Mightiest of the Dragon Horde by Astris

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Mightiest of the Dragon Horde

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“But has anyone actually confirmed that it’s male?”

“Is this truly what you’ve decided to focus on? Truly.”

Rain fell from the looming clouds in sheets, forming puddles at the bottom of the ditch that Faelil and Merendis were crouched in. Merendis was shivering, her cloak and every layer under it soaked through to her skin, but her companion seemed unaffected by the chill or the wet. If anything, Faelil seemed almost excited to be out here in the downpour.

“Our naturalist’s history of dragons is very limited, you know, as is our taxonomy,” Faelil continued, and Merendis resisted the urge to bury her face in her hands. “There are the fire-breathers and the cold-drakes, of course, and then wingless, legless, and winged. The first report of any dragon was Glaurung, and it’s forever my regret that I was not able to make it to that site before the body was burned.”

“So you’ve told me,” Merendis said dryly.

“We don’t know what substantial differences, if any, exist between winged and wingless dragons,” Faelil continued over Merendis, inexorable as a boulder rolling down a mountainside. Merendis knew that if allowed to, the other woman would go on about the anatomy of dragons for hours.

“Well, the wings, for one,” she muttered. Faelil ignored her.

“It’s been established that both types can reproduce sexually. The sexual dimorphism of the species has not been confirmed, but the studies I have conducted on lizards leads me to believe that dragons would likewise would have two sexes.”

Despite her better sense warning against it, Merendis said, “But surely someone would have seen—”

Faelil seemed to brighten even more, if that was possible. “You know, lizards do not have externally visible—”

“Noted,” Merendis said forcefully.

Overhead, a flash of light. Faelil fell silent, and Merendis flinched. There had been such flashes coming from the heavens for several hours, accompanied by roars too feral to be thunder. Faelil was certain that the dragons had been unleashed, which was why they were here, huddled in a ditch, waiting for the clouds to clear so that Faelil could make her damned observations.

“By all rights, we ought to be fighting against Morgoth’s forces with the rest,” Merendis said, blinking rain out of her eyes.

“Why, when we have spent all this time in battle?” Faelil waved her off. “Let the Valar take care of it, for once. Besides, this is a prime opportunity. Morgoth has unveiled every facet of his might now that his end is nigh, and Ancalagon fights in the skies even now. We may never get another chance to see a dragon in such close proximity.”

The way Faelil lingered on the name of the dragon was almost tender with curiosity. Merendis knew that she had been studying the dragons for almost as long as the Noldor had known about them, but it still startled her how fascinated the other woman was by them.

“Are you certain you would be able to tell anything from such a distance?” she asked. Faelil shrugged, flicking rain-soaked hair back from her face.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. I cannot pass up such a chance, regardless.” She patted her pocket, where her journal was a visible lump. The pages were wax-coated to be waterproof, a quality that Merendis was very much envying right now. “As soon as this rain clears, we can move northwards again.”

Merendis nodded, settling back on her heels. Her thighs were starting to ache from holding this position for nearly an hour. The rumbling noise of war hummed at the edge of her hearing, as it had been for days, but she could tell that they were getting closer to where the Valar and their forces were engaged in battle with Morgoth.

“There is a species of lizard that reproduces parthenogenetically,” Faelil said suddenly, and Merendis blew out a breath. So it was back to the lizards, apparently.

“I don’t know what that word means,” she said, voice miraculously more patient than she felt.

“They’re all female, I mean. Their embryos develop without needing to be fertilized. They still engage in mating displays, interestingly.”

“Are you really relying on lizards to figure out how dragons work?” Merendis would really rather not think about how Faelil knew so much detail about lizard reproduction.

“I’ve considered the possible deviations,” Faelil replied blithely. “The presence of legged dragons suggests a closer kinship to lizards than snakes, no matter what the general populace refers to them as.” From that, Merendis gathered that Faelil held the term serpents in disdain. “Certain species of lizard, especially in warmer forested areas, have extended ribs and connective membranes which function as wings meant solely for gliding...”

Merendis let her chatter on, focusing on the steady drip of water from a branch above her into the puddle at her feet. The rain was beginning to lessen, and she was not looking forward to when Faelil would inevitably decide that it was light enough to proceed, regardless of the mud and the cold.

“...Merendis. Merendis.”

She startled out of her daze to see Faelil pushing to her feet, mud sucking at her boots as she moved to the edge of the ditch. Faelil’s face was lined with pale light from above. Were the clouds thinning out?

Another flash of light, and a great, thundering roar that made Merendis’ bones shake and her ears ring. She stumbled to her feet, muscles protesting after so long in one position, and opened her mouth to ask what that had been.

The clouds broke, revealing a dazzling light. Merendis squinted, perplexed for a moment—it was late afternoon, the sun should not be riding so high in the sky—and then she realized that the light was a ship, hanging in the air, a brilliance at its prow like moonlit water and sunlit steel. There was a glint of a silver-armored figure there as well.

Faelil grabbed her arm, fingers digging into Merendis’ skin in her excitement. “Look!”

Merendis followed her pointing finger, not towards the miraculous ship, but beyond it to the looming shadow so great that she had mistaken it for another storm cloud. Ancalagon—for that must be what it was—descended, its great maw a yawning pit of blackness. The trees above them formed a leaf-fringed frame through which Merendis could see the ship and the dragon caught in relief, like a painting of an unearthly battle.

A mirror-bright arc of light shot from the ship, impacting Ancalagon’s body, and then the ship darted backwards faster than Merendis would have thought possible, just barely evading the massive jaw that clamped shut after it, teeth clashing together with a noise that Merendis could hear even at this distance.

Beside her, Faelil had pulled out her notebook and was scribbling in it, glancing up at the dragon, down at her paper, back again. “The cerebral ratio is interesting,” she mused aloud. “Smaller than that reported for Glaurung. I wonder—”

The ship swooped low suddenly, close enough to brush against the tops of the trees, and Ancalagon followed, a mass of twilight darkness crashing down like an avalanche. Merendis threw herself at Faelil, knocking her to the ground. Faelil made a noise of indignation, then gave a gasp of unmistakable delight as Ancalagon’s weight crashed down above them, stopped short of crushing them only by the walls of the ditch. The sudden sky of black scales above them began to move as the dragon presumably began to drag itself across the ground in pursuit of the ship.

Before Merendis could stop her, Faelil reached up to touch the dragon’s hide. Not for the first time, Merendis wondered if the other woman was entirely sane.

“Smaller scales than I’d have expected,” Faelil said as Ancalagon lifted out of her reach, hobbling into the air with great beats of its wings that sent gusts of wind rushing down around them. Faelil wriggled out from underneath Merendis to pick up her fallen notebook and shake the mud from its cover.

Merendis’ heart felt likely to beat out of her chest with the lingering terror of their very close encounter with Ancalagon’s body. Faelil seemed unaffected; she stood and watched the ship lead Ancalagon up into the air, chased by sheets of fire from the dragon’s mouth.

“It’s so big,” Merendis managed around the fear tightening her throat.

“I cannot be certain which part of the body we saw,” Faelil said, “but I did not see any evidence of a vent that would conceal an inverted—”

“I’m glad you were focused on that,” Merendis cut in hurriedly, “rather than our impending death.”

The ship and the dragon receded from view, headed for the northern horizon, toward the noises of battle. The trees around them were flattened by the dragon’s weight and torn up from their roots, great scars carved into the earth around them by Ancalagon’s claws.

Faelil finished writing in her journal and tapped her pencil against her chin, considering something. “There was someone up there in that ship,” she mused, and Merendis saw in a flash exactly what her companion had in mind. “Surely they got a closer look. If I could somehow contact them, ask them what they saw—”

“I’m sure they were somewhat occupied by fact that they were fighting the dragon, I doubt they had time to observe finer points of anatomy.”

Faelil was already clambering out of the ditch, boots slipping in the mud as she scrambled up the incline. “Come,” she called. “When Ancalagon falls, we must be there to examine the body.”

Merendis swallowed her sigh of exasperation and followed her.