Draconiformes
fantasy taxonomy
The first fireball hisses past Brawndo’s left ear and scorches a black streak across the wyvern’s underbelly.
“Watch it!” Brawndo says.
“I am watching it. The dragon. I am watching the dragon.” Moxie flicks his tail, and a second fireball blooms between his front paws. “I want the dragon dead.”
The creature wheels above the peak, leather wings cracking like wet sails. It stoops. Brawndo plants his boots, hauls the greatsword up in a two-handed arc, and sets the edge into the joint of the wing as it passes. The blade bites. Black blood smokes on the rocks. The wyvern shrieks and climbs.
“Wyvern,” Brawndo says.
“What.”
“Not a dragon. Wyvern.”
Moxie’s ears flatten. He lobs another fireball. It clips the tail. “Ok, I want the wyvern dead. Same problem. Same dragon.”
“Two legs.”
“What.”
“The creature has two legs.” Brawndo wrenches a slab of basalt loose from the cairn behind him and hurls it. The slab catches the wyvern across the jaw. Teeth scatter. “Two legs and a pair of wings. Wyvern. Four legs and a pair of wings, dragon. Bestiaries are quite specific on this point.”
“I want the bestiaries dead also.”
The wyvern banks and dives. Brawndo drops to one knee, sword braced across his thigh, and lets the thing impale its own breast on the upraised tip. The shock travels up the blade, through his arms, into his teeth. The creature rolls off, screaming, and tumbles down the scree. It catches air at the cliff edge and labors back into the sky, dragging one ruined wing.
Moxie is already charging another fireball. “You are doing the thing.”
“What thing.”
“The thing. Where you correct me. While I am working.” The fireball releases. It strikes the bad wing. Feathers of fire spread along the membrane. “You did it last week. The owlbear? You said it was an owlcat. No one cares, Brawndo.”
“It was an owlcat. Owlbears are extinct in this hemisphere.”
“No one cares.”
“I care. The cartographers care. The Adventurer’s Guild has standards, Moxie.”
The wyvern circles, lower now, fire eating its left side. Its breath comes in wet shudders. Brawndo paces it along the ridge, sword low, reading the line of the next dive.
“Fine,” Moxie says. “Fine. The wyvern. Are you happy?”
“I am professionally satisfied.”
“That is worse.”
The creature folds its wings and drops. Brawndo steps inside the strike, lets the talons rake past his shoulder, and brings the greatsword up underhand into the soft place beneath the jaw. The blade goes through. He feels the resistance break.
The wyvern hits the rocks and skids. It comes to rest with its long neck draped over a boulder, one yellow eye fixing on the two of them. Its ribs lift. Lower. Lift. Smoke curls from the nostrils, thinner each time.
Brawndo crouches. He sets a hand on the scaled snout, a gesture that on the long road north Moxie has seen him make for dying horses.
“Wyvern,” Brawndo says, quietly now. “Bipedal, winged, of the order Draconiformes. A clean kill.”
Moxie pads up beside him. The fire in his paws is out. “Dragon.”
“Wyvern.”
“Dragon.”
The yellow eye rolls between them. The creature’s jaw works. A sound comes up from the long throat, wet and tired, and shapes itself, with effort, into a word.
“Wyrm,” it says.
Then the eye goes flat.
Moxie sits down on the rock. He licks one paw, slow, and considers.
“I want the wyrm dead,” he says. “The wyrm is dead now.”
Brawndo does not answer. He is looking at the creature’s face, and at the small dignified set of the jaw, and he is thinking that he will have to revise his letter to the Guild.