# A Whistle in a Blaze

By: TheDragonBoy

## Content

She ran as fast as she could, her breathing heavy, the load on her back even heavier. She shifted the straps digging into her shoulders as best she could, but she never stopped running, sprinting. She had to get to the castle. It was the only hope.

All around her, terrified screams and pained cries echoed off the cobblestone, bouncing around between houses and down streets, filling the city with a horrible chorus, wailing over the constant roar of ever-growing flames. And above it all, in furious bursts that seemed to shake the very earth, a much more literal roar.

She threw her eyes skyward as the huge, red form rushed past overhead, letting loose its deafening bellow as it beat its enormous wings. And a moment later, a sound like a crackling avalanche as it released another huge plume of flame somewhere nearby. She couldn’t see where, past the houses, but she could see the bright, burning light it cast against the shadows of the rooftops.

She had to get to the castle. It was the only hope. The only hope for anyone in the city. So she drew on all the strength she had, held tight to the straps of the pack on her back, and kept running, as fast as she could go.

The palace gates were wide open, with a few scattered guards frantically urging any and all stray citizens inside. The imposing stone structure beyond was a fortress, a stronghold, a keep that had stood the test of hundreds of years. It was the sturdiest place anywhere around, the pride of the province, and the natural shelter for all the provincial populace, fleeing as the flames spread and climbed.

She rushed through the gates and straight inside. The large halls, usually awash with the air of nobility and composed refinement, shook as if in fear themselves with the thunderous roar of the dragon overhead. Ornate adornments sat crooked on the walls or fallen onto the floor altogether, fine carpets and polished floors soiled with dust and debris.

“Ah!” she screeched, as the ground itself suddenly shook, along with everything else. A moment later, she heard the muffled, mighty thud as a large hunk of something crashed to the ground outside. Someone more naive might have hoped that the dragon had been slain, but in reality, the beast had only thrown itself against the stone walls again, sending tremors throughout and knocking away enormous chunks of crafted stone.

Just getting inside the castle wouldn’t be enough, she knew she had to get somewhere deeper. She caught her breath for a moment as she paused, forced to stop her frantic sprint as she looked around anxiously in search of the right pathway. Other people continued to rush by, moving in all directions, citizens, nobility, court staff, guards and-

“You!”

Her eyes snapped toward the familiar, venom-filled voice. Across the chamber, a man in military dress glared daggers through the chaos, pointed directly at her. Her already weary heart leapt with renewed panic. She turned and ran once again, picking the opposite direction as he began forcing his way through the crowd.

“You! Get back here! This is all your fault! All! Your! Fault!”

His words echoed away as she fled into a tighter passage, swallowed up by another loud thud as the castle shook and small flakes of ceiling and wall rained down. She pressed on at top speed, traversing stairs, twists, turns and yet more stairs. Panting audibly, she felt the straps of her heavy load digging into her skin, but she ignored the pain. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t slow down.

She ran and searched, this way then that, past panicked faces too terrified for reasoning, through doors knocked ajar and over small mounds of toppled stone, and all the while taking every staircase she could find, step after step after step, until-

“Ahh!”

She cried out again as another huge impact shook the stone below, this one knocking her clean off her feet. She caught herself with one arm, scraping her palm and elbow, but refusing to let her body or her bag tumble to the floor. With deep breaths, she lifted her head and made to get up, but found herself looking directly out and up through a window.

Before her eyes, the large, red dragon soared, its scales sparkling in the firelight from the inferno it had set below, twisting this way and that through the sky as it circled over the city. As she pushed herself back off the floor, the city itself came into view, vast swaths obscured by towering flames or the walls of black smoke they threw off. The wailing chorus reached her ears, muffled, through the cracked glass.

Despite the task at hand, she felt a weakness in her limbs and tears in her eyes. All this pain and destruction… Her home in flames. Her loved ones in anguish.

Sharp cracks of muskets and heavier thumps of cannons echoed past, but they did nothing. She watched a man standing valiantly in the center of a large street, aiming and firing and aiming and firing. Apparently he was obvious enough that the dragon noticed as well, swooping down toward the soldier with a vengeance.

Her eyes widened as she watched the beast’s jaws do the same, thrown agape in a terrifying display of teeth and shadow. The red maw descended upon him, scooping him right off the ground as the dragon swooped skyward again. She caught a brief glimpse of the man’s flailing legs as those teeth snapped shut around them, followed by the contour of what she thought might have been a bulge in the creature’s neck before its wings took it elsewhere out of sight.

Her chest tightened.

“That is far enough!”

Throwing her head to the side, she was terrified to find the officer from earlier glaring and rushing in her direction. She rushed fully to her feet, but before she could get away, he had already taken a firm grip on one of the straps of her backpack.

“Oh no you don’t!” he declared.

“Ugh! Let go!” she demanded.

“This is it, isn’t it? You thieving little wench.” He tugged hard on the bag, but she refused to part with it, keeping her arm wrapped hard around the strap in his grasp. “Hand it over at once! That is property of the crown! Haven’t you ruined enough by bringing this flying death upon us!? LET GO!”

“NO!”

*CRASH*

The dragon plowed its scaly hide into the castle walls once again, not far from the landing where the two were struggling. The floor shook, the walls shook, everything shook, and limb-sized hunks of stone came tumbling down around them as they tumbled themselves.

*snap*

In the fray of rubble and stumbling, the strap they had been fighting over broke. She felt the entire weight of her load fall immediately onto one shoulder. Her knees bent, the bag stretched, but she refused to fall, and the bag still held.

“You… you filthy cur!”

Turning to look, she saw the man she’d been wrestling with down on the floor, clutching at himself, one hand to his face and the other to his shoulder. A large fragment of wall sat next to him, right where he had been standing a moment ago.

Taking her chance, she summoned her remaining strength and fled from her injured opponent, toward the nearest staircase.

“Get back here! You won’t get away! You won’t steal my one chance at greatness! You’ll pay for all of the death you’ve wrought!”

Tears in her eyes, she rushed up the steps, climbing higher and higher as she ignored the pain in her legs and the ache in her chest. The sounds of more firearms reached her ears, more screaming people, more thunderous roars.

Maybe this was all her fault. Maybe she had brought all this death and destruction. But those muskets and cannons couldn’t stop it, none of the weapons in all the kingdom’s arsenal could stop it, nothing could stop it. Nothing except for the bag atop her straining back.

The sounds grew louder, and louder, the crackle of the flames becoming clearer and clearer, as she climbed and climbed the narrowing staircase, until finally she saw the blue, black and red of the sky.

Rushing winds swept at her clothes as she rushed out onto the small balcony, high atop the castle tower. Below, the cries of her neighbors rose up along with the dark clouds of ash. And out ahead of her, the red dragon soared on its two enormous wings, breathing a jet of glowing fire across its path.

She took a few deep breaths of her own, steadying herself, filling her lungs as much as they could hold. Then she put two fingers into her mouth and blew as hard as she could.

*whiiiiiiiiiiiiiistle*

…

The sound echoed over the town, a shrill tone riding barely above the cacophony.

And as soon as it ended, so did the torrent of flame from the dragon’s mouth.

She watched the large creature immediately change direction. And finally, she felt its eyes on her, filling her with both terror and relief simultaneously, as the glaring beast barreled directly toward her. A lone girl, standing unprotected atop a tower, overlooking a burning city.

Bracing herself with her memories, she stood her precarious ground. The image of the man she’d recently seen devoured flashed through her mind, and for a horrifying moment, she imagined just the same happening to her. Nothing more than the crushing force of furious jaws and a suffocating, black end within a hungry gullet. But she shoved the thought aside, looking straight into those huge, rage-filled eyes and keeping her mind clear.

The dragon tilted back and flapped as it approached, impacting relatively lightly into the tower and digging its claws into the stone, its massive front talons latching onto the ledge where she stood and cracking the floor beneath her feet. Perched there, atop the castle, it growled and glared death at the girl.

Trembling, but moving with purpose, she carefully un-slung the pack from her aching shoulder, placing the oversized bag gently down between them. She opened the top, pushed down the sides, and there inside was a large, smooth, vaguely round, sparkling stone, red as the dragon itself.

“I’m sorry,” she choked. “I never thought he would take it… I didn’t know… I swear. I… I thought he loved me…” She stared pleadingly into the dragon’s eyes, her soul bare.

“You thought wrong!”

A harsh, unexpected impact sent her tumbling off balance and down to the ground in the dragon’s direction. When she next opened her eyes, it was to the renewed sound of growling, and the sight of the man who’d been chasing her grabbing the remaining strap of her bag.

“I could never love a thieving, treacherous thing like you. You, who would deprive me of my one chance at status, all for some supposed kinship with a mad beast?” He lifted the bag. The stone floor fractured further as the dragon shifted. And for her, a fury arose in her chest to rival the fires burning all around her.

“She’s less of a beast than you!!”

Leaping up off the ground, she threw herself against his arms, shoving her body between the man and his prize, not even fighting him so much as clutching stubbornly to the shining, ruby stone. She could not let him take it, she would not let him harm it, she would not-

In the midst of struggle, her eyes caught a sight so striking that, for a moment, all impulse left her mind and body. The enormous, gaping maw of the red dragon flashed clear before her. Huge, dagger teeth bared and poised around the broad swath of fleshy crimson, thick columns of saliva glistening in the firelight as they stretched from rugged palate to forked tongue.

It was just a second. One infinite second. And in that second, she knew: she had done all she could. And there was nothing left, that she could do.

Shadow fell over man and woman, sweeping them away between the mighty jaws. She closed her eyes and felt the impact as wet, saliva-slicked muscle crashed over her, stealing her away from the floor and from all sense of balance or direction. Terror and panic flooding her mind, only one deliberate thought remained.

Wrapping herself, arms and legs, around the treasure she had carried all this way, she held on with every ounce of remaining strength. Maybe there was one last thing she could do. After all the pain she’d caused, she could protect this precious thing with whatever life she had left.

For an impossibly long few moments, she tumbled and turned within the dragon’s maw. Pressed and squeezed and slathered. Battered and smothered. Utterly overwhelmed. And then finally it came.

*GULP*

The tightly clenching muscle sent as much of a tremor through her body as it did the dragon’s own, as terror struck at the sound of the great beast’s swallow. The muscular gullet pressed in tight against her, threatening to snuff out what little life remained before the stomach beyond could even get the chance. And then the never-ending shifting and sliding resumed, shoved and slipped between harsh walls of unyielding muscle that simply pushed her where they wanted her to go, uncaring and unfeeling.

Her world now shrunk down to solely the harsh sensations battering her body, she held the tension in her muscles and simply waited, bracing herself for the end.

And then a moment later, everything fell relatively still. The fleshy prison settled into a firm, steady grip, and she began to hear the rush of air. In and out of the dragon’s lungs, and around those great, beating wings. Gravity pulled this way and that, though nothing seemed to move her, and that’s when she finally realized that they were flying.

…I’m sorry, she thought, in the hot, oppressive solitude. You trusted me, and I… I deserve this. We deserve this…

With nothing else to do, she wallowed, deeper and deeper. Both in her regret, and in what she could only imagine to be stomach juices, slowly sinking into her skin, probably working to give her the long, painful death the dragon knew she deserved. A fitting punishment for the pain she’d helped inflict, both on her city, and on the red beast that had claimed her.

The first human in hundreds of years to befriend a dragon, and she’d led a thief right to her-

Suddenly, light flooded in against her sodden eyelids- just about the last thing she had been expecting. The fleshy walls around her shifted, and she swore she felt something like fresh air against her dripping skin. With difficulty, she opened her eyes, expecting to see the brilliant white expanse of the hereafter at best.

But what she saw was grass. Common, ordinary, grass. The sight was so mundane that it actually jogged some sense back into her. She blinked. She felt. There was something… hard, pressed against her chest, against her arms and legs. She shifted her head slightly to look down.

…The… the egg…

A puff of hot air gusted pass, pulling her attention, and she turned her head a bit further, only to look up and see the very face of the dragon who had just so recently eaten her. Or… apparently not? The red creature looked down at her unblinkingly; waiting, watching.

With a fair bit of effort, she peeled her limp, sticky limbs and torso off the brilliant, red surface. She’d been holding onto it the whole time, hadn’t she? She’d practically forgotten in all the panic and confusion, but… she had. But… where had her bag gone? And where had he…?

The woman looked up at the huge, imposing dragoness again, with a new, bone chilling understanding.

She had claimed him, and he had taken the bag along with him.

But the egg had been in the girl’s grasp the entire time, held tight. Never swallowed, only carried.

…But… if he’d taken the long trip down the dragon’s gullet, had she been spared intentionally, or only because she’d stayed stubbornly attached to precious cargo?

The girl continued to stare up at the beast, who continued to stare right back. She had no further fight in her, no strength in her body. Whatever judgment was to be passed, she would accept it. Only half sitting up, she scooted roughly away from the egg, a feat she probably couldn’t have even managed if not for the lubrication the dragon’s saliva provided. And with that, finally, she relinquished her care of the stolen treasure, returning it to its rightful owner. Its rightful mother.

And leaving herself completely exposed for whatever happened next.

Feeling the weight of what could be her final moment, she offered a few last words.

“…I wish…” she muttered. “…I wish I could go back to when I used to meet you out here in the woods,” she mused. “Before I ever met him… Before all this… …. I liked being your friend… I’m sorry… you couldn’t trust us…”

She saw the big red muzzle begin to move in her direction and braced herself- mentally, as her limbs lay limp and tired. Another wash of hot breath rushed over her from the dragon’s insides. She closed her eyes.

…

A gentle pressure presented itself against her chest. And though her clothes were still quite sodden, she could tell the thing which touched her was not. It was not the wet, flexible muscle that had claimed her would-be suitor. It was something else.

She opened her eyes again, and saw the dragon’s broad nose, the tip of its snout, resting softly against her. A quiet hum vibrated through the scales, from way down in the red chest. Her vision blurred as tears welled into view.

“Thank you,” she whimpered.

The tip of the long, red tail came around, lifting and sliding her as it went, bringing both herself and the egg in closer to the broad wall of scale that was the dragon’s body. Curling into a crescent, tucking both the unhatched child and the child’s savior in close, it let out a low, soothing rumble.

She’d worked hard to right the wrongs her kind had done. To return what had been stolen. And now, she knew, she could finally rest again.

And beyond the wall of scale, through muscle and bone, a faint gurgle emerged, as a liar and a thief learned what it really meant, to have everything taken from them.

*glurg*

Originally Published: 19-Apr-2024