A Dragoness' Tale P.I
by Mortanius

Of ten nights, nine found Maya il’Trakken awake long before dawn’s light, panicked and plagued by nightmares she would not have wished upon her most hated of enemies. Tonight, it was a clap of thunder like a giant’s footstep that woke her and set her heart beating fit to burst. The door, left ajar by the storm, slammed loudly to and fro in the ceaseless wind. It was all out of place in the isolated green valley Maya called home, and still more so at this time of year—the storms rarely set in until autumn, and it was hardly summer. She slid the latch home and returned to bed, though she knew sleep would be slow to come.

A young half-dragoness of slim stature but impressive height (taller than most men by some inches), Maya was a stunning specimen of her kind. Segmented scales greener and more radiant by far than the weather-beaten foliage that had taken root in the valley covered her from her head to her digitigrade feet, paler along her belly and tail. It made her look as though the whole of her body had been fashioned from sea foam. Eyes the color of autumn pumpkins stared lidless from a face much like that of a human woman, but for its fine scales and elegant, crested fins where a woman’s ears would have been. A bosom high and full enough to turn the eyes of any man lay bare in the sickly purple light of pre-dawn. She buried her face in her tri-clawed hands, weeping silently more at her own weakness than at the storm.

"And you dare call yourself a dragoness," she sniffed angrily. "You are so beautiful and your fins so colorful you’d be the envy of your clan, if you could bear even one clutch of eggs. Well, we will see if we cannot do something about that."

She pondered the apprentice’s offer; it did seem rather too wonderful to be true, but to spend the rest of her days with no mate and no children…. She did not trust magicians of that sort, nor did the rest of her kind scattered about these mountain valleys far from the lands of men. Human men brought little but trouble and despair, and human magicians were the worst of that lot. Rogues were worse than that still, as they inevitably sought to steal the coin from under a friend’s nose, and had magic to help them in the task. Perhaps this one would think twice, wither her a half-dragoness head and shoulders taller than he. Alanius by name, Maya had encountered him purely by chance by the side of a drinking pool, and he seemed a nice enough fellow. She was too trusting, though, and all of them were noble and selfless at first. She would see. Her people were not strangers to feasting upon those human men and women that strayed from their known paths. Maya did not agree with such things, but if this man took her heart’s confidence and did her dishonor….

Despite these misgivings, she departed the following morning with a high heart even without a great deal of sleep. Over her shoulders was slung a hide carry pack containing enough provisions to last her two days or more, as magic often took its own good time to run its course. Maya took care to cover her distinct footsteps in the mud left by the storm, as no half-dragon with sense in his head sought help from a human—the lesser half of their race. It was not long before she came upon the watering pool, long forgotten by all but the forest dwellers. It was an idyllic place indeed, all rocks and ruins covered with moss. A palace had been built over it, or perhaps it had simply been built into the palace. Its beauty was all the greater with the walls and ceiling gone.

And there was Alanius, as he had promised. He was a young fellow, with barely enough years behind him to be an apprentice, and Maya supposed women of his own kind might have thought him handsome. It was his magic that brought her to him today, and his vow. She skirted him wearily, seating herself upon a crumbling limestone bench. She managed a smile, and hoped it convinced him she would not make a meal of him.

"I did not know whether you would come," she admitted. "My kind and yours do not mix well."

"True enough," Alanius chuckled. His voice would have smoothed a mountain. "I long since abandoned the company of men, my Lady Maya. I do not think you have much to worry about around me."

"Please, Maya will do." It was not often she was called a Lady, and it made her blush. "Tell me, Alanius, what spells do you plan to work on me? I like to know what is being done to me and how."

"That much, we have in common." Alanius nodded confidently and took a few tentative steps closer. "This will be more medicinal than magical. Truth to tell, I’m more a man of medicine than of magic, but I know enough of both to be a respectable apprentice, at best. My books often tell the one to be magicked to get in nothing but their skin, but I think we can do with just your belly open to me—that is where the herbs must be spread, after all. The herbs that might heal you, if all goes to plan."

"You do me great honor," Maya breathed, and gladly unlaced her loose-fitting tunic until the smooth green plane of her stomach lay bare. "If this sorcery of yours can do as you say, you are a blessing from the Goddess."

"I don’t think I am that much." It was Alanius’ turn to blush, and he masked that in turning to his satchel of herbs. Those, he ground in a lacquered bowl until they were made into a fine paste the color of skinned grapes. It did not look too pleasant to Maya, but she supposed there were worse forms of human medicine than herbal salve. Tales were told to hatchlings that would make any giant cringe, though half were not to be believed, and the other half were doubtless exaggerated by those of her people fearful of men. The salve was uncomfortable on her scales, and itched the skin beneath. Alanius looked less pleased spreading it with his hands, bare as they were, than she did having it spread over her. He laughed in spite of himself. "Some aspects of magic are less…agreeable than others, my Lady Dragoness. Medicine still more so."

"A price any of my kind would pay, in this barren condition," Maya replied firmly, and the young apprentice continued the anointment. She felt nothing but the itch of the herbal paste, but she supposed she could not hope for a clutch of eggs at her feet so soon. Too trusting, she’d been told by several of her people, and too eager. "This is not too comfortable, Master Alanius, but discomfort is bearable."

Alanius said nothing, absorbed in his work. At last finished with that part of the spell, he turned to his books, a collection of thick volumes piled atop his own rucksack. Wetting his lips as though nervous—apprentices must always be nervous, with greater magicians peeping over their shoulders left and right—he selected one of the smaller tomes and flipped it open to a page he’d bent over to mark. The language in which he spoke then was some archaic tongue Maya knew nothing of, and did not want to. Ancient knowledge was a dangerous bauble, with a glitter to it that drew evil men to it like flies to a manure-heap. Time and again, Alanius would gesture sharply at her, and, unsure whether he meant her to do something in reply, she did nothing. At last he etched with his finger a complex symbol in the salve upon her belly.

A moment later, Maya felt a stirring within it, and her heart soared with delight.

It was a curious sensation much like that which took her when she swallowed a fish whole and alive. Though the salve was cold and gritty to the touch, she laid a hand across her belly, joyous to find a slight bulge in it, as if she’d eaten a particularly large supper. The bulge increased beneath her very fingers, and Maya chirped, delighted, at the feeling.

"I think I would take you as a husband, if you were to ask right now," she sighed, happier than ever she had been. At last…. At last her clan would not laugh at the sight of her. "You should be a master, Alanius, not an apprentice."

"You flatter me too early, I think," Alanius stammered, and the book of spells fell from his grip as if heated over a fire. The stir of new life within Maya reached a boil, as though she were a teakettle. Her abdomen had grown large enough to hold a sow and a litter of piglets as well, and the riling inside was stronger by the second. She guessed her engorging womb could hold no less than ten eggs, now twelve, now fourteen…. If Maya had ever known fear, surely this was greater. She felt as if she’d been made to drink the watering pool down to the dregs, though she was not yet so large as that. Alanius was fluttering about his tomes like an agitated squirrel. "No, no, this is not right…."

"W-what’s happened?" Maya felt the fear in her voice, and her efforts to stifle it became frantic as still she swelled, her once-slim form bloating until the fine scales of her belly began to part. It was not her midsection alone, either; her breasts, filling with milk with which to nurse her dragonets, stretched at her tunic’s laces on the verge of bursting free. Maya writhed about, the pressure in her belly growing painful. "No, this—this is not what I wanted—I—please stop me, I’ll—"

"I am trying, I am trying!" Alanius exclaimed, hurriedly flipping through the pages set out before him. "I—I do not understand it, this should not be—"

"S-s-stop this, sorcerer, or I swear I’ll burst like a dropped waterskin!" Maya exclaimed, not so hasty to ease herself off the stone bench for fear that she would do just that. She felt as though she had a clutch inside her enough to produce an entire clan of her own and more. She had seen human women great with two and three unborn, and they had not been half her size. Still the dragoness’ middle swelled out, her navel jutting much the same as the cork plug in the neck of an overfull wineskin. So full was she now that her insides had been pushed about by her expanding womb, and her scales seemed nothing more than sparse decoration. Surely, only the Goddess might ever have felt such abundant life inside her, and Maya was no Goddess. Her womb was not fit to bear a universe—or such a number of her own people. She reached for Alanius, and he shrank from her in horror as if afraid she would burst on him. "If that is what you fear, apprentice, you must stop this magic or I will explode. You d-do not want me to mess your robes. Please, it h-h-hurts—"

At last, too wide for the crumbling bench to support her weight and girth, she dropped to the soft moss at the poolside, fingers splayed across the growing surface of her abdomen perhaps in the hope that she might hold herself together at the seams. Stretched tighter than a drum, Maya’s belly rippled as she grew ever riper with eggs, her gravid body rising like a bellows, or a loaf of baking bread. Such was the pressure in her that her eyes felt ready to burst from their wide sockets, and the rest of her simply felt ready to burst. Was this some punishment from the Goddess for asking release from her barrenness, or mere foolish inexperience on the magician’s part? It mattered little, when Maya lay squirming about with her skin stretched thin over a sac gorged with eggs that felt bigger than the moon.

At length, when the pain was enough to make her wish for death or madness, she abruptly ceased to expand. She grew no smaller, nor was the pressure relieved in the slightest, but at least she was bloating no further—perhaps because her hide would not allow it. Her belly might have accommodated five men a head taller than Alanius, who still whisked through those volumes of magic. A cloud seemed to descend over her thoughts. For the life of her, she could find neither reason nor sense in her head, smaller now than her child-ready breasts and doubtless comical atop the great expanse of her belly. Magic does us nothing but wrong, and you, Maya il’Trakken, the trusting one, the beautiful—you would just take it upon yourself to find a rogue as clumsy as this.

"That," Alanius breathed at last, "was too close."

"What have you done to me?" Maya demanded, her long, spear-like tongue drooping from her mouth in exhaustion. It was all she could do to utter a word, and she might as well have tried hewing a mountain to the ground as moving about. Inside her, a sea of soft-shelled dragonets and protective fluids rippled the surface of her womb. In vain, she attempted nursing from herself to relieve the burden of sweet milk within her bosom, and only felt her belly grow tighter for it. "One more egg in me and I think I would pop like an overripe melon fallen from a tree. You have destroyed me, wizard. I—I am stuffed fuller than a turkey on feast-day."

"I have just saved your life," Alanius replied. "And the lives within you. I—I do not know what went awry with the magic, but I have slowed it enough to give you a week’s time. After that…well, I do not want to think what might happen to you. I have done you wrong, and now I must right it. I will be at your side through this. In a week’s time, I think, you must come back to me, and we shall try to make you a bit more elastic. Otherwise…. Otherwise, I fear you may suffer a rather…messy fate indeed…."

Click Here To This Page!

This page is part of a larger framed site. To view the site in its entirety click here.
"A Dragoness' Tale P.I" is © its creator, Mortanius.