Wingthane | A Short Story
Bregondil, a fallen dragon rider, waits in ambush, hardened by loss and fueled by a thirst for vengeance. His body bears the marks of past battles, and his spirit is as unyielding as his iron blade. When a young lord and his squires stumble into Bregondil’s path, a brief, brutal confrontation reveals his ragged determination to right the wrongs of his world, and how far he’s prepared to go.
Ring, ring, ring…
The dull, poorly-smelted, iron blade spun in a tight circle on the stone. In the early morning fog, the forest silence pressed down heavily around him. And he waited.
Bregondil cupped his hands around the pommel, keeping the sword upright, a hardy, chipped sword pulled from an old soldier, usually wrapped in burlap and either strapped to a satchel or bouncing off his hip. Crude, but it had served him for a hundred days. That’s how long it took to heal from his fall.
He grit his teeth together, feeling the tendons in his neck stand out.
His fall…
Ring, ring, ring…
He was waiting. And it wouldn’t be long. They were due to show up soon. Never early, always late. Young lords were always like that. Loved the grand entrance.
He glanced up. The sun was a dull blur of pale lemon, fanning an orange-cherry wing across the sky. The fog ran thick and dense down in here, the trees old and hoary with dense moss, and mushrooms. Layers of curved, flat, fringed mushrooms with dull and bold colors. Like shoals of fish in a pond. Everywhere, the old forest netted itself together with a million roots, softened with the mouldering woodfall of a million branches.
The world was silent. The birds had fled in terror from him, or hunkered in hollows to wait for him to go away. Only the drip, drip, drip of fog coalescing into dew, rolling down rivulets in the bark, and breaking off to slice the air in lines and plop on undergrowth. It smelled like old, winey, fermenting beer.
In the distance, he sometimes heard the sounds of the festival. Hundreds of country folk, his folk, with banners and braids and their colored best gathering for the event of their year, under the watchful eye of the local wingthane garrison. Smoke from the campfires and cooking tents would run all day, feeding the jostling throngs gathering around the tournament field.
He shifted on his seat. It was a trunk, chopped down less than an hour ago by his own hands. The axe lay in pieces by the side of the path. He’d raged and chopped with it like a beast, stripped off his shirt down the skin, wrapped the heavy hemp around his hands, and rammed the bright edge into the bark until it chipped, dulled, warped, and then finally snapped clean off. The tree shivered like a cold, tired dragon, raining leaves and twigs on him that peppered his beard and stuck in his matted, white braids.
He finished the last few inches, the bole hinge with the sword, and it groaned, splintered, hung in place like a dying man flailing for a handhold, grasping for any possible root, pebble, fingernail, as he fell off into the empty air.
The trunk sheared through, the immense weight of the tree hung in the branches of its brothers.
Heaving with hot, irony air, Bregondil collected himself, shook the rolling sweat off his shivering, shaking arms, and drew on the pale magic in the world around him. Gathered it like a tip of cloth dipped in a stream, slowly sucking it together into a mouthful.
Then pressed his palm against the tree and released it in a single, blasting exhale of raw, racing power, power so strong it sent a shock wave through the tree and shattered it like a lightning blast, blackening the bole from the inside out and lifting its huge, hulking weight an actual handsbreath into the air.
Then it collapsed across the path like a dying dragon, falling in pieces, crashing through the trees and shearing them like a scythe down a sheep’s back.
And then, like always, dizzy in the aftermath of the surge, the scars that ribboned his wrists and forearms like black blood burned a little higher, flared a little further, like dragon fire sparking up a line of powdered coal. Then came the smell of horse sweat, harsh and stinking, the mouth drying out like cotton and rancid with hard iron and copper. The rush of heat that left feverish shivers and blinding headaches, an aftermath that only with a decade of regular training could a rider shrug it off and channel again.
Ring, ring, ring…
Now he sat, the path blocked, and he waited for his prey.
He rested, feeling the flow of blood and air and wyrm-magic tingle through his skin and bone. Trying to breathe evenly.
His weight wasn’t what it used to be. His hard, rounded muscles had flabbed, and his browned arms and chest was creased with stretch marks. But it was coming back. Hiking miles across the moors each day, hauling himself up cliff falls, hunting deer by hand and building cairns to hold his food… all of it was roughing up his hands, filling in his frame, building back the bone around the breaks, stronger than before.
He hadn’t used magic in a long time. Not since his fall, the fall that shattered his shoulders and legs, leaving him flailing on the flagstones as the city burned around him, helpless, utterly helpless, a decade of back-breaking training over in a single second. Figures flitted across the walltops, setting fire to the training yards and feederies. And that one shadow figure who killed her, stabbed her through her gorgeous, scarlet, scaled gullet, and left her to bleed out like a crazed fish…
The anger and hot hatred for that man. Bregondil, Wingthane of the Stormsand Garrison, was left a hopeless, helpless, broken man held together by his armor. He watched the life bleed out of his dragon, the eyes widen and go dull in the dark, and the scream that ran his throat raw as the magic ebbed out of his marrow and muscle, bleeding away into air.
He shook his head. That was one hundred days ago.
He crawled out of there. Somehow. Dampened his pain with ambient magic, shivered out of his armor, hitched a ride into the hinterlands on a cart escaping the garrison, and collapsed in the backroom of a kindly loner.
Ring, ring, ring…
And now, he was back.
No dragon survived the death of its wingthane. And a thane who survived their dragon was a shell, a hollow egg, brittle and doomed to stare over wall tops and watch for strange flags, unable to ever wrap their fingers around a hilt, or pull the life out of an enemy’s eyes in a hot, rancid tug.
Why was he different?
Why could he get crawl back from a fall like that? Like a lone pup fished from the litter and about to be thrown off a bridge into dead water, and its jaws biting in blind fear on the hand that throws it out, biting till the blood-draw, the body flailing around on hardened jaws, unwilling to go out with a whimper, holding on like ravenous wolf.
Who knew. Maybe it was his breeding. Generations of fire-hardened farmers who served lords and raised their dragons. Maybe it was his training, pushing harder to climb higher for his own secret reasons. Maybe it was his dragon, since each wyrm broke in their rider in their own way.
And maybe it was none of that.
Maybe he was so hardened with hate, so rank with revenge, and so furious to fight back, he had an edge beyond others… His spirit wasn’t wispy and weak like most, where a swift slash of a blade, or tripping off a roof, or a harsh word, could sent someone into a death rattle.
He rolled his tongue around his teeth.
His spirit refused to die, refused to flit up through the roof like respectable folk, follow the smoke out through the sky door and move on to the judgment of the gods. No, his spirit was still that little wolf pup, frozen, but lockjawed on life.
Dragon or no, he was back.
Ring, ring, ring…
And there it was. The heavy, clattering thunder of hooves.
Large, hulking horses with shaved manes, boiled leather bridles and saddles weighed down with heavy armor and supplies. Neat, trimmed hooves clamped with iron shoes, and the huge, shuddering heft of draft geldings. Lord carriers.
He flexed his back, tested the weak spots on his shoulders, and pulled the sleeves down over his wrists to hide the black scars. Hide the cost of using magic.
A troupe of riders came around the corner, three horses, with a stallion pulled behind on long reins. A young lord and two squires. They pulled up in annoyance at the fallen tree. Stared at Bregondil as their horses paced and turned in place.
Bregondil hefted the sword. Still sitting, he looked up.
“Who the hell are you?” The lead rider, the lord, called. Blonde hair, brushed smooth, dark eyes. Pale skin from plenty of time indoors lifting weights, round muscles from hard training under pretty pavilions. A soft wolf.
“This road is mine,” Bregondil said simply. “And I want that sword.” He pointed at the lord’s broadsword hanging from the squires’s saddle.
A squire snorted. “An idiot brigand. Are you challenging the three of us? You’re not even thirty years.”
“It’s an ambush.” The other squire yelled, clucking his horse to get in front of his master. “Look to the trees!”
“There’s no one there.” Bregondil nodded, pushing off the trunk. He took a long, slow breath. No magic this time. Only raw, human, savagery to draw on. He looked up, locking eye contact with the young lord. “And there’s nowhere to run.”
He lunged forward, his sword ripping through the neck of the first horse, its beautiful eyes widening in shock. The horrific roar of a terrified horse blasted his ears. In the same move, he yanked on its reins, hauling the head down and to the left, leaping with all his strength out of the way of the ramming hooves.
It did the trick. The horse staggered and surged sideways, barreling into the next horse, bringing them both to their knees and crushing their riders like soft, brittle scarecrows. The squires were down.
That left the lord, who at first chuckled at the challenge, then choked at the leaping, lurching stallions crushing men and saddle bags and burnished armor together into the mud and dirt. He screamed in fury, leaping off with a short sword in hand.
He didn’t last long. Bregondil had the lithe fire and rough bulk of an old beserker, a warrior used to drinking in pain and pushing through till the blinding, searing nausea and agony faded, body memory trained on a decade of dragon magic. But he had to be careful not to be as reckless as he used to be.
They danced briefly with their blades in the fog.
With that broadsword, that lord’s sword in his hand, he could get past the guards. Then he would be only an hour from his goal. Only an hour, and everything would be different.
The lord thought he could play for a moment, test his skill. After all, that’s why they all rode in, to fight in the country tournaments. Winner takes all. In this case, the prize was the latest dragon bred for wingthanes. A dragon like that was a hardwon prize.
And there was no way in red hell that after a hundred, agonizing, hiking hours, Bregondil wouldn’t be dragonback in a single hour, freshly bonded, and skybound.
Time to be done here.
Two swings of the old sword, two clunky, clanging strokes, and the lord lost a hand and staggered back with a severed liver. He collapsed to his knees, stunned, too stunned to scream. “Why…” he mouthed, shocked. “Who are you?”
Bregondil reached up to calm the scared stallion, side-stepping the hooves, running his hand along the bucking bridle with calm, murmuring words. One horse lay dead, the other limped back and forth nearby. He drew on a little of the life magic seeping from the dead horse nearby, funneled it through his veins. Unseen tendrils of life sprouted from his finger tips into the stallion’s life-wall.
The response was almost instant. The horse went still, calm, dull. Waited for him like an old friend. Or a broken beast.
He leaned over to the fallen pack horse, unsheathed the glittering, hard-polished lordblade. “Who am I?” He said, a grin breaking his beard into a toothy, crack-lipped smile.
He hadn’t smiled since before his fall. It felt good. Wild. Human.
The lord tried to swallow, his throat bobbing up and down, but nothing would go down. It all wanted to come up. His fingers disappeared around his wound, and around his stump wrist, trying to hold it together, stop the soaking through his colored gambeson. He couldn’t take his eyes off Bregondil, who tested the sword in a few careful sweeps.
Bregondil pointed the sword at him. His sleeves fell back from around his wrists.
“Wing…wingthane.” The lord managed, his eyes bulging, staring at the scars.
“Men like you made men like me,” Bregondil ran his finger tips over the blade surface, sensing its clear, well-hammered soul like sunlight slipping through water. “Riders who fly to fight your wars. But when came my turn to fall, where was your honor then?”
The young man said nothing. His face was asphodel-pale.
Bregondil dropped to a crouch, staring the young man in the eyes. The were almost the same age, he realized. In another life, he might have been this clueless, pampered son of a fattened baron. “When we called for you, you locked your doors and prayed that our enemies would keep their sights on us, and not you.”
The life went out of the youth’s eyes. He slumped sideways. Gone.
Bregondil rose. Kept talking, even though he knew the spirit had gone to the gods, and the fading soul slowly realized it was locked in a dream with no waking. Just enough to hear his last words.
“Raise a rider, deed a dragon, wield the world,” he murmured. “But let slip your honor, and you face the fury of the storm you fed.”
He reached for the saddle to swing up on the back of the stallion in a smooth leap, but his legs failed him at the last second. He stumbled, took a breath, and pulled himself up.
Everything had just begun. Like a red worm wriggling out from the cold, its legs and wings torn off and abandoned, the wingthane would rise again. With new wings, he would climb the skies, hug the stormfronts, press through the pinnacles, and find the damned desert witch who burned his dragon garrison, and the long-clawed wolf who gutted his mount.
And then, when it was all done, he would return his sights to the highest, hardest goal. The goal he had trained for a decade, the goal that kept him pushing back up and into life like a wolf rabid for one last mawful of freedom. Or a wyrm trapped in a glacier crevice, chilled with frostbite, grating with numb teeth and frozen thumbclaws to reach warm sunlight again.
This goal had haunted him since his father’s last breath, that last tortured gaze begging him to carry out the impossible, dishonorable, terrible task. A promise he bound himself and his life to.
Free the kingdoms of the Council.
Kill the wingthanes.
Free the dragons.
This is a draft of a first chapter for a novel I abandoned fifteen years ago, and has returned to haunt me in the last few months. I had hoped that writing this story would release the inspiration genie like a pressure valve, only now it wants more. Like… maybe the rest of the novel.
What do you think? I hope you enjoyed this!