To Kill A King

[vonnix]

Part One

She wishes she could think of another solution, some other way to rid her home of the tyrant of a king, but she can't. For her entire life Hana has been forced to watch her parents work their fingers raw to make enough money to pay taxes and still be able to pay for simple necessities such as shelter, food, and clothing. She hasn't seen her parents wear new clothes for at least six years and she knows they only take enough food to keep from starving to death for themselves.

Times are lean for the common folk. There are food shortages, great plagues, wars, and Hana knows that. She knows it but she also knows this: that for the royalty, for the people that live in the rich quarter, times are never lean. She blames the shortages, the wars, on them and while she's not the only one that does she's the only one willing to try and do something.

It's been a long few years that took Hana to build up to what she's about to do. She's tried requesting audiences with members of the royal family. She's tried talking her friends, neighbours, family, into protesting with her. She's tried to get the young men that leave to join the war - both volunteers and otherwise - to refuse to go. To throw down their arms and tell the rich people to fight their own wars. Everywhere Hana turned she was laughed at, ridiculed, and once even thrown in the gaol for two days for tying herself with rope enchanted to be uncuttable (stolen from the Sorcerer that lives in the next town over from the one she lives in) to the gates of the castle that the royal family lives in.

He's a local legend, the solution she's been forced to try. The man in the mountain, the fallen Rider, the bringer of the green flames. He's known by many names and there's a different story for every name as to how he's come to be. Everyone in Hana's village knows of at least one of the stories and most parents use him as a boogeyman to scare their children into behaving.

None of the stories are right, though.

Hana's heard them all. How he's one of the wizards of old, one of the ones whose powers knew nearly no limit, and he pushed his powers too far while trying to become immortal. How he insulted one of the Shadow People and was cursed. She grew up with them told as bedtime stories so that she would know better than to believe in them, but she doesn't know why. Her father wouldn't ever tell her.

She's glad she knows all the stories though, because it gives her the information she needs. With all the stories there are similar facts that she's guessed to be the truth that all really good lies are built upon. One is that he keeps to the Dead Mountains, and that the best way to get his attention is to call him by his birth name.

So Hana makes her way slowly to a ledge over the canyon snaking through the Dead Mountains. There's nearly no plant life anywhere despite the dirt beneath her feet looking and feeling like it would be perfect for it. The few trees that have dared to defy the keeper of this particular mountain range (one of the longest in the world, starting in one corner of the map and then winding down around to the opposite corner like a twisting river of evil intentions) are twisted and evil looking. She's never been farther away from her home of Toyl than Rufgar, the city that's not even on the next horizon to Toyl, but she's heard from travellers passing through that there isn't any life at all anywhere along the Dead Mountains.

It's a long drop down from where she stands on the ledge she chose to meet with the smokey chasm, and, picking up a pebble from the ground underneath her feet, even farther to reach the bottom of the canyon. There isn't any sound of the pebble she drops reaching the end and she guesses - hopes - that maybe the green mist ate the sound up like the banks of fog sometimes did when they fell upon her town.

She steps back from the edge, trying not to look afraid. She isn't afraid, she tells herself. She's a brave woman that's going to save her home.

"David!" She calls out to the wind. It'll carry her voice to him, she knows. None of the myths surrounding him agree on what he is but they do agree that he controls some form of mystical powers. "David of Nihsonne, I demand to speak to you! Appear before me at once!" She shouts. Another way to gain his attention, the stories all agree, is to demand something of him. They don't agree on if he'll ever obey the demand but you'll at least have his attention.

A minute passes, then three, then ten, but Hana doesn't leave. This is her last option and she's determined to have her way. She gets her stubbornness, she's told, from her mother.

Finally when the twenty-ninth minute passes something happens. The sound of a great drum beats up from the depths of the canyon and the mists swirl. She doesn't know what she's seeing, no one knows for sure what he or his steed looks like, but she knows who she's seeing.

It takes a few heartbeats but finally the smoke recedes enough for Hana to see what is flying towards her and make a tiny part of her wish she hadn't ever caught his attention.

A great dragon is rising up towards her. There aren't many left in the world because of knights going on quests, but those that are still around tend to be savage beasts that are older than the hills they live upon, inside, and underneath. It's eyes glow a phosphorescent green while it's skin is a mottled red and grey. The clouds of green smoke it's flying through give it an otherworldly look that Hana can't help but marvel at. When it gets closer she can see that the dragon's skin isn't a mottled red and grey but a decaying grey that have great patches of muscle, bone, and innards poking through.

When it reaches her, Hana realizes one critical error she unknowingly made. In not knowing that he's a dragon she didn't take into account that she was about to make demands upon a creature that's she barely reaches the elbow of. So when he lands on the mountainside behind her, blocking her from running any way but over the ledge and to her death, she is nearly shaking herself out of her clothes in fear.

A low growl rumbles threateningly from his throat and would have made Hana take a step back if she wasn't already on the edge. She wishes she had brought her younger brother with her because then she'd have no problem standing up to this man, this creature, this horrific beast. With her brother here she would have refused to let herself be thought a coward so would have been able to easily push aside her fear. Her brother isn't here though, so she has no reason not to cower like she knows she really shouldn't. Not all of them, but a number of the stories say that he doesn't like cowards at all.

All of a sudden Hana feels a great pressure inside her head, a splitting headache that forces her to her knees, and then she can hear words.

'Who are you to make demands of me?' the words are spoken directly into her mind and in her own voice. It's a strange thing and if it didn't hurt so much she would have marvelled at it. None of the tales of knights slaying dragons have that in them, the dragons talking to the knights with their own voice.

Try as she might - because she knows that she needs to answer the question posed to her - Hana can't manage to fight through the pain inside her brain to string the words she wants to together. All she can manage is a few attempts at sounds that aren't even close to becoming words until she gives up. She stumbles to her knees, dirtying the hem of her dress further, all the while clutching her head.

A hand touches her and she startles, trying to get away because while she'd always thought that the man in the mountain had been a human there hadn't been one riding the dragon. Which meant that the man was the dragon. So where had the human hand come from? The pain in her head was gone, though, so she thanked the gods for that.

Immediately she spots a problem with trying to get away. There's only one way to run still and that's to a painful death as a big blood splatter when her body finally hits the bottom of the canyon. She screams as soon as she realizes she's going to fall and grabs at the hand that startled her away.

She looks at the owner of the hand, her unintentional saviour. The dragon's gone and in it's place is a man, equally as decomposed as the dragon was. His eyes are glowing a bright green, his teeth are all carved into deadly points to match the claws he has in place of fingernails, and has spikes lining where she knows his spine is. He's also not wearing a single stitch of clothing.

"Tell me who you are to try and make demands of me or else you're taking a long walk off a short pier." He demands with his face twisted into a sinister scowl.

"I'm Hana, daughter of Emilia and Kaiser of the Nakamura clan." she introduces herself, just like her father taught her and her siblings. They might be poor but they should still introduce themselves properly and be proud of who they are. Not many people nowadays can truthfully say that they're in a clan as most of them have been killed off in one war or another. That's what her parents told her at any rate.

He didn't look impressed at her name. No one did, everyone in her hometown knew her parents were dirt poor. "What d'you want?" he demanded, rudely not introducing himself in return. She was positive that he had a name other than his birth one that he preferred to be called by but she didn't know it.

"I want, sir, to make the king stop raising the taxes so high. I want more food for my family. I want the wars to go away. I want my parents to be able to afford new clothes for themselves." Hana said quietly.

"The only way for any of that to happen is for the king to die. Which isn't happening any time soon." the decomposed man said simply, as if it was a fact not worth arguing.

Hana shook her head. "The king is nothing but a man, and men can die."

Her answer was loud laughter, the man-dragon (for Hana knew he had been the dragon that had flown up as it was the only explanation towards its disappearance) fell down he laughed so hard. It annoyed and angered Hana but she didn't move to strike him like she would have if it had been one of her brothers laughing, or someone else back home.

"You're so young and naive it's funny." he said, still grinning, chuckling bemusedly while laying down from his sitting position onto the hard rock. "So you want the king dead? Get a blade and stick it in him somewhere, it's not as hard as knights and soldiers make it seem."

"I want you to help me." Hana explained. "Killing him may be easy but getting close enough to kill him won't be. None of my family nor friends will be willing or able to help me."

The man-dragon looked at her carefully through narrowed eyes from his place reclined upon the ground. "I guess I can help you." he eventually shrugged, standing up and offering out a decayed hand. "Call me Sam." Hana reluctantly took it, shaking it briefly before letting go.

"Before we go anywhere near his royal mightiness and his army of idiots we're going to need some specialized help." Sam, the man-dragon, told her, stretching. Hana could see in places where skin should be but wasn't the muscles lengthening and shifting as much as they could. She wondered if it was possible for Sam to stretch them hard enough on his own for them to detach from his bones and what would happen if it did.

She didn't ask though, slightly afraid of the answer she might get.

"Specialized how?" She asked instead.

Sam smirked at her. "You'll find out soon enough. No need to rush things, the king doesn't know we're coming after all." he said before transforming back into a dragon. He reached over and grabbed Hana up into one of his giant hands, his fingers now almost as long as she was tall. They were slick in places with things that Hana didn't want to know about but she held on as best she could.

With a great blast of of air from his wings Sam launched himself into the air, aiming himself south. Hana tried to not be sick with fear from how high and how fast she found herself moving.