[O65] Smaug the Magnificent Reminisces
Mar. 11th, 2012 07:07 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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b2memB2MeM Challenge: "Smaug, the Last Great Dragon" (All Creatures..), "The Clouds Burst" (Alternate Viewpoints).
Format: Ficlet
Genre: General
Rating: PG13
Warnings: incest, discussion of dragon sex (there's been plenty of tree sex this month, so...)
Characters: Smaug
Summary: The ghost of Smaug considers what went wrong.
I’m afraid that inbreeding is to blame for my death. It isn’t a thing any self-respecting dragon would care to admit, but one can scarcely avoid the facts when they catch one up. Most of the original generation of dragons, my great–grandsires among them, were slain in Eärendil’s massacre. After that age had closed itself with the capture and expulsion of the Dark Lord, there were precious few dragons left in the world. Two males and one female, to be precise.
Of course the Dark Lord could hardly be expected to make more of us, being otherwise occupied with obscure banishment. And so my grandam and my grandfathers–who’s to know which fellow was responsible for which eggs?–resolved to repopulate our race. My own parents had to have been half-siblings at best, and possibly worse than that.
I digress. The point of course is that most of the dragons hatched in my generation were in some way–off. All of us were smaller than the prior generation. Some had stunted and non-functional wings, one poor fellow had no legs. And me? I did not have the proper armor on my belly. I had the most splendorous coat of golden-red mail on my back and flanks and legs, which made me the envy of many of my less shiny siblings and cousins, but underneath was a long swath of vulnerable and dare I say embarrassing naked flesh.
Not that there weren’t advantages of a sort to it. Most dragons are generally shielded by their armor from pleasure as well as from harm. When we were of an age to mate, a thing which most treated as a quick and passionately violent activity, I thought myself lucky to feel the rasping pleasantness of scales on my underbelly, the singularly alluring danger of claws and teeth…
But, I digress again. I grew older and more concerned with conquest and treasure, and so I sought for ways to remedy my vulnerability. We dragons, even we inbred dragons, have some measure of sorcery to us, and so I contrived to complete my mail coat with jewels and precious metals. Now I was tougher, as well as magnificent, and of old the Men of the northern lands would flee in panic when I circled over their settlements idly. Yet some would be transfixed with awe at the wealth of kingdoms arrayed above them, and these I took especial amusement in dispatching, but not before alighting and toying with them in subtle mockery.
Things went well enough until my siblings and cousins and I noticed we were barely producing any heirs. Whether this was to do with our inbred stock, or with the power the Dark Lord had given our race being too diluted now to pass on to another generation, none could say. Those few hatchlings who survived infancy were still smaller–they could barely eat a horse at a sitting without complaining of overindulging–and none had working wings.
And then wretched little heroes went about killing off my kin. By the time I successfully took Erebor, I was the last aside from a few of the weaker young ones skulking about somewhere.
We dragons have always liked not only to claim things, but to count and sort them. So I learned all about my treasure, sorted it in a functional and of course aesthetic manner, memorized where each thing lay in relation to all the other things, and then I slept. There was very little else to do. Given that my race was going extinct, I wasn’t really all that keen on remaining awake. So I took what delight I could from my hoard and lay dreaming of shining gems and shining eyes.
As furious as I was about the odd little burglar nipping in and stealing that cup–a particular favorite of mine–I suppose I had grown a little bored of no company at all, and a little dull. I was a bit too keen to show off my jewel-girded belly. I don’t know how he did it, but that oversized weasel must have been able to communicate to the archer in Laketown that I had a bare patch on my chest. I don’t know how that happened either, how the gems fell off without my noticing. I must indeed have been tired.
That sudden pain stabbed into the center of me, a core of pain that I clenched up around, and then I fell out of the air. I sensed I would be dead before I hit the water, and I was really profoundly relieved about that, for it would have been a bad business to drown.
I hung about my own corpse for a while, in the murk at the lakebottom, for even there the light from the blazing piers came through in cunning rays that glinted darkly off the jewels. I was disoriented and mesmerized by the shining. After quite some time, I came to understand that I was dead and no longer a part of the world though I loitered within it. I rose from the water in bitter malice, but I was become less than a petty breeze.
The Men were clearing away debris, and none noticed as I flew north in a fury. I found a battle in progress there, and I was heartened by this. There were Dwarves, some of whom my blasted burglar must have ridden with, and Elves and Men, and also there were Orcs and Wargs. I wished them all death. We dragons have little regard for any other creatures, after all, and why should we? What else within the world has the cleverness, the might, and the grace of our kind?
So I watched this battle rage back and forth, and each death was a jewel that I added to an ever-growing mound. I sorted them and piled them up in my mind. I did not sort by race, that was too simple, just as piling every last emerald in the same place would have been too simple. There is an art to these things. I sorted them by rank, when I could figure it out. All the captains would go here, regardless of race or allegiance, all the lieutenants over there–friend and foe, piled up together, would they not hate that?–and the rest could be sorted by how long they managed to survive before being slain. I pictured the pile of them in the sun, armor and weaponry glinting, weathering wind and rain and snow until their flesh was gone and only bone and metal remained.
But when the battle was over and the winners began clearing out the corpses, I saw then what I of course knew already, that I could not sort and pile them up myself. There were no kin left, and now there would be no more hoarding.
Format: Ficlet
Genre: General
Rating: PG13
Warnings: incest, discussion of dragon sex (there's been plenty of tree sex this month, so...)
Characters: Smaug
Summary: The ghost of Smaug considers what went wrong.
I’m afraid that inbreeding is to blame for my death. It isn’t a thing any self-respecting dragon would care to admit, but one can scarcely avoid the facts when they catch one up. Most of the original generation of dragons, my great–grandsires among them, were slain in Eärendil’s massacre. After that age had closed itself with the capture and expulsion of the Dark Lord, there were precious few dragons left in the world. Two males and one female, to be precise.
Of course the Dark Lord could hardly be expected to make more of us, being otherwise occupied with obscure banishment. And so my grandam and my grandfathers–who’s to know which fellow was responsible for which eggs?–resolved to repopulate our race. My own parents had to have been half-siblings at best, and possibly worse than that.
I digress. The point of course is that most of the dragons hatched in my generation were in some way–off. All of us were smaller than the prior generation. Some had stunted and non-functional wings, one poor fellow had no legs. And me? I did not have the proper armor on my belly. I had the most splendorous coat of golden-red mail on my back and flanks and legs, which made me the envy of many of my less shiny siblings and cousins, but underneath was a long swath of vulnerable and dare I say embarrassing naked flesh.
Not that there weren’t advantages of a sort to it. Most dragons are generally shielded by their armor from pleasure as well as from harm. When we were of an age to mate, a thing which most treated as a quick and passionately violent activity, I thought myself lucky to feel the rasping pleasantness of scales on my underbelly, the singularly alluring danger of claws and teeth…
But, I digress again. I grew older and more concerned with conquest and treasure, and so I sought for ways to remedy my vulnerability. We dragons, even we inbred dragons, have some measure of sorcery to us, and so I contrived to complete my mail coat with jewels and precious metals. Now I was tougher, as well as magnificent, and of old the Men of the northern lands would flee in panic when I circled over their settlements idly. Yet some would be transfixed with awe at the wealth of kingdoms arrayed above them, and these I took especial amusement in dispatching, but not before alighting and toying with them in subtle mockery.
Things went well enough until my siblings and cousins and I noticed we were barely producing any heirs. Whether this was to do with our inbred stock, or with the power the Dark Lord had given our race being too diluted now to pass on to another generation, none could say. Those few hatchlings who survived infancy were still smaller–they could barely eat a horse at a sitting without complaining of overindulging–and none had working wings.
And then wretched little heroes went about killing off my kin. By the time I successfully took Erebor, I was the last aside from a few of the weaker young ones skulking about somewhere.
We dragons have always liked not only to claim things, but to count and sort them. So I learned all about my treasure, sorted it in a functional and of course aesthetic manner, memorized where each thing lay in relation to all the other things, and then I slept. There was very little else to do. Given that my race was going extinct, I wasn’t really all that keen on remaining awake. So I took what delight I could from my hoard and lay dreaming of shining gems and shining eyes.
As furious as I was about the odd little burglar nipping in and stealing that cup–a particular favorite of mine–I suppose I had grown a little bored of no company at all, and a little dull. I was a bit too keen to show off my jewel-girded belly. I don’t know how he did it, but that oversized weasel must have been able to communicate to the archer in Laketown that I had a bare patch on my chest. I don’t know how that happened either, how the gems fell off without my noticing. I must indeed have been tired.
That sudden pain stabbed into the center of me, a core of pain that I clenched up around, and then I fell out of the air. I sensed I would be dead before I hit the water, and I was really profoundly relieved about that, for it would have been a bad business to drown.
I hung about my own corpse for a while, in the murk at the lakebottom, for even there the light from the blazing piers came through in cunning rays that glinted darkly off the jewels. I was disoriented and mesmerized by the shining. After quite some time, I came to understand that I was dead and no longer a part of the world though I loitered within it. I rose from the water in bitter malice, but I was become less than a petty breeze.
The Men were clearing away debris, and none noticed as I flew north in a fury. I found a battle in progress there, and I was heartened by this. There were Dwarves, some of whom my blasted burglar must have ridden with, and Elves and Men, and also there were Orcs and Wargs. I wished them all death. We dragons have little regard for any other creatures, after all, and why should we? What else within the world has the cleverness, the might, and the grace of our kind?
So I watched this battle rage back and forth, and each death was a jewel that I added to an ever-growing mound. I sorted them and piled them up in my mind. I did not sort by race, that was too simple, just as piling every last emerald in the same place would have been too simple. There is an art to these things. I sorted them by rank, when I could figure it out. All the captains would go here, regardless of race or allegiance, all the lieutenants over there–friend and foe, piled up together, would they not hate that?–and the rest could be sorted by how long they managed to survive before being slain. I pictured the pile of them in the sun, armor and weaponry glinting, weathering wind and rain and snow until their flesh was gone and only bone and metal remained.
But when the battle was over and the winners began clearing out the corpses, I saw then what I of course knew already, that I could not sort and pile them up myself. There were no kin left, and now there would be no more hoarding.
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 02:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 06:06 pm (UTC)Excellent! Thanks for reading =)
no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 04:10 am (UTC)Inbreeding-- it would explain a lot, wouldn't it? And showing off to the little burglar.
I like the ironic voice you've given him.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 09:04 am (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
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Date: 2012-03-12 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-12 06:27 pm (UTC)- Erulisse (one L)
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Date: 2012-03-12 07:20 pm (UTC)This line is great: So I took what delight I could from my hoard and lay dreaming of shining gems and shining eyes. As is his description of the "oversized weasel." I love how, at the end, he treats the deaths of his enemies as jewels, and sorts them all out as his final treasure and revenge. The ending is oddly sobering, and it works very well.
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Date: 2012-03-12 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-14 12:22 am (UTC)Well done!
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Date: 2012-03-14 12:49 am (UTC)