Laran
The oldest dragon story my people tell is perhaps the most terrifying. Ancient tales came with my ancestors as they struck out across the vast ocean, so we knew that such things existed, but no creatures came to our islands until three generations after we’d first arrived.
This story is the most terrifying, but it also gives us the most hope. In that time, there was a hero named Laran. The dragon, says the story, was larger and crueler than any that have come since. It killed and ate hundreds of men, women and children on Halana before its insatiable hunger drove it toward Kalina. By that time, the people of Kalina had gone into hiding in their caves, and the dragon raged for days, finding three here, half a dozen there, but these small meals were never enough to satisfy it. It is said that a dragon is seldom full. They need unnatural amounts of flesh to fuel the fires within their bellies and lift their large bodies into the sky.
Finally, the creature flew toward my island. Like those on Kalina, our people went to hide in the caves, but when the dragon arrived at the village, one man stood to greet it. Laran. He feared that this dragon would not leave, that it would wait until the people were forced out of the caves by thirst or hunger and then devour them. If his people were to live, this dragon would either have to die or be driven away.
The creature crushed a hut beneath its curved claws with every step it took as it slowly and purposefully strode toward Laran. It could have killed him with its fire in an instant, but perhaps it had never known a man to so defiantly face it.
But Laran was not stupid. He knew that while the dragon was protected from neck to tail by scales as thick as coconut husks and as hard as stone, its face—its mouth, eyes and nostrils—were as tender as any man’s. Laran stood clutching his spear in one hand and a wooden shield in the other. He stood naked, stripped even of his loincloth, for he knew that any clothing would immediately ignite if the dragon breathed its fire. He had likewise cut off his long, beautiful hair.
The dragon lumbered closer and closer, curiosity driving it nearer and nearer the stone blade of Laran’s spear. At last, the thing’s monstrous head came within an arm’s length of Laran, but still it did not attack. Laran’s bravery both amused and interested it. The elders say that the dragon, in all its many centuries roaming the earth, had never encountered a man as bold as Laran.
The creature’s ignorance about the bravery of man was its undoing. As quick as lightning, Laran threw his shield into the air. It was only the briefest of distractions, but it was enough. Laran saw the dragon’s eyes dart to the shield, and in that instant, when it was looking away from Laran’s face, he drove the spear into its eye. Using every muscle in his body, he leapt up as the dragon reared its head and drove the shaft deeper into the thing’s eye. He held on to the spear shaft with one hand and gripped the monster’s snout with the other, the skin on his hand bubbling as the heat rose up from the dragon’s throat. He pulled himself in toward the raging maw of the dragon, and the skin along the side of his face began to burn. But as he pulled himself forward, he plunged the spear in as far as he could drive it.
This all happened within the span of a few heartbeats, but Laran knew the moment his advantage had come to an end. He released his hold on the dragon’s snout and dropped to the ground, breaking his ankle in the fall. But he was beyond pain. Laran ran past the dragon and down along its side, ducking beneath a wing as it loomed above his head. The beast would have to turn to chase him, and that slight delay might mean the difference between life and death.
But the dragon’s brain had been pierced by the spear. It raged insensibly in the middle of the village, destroying everything it could find as Laran fled into the forest. Finally, it took to the air. He feared it would survive the wound, but just before it disappeared from sight, he saw it plummet into the water north of the island.
Later that day, as Laran lay unconscious from the pain of his wounds, some others from the village went to the cliffs in the north to look for the creature. They could not see it, however, and it was decided that it must have fallen into the water beyond the reef and sunk into the bottomless depths of the open ocean. Laran never fully regained consciousness. His face was so badly burned that he was unrecognizable. He lingered for several days but eventually died from his injuries. He had saved his people but at the cost of his own life.
Laran has been one of the few men to ever kill a dragon. In all the generations, five more have been shot or stabbed in the eye or mouth, and we don’t know for certain how many of those died. As much as the shamans crave dragon teeth, they have been disappointed, as the creatures always take to the air when gravely injured. If they die, they do so somewhere over the ocean.
The dragons that have come since have been smaller than that first monster, but they have been wiser, content to pluck people from the ground as they swoop over the burning village. But their hunger has not been as great, their cruelty not as keen. And perhaps that was the undoing of that first great dragon. It wanted to look Laran in the eyes and see his terror before it devoured him. It did look into Laran’s eyes, but it did not see terror. It saw death.