I NEVER CLAIMED TO BE ST GEORGE

[vrykolakas]

previously on Swearing At A Dragon.

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He only looks up because of the sickening, stomach-lurching crack of bone breaking against rock. And then he just has time to think, you shit-for-brains old monster, if you die now you deserve it—to himself? To the dragon? He's not sure. He's looking the thing dead in the eye.

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[fairyfoes]

The green of those eyes flares outwards, 'til his vision's full of the colour and the black line of the slit of the beast's eye. It's painful to watch and he might want to shut his eyes against it, but he can't seem to move a muscle of his own will. There's the sick sense of falling, but only for a moment, because the world blurs, and he hears his own voice in his ears.

"I killed my way to this city before you were born. I won my riding in war and fire. I've butchered things that no Liveman has even seen..."

And all at once he can blink. He blinks and breathes a shuddering breath filled with the stench of old blood and trash, because that's what he's been sleeping on. Dirty-faced, curled into an alleyway that feels familiar, listening to the cackle of drunks in the near distance, the chittering of rats nearby, feasting on something he can't make out in the dark.

He's back in a child's body, and a great sense of being hunted, haunted, hungry, pervades him. And he can feel all his old memories, memories of being a beast and a man, all draining away like dirty water down a drain.

[vrykolakas]

The green pushes all else from him, seems to spread right through his body, his own words like a cruel joke:

and then they aren't his words at all but the hangers-on of some dream. Aren't they? He hisses, but his tongue is clumsy in his mouth. He blinks and shakes his head, breathes in. And out again. His chest hurts when he breathes, like he hasn't in a while (haven't breathed in a—) but dreams are like that sometimes, aren't they? You wake up gasping for breath. More frightened than you were before you slept. His senses feel warped, as if he's underwater. There is something he has to remember.

But for the life of him he can't remember what it is, only that he doesn't think it's safe to go back to sleep.

[fairyfoes]

It's not. The trash he's been laying in, the street-filth, has become bodies in the moment he's looked away. A cluster of them, white and bloodless, skin still waxen from the fever that killed them.

They moved, slowly, turning white, rheumy eyes towards him. A thin, bony hand curved coldly around his wrist, pulling him down to them.

And other hands rose, not all attached to bodies, drawing him down to blue-lipped mouths peeling away from teeth. The chittering of the rats has become a loud, incessant sound, high-pitched, ricocheting around in his skull.

[vrykolakas]

He starts to scream. He is not sure he wasn't already screaming. He starts to hear it. Some muscle memory in him tries to snap free, contorting desperately: he kicks, he claws.

Lich! Zombie! Where is he? What is he? (But these thoughts are alien. The panicked vestiges of a child's nightmare.)

[fairyfoes]

Yellowed teeth tear easily through his skin, crunch through bone, until he's more ruined blood and meat than body, choking on the blood that's risen from punctured lungs. Only the dead and the rat could hear the cries when they began, and now they're only pitiful gurgles.

That thought lingers, though. Not his own. Cold and condescending, curling in his mind.

Pitiful.

It's a sneer.

The gurgles are still there, the sense of choking, salt filling his mouth. His hands are still clawing, but up now, towards the rippled surface of the ocean far above him. He can see the moonlight filtering through it, the hull of a ship neatly sluicing over the waves. Something wound about his ankle keeps him down, is dragging him deeper, and down into darkness.

[vrykolakas]

(Pitiful: pit, full: a ghetto full of starving, limping predators—)

—some predator tugging on his ankle, or a chain tugging on his ankle, what is it? He chokes his life away and sinks under, anew, to choke some more. Salt. He's under the sea, clawing uselessly up towards the moonlight. His lungs—

(—penned in around a city they are forbidden to enter, hungry attack dogs, necessary vermin, scrambling to survive in a pit—)

—are full of water.

[fairyfoes]

He hears the sounds of their survival all around him, the snarling, the harsh voices, cut here and there with screams in the dark he has sunk into. He feels them all around him, the beasts that were once men, bodies hot or cold. He's just another one among their number, blind, hunger devouring him from the inside out.

If he doesn't turn as they do and sink his teeth into something first, they'll tear into him, like the chittering rats had done to their meal. They won't kill him before they start eating him, it won't be clean, just his screaming while their hungry mouths gnaw blood and flesh and bone.

[vrykolakas]

Again, he starts to hear himself scream, and can't remember when he stopped. His throat aches. Their teeth are in him and he's hungry, gods forgive him: muscle tears under his canines, skin rips free from bone. He's trying to eat. He's trying to break free.

[fairyfoes]

There's no help for it. He wounds others; they wound him. It's madness, they're all eating each other.

Where holes in his body have been opened, there's a new sensation. Probing, flicking tongues, serpent's tongues. He can feel their wedge-shaped heads press against his wounds, probing them wider, sliding, snaking, pressing into him. Cold scales, cold bodies, beginning to fill him.

[vrykolakas]

Wrenched in an ouroborous.

Tongues and scales. (Glinting and weighing.)

For a moment he's numb with horror, and then he's lashing out again, kicking away bodies and snakes, hissing and snarling, spitting and refusing: no, no, no, not this endless biting and being bitten—

fin~

[fairyfoes]

His eyes open to the darkness of the cavern, the stone at his feet, the whole cave crumbling, the dragon long having moved from where it had been when he'd fallen.

The rope which had held him had been sawn off, somehow; on jagged stone, the dorsal spines, he couldn't say.

But while prone, his hand had still been clenched around his knife. Stabbing himself, over and over. The strange feeling of serpents entering him had in fact been the cold of the blade.