He paced around his cavern, wings folded tightly against his back, eyes as big as gongs inspecting the lava veins cursing through the walls. He had carved the ancient bedrock around them, dug deep into the entrails of the earth and made a home for the both of them. Brought some pine-scented air fresheners from the surface, because his wife liked them. He had bribed his way into the right to marry her by giving away loads of treasures to her tutors, invaluable relics no other dragon would part with. He had kidnapped virgin princesses just so she would have some friends to chat with. He had removed the earth, expelled the excessive heat from their deepest of abodes, and said farewell to the surface world, just to be with his sweetheart.
And still in this self-imposed reclusion, they high above remembered his name. Gods and mortals shuddered when they heard it, even the children that had been born long after his retirement. Trees exuded thick, glistening sap due to the stress when they felt the subtle yet foreboding vibrations in the air. Fishes buried themselves deep in the ground, and those already buried stopped simping. Golden Retrievers learned to snarl, bite and maul by the mere promise of his presence, of his existence. Cats… cats acted aloof as always. He believed they may even enjoy the ensuing chaos. There was no displeasing everyone.
And yet, during those moments, all of his power, all of his experience and cunning couldn’t do anything but wait. His wife was giving birth and to give birth was his wife[1].
The VET entered scene from behind one of the massive pillars of the halls, a flea walking through a forest of sequoias. The dragon lowered his golden head, his slit pupils as tall as the man, and stared directly at him with a colossal eye.
The man was wearing blue overalls over a black T-shirt, and cleansing some foul dark fluid form his hands with an old rag. He enjoyed a healthy weight, even if he had considered doing crack as a surefire way to drop a few kilos for the summer. The man was crying.
“I am afraid there was nothing I could do to improve the situation. I tried to stabilize them for the time being. And I may be the best in this field, but sometimes the heavens dispose of such cute models to part.”
“She died!? My little beetle sweetie died?”
“No, but she cannot get her bearings. Not many miles remain in her odometer, if you allow me to be crass.”
The dragon slammed his open paw on the cavern’s floor, sending tremors through ground, walls and ceiling alike, making the man lose his footing and fall onto his ass. “Then we still have time! What are you doing here with me when you could be ensuring their survival?”
“She already lost too many fluids. I work with what we have, but I am no mage, fellow. I cannot bend matter to my will.”
Chalazarian the First Speck lowered his head and blew an oversized nostril onto the man’s face, making his skin flap due to the strength of the exhalation as the VET clawed the floor to not be blown away. “Did you just call a primordial dragon ‘fellow’?”
The man grabbed the surgical crescent wrench that hung from his toolbelt and weighed it in his hand, an old habit of his. “You are my client, despite the kidnapping, and I must assure high-octane performance for every one of my clients. This said, your wife is a case of geriatric pregnancy. And the first of this kind I ever saw, but that’s irrelevant.”
Chalazarian snorted to a side, and looked at the VET with a single eye, mirror of his dejection. “I killed her, didn’t I?”
“Not yet. Do you want to see her and your child? They still carry the fire inside, but are not long for this world. It will likely be a stillbirth, if at all.”
The dragon let out a sigh of acceptance, tears the size of Newfoundlands but far more intelligent rolling down his lanceolate scales. “Lead the way, doctor.”
The man, not being a doctor, shrugged and turned away from the lizard that could kill him with a single inhalation. He was now in a fantasy world with dragons, big deal. He was still a titled Vehicle Technician. If he could not improvise a way to deliver this dragon baby, he could not call himself that ever again. “Are you sure you have no electrical outlets here, like at all? I could use more adequate tools if you had those.”
“We are several kilometers down into the earth’s crust.”
“Kilometers… do you happen to speak Spanish, friend?”
“No…” the dragon said, unsure if that was the correct answer
Pablo Isaias Gutierrez snapped his fingers. “Damn. This portal fantasy experience sucks, huh?”
“Hurry and save my wife or I will ‘portal’ you down my throat!”
The man scratched his week-old beard and chewed on air a bit. “The child is being born trunk first, if you get my meaning. The alimentation cable is coiled around him, if you get my meaning, and its strangling him, if you get my meaning. Due to the… nature of your wife, if you get my meaning, I cannot use a pair of pliers to force him out. If it was my wife, I’d reckon the tissues would be soft enough to be able to, but, then again, I married a human…” the mechanic said as he made his way around the corner, to his improvised maternity wing and workshop.
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The dragon pushed open the titanic mafic igneous stone gates into which a small hole had been drilled at the base for the man to go through, and saw her, laying in the middle of a white canvas smudged with her precious lifeblood as it drained from the exhaust crevices of her body.
“I am here, love, I am here. “he stepped with extreme care, as he often did around her due to her delicate state. “I am here. This good man is doing his best to save you both, Volksarina.”
“He… cannot,” she said, her headlights shining with a dim sparkle, unlike the almost blinding brightness they used to regard him with the day they had first met.
When they had first met, back when she was slim and curvy. Now the posterior end of her body was swollen, unnaturally so, the child bigger than it should for such a petite lady. So petite compared to him that he called her ‘my sweet beetle’, endearingly.
For Pablo, she was also beetle sized. The other kind of beetle. The legless one.
Pablo checked the feed of his portable oscilloscope, the data drawing erratic lines on his screen. “I am afraid to tell you this, Chalazarian, but I think I figured out what’s going on with your wife, and it’s worse than I hope it would.”
“I am going to the scrapper, ain’t I, sweet Pablo?” said Volska, deep in delirium from the pain, her cold, metallic skin shuddering in a way her designer never intended.
The technician closed his eyes and patted her on the door. “I’d say that, dear. You are a rear-engine model, and the baby is not only deforming your exhaust pipe, but damaging the pieces around it, including the motor. If the baby is removed, your whole structure will collapse due to the weakness. The damage cannot be repaired.”
“What do you mean it cannot be repaired?” Chalazarian interloped. Pushing the man’s cap onto his head with a titanic claw. “I could crush you for your incompetence.”
“How many men are willing, in this whole universe, to aid a sentient Volkswagen beetle give birth to a dragon hybrid, considering you had to bring me from across the veil?”
The dragon rested his head next to his wife. “I killed you, Volska.”
“And what a murder it was,” she answered with a thread of voice, the sputtering from her engine growing weaker by the second. “What a beautiful murder…”
The dragon nuzzled her dying wife with a care seldom attributed to such creatures. “Don’t leave me. I am nothing without you. I am but chaos and destruction without you, my darling Volska!”
“You are not the dragon I met anymore. You have grown into a better primordial force, Chalichali. But now I am courting death. Like a toad that wanted to eat swan meat, not knowing that swans are venomous...”
“Poisonous is the word you are looking for, dear,” Chalazarian corrected his dying wife, and those were the last words he ever said to her, as the moment after, one of her pistons cracked, sending her whole engine into disarray, and causing Pablo to declare her battery-dead.
“Volska! Volska, speak to me, Volska!”
The mechanic, sobbing, approached the monstrous bulge in the greasy, dusty exhaust pipe while holding a pair of bulky tin snips. “I will try to save the baby, but I cannot promise a miracle, Chalazarian. She’s battery dead.”
Teary eyed, the dragon turned, looking at the man with a tranquil fury, pressurized deception. “She’s gone. Our baby is probably gone with her. It will be better if it is already gone with her mother.”
“So… do I try to pry it out?”
“The heavens didn’t want our lovechild to be born. It’s not your fault nor responsability, Pablo. You told me it would probably be a stillbirth, so why give me hope?”
“If you would forgive my boldness, you fucked a Volkswagen beetle pregnant. I thought dragons laid eggs all my life. I am thoroughly traumatized and trying to cope with this, and seeing the horrible hybrid you engendered may help.”
“She is gone, scavenger! do whatever you’d like to her mortal remains, and if the baby is alive… I’ll owe you thanks. Find me in my chambers when you are done, I don’t want to see you defiling her body.”
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In his chambers, Chalazarian cried disconsolately. His sweetheart had been taken away from him, not by a foe but by his own hubris and desire to mate and … the big horny. And the big baby. Mostly the baby.
How could he dare to dream of a normal life with her. His father, the very land under his feet, had warned him: “Date a pick-up truck, them country gals are built for BDC”. He hadn’t listened. He had gone for the cute, sweet city lady, an uptown girl of a hardworking family. She had even learned to dance to Billy Joel to court her.
And now she was gone, her soul carried away like leafs on a hot air current. Her metal being cut and bent so Pablo could determine the exact cause of death and try to save a baby that, he knew, had died long before her.
And he would never see her again until his time was up, and a primordial dragon couldn’t die until the last star sputtered its last photon. An eternity of grief awaited him. No eternal life to look forward to, no date to reunite with her in a heaven or a hell tailored for them. This all-encompassing sadness that hadn’t settled yet, this misery that was numbing for now but would soon scorch the unhealable insides of his soul. For millions of years he had lived without her, and now memories of that life had been turned to sour visions of a promised torture. Her memory was a heavy burden to bear, and like weight can shape the back of a man and make him slouch, a love so deep can reform the rotten soul of a dragon.
He cried out in pain, a screech so deep it turned the walls of the room he was in to microcrystalline quartz. His tears came out watery, but reached the ground as translucent, white geodes that cracked apart on impact, revealing precious minerals inside. And Like a load could deform the back of a man, a dragon’s grief could twist reality around him.
And change reality he would. Volska deserved this grief to not be his alone, not in the future. For a few years, sure, he would suffer in private, alone. He would age the sorrow like an ocean of fine wine for a time, and then, only then, he would open the floodgates and make the whole world drown in his misery. Come the right time everyone, mortal or divine, would share his pain, his loss.
But before submerging deep into his eternal suffering he would pay Pablo some deserved vacations wherever the man pleased. Because Volska would have wanted it that way.
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[1] I found myself unable to end this seemingly unassuming sentence in any sane way. This often applies to the situations depicted in this narrative.