The Dragon of the Dolomites Read online

  Fanzini scratched his chin. "Well, I could paint one of them for you."

  "You remember them from memory?"

  "Oh yes, I never forget a dragon."

  "How will I know that you didn't make them up?"

  Fanzini shrugged. "Judge for yourself. You don't think I could make up a creature as beautiful as a dragon if I'd never seen it, do you? You would know the difference because you're a dragon, right?"

  The dragon's many eyes merged and narrowed to a point. "Yes I would," he said. "Of course I would. Now paint, paint the most beautiful dragon you've seen and let me be the judge!"

  Fanzini took to his easel again, unrolled a new parchment, clipped it to the board, and let his panic fuel his work. It came quickly. Fear of death, he found, was a decent substitution for inspiration.

  The dragon watched from behind, its shadow stealing his light, its warm breath tickling the hairs on the back of Fanzini's neck. In a short while he'd finished the painting: a magnificent blue and white specimen, skin shimmering like the sea. Twice the size of the dragon behind him, this creature soared through the clouds on wings golden as the sun. The dragon was so vivid, the details so precise, that there could be little question he had seen it. The final touch was the most important of all: he made sure to paint the dragon with its mouth open.

  He stepped back and sighed. "Ah, the beautiful dragon of Paris."

  "But—but—this dragon has no teeth!" the dragon blurted.

  "Why is that surprising?" Fanzini said. "As I'm sure you know, the most beautiful dragons don't have teeth."

  "But how do they eat their prey? They obviously don't gum them to death."

  "Most of them swallow their victims whole."

  "Whole!"

  "Yes, well, not all dragons could do this, of course. Only a few."

  And here Fanzini smiled and let his gaze wander, as if he was thinking back to pleasant encounters with dragons from his past.

  Fanzini was counting on the dragon's vanity, and his remark produced a swifter reaction of jealousy than he had even hoped. "Well . . . well . . . " the dragon blubbered. "Well, if they can go without teeth, then so can I!"

  He stomped over to a large boulder and kicked it into his mouth. This was followed by an awful crunching while the dragon proceeded to grind his teeth on it. The dragon's eyes closed tightly, until finally blue blood spilled over its lips and stained the ground. With a roar, the dragon spit out the boulder, still whole, along with what remained of his teeth.

  "Now what do you think?" the dragon said, opening its mouth wide.

  At the sight of the hollowed-out gums, the flesh torn asunder, and the pallet pooling with blood, Fanzini stifled an urge to retch. "Beautiful," he said.

  "Good! Then I am the most beautiful dragon you've seen—and the last one you will ever see."

  The dragon bounded forward, nostrils flaring and eyes wide, and inhaling a deep breath.

  Fanzini, who was getting a better grip of his fear, held up a hand. "You're not going to burn me, are you?"

  The dragon skidded to a halt, sighing a cloud of gray smog.

  "And why shouldn't I?""

  "Because of the course the most beautiful dragons don't have the ability to shoot fire."

  "They don't? Impossible!"

  Fanzini shrugged. "It's your life, I guess. I'm just your next meal . . . but there was that dragon I saw in London awhile back, drinking from the river Thames. Now that was a glorious creature . . ."

  "Drinking!" the dragon said. "Dragons don't drink water. Why, water—water would—"

  "—put out a dragon's fire, of course," Fanzini finished. "Yes, this is true. But all the beautiful dragons drink water, and they certainly aren't concerned with losing something as trivial as the ability to make fire."

  "Paint him, paint him!" the dragon said.

  "It was a her!"

  "Paint her, then!"

  Fanzini complied. His wrist ached and his fingers were cramping, but he managed to get the dragon on parchment. He was pleased his efforts were improving each time. He had never been to London—and he was counting on the fact that the dragon had never been there either—but still produced a credible scenery of a river and the dark outline of a town in the distance. The dragon was bold yellow, crouched on the river's edge, again with an open mouth with no teeth, wings pressed tight against its body. The creature was clearly lapping at the water with its forked tongue.

  "Stunning, isn't she?" Fanzini said.

  "I would never believe it," the dragon said, "but there it is, real as if I had seen it myself. No man could dream up such a remarkable creature. Fie then! If the dragon of London can drink water, then so can I."

  He sidled up to the pool of water and lapped some into his mouth. He tilted his head back, sloshing the liquid around, and then, with a last bit of hesitation, gulped it down. There was a muted hissing, and then the dragon belched five white clouds in a row.

  "Now what do you say about me, little man?" the dragon said.

  "Oh, I am stricken by your beauty, dragon."

  "As you should be!" He moved back to Fanzini, his long neck slithering snake-like through the air. "Now, this charade of ours is at an end, and dinner is served."

  The jagged wall pressed against Fanzini's back. He had nowhere to run.

  "Yes, even the dragon I saw drinking from the Nile got hungry," he said. "And he was indeed the most beautiful thing under the skies."

  This brought the dragon to a halt. "The most beautiful, you say? What about the one in London?"

  "Oh, at the time I thought the dragon was the most beautiful. Indeed, I had even forgotten about the one in Egypt until now. You see, it was so perfect that I trembled in its presence, and could not even bring myself to paint it. In fact, he looked like you, except . . ."

  "Except what?"

  "Except he didn't have wings."

  "No wings! That's preposterous! It must have been some type of lizard you saw. An overgrown crocodile, perhaps."

  "No, no," Fanzini said. "No lizard could match this creature's grandeur. It was a definitely a dragon. Besides, there are no crocodiles along the Nile. Anyone who's been there would know that."

  Fanzini definitely did not know such a thing, but by the flabbergasted look on the dragon's face, it obviously didn't know either.

  "Show me what you saw, painter!"

  "Oh, no, it was too beautiful. I would do it a disservice putting it down on paper."

  "Show me what you saw!"

  So Fanzini painted the dragon of the Nile, and he painted him so that he looked as much like this dragon as he could manage, except for the skin tone, which he made a shade of sand to match its surroundings. The dragon had no wings and no teeth, of course, and it was drinking from the river's edge. Yet it was so vivid, so intensely real, that Fanzini found himself in admiration of what he had accomplished. He signed his name, the first one he had been truly proud to call his own, and handed it to the dragon.

  The dragon took it in its mouth and placed it along with all the others against his pile of bones. He studied it a long time.

  "But without wings . . ." he said, bowing his head. "Without wings . . . I would only be able to walk."

  "Oh, but that dragon didn't walk," Fanzini said. "It was so angelic, so incredibly divine, that it practically floated. I swear by the honor of my father, who was a priest you know, that you could not look at that dragon without weeping in joy. I am but a poor painter. I have only captured a fraction of its true splendor here. Multiply my talent by a thousand times and still I could not come close to its beauty. And except for the wings, my dear dragon, except for those wings, you could be his brother."

  The dragon peered at the painting again. "There is a strong resemblance."

  "If not the wings . . ." Fanzini said.

  "And if my wings were gone, I'd look like him, you'd say?"

  "Well, on second thought, you'd be different."

  "What? I thought you said—"

  "He has a
flaw, of course. Look at that scratch on his lower lip. Your lips are perfect. You'd be more beautiful by far . . . if your wings were gone, that is."

  That was all it took. With a horrible wrenching, the dragon tore each fragile wing and from his body. Fanzini expected more blood, but the delicate things were attached with no more strength than hair. Once the wings were gone from his body, they disintegrated into dust.

  The dragon, or what was left of the dragon, stood straight and proud.

  "Well?" he said.

  "You are," Fanzini said, and placed his hand over his lips as if he couldn't finish the sentence, blinking as if his eyes were welling up with tears.

  "The most beautiful?" the dragon said.

  Fanzini nodded.

  "In all the world?"

  Again, Fanzini nodded.

  "You really think so?"

  "Yes, yes!" Fanzini said. "And we must paint you. We must put you down on paper for all the world to see."

  "Yes, do it!" the dragon said. "I want to see my true greatness as I eat!"

  The dragon took a pose and Fanzini set to work. He painted the dragon truly the way it looked now, and he had to repress an urge to chuckle. The thing looked more like a rhino with a long neck than a dragon. After the painting was finished, Fanzini knew his chance had come.

  "I'd like to make sure I have all the details right," he said. "Could you turn around, so I can see your backside?"

  "But you're not painting my backside."

  "Yes, but I must see it in my mind's eye. Even though it does not appear on the page, I must know what it looks like. Trust in the process, dragon, and it will come out better than you imagined."

  This satisfied the dragon well enough, and he turned and faced the pile of bones and all of the earlier paintings. Fanzini quietly took his current painting off the easel—the only one he could brave to take with him. "Just another moment, almost done," he said, backing away, careful not to trip on the rocks or even to make a sound. The dragon fidgeted, but Fanzini was almost there, just another few steps to the least steep part of the surrounding walls. He was about to turn and run when he heard the strangest sound, akin to the roll of thunder—and then he saw that the dragon's flanks were trembling.

  The dragon was staring at the first painting Fanzini had done, the one of himself as he was when Fanzini had met him—with teeth and fire and wings. He was staring at it and making noises that were a mixture of weeping and moaning.

  "Oh, no, no," the dragon said. "What have I done. Look at me there. I'm so beautiful, with wings and teeth and all my fire-breathing glory. This is a mistake, a mistake, I never should have . . ."

  The dragon turned and locked eyes with Fanzini. He watched the lips curl back in a snarl. He stood frozen for just a moment, then broke for the hill.

  The dragon shrieked. Fanzini heard a crackle as the dragon tried to expel fire. He clambered up the slope, tossed the painting over the top, and had his fingers on the rim when he felt something wet clamp on his foot. He turned and saw that the dragon had him in his toothless mouth. With no teeth, the dragon could not stop Fanzini from kicking free, and with a last lunge he was at the top and running down the hill for cover of the trees. His painting he left at the pit's edge.

  The dragon screamed and with a great deal of effort pulled its enormous body out its lair. By then Fanzini had reached the trees, and before the dragon could reach him, he found a hollowed-out log half buried in the earth and threw himself inside.

  Crouching in the mossy, wet interior, he held his breath as the dragon rumbled past.

  "Curse you, painter!" it shouted, his voice reverberating inside the log. "Curse you and all your kind! Look at what you've done to me. I'm not even a dragon anymore. I'm—I'm—I don't know what!"

  Fanzini stayed hidden until the ground no longer shook, until the dragon's shouting was but a distant drone. Finally, he slipped from his hiding place. Remembering his bargain with Lord d'Appiano, he retrieved his last painting—not daring to go back for the others—and ran as fast as his legs would take him. He did not stop until he had put miles between himself and the dragon.

  So it was that the dragon of the Dolomites, perhaps the last dragon of Italy and even all the world, lost its teeth, its fire, and its wings. Fanzini returned to Castel d'Appiano with his painting in tow, but since it clearly contained a creature that was not a dragon at all, he was chased out of the castle. Still all was not lost, because he later managed to stow away on a ship to France, and there he fell in league with a great group of painters in Paris.

  For a few years there were rumors of a huge, monstrous thing roaming the Dolomites, never seen but in shadows and silhouette, chilling travelers with its mournful wail. But after time even these rumors died away, and only people of a superstitious nature refused to pass through the Dolomites.

  Historians many years hence surmised that either the dragon died, and so its kind finally came to an end, or in its grief plunged into the ocean, shed its arms and legs, and dove deep into a cold abyss—perhaps occasionally surfacing to be glimpsed by seafarers who thought it merely a rather odd whale.

  ~ | ~

  || Please read further for

  a sneak preview of

  Drawing a Dark Way,

  a fantasy adventure

  by Scott William Carter

  published by

  Flying Raven Press. ||

  ~ | ~

  About the Author

  SCOTT WILLIAM CARTER's first novel, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, was hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "touching and impressive debut." His fantasy novel, Wooden Bones, is due out from Simon and Schuster in the summer of 2012. His short stories have appeared in dozens of popular magazines and anthologies, including Asimov's, Analog, Ellery Queen, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales. He lives in Oregon with his wife, two children, and thousands of imaginary friends. Read more about his books for kids at www.rymadoon.com.

  ~ | ~

  Drawing a Dark Way

  A Fantasy Adventure

  Chapter 1

  Birthdays were the worst.

  In fact, the only thing worse than a birthday, as far as Jason was concerned, was a birthday party. And the only thing worse than a birthday party was a birthday party you couldn't avoid. All that bad singing and clapping of hands and loud ripping of paper—it was enough to drive anyone crazy.

  "Bir-day! Bir-day! Bir-day!"

  Buried under his cotton sheets, Jason heard Lenore flutter into his room, squawking the horrible word. He cupped his hands over his ears. Now most birds (or cats or dogs or any other living creature) might get the hint and leave him alone, but not Lenore. She went right on squawking. That was one problem with having an inventor for a dad: He could invent things like robotic talking ravens who, if they were sent to get you, would not stop until they actually got you.

  Lenore landed on his back, talons digging through his bedspread into his skin.

  "Ow!" Jason cried. He shook his back, but Lenore didn't budge. It was stuffy under the covers, but Jason wasn't coming out—not until he thought of a rare disease that could get him out of the party. African Pygmy Flu? Demented Buffalo Disease?

  "Bir-day! Bir-day! Bir-day!"

  Even with his hands over his ears, her voice still grated. The only voice that grated on him more was Emily's. If it was your own birthday, you could usually get your way not having a party, but would his annoying little sister ever do such a thing? Oh, no, she loved birthdays. What a nightmare.

  "Up!" Lenore cried. "Up, up!"

  "Leave me alone," Jason muttered.

  "Bir-day!"

  Jason groaned.

  "Bir-day! Bir-day!"

  "All right, already!"

  Jason tossed off his covers and Lenore bounded away, landing on his far right bedpost. The bright morning light slanting through the blinds made Jason squint. Actually, it would be a stretch to call it morning, since the digital clock on his bookshelf currently read 11:58 AM.

  "
Up!" Lenore squawked. "Up, up!"

  Jason rubbed his eyes. He noticed that the top of her head was missing again, exposing a green circuit board and red wires. Everything else about Lenore was beautiful—she was sleek and black, with pristine feathers and eyes like black marbles—but with her circuit board exposed, she looked stupid. He wished Dad would fix her once and for all.

  "Up!" Lenore repeated.

  "Yeah, I know," Jason said. "I'm up, okay? You satisfied? Go tell Dad and Emily I'm coming."

  Lenore squawked and took to the air, bumping hard against the door frame, then against the wall, before swooping out of sight. She may have been beautiful, but she wasn't exactly graceful.

  Jason scooted out of bed, his bare feet touching the cool hardwood floor. He moseyed in his pajamas past his black metal bookshelves and his black drawing easel until he reached his black dresser. At one time the walls had been painted to resemble outer space, something his Mom had done when he was seven, complete with stars, ringed planets, and cute little Martians, but he had painted over all of it with black, making the room as dark as a cave. Outside his window, he heard clanging metal and the shouts of men, but he resisted the urge to look. It was just Dad doing something crazy for Emily's birthday.

  He took his time slipping into his black jeans, black t-shirt, and black tennis shoes, and gazed at his drawings pinned to the corkboard above his easel. There were hundreds of pictures, two or three deep in some places, a few done in acrylics or chalk, but most with a regular drawing pencil.

  Drawing was one of the few things in life he enjoyed. It sure took his mind off the jerks who picked on him at school. He'd been drawing practically forever, and most people—the ones who didn't mind that his drawings were a little, well, dark—said he was pretty good. When he was little, he drew stuff like sailboats and cute and cuddly teddy bears, but by the time he was ten he moved on to skeletons, trolls, and dragons with blood dripping from their lips. If it wasn't for the occasional assignment in art class, that'd be all he drew.