ignore me any longer. And then I found this lad, a weaver and asked for some rope and that’s what he gave me, and now we have to stage everything, so by the time the knights get here, they will see how cruelly you have treated me and they will blame my father for not attempting to rescue me earlier.’
‘But what about me?’ Gildaran finally managed to ask the only question that was on his mind. The princess didn’t seem to hear him.
‘This lad, Jack, the one who gave me the ropes, he is a really nice guy. Pity he is just a farmer. He has got a nice smile. We had a lovely chat and he seemed really upset about my tragic fate. Said that if he was a knight, he would have saved me, even if there were ten fire breathing dragons trying to stop him. You know, I believe him. He is not like others. Honest. And he cares about what I have to say.’
‘What about me?’ Gildaran repeated more loudly.
‘Oh, don’t worry. I have thought of everything! In fact you are playing a vital role in my plan. When the knights start to charge you wait for my signal. I will choose the one who is most handsome and then you burn everyone else and the handsome one cuts your head off, and then the king has to marry me off to him, because he saved my life and killed a monster.’
This plan was so flawed Gildaran didn’t know where to start.
‘I am glad you will have your happy marriage, but did I hear it right, part of the plan involves cutting my head off?’
‘Well, yes, the handsome knight cuts your head off, and then you pretend to be dead, and then I marry the knight because he killed the monster and saved me.’
‘There is one problem,’ Gildaran started. ‘Well, actually, there is more than one, but this one is a really big problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘If my head gets cut off,’ Gildaran tried desperately not to imagine the sight. ‘I won’t need to pretend anything. I will be quite dead.’
‘Won’t your head grow back?’
‘No, I am fairly sure, it won’t.’
‘But in this book I read that if you cut off the head of a giant serpent monster it re-grows.’
Gildaran feared the fairy book had become the source of princess’s inspiration.
‘You are talking about hydras,’ he realised. ‘Hydras have many heads, and they re-grow them should one be cut off. Dragons have one head, and if it gets cut off, they die.’
‘Are you sure?’ The princess seemed disappointed there was a flaw in her carefully mastered plan.
‘Yes. Yes, I am. And anyway, I don’t wish to test the theory.’ Maybe the princess was just getting cold but Gildaran thought he noticed traces of doubt on her face, so he pressed the issue.
‘Besides, I do not want to burn any knights! This is not the sort of behaviour one expects from a respectable dragon. Don’t you think that it’s not right to kill people? Doesn’t your Vegetarianism have something to say about it?’
The princess looked genuinely upset. Clearly there were gaps in her master plan she hadn’t worked on. Unfortunately, her iron determination, the sign of royal blood, didn’t allow her to back down.
‘It’s too late now. I was in the village in the morning. They should be on their way to the mountain now.’
There was nothing that could be done. Gildaran took the apples back to the cave and tried to prepare himself for the inevitable conflict.
Time passed. The princess got cold and demanded Gildaran bring her a fur coat and shoes. She couldn’t put the shoes on because she had tied her legs to the tree and couldn’t move them. Gildaran had to cover her in furs and curl around her to warm her up. The princess got hungry and Gildaran had to get her food from the cave. She couldn’t eat because she had tied her arms to the tree and Gildaran had to feed her with a spoon, which was quite tricky, because the spoon was too small and kept falling out of his claws. Gildaran suggested untying the ropes, but the princess said they wouldn’t have time to tie them back, when the knights came. Time passed. The princess suggested untying the ropes because her body was getting numb. Gildaran discovered the knots were too small for him to untie and the rope was too tight for him to get his claws under it without damaging the princess. The princess tried to untie the ropes herself but she had done a good job tying them in the first place and couldn’t move an inch. When the sun started to set the princess was demonstratively sneezing and trying hard to hold back her tears. Even Gildaran was starting to get uncomfortable and wished the knights would appear so it could all be over.
‘They won’t come.’ The princess broke the long silence. ‘They won’t come and I will die here of cold and hunger and no one will know.’
Gildaran tried to calm her down.
‘You have to give them more time. It’s a long way from the capital to here. May be they got into some sort of accident on their way. I am sure they are all eager to rescue you.’
Then, just as the princess were about to open her mouth and start another long monologue about her loneliness, they heard footsteps and a moment later a young lad, dressed in farmer’s clothes appeared.
‘Jack!’ As if by some magic, the princess suddenly came back to life. ‘Jack, you have to help me! You have to untie these ropes! Never mind Gildaran, he won’t do anything to you!’
‘You see,’ Gildaran saw terror on the lad’s face, so he decided he needed to explain himself. ‘She… We tied those ropes, and they got too tight and now we can’t undo them, and since it’s nearly night I don’t think the knights will come today, so we would quite like to go back home to sleep, but we can’t, because we can’t undo the ropes.’
It took the princess and Gildaran some time to explain that Jack has nothing to fear, and the dragon wasn’t as evil as the princess had described earlier and wasn’t going to swallow him, or breathe fire on him, and that he was generally quite friendly to humans.
Jack reminded that the princess had promised that the ropes would be returned to him by the sunset, and since they weren’t, he went himself to get them back, as they were of the finest quality. The princess started to explain herself, but Jack didn’t seem to be angry at her, as he understood she couldn’t move and therefore couldn’t have possibly returned the ropes in time. He was happy to untie the princess, though it took them a while to do it. Jack didn’t want to cut the ropes, as they were of the finest quality and worth at least five coppers at the market. After lots of advice from the princess and the dragon, who was quite proud of his weaving skills, Jack managed to untie the knots and they could all go back to the cave. As the saviour of the princess Jack was invited to share their dinner. When Jack saw the princess cooking her special diet apple pie he suggested she had a rest and cooked the dinner himself. It was the best pie Gildaran ever tried, and even the princess was quite happy in spite of the fact that her special diet apple pie was stuffed with meat and didn’t have a single apple slice in it.
In the middle of the dinner they heard a human voice calling from beneath the sunbathing plateau:
‘A little help here!’
Gildaran saw a human desperately climbing up to the cave. He turned out to be the father of the princess and the king of the country. The princess started to shout about how unloving her father was and what tortures she had endured, but she was too tired and the meat pie was too tasty so she went back to eating.
‘Sorry, it took me so long,’ the king addressed Gildaran. ‘Had to leave my horse, the creature wouldn’t go anywhere near a dragon’s lair. Well, I see you are doing fine in here. I have expected worse.’ The king looked around the cave, his stare clinging to the shared meal. Gildaran politely asked him inside and Jack served him a plate of modified princess’s special pie.
After everybody was fed, warm and sleepy, and Gildaran made sure that there were no knights around, he risked asking the king.
‘How come you came here alone?’
‘Do you think knights are fools? Nobody wants to be toasted in his armor. If the princess had said she was stolen by an evil wizard, they would have no problem risking their lives to save her. But a fire breathing dragon is a totally different issue. Plain suicide.’
‘And they know they would have to marry her should they succeed,’ the king added after making sure the princess was busy chatting to Jack and wasn’t paying attention to anything else. ‘I mean, you have lived with her, you understand what I mean. And that is before she starts to sing.’
‘But you weren’t afraid?’ Gildaran thought that although the princess had her moments her father was unfair about her, so he decided to change the conversation.
‘I knew your dad, boy. Wonderful dragon! Never harmed a single human being. Never stole a single sheep from the farmers.’
So the night went on, Gildaran was happy to talk to the king about his father and the good old days, the princess was telling Jack about her intolerable life in the palace, and he seemed happy to listen to her.

***

The next morning Jack took his good quality ropes and went back to the village, and the reunited royal family went back to the palace. Gildaran generously agreed to help to carry princess’s things down the mountain. Even with his help by the time last of the things were safely transported it was already midday. Gildaran came back to his cave which suddenly became so much tidier and strangely alien. Something was not right: somehow the cave seemed much bigger than before. At first Gildaran thought that he got too used to the princess’ singing. Then he noticed a forgotten vase with flowers on the table. It took him a while to realise that originally it was his bed, and that the cave seemed so empty because there weren’t any spider webs in it. Gildaran spent the next days attracting spiders back into his cave. He thought long what to do with the table, for which he had no use, but finally decided to leave it as it was. By the end of the week his home looked like his own again and the princess’s singing stopped echoing down its chambers. Gildaran finally returned to normal life.
Soon after that the king announced that since the princess and Jack got along so well, the two should marry. He mentioned that prince Lawrence had married a common girl the week before and that according to national surveys this event increased the popularity of his father’s government by 47%. The princess wasn’t interested in numbers and politics but for once agreed with her father as Jack had no spots and blond hair and the most beautiful smile. Nobody asked whether Jack the weaver agreed to the idea, but it soon became known that he enjoyed princess’s singing and that had to count for more than simple words.
Gildaran was invited to the wedding, and after people realised that he liked Jack’s special pies much more than raw humans, the guests became more relaxed and some even went as far as confessing to Gildaran that they had thought dragons were bigger.