Ultima

Part Eleven

Wind whipped over Hero's face. For a moment he thought he was still falling and reached again for his knife, turning his head in the process and looking right into the depths of an eye the size of his body. Hero put his hand down carefully and had just enough time to process three things: he was rising, he was atop something solid, and that something was scaly. Then the eye narrowed, there was a roar that hurt his ears, and the world spun out of control. Abruptly Hero was falling again, but only briefly before he hit the ground, sending out a shock wave of dust.

Compared with the many impacts Hero had already suffered in his travels this was a pretty minor one, and it was not long before he could shake off the usual confusion and pay some attention to his surroundings. Everything had gone quiet. Hero was not the sort to pick up on subtleties but if he were he would have felt the silence to be a tad ominous.

He got to his feet and looked around. He was some yards away from the cleft into which he had plunged just before that strange portal had opened. At least, he assumed it was the same cleft; there were no other landmarks to serve as points of reference, and he didn't quite feel up just yet to peering down into the abyss to see if the portal was still there. His memories of the portal itself were hazy, and he could not recall what had transpired after he fell in, or how he had escaped, if escaped he had. But there were strange thoughts in his mind, and a strange tugging in his awareness, almost like another consciousness was trying to make itself felt. It was a most perplexing sensation. Hero, being Hero, decided not to worry about it. Indeed, he didn't feel much like worrying about anything, really; rather the opposite. He was filled with a remarkable sense of confidence, peace and, above all, pure undiluted capability. Hero suddenly felt as though he could take on and withstand anything. Even trollish poetry. He smiled, adjusted his sunglasses, and walked towards the cleft three paces, at which point he tripped over his feet. Some things don't change.

It occurred to Hero to wonder what had happened to that eye, as well as whatever it was attached to. There was nowhere to hide, not even a cloud in the sky. Gargantuan eyes don't just disappear, after all, unless they have an invisibility power. Hero decided it was more likely the eye had taken up residency within the cleft. He approached it and peered in. There was no sign of the portal; clinging to the rock face there was, however, a dragon.

The dragon burst from the void with a velocity so great that Hero was lifted two feet into the air by the slipstream. When he fell back down and landed on his behind he didn't even bother to get up but just gazed on the creature with awe. Justly so, for it was sufficiently awesome to make people remember the original meaning of the word. Imagine the most magnificent dragon you've ever seen. This one may or may not have exceeded its magnificence. These things are all relative, anyway.

The dragon, which had been hovering in the air above the chasm and causing minor gales with each beat of its wings, suddenly opened its mouth and expanded its chest and Hero decided that getting up now was an excellent idea, worth acting upon immediately, which he did and thanks to his dwarf-honed reflexes narrowly escaped the river of fire that raged out of the dragon's maw.

Somewhere epic music began playing. Hero quickly scanned for local orchestras but somebody had already done that joke and there was no musical source to be found. He could devote no further energy to pondering the question because at this moment the dragon, which was not pleased that its morning toast was still raw, let out another roar that was the sonic equivalent of the flame, and began chasing the poor Hero.

The next ten minutes, or maybe it was ten seconds or ten hours, hard to tell, were for Hero a blur of running and dodging and panicked thinking, which latter was much more tiring. He was fairly certain that he could not hope to get close enough with the katana, and anyway he was not certain the blade could do any damage. His other weapons seemed woefully inadequate to the purpose at hand, and there was nowhere to escape to - not even time to dig a dwarfhole and bunker down. He needed...he needed...

For some totally inexplicable reason Hero's thoughts drifted to the haze of the portal. The word "aspire" rang in his mind.

Another burst of flame just missed his leg. He had the feeling the dragon was just toying with him, but was more concerned with survival than pride and so didn't mind, under the circumstances. Aspire...aspire...aspire...aspear...no, that wasn't right, aspire...no, that was right...Hero recalled the spear, with that curious mispelling d-r-a-g-o-o-n on the side...

Well, counterfeit or not he didn't have any other options. Hero pulled the spear out of his garments, into which too-small space he had stashed it using secret dwinjitsu techniques, and, with the intention of leaping onto the impending dragon's body, he got a foot up on a large boulder and jumped backwards.

Well. That was unexpected.

It really was the most curious sensation. At the moment of pushing off Hero felt his legs suddenly full of a strange energy, and before he knew it he was soaring high into the sky, above the dragon, above the clouds if there had been any clouds; in fact Hero wondered momentarily if he was never going to stop rising and might just fly to the stars, which really wouldn't be too bad an adventure.

Eventually, though, he felt his momentum decrease and gravity's angry tug reassert itself. As Hero came to the top of his leap, he executed an elegant back flip of which his dwarf tutors would have been very proud, and then plummeted back to earth where he landed right next to the troll, who was sleeping peacefully in the sun, at least until Hero landed on his fingers.

You have to remember that Hero had jumped not straight up but backwards, knowing that the dragon was right behind him. Consequently he had described an arc, and with his strange new jumping prowess had in one leap traveled all the way back to the edge of the desolation, where he was currently staring into the bulging eyes of a very angry troll. Hero quickly decided that he didn't really feel inclined to test his feelings of invincibility from earlier, and so before the troll could open its mouth, and perhaps quote some poetry, Hero had leaped back towards the befuddled dragon.

The dragon had seen a great number and variety of desperate escape attempts by its prey over the millennia, including suicidal dives into the chasm (this didn't work) and efforts to turn invisible by sheer willpower (neither did this). It had never seen its food actually disappear, and into the sky no less. The dragon was not used to confusion and also had not eaten for five hundred years, and consequently had got rather cranky by the time it heard a strange whooshing sound, which was getting louder.

The dragon was unquestioned master of the skies. Always it hunted its prey on the ground or occasionally a bit above it, but never had anything "gotten the jump on it," at least not from its own realm. But it followed a strange instinct and did something it had never done before, and looked up. What it saw filled it with rage besides which the earlier anger had been a mild distemper, but also a secret feeling that maybe this day wouldn't be such a waste after all. With a roar it sent out a great torrent of fire, which was especially impressive, being straight up. Normally the dragonian physique does not allow this kind of maneuver - the body needs to be aligned with the head for maximum flameage. A bad mood does a lot, though.

Hero, who was plummeting towards the dragon spear-point first, was a little worried about the river of fire racing towards him, but not much. Wrapped in a cone of rapidly-displacing air, falling in a very self-assured and heroic manner, Hero knew he was much too cool not to beat the heat. Sure enough, after a moment the head of the spear gave off a strange glow, and as the fire hit Hero it parted all around him and streamed harmlessly off into the atmosphere, where over time it would warm the local atmosphere just enough to facilitate the growth of a new kind of plant, which would quickly spread over the wasteland and turn it into an ocean of green. That was later. This was now.

And now Hero dropped right through the dragon's attack unscathed, and the spear struck.

There was a great flash.

When the light had dissipated, there was no trace of the dragon, or the spear. And Hero looked on the scene and knew finally what his quest was, and that it was done. After all, in this strange world, once the wyrm has been slain, the story must end, as it can no longer...drag on.

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The End

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BAHAHAHAHAHAHA!...er...in the manipulated words of the Monty Python's Flying Circus DVD menu, "I apologize for that. But I think you'll find this a bit more entertaining!"

That's really it, folks. Before you judge me too harshly, bear in mind that very little planning went into the ending or pretty much anything else. I promise you, if I had planned this story and written it like a traditional project, the pun would be much, much better. Anyway, I hope that anyone who got suckered into reading this epic tale enjoyed it, especially as I do think I got some good jokes in there. There may be future serialized writing experiments in the future but for the moment I'm taking a break and moving things in a new, but not necessarily better, direction on Wednesday.

It's only maybe not better because I've already attained perfection. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Cheers.