Some short works I've been playing with.
"Hashal"
The sorceress lived deep in the forest with a pair of corona dragons as her companions. Many witches had familiars, often dragons or other animals, but this particular witch simply had these two corona dragons that she kept as pets. Bonding with a familiar was just too much like work. They had a very simple arrangement: she fed the dragons and gave them a warm lair to sleep in, and in turn, they kept her fire lit and brought her news of the forest. The cabin was deep in the woods, far from everything. The dragons, though small, could cover lots of territory in a days time. They always had plenty of news to share. Sometimes their news was anything but. The sorceress hardly needed a dragon report to tell her it was raining in the forest when the water was dripping through her roof and pooling at her feet. On those days, it was tempting to give the dragons the boot and hire REAL familiars. But then she would think about the work involved and decided against it.
Hillary McFangle had lived in these woods all her life. She was an old woman, of a built that country folk would call “stout”. She preferred the solitary way of the forest over the hustle and bustle of the village square. She ventured into the village as seldom as possible. She was rather a folk figure there. A mystical figure surrounded by an aura of the unknown. People distanced themselves from her. Childen stared and hid when they saw her. It had taken Hillary years to concoct this image and she cherished it. Each trip to the village had to be carefully planned. First she would send the Corona’s out on a reconnaissance mission. The dragons brought her back timely news of the village, something that only someone who actually lived there would know, and something that someone in the village wished to remain a secret. A little tidbit she could drop into conversation at the market about the lives of the people she was dealing with. Whne she had her tidbit, the name of the latest paramour of a certain married merchant perhaps, she would brew a special potion.
Now, normally, potions and brewing is the sole territory of witches, and most sorceresses never bother to learn it. But Hillary liked to keep an open mind. And there was a lot to be said for some potions. Oh, she didn’t waste her time with any of that ‘make me fall in love’ nonsense, she had far better things to do with her time than that, and far better ways to accomplish it if she put her mind to it. As a general rule, regular straight-forward, old fashioned magic worked far better than any old potion could. A good spell was far superior to a potion. Potions didn’t have much distance for one thing. It was hard to brew a potion that would cause a nasty meddlesome old coot 2 miles away to suddenly start stuttering or cluck like a chicken. Whereas with a spell, well, it would not only get the job done but let you watch it in your crystal!
The special potion Hillary brewed was not one she drank. It was one she washed in. Just the perfect blend of secret ingredients caused the skin to give off a mystical and all knowing aura. It just helped with her masquerade and kept nosy folks from asking too many questions, like where her cabin was or how she knew so much.
When all was ready, Hillary would splash around in the potion, don her favorite worn traveling cloak and her best worn and tattered boots, and venture into town. The results were always perfect. People stared and gave way as she passed. She never had to worry about crowded shops. Whispers would follow her as she passed, “There goes a powerful witch.” Parents warned their children to stay clear and Hillary wasn’t certain, but she was sure that more than one parent in the town used the threat of her presence as a means of getting naughty children to behave. Hashal she was known as in the village. It meant “ancient hag” in the old tongue and it suited Hillary just fine. Very few people knew the old tongue anymore, it was mostly a language of scholars, and there were very few of them to be found in the village. Long ago, she wasn’t even sure how long anymore, when she had first decided that the constant stream of visitors to her door was getting annoying, she had sent the Corona’s out to whisper a legend in the ear of the King’s bard. It was a tale of an old woman, a powerful sorceress, who lived in the air above the kingdom and saw all. She could see into windows and through walls. She knew what you were thinking even, and she would punish any who crossed her and reward those who let her pass quietly. It really wasn’t much of a tale to begin with, but once the bard got a hold of it, the story grew and grew with the retelling. It had frankly, been a stroke of genius on her part for within weeks, the constant stream of people who ventured into the forest looking for favors or magical solutions to their problems ceased. Hillary wasn’t quite sure why. She had expected it to take much longer and she was prepared to use Hashal as a threat to one or two herself. She hadn’t needed to though. One day the visitors simply stopped coming. The trail that led from the village to her cabin grew over and Hillary went back to enjoying the solitude of the woods again. She often wondered though, if those silly people were home praying to Hashal, hoping she would solve their problems. And to this end, when she made her trips into town in her Hashal guise, she never bought anything of consequence, and she always made sure she had a few coins of a foreign currency to spend. The Corona dragons, for the price of a special meal, (and Hillary was an excellent cook) could be most helpful about such things. People were so careless. There were always coins to be found just lying around inside streams and by roads. Sometimes they were in plan sight, and sometimes they were hidden in pockets and purses, but the Corona’s had a special way of convincing those purses and pockets to open so that the coins could liberate themselves. It helped to be able to breathe fire. It made people so much more co-operative!
And so Hillary made her preparations to go into town again today. She had a tasty tidbit to tantalize (or was that torture) a certain shopkeeper with. This man had always in the past failed to properly honor the mystique of Hashal. But today finally, she had something to share with him. His pretty little girlfriend, not to be confused with his pretty little wife or his voluptuous long time mistress, had finally wised up and found another, less adulterous man upon which to bestow her charms and with which to share her affections. She hadn’t told shopkeeper, of course. The Corona’s had spied the girl and her new beau out in the forest. And they weren’t picking berries. Far from it. The Corona’s had over heard their plans to run away together to avoid the wrath of the shopkeeper when he learned that she had strayed. The Corona’s loved it. Dragon’s thrive on high drama and human angst. The real reason why the dragons could be seen so often in the company of humans is that they enjoyed a good soap opera. They would hang around the village, let a few of the inhabitants think they had been tamed as pets, and thus get themselves a ring-side seat at the best entertainment a dragon could have. And Hillary, for her part, fed the dragons and listened as they feasted in the evenings and retold the tales of the day. In a way, she supposed, that didn’t make her much better than the dragons. But these nightly tales of angst and strife and drama just kept reinforcing to Hillary why she lived away from the village, and why Hashal was necessary to keep the rest of humanity away from her.