"DRAGON - SLAYER"

a tale of who King Arthur could have been...

…before the throne, there was only blood….

They tossed him into the pit like meat.

Fourteen winters old. Starving. Shackled. Bare-chested in the cold ash of the Black Hollow. No sword. No armor. No prayers.

Just death…

That was the tradition. When a dragon nested in the hollow, the village fed it its cursed and Arthur was the cursed, born under a bleeding sky, eyes black as pitch, fists clenched the moment he exited the womb. A bad omen some said, a beast-child others whispered…

So they threw him down and waited for his screams.

They never came.

The dragon came at nightfall. Its breath thick with the stink of molten bone. Scales black, edged in rust. Eyes glowing hate. Wings spread wide like torn banners from some ancient war.

The boy stood to meet it.

In the dark, he’d scavenged two swords from old corpses, knights who’d tried and failed. The hilts were wrapped in dried sinew. The blades worn, yet still sharp.

The dragon roared.

Arthur roared back.

It struck, fangs wide, fire building in its throat. Arthur rolled beneath the blast, ash and flame engulfing the pit. Skin scorched, he rose from the smoke like a shadow made flesh and leapt.

The twin blades screamed as they slammed into the beast’s neck, one in the throat, one between scale plates near the eye. The dragon thrashed. Arthur held tight. Ripped the first blade free and plunged it again…this time into the eye. The socket burst sending boiling blood spraying across his chest.

He didn’t stop.

He climbed the thrashing beast, burying blades into spine, ripping flesh like a mad dog. It rose into the sky, shaking him like a splinter. He clung harder, eyes wide with something not human.

The dragon slammed into the stone walls. Once…. Twice…..

He didn’t let go.

When it landed, broken and crippled, Arthur fell with it…onto its back, blades now nothing more than stubs of metal. He grabbed a shattered rib bone from the ground. Sharp and long, kinda like a butcher’s spike.

He drove it through the dragon’s heart.

Seventeen times.

Until his arms gave out and the heart stopped beating. Until the pit was soaked in steaming blood and the only sound left was his breath…ragged, feral, victorious.

He stood, slicked in gore. Eyes hollow and body burnt.

When the villagers came, they found him atop the corpse, one blade buried in its skull like a crown….the other clenched in his fist.

***

As legend tells it…King Arthur’s first crown wasn’t made of gold or some precious metal.

It was made of dragon’s bone.”