The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Fiction about Ravenloft or Gothic Earth
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Suvie
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The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by Suvie »

Once upon a time, there was a dragon, fierce and powerful. After the manner of dragons, he craved the flesh of virgins, and terrorized the villages around his lair by snatching up their fair daughters to consume. The kingdom was in an uproar, and demanded the king do something, but any attempt to slay him by knights or wizards failed. In revenge for each such attack, the dragon would prowl far and wide across the kingdom, devouring men, women and children for a month and promising to do so again, if others were so foolish as to try and slay him. The people lost hope, and there was talk of a lottery to sate the dragon's appetite with monthly offerings from among their daughters.

The princess of this nation had a different solution. Alone she went to visit the dragon in his lair and propose a covenant: she offered herself as payment for the protection of her people. The dragon scoffed at the proposal--after devouring her, he would surely hunger again for the flesh of virgins, so the deal hardly benefited him. On the other hand, she could hardly enforce their agreement after her own death, and thus had nothing to bargain with. So saying, the dragon was about to eat the princess for her foolishness, when she revealed the rest of her plan: by arcane arts, she had learned how to regenerate her body from the smallest bit of flesh. Thus, after being devoured, she would return and allow herself to be eaten again, and again, for as long as the dragon protected her kingdom.

Her offer intrigued the beast. At her behest, he devoured all but the littlest finger on her left hand. Within minutes, she regrew from that tiny piece back into a full-grown woman, whom the dragon immediately devoured again, and again, and again, for the better part of two days. At this point, the dragon had become full, for the first time in its existence, and in gratitude for the new sense of satiety, it agreed to her terms. Determined to stave off the obscene hunger that had defined his previous existence, he enforced his part of the contract ruthlessly, devouring her five or six times a day without preamble to sate the merest growl of his stomach. But knowing that her arcane arts would also allow her to leave him, he spread the word far and wide that the kingdom was under his protection.

The people were stunned at the change, and while they knew not the reason, they heard that their princess had gone to face the beast alone just a few days before, and was now nowhere to be found. So it became rumored abroad that she had sacrificed herself in a magical ritual to change the heart of the dragon from bad to good, and the people mourned and praised her memory. Unbeknownst to them, the princess remained alive, stoically enduring the agony and the ignominy of being torn asunder and devoured day after day.

The king also mourned his daughter, but after many years of her not returning, he accepted the local legend and erected a monument to her heroic sacrifice. After a few years more, the dragon was not only accepted as as a protector of the kingdom, but many assumed it would also fight their battles abroad. As such talk became more and more commonplace, the king sent an emissary to the dragon as to whether the beast might make an example of another nation that had spurned the kingdom in international affairs. When the beast saw the emissary coming from afar, he devoured the princess again as the simplest way to hide her, and told the emissary he would consider the idea and deliver his message to the king personally.

Once they were alone again and she had regenerated, the dragon consulted with the princess as to how to proceed. He cared nothing for the affairs of men, and was only working her will because it kept him fed. For her part, she grieved for her father's foolishness, but it had been almost a decade since she had last spoken with him. Her arcane arts assured her the kingdom was happy, even if her father was not. At her behest, the dragon went to the palace and spoke for all to hear--he would defend their peace and their happiness, but would fight no wars for them. Everyone who listened was moved by his words of wisdom and sagacity, having no idea that these words had originated with their own long-lost princess.

With the dragon perceived as so wise and perceptive, it was only a matter of time before a few bravest souls went to consult with the beast on all sorts of different problems. Originally opposed to intrusion, the dragon refused to be a sage until the princess vanished, leaving him alone for a whole day. Humbled by his own obscene hunger, he was eventually mollified by the petitioners' tradition of bringing offerings, from sheep to rare art to bags of gold coins. So, after devouring the princess, the dragon would listen to their problems and then send them on one errand or another while she regrew and gave him the answer to give to them. Thus, over the remainder of the old king's life, the monster slowly eclipsed the man as the one to solve their problems.

When the old king died, the princess's brother took the throne. Spoiled by the kingdom's prosperity, and having seen his father's discomfiture and eventual overshadowing by a dragon as unfitting of a king, the young and greedy king took an aggressive stance against nearby nations in local trade, demanding larger and larger tariffs. He knew the dragon would not be the aggressor, but if it agreed to defend the kingdom, then what should stop the nation from provoking aggression? Trade disputes led to shows of force, and armies marched forth to battle. Again and again, the armies of the kingdom pillaged their neighbors, and then retreated into the shadow of the dragon when vengeance threatened.

Repulsed by her brother's abuse of a peaceful arrangement, the princess decided to withdraw the dragon's protection from the kingdom. Villages were sacked and looted, houses razed, and thousands died in the wars that resulted. Those who ventured the dragon's cave for aid found only that he refused to defend a tyrant. Even as the young king cursed the dragon for abandoning them, the people rose up in rebellion against him for destroying their prosperity. The young king was dragged from the palace in chains, and a petition was sent to the dragon's cave, begging to know whence they should look for a leader he would approve of.

So it was that the kingdom lauded the dragon himself as king, having scorned mortal rulers as fickle and selfish. The beast presented the princess as his wife, her regenerations having kept her young and beautiful so that no one recognized her after so many decades. The citizens treated her with awe and wonder, and counted themselves doubly blessed to have two supernatural rulers to rule over them. They all imagined she must be a dragon as well, albeit in the form of a mortal, because everyone witnessed at the coronation when the dragon-wife made an incantation and transformed the dragon into the likeness of a man.

So it was that the princess returned home to the palace to rule, albeit none of her citizens knew it. Nor could they know that late at night, their beloved, wise, generous, magnanimous, glorious ruler would chop his wife to pieces with unholy zeal and devour each morsel of her flesh with relish. That in quiet moments throughout the day, the two of them would sneak off for him to bite off her arm, or her leg, or the choicest bits of her flank. This secret remained theirs alone for centuries, as the two immortals led their kingdom, and later that continent, into a new millennium of peace and prosperity.

And they lived...forever after.
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Re: The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by Gonzoron of the FoS »

Wow... that's... that's really good! Quite a fireside tale to tell!
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Re: The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Agreed, excellent quality, and deeply disturbing. I was reading it with an eye toward who the dark lord might be just out of habit, but I really don't see a good candidate. This is not a dark lord origin story like I was expecting. The dragons evil has not really changed since the beginning, so he can't really be a dark lord. The princess has obviously lost her innocence, but has done nothing worthy of a Powers check. The second king kind of reminds me of Vlad Dracov II. But really, I can usually see darklord potential in just about any story, and this one is altogether a completely different kind of story, and yet so worthy of ravenloft
The Avariel has borrowed wings,
The Puppeteer must cut the strings
The Orphan Queen must take the throne
The Queen of Orphans calls them home
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Re: The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Not to mention this maybe the most creative use of a ring of regeneration yet. :shock:
The Avariel has borrowed wings,
The Puppeteer must cut the strings
The Orphan Queen must take the throne
The Queen of Orphans calls them home
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Re: The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by Suvie »

Gonzoron of the FoS wrote:Wow... that's... that's really good! Quite a fireside tale to tell!
Thanks! One of my former players wrote up the original, which had a more ambiguous ending because it was intended to raise the question of at what point was the dragon no longer an evil monster? Was it when he stopped eating anyone except the princess, who had volunteered? Some folks might argue that limiting himself only to the one volunteer might constitute a change of heart. Others might say when he defends the kingdom on her behalf, that makes him not a monster. Traditional concepts of monstrousness might say that the real turning point in the dragon's story would be his transformation into a man, while others might say that the eventual accumulation of good deeds, or the willingness to act with civility, make him no longer a monster.

But of course, the ending for this version makes it all too clear, that he is still a true monster in any meaningful sense. He savors the pain and humiliation as much as he does the nourishment. But at the same time, he's in a truly wretched state, being totally at the mercy of the person who appears on the surface to be the victim.
DeepShadow of FoS wrote:This is not a dark lord origin story like I was expecting.
Nope, not a DL story at all. I actually think it may serve best as a parable told in-game, about the nature of evil and the dangers of superficial redemption. Evil stays evil, even when it is helpful, and even when it is harmless to the vast majority. Some evils can stay buried for years under a veneer of civility, or even give all the outward signs of atonement. There's really no good test, that I can think of, to be sure someone's heart has changed.

I was hoping to have more discussion of these themes by now. Should I post this in the general section instead?
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Re: The Princess and the Dragon: A Parable

Post by jamesfirecat »

Suvie wrote: Nope, not a DL story at all. I actually think it may serve best as a parable told in-game, about the nature of evil and the dangers of superficial redemption. Evil stays evil, even when it is helpful, and even when it is harmless to the vast majority. Some evils can stay buried for years under a veneer of civility, or even give all the outward signs of atonement. There's really no good test, that I can think of, to be sure someone's heart has changed.

I was hoping to have more discussion of these themes by now. Should I post this in the general section instead?
I think the reason that no one commented on that particular subject /theme is because the dragon remains at a constant level of "evil" from start to finish and even more importantly, there is no "twist of the knife" at the end where the Dragon in some ways betrays his deal.

He never truly reasserts his evil nature, never seeks to do something more evil than what he'd been doing before, never seeks to take advantage of his position to do greater evil things...

So the moral ends up seeming less "evil will always be evil even when it seems like it isn't" and more "a grand sacrifice can FORCE evil to do good things even if it doesn't really want to."

Granted I may just be biased against this particular parable because in some stuff I've been writing a similar situation appears (a kind hearted lycanthrope with regenerative powers willingly giving his blood to an evil vampire every night so she doesn't have to go and take it forcefully from someone who the blood loss might kill/seriously harm) and it is actually working. Them spending massive amounts of time together, going on various adventures together, is causing the vampire's thought processes to shift ever so slowly towards CN rather than CE, though the vampire's innate psychopathy remains.

On the other hand, vampiric blood drinking has had a long history of being roughly equivalent to sex, so one can argue it makes for a much more solid foundation of a relationship than... well repeatedly eating someone. That and vampires quite literally can't exist on anything but (sentient) demi-human blood (even Jander Sunstar wasn't able to find a way around that fact, he just limited himself to shallow feedings that would not do long term harm to those he drank from), as opposed to the dragon that could at any point start eating cow meat but doesn't, unless her quite literally has some sort of weird dietary system that can only stomach virgin meat, was that supposed to be the case, or is he just being a picky eater because he's a "jerk" to put it in family friendly terms?
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