Chapter Text
The first thing the Dragon of the Wild knows is this:
It hurts.
It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts—!
The bellows of its lungs heave, and a shriek tears from its throat. It whips its head around to see the vast hurting places on its body. Decay creeps along its foreleg, its shoulders, its spine. Globs of gloom fall from its flank and spatter onto the stone below, sizzling where they settle. It lunges for its own rotting flesh, jaws splayed, and it hears someone scream.
It hesitates, but only for a moment.
Then it tears its own leg off.
Decay burns its mouth, boils its tongue, and it casts the ruined flesh far from itself. Quickly, it sinks its fangs back into its shoulder, tearing off great chunks of poisoned hide and tainted scale. Only when the worst of the gloom has been cast aside does it stop, panting, hoarse with pain. There is a high-pitched noise in its ears, which it pins flat in distress.
Someone is speaking.
The dragon curves its neck, looking down its own long snout to its uninjured foreleg. Something small and gold is touching its talon. The thing speaks a language that the dragon does not understand, but her voice is soft and her touch is kind. The dragon will not devour her. It bows its head instead, brushing the tip of its muzzle against her halo of hair.
She smells like flowers.
This is familiar.
“Link,” she sobs, reaching up to press one warm palm against its nose. “Oh, Link.”
The dragon nudges her, flips her up onto its snout to carry. It does not belong in this place, and it doubts this small golden thing does, either. This place is dark and foul and full of rot: it is everything the dragon is not. So the dragon bunches its haunches, braces its five uninjured limbs, and leaps to fly as it is meant to do.
It makes it only half a dragon-length before its magic flickers, falters, and it slams back into the ground. Its belly skids across the stone, scraping several scales off. It lays, dumbfounded, for some seconds. Then it gets up to try again—
—and again—
—and again—
—and—
“Please,” the small golden thing begs, brushing one hand beneath its eye. “Please be still. My Link, my knight, lay and be still.”
But the dragon knows this:
If it lays quietly, it will die in this underground tomb. The gloom curdles inside of its bones and its belly. It does not know how to fix that, but it does know how to seek the sunlight. It digs its talons into the stone of the chasm and begins to climb. It will not be kept here. It will not die in this place.
But it is missing its leg, and so very much of its magic.
It only makes it a few tail-lengths before it loses its grip and crashes back down. Blood oozes from its injured side, oily and black. It lays panting, breath sawing in and out of its throat. Frustration blooms around its body in the shape of thorns and brambles and great locust trees. The small golden thing kneels in front of it, her hands stroking its chin.
“Shh,” she says. “Shh, settle, there now. I’ll help you. I promise I’ll help you.”
But the world moves on above them, and the gloom grows ever deeper, and the dragon cannot fly.
Sometime, somewhere, a goddess grieves and a portal opens.