Wordsworth – Chapter 26

Sometimes, stories try to be clever.

I don’t have any issues with cleverness. I enjoy it as much as anybody with a hint of mischievousness, with a love for Clever Foxes.

But I don’t enjoy it when it runs contrary to the tale.

Subversion, deconstruction, parody, and satire… They all have their place. I understand that.

I just don’t like it.

I… There’s something lacking, a pervasive trail of something disingenuous stomping around the tale, crushing beautiful flowers in its rush to find a new path.

To disregard what was already there in its attempt to shine, to showcase its own superiority.

Its cleverness.

“Tay?” Liz’s voice asks, black waves of inky hair pleasantly thrumming at the passage of her voice.

“Yes?” I answer, slowly breathing out, feeling as if my pages are about to creak like an old leatherbound tome finally opening under worthy, inquisitive eyes.

“You’ve got incoming,” she says.

I close my eyes, lids falling shut like that earlier tome would have in an empty library.

“Thank you,” I tell her.

And then I dive into myself.

In search of true stories.

Stories that aren’t twisted by the hand of a clever author. Stories that are as pristine now as they were when first told. Stories that have changed, shifted, across the centuries.

Across the millennia.

Yet stories that remain as true now as they ever were.

I find one. The right one. What I need for Lisa’s plan to come together.

And then…

I add my own clever twist.

My lips turn into a wry, self-deprecating smile as I contradict myself yet again, but isn’t that also the nature of tales? Isn’t that what stories do, when they are repeated in another time and place, the hero becoming a villain because the world has changed even as his acts haven’t?

Isn’t that what growing up is?

“Once upon a time…” I start.

And my mind and words drift over tall mountains and a white castle ensconced in them, one whose thick walls were spacious enough to hold all the villagers inside when there was risk of an attack, and they were forced to abandon their homes in search of the protection of their lord.

But, in this particular tale, the lord is a king.

And the king had a daughter.

A beautiful one, a lovely maiden, a princess who was as all fairytale princesses are.

But, in this tale, there was no poisoned apple, no evil stepmother, no glass slipper.

In this tale, there was a dragon.

A beast who had devoured their cattle, taken their wealth, eaten a yearly sacrifice, and been tolerated. An evil the kingdom had grown used to, like so many become blind to the little, everyday cruelties they are surrounded by.

But, like evil often does, the dragon crossed a line.

And the princess was chosen.

My words roar around me, surrounding me, making me clad in midnight scales, in interlocked shields that glimmer under a pale moonlight that blazes when it reaches my shape.

My spread wings.

My body doesn’t change; I just remain inside the beast’s chest, my arms spread, connected to it by tendrils of ink carrying more and more words as I keep reciting my tale for an audience that is only of Lisa and I.

So I am not strong. I am not as powerful as Lung was, and my teeth are not swords, my claws spears, nor my tail a thunderbolt.

My wings are not a hurricane.

And my breath is not death… no matter what Lisa may jokingly claim.

No, I am not Smaug. I am not any named dragon who would tear mountains apart. I come not from Mordiford, nor do I battle my white twin to vex a king without a castle under Merlin’s watch.

I am just…

A dragon.

And below me, on the street littered with broken crystal and men, there’s a princess to abduct.

I jump off the roof, letting the story guide me as black wings stretch until their tips brush along the buildings on each side, and the dragon’s slitted eyes (What other shape could they be?) find Othala kneeling by the side of the man whose shin I shattered.

She turns toward me, her face paling in a way that fits my tale. That fits my clever twist.

That fits the story of the virtuous dragon capturing the wicked princess.

Victor draws a gun from his holster, fast enough that I can’t help but admire his skill, but he doesn’t shoot at me. Not because he can’t find the weak point between my scales that all dragons should have, but because he knows my power. He understands it.

So he won’t attack my story.

He will attack me.

It’s a pity he doesn’t realize I am inside my story, but when am I ever not?

So I glide over Stormtiger’s still body, past the ugly men with ugly wounds, and snatch my prize.

Othala screams in my claws, thrashing and trying to free herself from my careful attempt not to pierce her flesh, not to injure her as I injured all those who attacked me in War’s false altar.

Victor leaps and grabs my waving tail, swinging forward before letting go in a daring attempt to reach his princess, trying to play the knight in this story.

But he isn’t.

He is, at most, a soldier. A vassal of the wicked princess.

So she touches his stretched fingers and grants him her boon, the red-clad man reacting with impossible speed to snatch my captive’s robes and twist his legs up, spinning around his precarious axis to hook his knees over my right claw.

He’s impressive. Brave.

But that was never the issue, was it?

I roar at him, the jaws of the story that surrounds me stretching as wide as a snake’s with its neck twisted to aim at the threat beneath its body, at the two people dangling from my claws.

I dare not rise. I dare not fly as high as I could for fear of them falling to their deaths, so we follow the white, broken line along the black, cracked street.

Heading toward the sea.

Perhaps because there, I could risk dropping him with no fear that he would be injured by the fall. Perhaps because some dragons come from the sea’s depths, and my story feels comfortable with the hint of brine carried by the westbound breeze.

Perhaps because that’s where Lisa’s plan pointed me to from the very start.

I suppress a smile at things going precisely as they should. At the story finding the beats laid down for it to follow.

And then Victor shoots.

The bullet goes straight through the dragon’s mouth, and my words bleed from the wound, black ink weeping over the street below.

I… I don’t understand. Why would he—

“Tay!” Liz shouts in my ear. “Higher!”

I can’t. If I do and he shoots again, they will fall to—”

“Stop holding back! Othala can make him invulnerable! He was counting on shielding her from the fall!”

Ah.

A clever ploy.

A twist in the story.

My lips thin again in something slightly bitter as I heed Lisa’s words and soar, the dragon’s thin body arching up in a graceful curve that takes the three of us above the squat, gray buildings that delineate the transition between a depressed neighborhood and the seafront property made for tourists to admire.

I see the moon in front of me, through the dragon’s eyes, conveyed to me by the stream of words linking us, and I aim straight at it, losing sight of the captives dangling from my claws.

A bullet ricochets off a single scale, its words returning to me, but I reform it before it can become a weak spot for the soldier to exploit, speaking of the dragon’s terrible might. Of the strength that would hold a kingdom ransom.

And, finally, I fly.

I fly as high and free as I ever dreamed when I was a child fastening capes around her neck. When I laughed, ran, and played, being a hero in my mind and Emma’s—

I fly.

I fly trapped inside a black dragon’s chest, borrowing its power, stretching mine to make it possible, using Lisa’s insight to cheat, to insert myself in the tale I tell, taking on the role of the dragon so I can clad myself in its guise.

To be clever.

To twist my story.

Like I didn’t do back then. Like I never did. Because we played pure and simple games, of heroes and villains. Of good defeating evil.

There were no betrayals. No tragedies. No ugly smiles plastered over a heart void of feelings that only longed for things to stop.

There was laughter. Joy.

Moments of pure sadness that glittered like falling gems before fading away like morning mist.

There was play between sisters. Between me and my first true friend.

There was much that was lost.

I reach the apex of an arc that brings me as high as I dare and close my wings around me.

Around us.

Victor shoots through them.

And I fall.

I spiral, the wind howling at my passage, along the ridges of interlocked scales, through whispered words meant for Lisa’s ears.

We fall faster and faster, the clouds above me eerily steady as the streets below blur.

“Now!” Lisa yells.

So I open my wings.

My fall abruptly stops, turned to flight once more.

And Victor falls.

I twist the dragon’s head below me once again to see him, to make sure, and he answers my concern with a last, parting shoot.

He fails.

Because he’s no longer possessed by the boon of speed and grace, but by that of resilience, and so I see him smash into a tarmac-covered roof, the soldier immediately jumping to his feet and running after me toward the edge of the building.

The dragon smiles.

So do I.

And then, our wings beat, and, captive princess with us, we fly.

***

Armsmaster is waiting where Lisa said he would, standing astride his bike, halberd in hand.

It should have been a lance.

“Wordsworth?” he asks as I gently land.

And I stop talking, finally allowing my words to come back, the black dragon dissolving under the silver moonlight and amber streetlights.

The same lights that trace the contours of his armor, the lines and angles of his mount, delaying only on the sharpest points.

Othala is on her hands and knees. Below me.

“I have been told that, without her, the Empire 88 won’t be able to field as many soldiers without fear of attrition. This should help curb the incipient war with the ABB,” I calmly tell the knight I just handed the wicked princess to.

And here the tale hinges, the clever twist waiting to see what kind of turn to take.

The virtuous dragon.

The wicked princess.

And the unknown knight.

He dismounts, his footsteps disturbingly silent over the wet pavement of the road beneath armored feet.

And he stops close enough that his hand won’t reach me, but his weapon will.

I can feel his stare. The steel eyes that must lie behind his blue visor because my stories won’t allow them to be soft and lacking in determination. Not when he holds himself like he does.

When he stands like he does.

His lips thin for a moment.

And then he speaks.

“Thank you,” he says. “I will tell your father what you’ve accomplished. And I will make him understand.”

My words catch in my throat.

And the knight kneels down to chain the wicked princess before carrying her away.

***

“Tay?” Liz asks as soon as I open the door to…

Home.

I called her, not that long ago, asking if I could spend the night after meeting my father and sharing a sunset through a waterfall with him.

She told me to come home.

And so I did.

So I have ever since.

Her arms surround me, and it takes me a moment to notice that I haven’t answered her. That I am still inside my head, caught up in not my stories, but my thoughts.

That I am more Taylor than Wordsworth.

It’s… fitting, I guess. That today’s events would bring me to this point.

Because that’s what I meant to do, wasn’t it? Define myself. Tell the world that I am who I am, no matter what Emma says.

No matter whether Emma agrees.

“Come here,” Lisa says, gently taking my hand and guiding me to that sofa where we’ve shared so many happy moments, so many idle silences, so many laughs and smiles.

“I am sorry,” I say as she sits me down by her side. “I thought I would feel…” I reach for the words, and I don’t find them.

How novel.

“You didn’t,” she gently tells me as she slides her white fingers through my gloved ones, paper over ink rather than the other way around. “You felt, Tay. You were hurt and acted. I was the one who thought. It’s in the job description, after all,” she says with a grin that is less mischievous than she wants it to be.

And I…

I squeeze her fingers.

Our eyes meet, her green, emerald ones seeming to fight the darkness from the night city behind her, glinting through the tall windows that show me a black sky and purple clouds.

She’s beautiful.

Not like Clever Foxes are.

No, she’s…

I lick my lips, caressing the words rushing over them, soothing them before I set them free.

And, finally, I understand my restlessness. The feeling that there’s something pending, unfinished.

It’s a feeling I misplaced. A feeling I thought had to do with Emma. With Lisa’s plan to establish myself as a hero in the eyes of the Protectorate’s leader. Of the true knight.

That this disorientation, this dangling, loose thread, was due to Taylor. To Taylor trying to come to terms once again with the loss of her Red Sister.

It wasn’t.

It isn’t.

This… This is Wordsworth.

“The dragon hadn’t taken a wicked princess,” I murmur, caressing Lisa’s cheek with my free hand as her eyes lid and she leans into my touch. “She had, instead, thrown away a fake one.”

I lean forward until our foreheads touch. Until her soft warmth washes across my bare pages.

“The dragon had given the knight an impostor to take care of. Because it offended her. Because she couldn’t stand the sight of it.

“Not when a true princess was waiting for the dragon’s return.”

Lisa lets out something that could be sob or a giggle.

I kiss her.

And I allow my clever tale to twist, to turn.

To say that the dragon and her princess lived happily forever after.