(January '18) Prompt #2 - "Eyes in the dark." [Archive]

ArtisticVicu

01-24-2018, 05:42 AM

He had been told about dragons, how it had been an honor to become the Binded of a dragon. It was an old tradition, one that was no longer practiced. Kind of hard to keep a tradition going when the main object of the tradition vanished.

No one ever told him what had happened to all the dragons.

The whistle hanging around his neck on a fraying cord was as heavy as his thoughts.

No one ever told him what it meant to burden a bonded whistle.

The fire snapped, drawing his gaze from wherever it had settled. He watched the flames dance about, watching as the darkness slowly encroached on the source of light.

He remembered when he had been a kid and had been terrified of the dark. He wasn’t sure how well he had hid it from his family as he grew older, but the fear certainly hadn’t vanished. It had been manageable on the journey across the ocean. When they touched land again, though, the fear had reared its nasty head with a vengeance.

A foreign land with foreign creatures and it took everything he had to convince himself that the eyes in the dark were nothing more than a figment of his imagination. Honestly, he could understand a child fearing the dark and thinking they see eyes staring at them at the edge of their vision in the dark. It was another thing for a fully grown adult to still fear the same thing.

There was a low rumble from behind him that he felt in his bones. He blinked, focusing his gaze above the flickering flames. A large, golden eye stared at him from where the dragon’s head rested on the other side of the camp fire. “What troubles you?” the voice asked, accompanied by the same, low rumble from behind him.

He offered a weak smile. “Thoughts of the past.” He shrugged, dropping his gaze back to the fire. “They’re not as troubling as they are exhausting.”

A different rumble, one he had long since learned was the dragon chuckling. “Is that so? And yet you choose not to share them with me.”

The smirk was involuntary. “I’m not used to sharing all my thoughts and secrets with another, let alone a dragon.”

Said dragon raised its head, staring down at him with a pair of burning, golden eyes. He pretended not to notice.

“You are my Whistle and I am your Dragon,” the dragon spoke. “If we cannot trust each other in such situations, how are we to trust each other in moments that matter most.” The massive dragon nose pushed against his side, shoving him so far over that he nearly ended up overbalanced and falling onto the ground. “I am not going anywhere and you know as well as I do that what you tell me will not be shared with others without your permission.” The dragon huffed, looking affronted. He still marveled at how expressive the dragon was, what with how massive it was at the same time. “I have lived for far too many centuries to care what others think should I retain information from them.”

He hummed, leaning back. “I tend to forget you’re ancient.”

The dragon shoved at him with his nose, this time pushing him into the dirt; he laughed the entire way down as the dragon chastised, “I am not ancient, you are the babe.”

There’s a grin on the dragon’s face as the hot breath washed over him. His laughter subsided into chuckles. The dragon had yet to remove its nose from his front, keeping him pinned without putting much weight on him. He reached up, rubbing at the scales he could touch, tracing scars from battles he knew not of.

“I was thinking of an old fear of mine,” he spoke softly into the quiet around them, “of how it’s still there on some level.”

“What fear?” the dragon asked gently, voice so low it was almost lost under the dragon’s natural rumble.

“I used to fear the dark.” He wasn’t paying much attention to what was in front of him but he didn’t need to. The dragon’s presence against his front was enough to keep him grounded in the moment, to remind him that he was safe. “But more than that, I feared what the dark hid, of the eyes I could feel watching me even when there were no eyes there to perceive me in the dark.”

“And now?”

The smile that graced his lips was soft, warm. “I still fear what I cannot see, of what the dark may hide, but it’s not as crippling as it had once been. It had slowly diminished when I was traveling with the dwarves and halfling, able to take solace in the fact that they had my back and would keep the dangers at bay to the best of their ability.” He chuckled but it was breathy and far more sad than he had intended it to be. “Then there were the few nights that held so much fear and stress that even the company’s presence was not enough to keep my fears at bay. And at one point, I feared the eyes in the dark to be some dragon I did not know looking to take back a whistle that I wasn’t sure I wanted to give up anymore.”

He wasn’t sure what the responding rumble was and it didn’t matter as the dragon asked, “And when you met me?”

He pressed his hand into the scales, curling his fingers enough to gently scrape his nails against the unforgiving skin. “I stopped fearing you once it was clear you were bound to the whistle I had been entrusted with. Before that, I was terrified that you would kill me on the spot but that is only natural, after all.” He blinked and focused on the golden gaze staring down at him. “As soon as I was Bound to you, I started looking for the eyes in the dark because I knew they would be your eyes making sure I was safe and protected against anything the dark could throw at us, just as I would do everything in my power to make sure you remain alive to see our homelands once more.”

There was a pause and, for a moment, he wondered if his words had been taken the wrong way. He needn’t have worried as the dragon shifted closer around him, its warm breath rushing over his face. “I am content with wherever we go, my Whistle, even if we never leave the dwarven mountain again.”

He laughed weakly. “As much as I would love to remain, I fear we would be nothing more than burdens, my Dragon. Besides, I must make sure my brother and his Charge returned home and hopefully safely, if nothing else.” His words stilled as he returned to rubbing what scales he could reach. “I would love to see more of the world as well before settling anywhere specific, if we ever do.” His expression turned sad. “To you, our homeland would be foreign yet similar and a part of me fears the same thing for myself. I am so used to the world here that returning home seems like returning to a foreign land while traveling through time. I want an excuse to leave, to return to the familiar and to explore the unknown.” He pressed his hand into the scales, swallowing thickly. “I don’t want to chain you to the ground just yet.”

The resulting rumble was loud and quaked his very core. It was soothing, reassuring, and so full of what he could only describe as pleasure that he found that his fears and trepidations with the future vanished for the moment.

“I am glad to hear such words,” the dragon informed him. “It means I don’t have to regret accepting you as my Whistle.”

He smiled, though it was tired. “I hope I can hold true under the burden, my Dragon.”

There was another rumble, though it was softer. The dragon lifted its head from his front but simply rested on the other side of the fire. There was the sound of shifting and he didn’t even need to look to know that the dragon and encircled the little camp. “Sleep, my Whistle. I will make sure that the dark is kept at bay.”

His smile grew endearing as his eyes closed themselves. “I know.” He rolled onto his side, pressing his forehead against scales and enjoying the warmth of his dragon to his front and the warmth of the fire to his back. “Thank you.”

Another rumble, this one soft and nearly obscuring the even softer words.

“You’re welcome, quod mea.”