One of this week’s spare Odd Prompts challenges: A dragon begins terrorizing the neighborhood and a minion delivers a message: a sacrifice is demanded. That’s it. Just “a sacrifice”. What (or who, depending on your mood) do you sacrifice to appease the dragon?
Joe gazed around at his neighborhood, wondering how the disaster looming in the sky had hit so hard and fast in just a week.
Across the street, Mary sobbed over her husband’s body, her hair askew and still half in curlers. He’d never seen her less than perfect and proud before, but evacuations did that to everybody. She must have been right by the door to escape the conflagration that used to be her home. Her husband, not so lucky.
Joe averted his eyes from the other man’s body. He’d offer Mary the guest room in a few minutes, but wasn’t sure it’d do any good. It’d only be a matter of time before the dragon swooped down again, and they still hadn’t figured out the puzzle.
The problem was, no one knew what the minion meant. This little guy showed up, literally out of nowhere, half the size of a normal human and wearing a tunic and those weird turned up boots with jingle bells on them, of all things.
“Balandton the Great demands a sacrifice!” the minion squeaked out, and the whole neighborhood watch group turned and stared. Just in time to watch him wink out of existence. Joe had never seen a group that big collectively doubt their own sanity.
They’d been meeting to figure out what to do about the dragon, but everything they’d tried so far just caused more fires and death. He was numb to it, after a week of shock, but he knew one thing.
Dragons were definitely real.
The first meeting had resulted in the weedy guy two houses up stepping out into the street, sword in hand. He’d tried to challenge the great lizard, but his hand had been in the middle of the first swing when it was left behind in the road, a single bite severing hand and sword from the rest of the dragon’s snack.
Joe knew another thing. Dragons had sharp teeth.
Every day since, the minion popped up for exactly five seconds at the neighborhood watch meeting to squeak out the same refrain. “Balandton the Great demands a sacrifice!”
They’d tried to ask questions, but he just repeated that blather and disappeared. No real answers.
The first time someone suggested a virgin, the dirty looks had shamed the person right back to their house. Joe had thought every father with a young daughter was ready to go for the shotguns that were all of a sudden commonplace for everyday carry in the neighborhood.
Now? Five days later?
Now, everyone was numb. Everyone just wanted it to stop. Everyone was starting to run out of food, because the local blockade on the neighborhood wasn’t willing to truck in food for the humans that would just be destroyed by the dragon.
Joe took a step toward his grieving neighbor, then stopped when he saw the woman down the street heading toward Mary with a purposeful look. They were friends, he thought, and better a friend to grieve with than a near stranger.
He headed into the house and grabbed his tablet. Overwatch be damned. There was nothing he could do about it if the Great Balandton showed up anyway. He might as well finish that book he’d started last week before he got eaten.
Half an hour later, he’d settled into the backyard patio, a cold beer in front of him. He heard a loud thump from the roof and tensed but kept reading, skimming his eyes faster over the page. If he was going to die, he wanted to know who the murderer was.
A hissing came from behind him, the blast of hot air ruffling his too-long hair. “What is thisss?”
Joe set his tablet on the table next to his beer with reluctance. Just one more page and he’d know if his guess was right. “It’s a tablet. I use it for reading ebooks.”
A snakelike head snaked down toward him, the size of a full-grown sheep before shearing. The neck was thicker than most tree trunks, sinuous as it eased through the pergola’s vines. Joe swallowed, eyeing the dragon with glum acceptance of his fate.
“What is an ebooks?” the dragon asked. Faceted eyes the size of grapefruits glittered with avarice, fixed on the screen. A long tongue snaked out as shining, scaled eyelids blinked a single time.
“Electronic books,” Joe said. He wondered if he would have time to reach out and turn one more page before the dragon could kill him. “Thousands of books that you can read and carry with you on one device. You just plug it in. This is smaller than a hardback. Some you have to pay for, but there are tons of old books online for free.”
“Free?” The dragon’s head pulled back in surprise, his orange eyes fixing on Joe with suspicion.
Joe swallowed again, unused to feeling like prey. He was having trouble opening his mouth to answer. “Yes. It’s a copyright thing…” His voice gave out as the dragon’s head swooped toward him.
“Marxus!” The dragon roared.
The minion popped onto Joe’s patio, the squeaky little bastard. “My Lord Balandton?”
“Get it.” The dragon pulled his head back through the pergola. A hole in the vines shone bright light onto the table. A crunching noise came from the roof and uneven winds shook Joe out of his frozen stupor as the dragon rose into the air.
Marxus the minion snatched Joe’s tablet. “Balandton the Great, Philosopher of the Honored Asprenica Bookwyrm Clan, accepts your sacrifice!”
The minion poofed out of existence. Joe could hear the neighbors coming, a murmur on the wind, not yet daring to come too close and certainly expecting to find only his corpse at best.
He reached out a shaking hand and drained his beer, the condensation dripping down its sides matching the sweat rolling down his face.
“Damn,” he said. “I really wanted to know who did it.”
