2024 Halloween Special Public Release: How To Starve

Phelan was almost drunk enough to miss his name in the tumultuous sounds of the crowded tavern, full of the shouts of drunkards and the stomping of unicorn hooves on bare, splintering wood. Only the lingering remnants of whatever attentiveness had been drilled into the chestnut unicorn in the army let him catch it even after all those years of going to seed. But even so, it took the elder unicorn several seconds of staring blankly at the bowl of whiskey left for him on the bar to gather wits enough to take in the conversation at the nearby table.

 

“—even after all this time. You’d think he’d try to make good with his neighbors at some point, but I guess some unicorns aren’t good for that. A shame of a bastard, really. I remember some years ago when his parents went off, there was some talk that they’d left the ranch and the animals to some cousins, and it’s only on account of Phelan’s bullying that he got it all to himself. Not that he’s done much at all with this.”

 

“What’s a soldier know of raising sheep for their wool, anyway?” asked another of the unicorns at the near table, a mare with a splotched grey coat. “Decades of nothing but marching miles and shooting gryphons out of the sky. Pfah!”

 

“Oh, no,” said a third unicorn, this one tending to a bowl of the same whiskey as Phelan where the other two drank from bowls of beer. A mean laugh was in his voice. “No, no, not Phelan. Everybody knows that prancer sat comfy in some out of the way fort for prisoners. No frontline action to rattle his horn!”

 

For a brief moment, the table’s laughter rose above the general noise of the tavern, drawing more than one curious eye to the source of the raucousness which would’ve gotten the culprits thrown out if it weren’t nearing the coldest stretch of weeks in that northern stretch of Vogelstadt. But just as quickly, the laughter faltered into an embarrassed silence tinged with annoyance as Phelan staggered from his spot at the bar and toward the table, enough heat in his gaze and in his voice to put a stop to the laughter, if not to the sentiment. “You Empress-blasted civilians don’t know what in Sheol you’re talking about.”

 

The silence spread in a slow circle outward from the confrontation, laughter dying, arguments and comradery turning to whispers. One of the gossipers, the mare, scoffed. “You’ve been drinking too much. There is no empress anymore, Phelan. You’ll say a good riddance to her, if you have any sense.”

 

Ignoring both these words and the full scope of the scene he was causing, Phelan let out his own scoff and continued, stomping closer until he was in amongst the gossipers. He looked around at them, snorting and stomping a hoof in agitation. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. It was a time of war and I served my country, which I know a fair number of you can’t say. Served my country. That’s right. Some out of the way fort, pfah. Don’t know what it was like, serving guard duty for her. For that . . . that Lord Beauty.”

 

None of those at the table looked in the mood to laugh anymore, expressions ruled by weariness and disgust, as if they had heard much the same before. Phelan didn’t notice this, nor the thickening quiet forming a ring around himself and the table of gossipers. He had gone from looking at his fellow unicorns with disgust to not really looking at anything at all, his gaze distant and wet with memory. “Maybe I don’t know how to properly care for sheep, but I still know more than any of you will. None of you were there to know the things we guarded. The things we stood witness to. The things you manage to learn for yourself, if you simply stick around long enough.”

 

“Lord Beauty was a lie,” snarled the unicorn stallion with the whiskey. “A lie, you rotten old bastard. That was Morgana le Fay you served. I think we hear enough of that monster’s foul deeds from the gryphons and the dragons, thank you.”

 

“Yes, there were dragons there,” said Phelan, latching on to only the end of the reprimand. He sat at the table and leaned forward, sweeping his gaze around to take in his unwilling listeners, the old soldier deaf to their groans. “Lord Beauty had dragons. They were her favorites. Gryphons died too quickly from what she did to them in her experiments, but the dragons could last a long, long time. Horrible things happened and were done. Terrible things. But I did my duty. Someone had to. If you think it was easy to see her at work for the good of the Empire, more the fool you are. Can you even imagine what it takes to burn through dragon scales, or how long they can hold their breath underwater? Have you ever seen a starving dragon?”

 

“For God’s sake, Phelan, will you shut up about—”

 

“They don’t starve easy! Dragons aren’t like us or gryphons or Wolf-Lords, they can live by more than mere food! In desperation, they can take sustenance from the heat of the volcano, or the rays of the Sun. That’s something Lord Beauty learned for the sake of the Empire. To starve a dragon, to really starve one, you—”

 

A half-dozen horns lit up with various colors of magic, not only those of the unicorns at the table but from among the surrounding crowd. Phelan went quiet as the magic seized him and forced him back onto his hooves, shoving him away from the table and toward the tavern door.

 

“Out!” bellowed the mare, standing to skewer Phelan with her dagger glare. “The Empire is dead and gone! Your Lord Beauty is gone! The war is over, and nobody wants to think about what our country did in it more than we have to! Especially not from some wretched, bloodthirsty drunkard! OUT!”

 

Phelan half-trotted, half-flew in the grip of the unicorn magic to the door, stumbling over his own hooves into the shocking cold of the night. For one breath he stood in a pillar of warm amber light spilled across the well-trampled snow. Then the door was slammed shut to him, and all the old, swaying unicorn could do was stand in the dark and listen to the sounds of the tavern rise back to their usual volume and cheer.

 

“Ungrateful . . . ungrateful foals. Don’t deserve this . . . .”

 

But standing there in the haze of his whiskey-filled veins and muttering to himself was satisfying only for as long as it took his bleary eyes to adjust to the light of the full moon twinkling in the snow fallen heavy across the rooftops and well-trodden streets of the valley town. With a snort and toss of his mane, he started down the road to his farm. He thought only of the bottles of contraband Wolf-Lord wine he kept stashed away in his fruit cellar, not even noticing the odd smell of ash in the air, nor the flicker of something huge passing high overhead, a swift terror across the face of the moon.

 

###

 

The farmstead and surrounding land had been Phelan’s father’s, seized by him in the early days of the Avalon Empire’s war with Schwarz Angebot and heavily modified once the native gryphons had been driven out. Though not born there, Phelan had grown up there, knew it and the nearby town as well as if the decades away serving in the army had never happened. He could trot the several-mile journey blindfolded; doing so while drunk and consumed by his self-pitying thoughts was no greater challenge.

 

It took the unexpected blaring of nearby sheep to tell him something was out of the ordinary. He looked up from the road, a startled breath bursting out in a cloud of icy white as he looked jerkily around. A dozen sheep milled on the road bisecting the fallow, snow-blanketed fields, shivering despite their thick coats of wool as they nosed about for any sign of greenery. Some, as startled by Phelan’s wandering into their midst as the unicorn was, startled away down the road. Most others gravitated toward the familiar presence, as Phelan, slowly sobering in the cold seeping toward his bones, realized with another start that these were HIS sheep.

 

“What in Sheol are you stupid animals doing out here!?” he snapped, in no mood for any animal antics after the confrontation in the tavern. His horn lit up with wavery blue magic as he conjured a long, flexible metal pole, with which he began to prod and flick at the sheep, adding in several curses as he began driving them back along the road and toward home. “Go on, move, move! Stupid animals! Who let you out? Who thought to make a damned fool out of me!?”

 

The sheep, of course, only baa’d in answer.

 

It was some half another hour before Phelan crested a final low-rolling hill and came within sight of his farm. From that distance and angle he could clearly see the red-painted barn he normally kept the small herd of sheep inside in the coldest months of the year.

 

The broad barn doors were gone, smashed splinters of wood littering the yard between the building and the fence.

 

The moonlight, so bright and clear as it fell heavy as snow onto the world, held no sway in the darkness within the barn.

 

A worm of fear began to eat away at the corners of whatever drunkenness the cold of the winter night had failed to banish. Phelan slowed his approach as he passed his rickety fence and crossed the yard, eyes narrowed as he tried to penetrate that darkness which seemed to sit like an unwanted guest. The prods of his staff grew harder as he herded his sheep ahead of him, the dumb animals slowing with him, their noises of distress growing louder as he forced them more and more violently toward the darkened cavern.

 

“It’s only a barn,” he barked out, still enough drink in his veins for talking aloud to himself to come naturally. He whacked at his sheep with his conjured staff, hard enough for them to feel even through the thick cushion of their wool, the unicorn neighing as his beasts shied away to the sides, away from both him and the barn. “No, NO! Bad sheep! Get back here, get back, you rotten, stupid—”

 

Tending to the farm had never been easy for Phelan, not even in his younger years when his father had still been alive and doing his best to show Phelan how it was done. Never easy, but never this hard before, either. Abandoning the staff, he tried to grab several of the noisy animals with his magic and shove them toward the yawning barn entrance in much the same way he’d been forced out of the tavern. Never the strongest of unicorns, he only managed one, a young and shivering thing, its baa’s sounding more like mad, terrified screams as it fought a losing fight with its body.

 

“Get in there!” Phelan bellowed, certain in his drunken anger that if he could only get one sheep inside, the rest would follow, and then after that he could worry about a replacement door. “Inside, damn you, get—”

 

Out of those tar-thick shadows, a scaled arm the pale pink of blood-soaked snow and as big as a nightmare reached out and grasped the young sheep before it could do more than rear back and shriek. Claws squeezed, the shrieks cutting off into cracking and squelching as sheep pulp splattered to the ground.

 

The rest of the sheep turned tail and ran, baaing and trampling through the snow. Phelan stood his ground, not out of bravery but out of cowardice, his whole front a star map of red dots, hot and rancid. Breathlessly, eyes stinging, “Oh Empress, protect me.”

 

The scaled arm drew back, drawing patterns of blood drips across the ground stark in the moonlight. The eyes opened, wide lizard eyes each as big as a kickball, blue as a drowning victim and turned toward Phelan with all the hate of a murderer. The eyes stared, and saw Phelan, and said without words “I see you. I’ve seen what you’ve done. I’ve seen what will happen to you, and you won’t like it.”

 

Even so, it was not until a blistering breath of curdling black smoke gusted from the greater darkness of the barn, scorching the blood dots black across Phelan’s front, that he found the sense to turn and run after his sheep. Otherwise blind in panic and horror, he galloped along their tracks in the snow like one more among the frightened beasts, leaping the fence like a far younger unicorn as they aimed to lead him to the woods. There was too much blind animal panic for thought, but if there had been thought, Phelan might have consciously hoped for the cover of the trees to shield him from whatever monster had hidden in his barn for his coming, to guard him until he made it back to town for help. The woods were not large, but they were dense, if he had light to see his way—

 

From behind, a sudden flaring of light, orange and scorching, for a heartbeat turning night to day. A step after came the roaring rush of jetting flame, an expanding wave of superheated air. Phelan screamed as it caught him and tossed him off his hooves. He landed and rolled a yard ahead, his going softened by the snow.

 

Mostly softened. A leg had badly twisted beneath his weight as he landed. The pain of it, sharp and flickering like a knife fight, pierced the hold panic had on him. There was room for thought again. The unicorn stallion looked around, eyes blinking stupidly in the pervasive firelight, ears twitching for the sound of any danger beneath the crackle of burning wood and stone. Many dozens of yards behind him, the barn and his home burned. Orange and yellow flames ate away at the winter night, ate away at Phelan’s life, his youth and the lingering memories of it, the rising smoke thick and full of angry cinders tossing in the wind.

 

“Oh, Empress help me!” the unicorn stallion cried, the cause of his original terror momentarily forgotten against the swell of pain and grief at the sight of all his departed family had left him going up in flames. He tried to get back on his hooves, shrieked and fell again as the pain in his leg flared at the slightest weight put on it. He heard it, the bone cracking like the flame-wreathed timbers of his caving roof. “Why!? Oh, Empress! Empress Nova, someone, why—”

 

But there could be no “why”, not then. Only the fear, then, as out of the fire and smoke rose the great beast of Phelan’s nightmares, scaled and horned, broad devil wings spreading, buffeting the flames down into embers with a single, staggering flap.

 

At the sight of the dragon, Phelan found the strength to power through the pain and stand. He even managed to stagger a yard closer toward the trees before those beating leathery wings scattered the snow all around him, before claws like falchions fastened around his barrel and lifted him up, up, up. Watching the ground recede far below him, the dragon bigger and faster even than the old Imperial troop carriers, Phelan screamed and screamed until the blessed relief of unconsciousness finally took him.

 

#

 

Phelan felt the cold before he woke. It was sharp as the pain of his broken leg, heavy over him like a blanket, every breath frigid and aching as it dragged through his lungs. Below him, a once-smooth floor dug its scars and rubble into him, cold in the way of things which had never seen sunlight, a cold which would seep into his veins and kill him if given the time.

 

Waking, Phelan became aware of more than the cold. The stench of old smoke clung to things. Fresher, hotter smoke loomed overhead, obscuring the roof of some cave or underground prison he suddenly found himself in. Somewhere, water dripped, its echoing ping catching in Phelan’s ears like a pebble in his hoof.

 

Somewhere, something growled. The dark cave brightened as a thin sheet of flames splashed across the broken floor like the waves of spilled water, dispelling much of the cold. The edges of it licked at Phelan’s hooves and he whinnied in fright, kicking out before pushing into a sitting position.

 

Yards off, half-hiding a thick crack in the stone wall of the cavern which might have been an exit, lay the dragon. Watching him with malevolent delight, it seemed crudely huge in the confines of this strange prison, though it was perhaps “merely” thrice the size of Phelan. In the slowly dwindling light of its flames, Phelan saw its scales were not the withered pearlescent white he had thought they were in the moonlight, but a bright, vibrant pink. The bright pink of muscle freshly shorn of its flesh.

 

“Where—”

 

Flames, already licking out from between the dragon’s teeth, erupted in a thick torrent, raking across the cavern floor. Phelan shrieked and danced away from the suddenly-blazing heat, or tried to. The broken leg sent him tumbling to the ground before he could make it farther than a skip.

 

Eventually, the fire breath finished. Through the warble of the superheated air, the dragon stared at the cringing unicorn with a look which would have done the late Lord Mordred proud. “Does the proud soldier remember me?”

 

“Re-remember?” asked Phelan, voice a whisper. It was not only the fire and the pain which hushed him. In the shifting light he had caught sight of worse than mere rocks littering the prison floor. Heaped in corners of the room were dead bodies. Unicorn bodies. Some long-dead, others so horrifically recent the blood still clung like jelly in their veins. Many looked like they had been chewed on, but not by the sword-like teeth of the dragon. “I . . . I don’t understand . . . the war’s over.”

 

“So said those other stickheads in the tavern,” agreed the dragon, a venomous, feminine lilt entering her deep-well voice. “So say the queens and kings of these lands, and the governors of the territories, and the peacekeepers. But you’ve never been able to leave the war, have you? You’ve allowed yourself . . . petty indulges, some faux-remembrance of those horrors you saw day by day, serving the will of Lord Beauty. Of Morgana le Fay.

 

“It is too bad for you that, for me, the memory of those days of horror is NO INDULGENCE!”

 

Dust and loose stones fell from the roof with the force of the shout. Phelan cringed still further down, his heart beating, his mind racing. There could be no doubt what the dragon meant, even after all those years. But . . . . “But my lord destroyed all the dragons in her control!”

 

“Not all,” snarled the pink beast. It seemed the roar had drained her of her worst furies, her voice carrying only coldness. “I am Ashe. I was a child by the reckoning of my people when you imperials came to take me and my family. But I can’t remember that childhood, or the faces of my parents, or the names of my brothers and sisters. I can only remember you imperials and your . . . experiments. Decades of them. I was a child and I didn’t understand what was happening to me, what was . . . being done to me. I’m not so much a child anymore, but I still don’t know. None of these other unicorns, guards and scientists of that infernal prison, could quite tell me. Perhaps you can do better?”

 

Phelan stared. His jaws worked, but for a while no sound could come out. Had it not been enough to be there? Had it not been enough to see what he’d seen? “I was a soldier. It was my duty. And you were only beasts, weren’t you?”

 

And Phelan’s heart dropped the next moment, as no look of surprise passed over the dragon’s features. A clawed hand reached out, all-powerful muscles tensing beneath their scales as Ashe shoved the crack in the stone wall open wider, revealing itself to indeed be a door out. “You may take it as some minor balm that Queen Galaxy the hippogryph, though a dear friend of mine, would not approve of my actions here. She would even find them, I think, monstrous. She would be right.

 

“It’s a good thing, then, that she doesn’t know what we’re doing here. Nor does Queen Holly of Gateway, nor the ruling council of Avalon. Nobody knows where we are or what we’re doing. Do you?”

 

Phelan looked around, trembling where he half-stood in his fearful efforts to find some clue to answer his tormentor’s question. The seconds passed and he thought he recognized something in the uniformity of the walls, the masterful construction lingering after what seemed centuries. His best guess was a forgotten room of some forgotten Wolf-Lord edifice, underground where they had once liked to build. Beyond this, the unicorn could glean nothing. As for what he was doing there . . . .

 

“We’re going to perform an experiment,” said Ashe once it became clear her prisoner could not answer, the dragon’s lips curling into a mad smile. “You should be familiar with those. You served under Morgana for nearly as long as I suffered under her. I wonder if you still remember anything we learned together in those grand old days. How much zakarian acid is needed to melt dragon scales. How much blood can a dragon lose before dying . . . .”

 

Without looking to check her step, Ashe began to back away, out through the heavy stone doorway. Another torrent of flames across the scorched floor kept Phelan from following; not that he even could, frozen in place by the horror of the dragon’s next words. “How to make a dragon starve.”

 

“No!” His voice cracked on the word, the horror of horrors spreading before him.

 

Ashe still smiled, still backed out, claws digging deep into that thick slab to pull it closed between them. The grinding of stone over stone as she closed him up almost drowned out her voice, deep but so calm, so conversational, so all-smiles madness. “Dragons, see, don’t starve easy. We can eat fire, we can eat light. To really drive a dragon to starvation, to make her not just feel, but BECOME, that murderous agony, you have to seal her away somewhere cold and dark. Somewhere forgotten. Forever, so her madness will never become someone else’s problem. Goodbye, soldier.”