You lived in ages when many doubted the existence of the great dragons. Perhaps if it were not the pact your great-great-great-something grandmother made with one of the beasts, you, too, would be a skeptic. However, ever since you were nothing but a mere baby, orphaned at the swaddle, the great beast had taken care of you. It had fed and warmed you, taught you how to hunt and survive, and when it was time, it had let you fly away from the eyrie, figuratively, to make your way just as your mother and her mother did so. And as you conquered land after land, the best knight your kingdom had been bestowed upon since the beginning of time, you had felt the mother beast watch you – as you fought, as you devoted the riches you pillowed to the beast, as you fell in love and the fate became all too cruel. It was the great beast you ran to, with a baby growing in you and having lost a husband way too young.
Now, you sat on top of a hill in a house too big and too lonely for two, having grown old enough to retreat from the wars without causing people to run their mouths. The great beast watched over your daughter as it did you – or so you told yourself. Although, you, too, knew that was incorrect. The great beast always was more distant towards your daughter. “It is because it was I who was the orphan the beast raised.” You convinced yourself. The beast was your mother, and your daughter had you to fill that role. However it may be doubtful how well you fit into that role.
You never were a caregiver. You were raised to be a taker; of lives, of riches, of cities. Perhaps it was why seeing your daughter, grown into a lady you never got to be, seemed to be the cause of the glossy eyes you got at night. And perhaps that is why, when she brought over a prince from another land to claim as her betrothed, her eyes shining from youth and happiness you once also tasted, fear entered your heart. The clouds turned dark in a way they never did on your hill. You were not proud of how you acted but felt it necessary. Your tongue became the sword you were used to holding as you cursed the prince’s name and forbade your daughter from marrying him. When she cried and yelled and locked herself in the barn with the sheep you felt you were a better mother to, asking for a reason, the only answer you could give her was that was the great beast’s wish. If the beast did not commend the relationship, the marriage could not happen. And that was final.
And if you believed your daughter to be a lady until then, you learned how wrong you were as she howled and growled like the beast that raised from her makeshift straw bed in the barn. You wondered if that was why the great beast forbade her from the marriage. Now, she had found herself a fighter just like her mother, and her mother, if the beast’s stories were to be believed. One day, when you were sleeping, the howling and the growling had stopped, and you woke up to an empty barn with a neighbor claiming a stolen horse. Â
You wept and wept and wept until the tears you had let go created a stream that flourished the kingdom that was now struggling to keep the lands you had conquered. It was until you learned the prince came from a kingdom from which those that find and hunt a dragon were believed to be the greatest rulers that you wept. That must have been why the beast was against the marriage, for the beast was afraid of being slain. Nearly a decade had passed since you retired your sword against armies, but now you knew it was time to belt it, maybe for one last time. And that is how you found yourself on the road, following the stream created by the tears you cried for your daughter, believing you had to slay your own kin to save the one that raised you as one.
