Chapter 3: Baiting Dragons

Jungkook is crying. He doesn’t know what’s happening, or where to run. If he should run. He can barely walk; he’s still a toddler.  But there is fire and heat surrounding him, and terror filling his heart and mind. Hands reach for him and drag him out from under the bed where he is hiding. 

“Eomma!” He cries. It’s one of the few words he knows. “Want Eomma!” He struggles in the strange man’s grasp and gets a cuff to his head for his efforts. Now his ears are ringing, and his sobs are harsher than ever. Jungkook bites the man’s hand and is dropped with a curse.

Jungkook runs.

His house is near the edge of the forest and Jungkook heads for the trees as soon as he scrambles through the burning but open back door, vanishing among the leaves. There are no sounds of pursuit.  

He comes back, later. To look for his eomma. There is no one left in his village, the houses burned to barren husks. Ash, broken glass, and splintered wood crunch under his bare feet. Tears stream down his face. He doesn’t know which house is his. He doesn’t recognize anything. He sits in the middle of the destroyed village square and cries.

He doesn’t know how long he’s there, but eventually, and suddenly, there is a thunderous thud behind him. Wind sweeps Jungkook’s hair in all directions. Jungkook swings around, ready for fight or flight from an unknown enemy. 

His gaze meets an enormous slitted golden eye.

Jungkook wakes from the dream, heart racing, but not totally in a bad way. It’s a dream he’s had many times before, and in a way it’s almost comforting, now, where once it had been alarming. His back aches from sleeping on the cool forest ground for… he’s lost count of how many nights in a row. Probably close to a month of them, by now.

He stretches to gently work out his aching muscles as he surveys his surroundings for any danger. You can’t be too careful here in the heart of the Great Forest. He’s surrounded by ancient and massive gnarled oaks, covered in moss and vines. The forest floor is laden with a layer of natural dead leaf compost so thick you’d think it would at least be comfortable to sleep on, but you’d be wrong. Ferns and shrubs reach leaves outs broadly across the ground, greedy to catch any drop of sunlight that makes it through the thick leafy canopy overhead.

There are morning birds calling out to each other among the branches, and insects and rodents busily scuttling about through the foliage. Jungkook frowns with disappointment. If a dragon were nearby, all these sounds would be gone, the silence a warning of its own, a whisper that something legendary walked the forest. Jungkook had yet to come across this sort of a silence yet, nor any other hint of a dragon. It had been almost a month already, and he was starting to get frustrated.

Jungkook had been handling life in the forest just fine so far, otherwise, had even come to enjoy the solitude, in a way. He was naturally skilled with a bow, and an excellent student to boot, well aware of which herbs and berries were safe and which were not, so food was not overly hard to come by. He’d had rabbit and berries for supper last night, and still had some left for breakfast this morning, so he munches on the berries as he sits and thinks about what his plan would be for today.

First, he needs to get his bearings. Once he’s finished with breakfast, Jungkook heads towards the nearest and tallest tree, testing the vines running along its trunk for adequate strength before starting to heft himself up into its branches. Once near the top, only slightly out of breath, Jungkook has a good view of the expanse of forest nearby. His eyes immediately find a lake a few kilometers to the east and he barely contains his whoop of excitement. It’s not smart to draw too much attention in the forest. He carefully notes the position of the lake in relation to the sun before climbing back down.

That lake is where he’ll stop, Jungkook determines as he wiggle down the tree. He’ll set up camp there and wait for a dragon to come to him. No dragon can resist a lake. They love playing in the water. With that thought in mind, Jungkook feels significantly livelier than he has felt lately as he strikes off in the direction of the lake.

The lake is even more perfect a location up close than it had seemed from a distance: a pristine blue almost perfectly round lake that's both wide and deep, with a few kilometers of long sandy beach running right up to the tree line on one side, and a tiny island in the middle. It is, hopefully, a dragon’s paradise, and Jungkook settles down and sets up a much more permanent style of camp, ready to wait by the lake as long as necessary.

A two-week wait is necessary, as it happens. Jungkook is pulled from a nap by the sudden deafening silence of the trees and bushes around him. Heart pounding, Jungkook scurries to the edge of the forest and peers out from between the bushes at the expanse of beach. His breath catches.

A dragon is standing on the lakeside, head dipped to sip at the water.

It’s beautiful, Jungkook can’t help but think. Its scales are a deep purple that refract sunlight onto the lake water, its underbelly and slightly spread wings a pale lavender, and its eyes a lovely shade of amethyst. Its teeth are sparkling white and razor sharp as the dragon stretches its neck to the sky after finishing drinking only to yawn a yawn so big the ground under Jungkook almost seems to shudder a bit.

The dragon turns away from the water, towards the trees, and Jungkook shrinks back instinctively, withdrawing further into the bushes with his heart still pounding. When he dares peak out again, the dragon is curled beside the lake, fast asleep. Jungkook's heart won't slow. He's found one.

The dragon has stays by the lake for three days, sometimes splashing in the water, sometimes basking along the bank, before Jungkook finally decides on a plan to gain its trust. Not that he’d been totally unproductive the last three days. No, he’s taken numerous notes on the dragon’s behavior and habits, plus drawn several detailed and anatomical drawings of it, that will be a welcome addition to his treatise. He documents his observations as he sees them:

Today the dragon played in the water for over eight hours. It never seemed to get bored. Though I suppose for a creature so long-lived, eight hours is merely a blink…

The dragon found a piece of stained glass from somewhere and has kept it in its clutches or very close nearby ever since. Hoarding tendencies are not exaggerated, it seems. The question remains though, does the hoarded object need to be shiny, or colorful, to attract draconic attention? Or would anything it finds interesting do the trick? Further observation may tell.

The dragon was startled by a flying fish today. I can now attest that the rumors that dragons’ scales do in fact lift rather like a cat’s fur when alarmed are undoubtedly true.

The dragon is endlessly fascinating to Jungkook, and he fills his first notebook in the span of his three days observing the dragon. He’s starting to worry that the six extra that he brought might not be enough. Observing the dragon’s reaction to its treasured stained glass is what gives Jungkook his idea. Or rather, he realizes the idea he was meant to have all along. He removes the small bag of rather large jewels Professor Moon had given him as a parting gift.

Jewels were not hard to come by at The Academy. In fact, a large part of the city-state’s riches came from the wealth of jewels of all types and varieties that could be found in the heart of the mountain. Still, Jungkook had tried to decline the small fortune’s worth of jewels the professor handed him. But he’d insisted, refused to hear otherwise. “I think you’ll find them useful,” he’d said cryptically.

At the time, Jungkook hadn’t seen how. In fact, until now he’d practically forgotten about the jewels, not having much use for them in the middle of the Great Forest. Now Jungkook grins as he clutches the bag. “Thanks, professor.” He whispers.

The first gem Jungkook leaves at the beach for the dragon while it has departed for a quick hunting trip is a large fiery opal, about twice as big as Jungkook’s thumb. He leaves it at the spot where the dragon usually sleeps and prays that it notices it before laying on it and burying it into the sand under its crushing weight.

He needn’t have worried. The gem is the first thing the dragon notices when it lands again, zeroing in on the light refracted from where it lies amid the sand, as Jungkook keeps to his usual spot in the bushes.  Its wings shuffle restlessly, uncertainly, as it cautiously approaches the gem. Its eyes dart around to look for the gem's potential owner. Seeing no one, it bends down to study the jewel closer. Eventually, at last, a pleased hum vibrates through the air as the dragon oh so delicately picks up the tiny gem in its mouth... and promptly swallows it.

Jungkook blinks, nonplussed. But the dragon looks even more pleased and circles around its sleeping spot before curling up with a satisfied huff, a plume of smoke drifting up from one nostril.

Well. That was unexpected. Still, it definitely seemed to like the gem, even if it did eat it, so Jungkook is determined to keep providing them.

From then on, every time the dragon leaves, a gem is waiting for it upon return. And every time, the dragon seems inordinately pleased before swallowing the gem whole. Jungkook wonders what the professor would say if he knew this is what’s happening to the small fortune he gave Jungkook. He hardly thinks the professor knew the dragon would eat them.

A full month passes like this and Jungkook’s gem hoard starts to dwindle. Also, the dragon is beginning to seem restless, raising its head frequently and staring off into the distance through the sky. Finally, one day Jungkook looks and finds only one jewel left in the bag: a large diamond he had been saving. The best for last. It’s now or never.

The next time the dragon swoops down from the sky after a trip, it doesn’t find a gem and is clearly confused and more than a little disappointed. Taking a deep breath, Jungkook steps out from amidst the trees. Immediately, the dragons’ eyes are trained on him, its scales lifting a little a threatening rumble ripping from its throat. But then it sees the gem in Jungkook’s outstretched palm.

Jungkook watches with bated breath as the dragon’s purple eyes flit between the gem and his face. It doesn’t take long for realization to dawn in its eyes, the connection made between the gems and their supplier. Cautiously, the dragon approaches Jungkook. Oddly enough, its eyes are trained on Jungkook’s face rather than the gem. It levels its head to meet Jungkook’s stare head on and Jungkook tries desperately not to look away. But eventually he caves and his gaze slides off to the side.

He can’t help flinching a bit as the jewel is suddenly plucked from his hand and devoured with a quick jerk of the dragon's neck.

Still. “Hey,” he says indignantly. “You could at least say thank you.”

The dragon blinks at him.

“Thank you,” it, he says, (because the voice is unmistakably male) in a voice deep enough to shake the ground under Jungkook’s feet. The words sit strangely on his tongue as if the language is foreign to him. It probably is.

Jungkook is shocked speechless.

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