| By Rachel Kaelin, rider of Purple Orcithe |
Orcithe was beside herself. Her large paws were draped on the outside of a huge wooden box with a padded inside that she called a bed, and she was gazing out with her large ebony eyes, quite happy, excited, and content.
“I’m a Christmas perr-esent?” she asked me through our mind-link, folding her wings against her body happily. “Aren’t I? Aren’t I?”
“You were a Christmas present long ago,” I lovingly told the curious little purple dragon, who immediately gave me the largest draconic smile I had ever seen on her face, and she curled up in the box immediately to sleep. “Perr-esent,” she murmured, and lapsed into silence. I shrugged, grinned, and continued to watch the timer. When it buzzed, the cookies would be done, and Orcithe would help me decorate them. She was ecstatic about the entire holiday thing, and insisted that nothing but holiday music be played and when the TV specials aired, she was there to watch them. She acted like a toddler, always happy to help and play and nose and get into things. She even produced her very first Christmas list with the tip of her tail dipped in ink and scrawling strange characters on a list, which she explained to me later. Being hardly an adult at Christmas with a very childish view to things, the young purple dragon was my best friend and bondmate.
I stoked the fire and looked outside; the wind gusted in cold bursts and swept some nasty sleet about. It didn’t look like we’d get snow on Christmas Day like Orcithe desired so vehemently. Primping up my two red poinsettias and straightening a picture frame, I moved around the room trying to pass the time.
Finally, I was finished. “Oh, you dear,” I told the sleeping dragon, and walked into the kitchen to fix up some icing for the cookies and arrange the colored sugar and sprinkles and candy stars, with the red-hots and chocolate, all set out with spoons to dash sugar and knives to spread the icing. Orcithe had a quite prehensile tail-tip, with which she would grab the small handles of my kitchen implements. For this reason, she was excited about the cookie-making. To her, it was really the best part of Christmas, because she would get to throw icing all over me.
“Well? Are you sure there’s a dragon there?”
“By my tail feathers, I’m sure. Hey! Blackbeak! Let’s go get it!”
“Of course I’m going to get it, but I’m going to get it in my own sweet time,” a large Black Eagle rumbled. “Don’t bother me right now.”
“Ever since you left Blackstar you’ve been doing things in your own sweet time. I smell a little purple dragon, really young, perfect for the Feast.”
“As far as I am concerned,” the second Black Eagle wheezed, rustling his glittering feathers angrily, “this weather is terrible. Even a fat, juicy purple dragon couldn’t tempt me right this minute.”
“It will, in the feast,” the first speaker, the smallest Black Eagle of the lot, spoke quietly with firm resolve. “The Christmas Feast. Has a ring to it, but it doesn’t without a spitted dragon sitting in the center of the table. Besides, golds and silvers are too gamy, and too big for us to kill unless they’re little ones.” He grinned, and his ruby eyes twinkled. “I say we kill this little one. She’s immature and foolish.”
They perched on an ancient elm, heads drawn back into their dorsals, with their cruel curved beaks not moving an inch as they telepathically conversed. “Well, this girl has several dragons anyway. She won’t miss one.”
“This one is bonded. It’s not like we can just fly up and kill it and she won’t know it happened…”
“Good point. Here’s another: How are we going to actually get it? Crash into the windows? We’re as big as the dragon herself and would alert the other dragons… I know that that girl has a particularly mean one called Ripper…” the second Black Eagle growled. “Ripper. A good name for the vicious beast, tore up three of my kin and twenty others beside in the fights. And he’s a green, of all things!”
“That’s only his color, you nitwit, he’s not the same species that the purple is. Maybe we can lure her out?"
Orcithe peeped out of the top of her box and tapped her tail on the cushion. Her perfect taloned hands settled on the top of the box, big enough to cover my face. She was as large as a small quarter-horse, but couldn’t carry me anywhere because she was so small. How she wished that she could!
The timer’s buzz sounded, and I grinned. Immediately, there was my purple dragon, excitedly bounding into the huge kitchen. Because of the holidays, the rest of my dragons, unicorns, and my two fairies were in the upper stories of my three story house, playing holiday games and watching the television. It was Orcithe’s special day, and they didn’t have such strong bonds to me except for the two whers, and they were curled up in the den fast asleep. For that reason, we had a time together.
“Cookies! I want to decorate that one,” she pointed with a claw as I used my hot pad to move the cookie sheet out of the oven. It was a snowman, and soon she was slinging icing with her tail curled around the knife, and popping a red-hot on for his nose by snatching it up between the points of her claws. Her eyes smiled, and her mouth hung open in a grin as she talked to me.
“Look! Here, I’ll use stars for his eyes…” She slathered on more icing, neater now, and dropped chocolate for buttons. I had to find and select the perfect candy stars for his eyes because her hands were too big to grasp the thin, tiny wafers of candy. She giggled and laughed, setting the knife down next to the bowl of icing on the counter. “Oh, now he’s lovely!”
I agreed wholeheartedly, and washed icing off of my shirt from where she had thrown it, when I suddenly saw a gleam of black flash past my window…
“It’s… making cookies.” The second Black Eagle shrugged, surprised, when he returned from his quick job of spying on the dragonet. “It’s decorating them.”
“How’s that supposed to help?” Blackbeak remonstrated. “Here we are, sitting in blasted terrible weather, while you wonder on the virtues of purple dragons making cookies. Not that I’ve seen it before, which I haven’t, and… how does she do it, anyway?”
“She uses her tail! It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I want to see!” Blackbeak widened his eyes.
“You can’t see, Blackclaw.” The first Black Eagle smirked.
“And why not, Blacksoul? I’ve never…”
“She saw you. That’s the shoddiest bit of espionage I’ve ever seen. Now she’ll be on guard.”
Indeed, the human girl was soon peeking out the window, shading her eyes with a hand and squinting out into the murk. They could see her with their sharp eyes, but without her glasses she couldn’t see them in the skeletal elm.
“Ripper! Come here,” I finally yelled. The top floors were silent for a moment, and then Ripper slunk into the room, shoulders hunched.
He was my most ferocious dragon. Small and compactly built, he was like a bulldog with scales and horns. His wings were silent and sleek, and his talons long and black, retracted into the sheaths of his toes. His face was delicate and handsome for dragon’s, but with the glinting red eyes and his dark green scales, he was fearsome. He was totally silent as he came to crouch by me, barely smaller than Orcithe, with his spurs, the large claws on the hind of his foot, digging into the carpet.
“Okay, Ripper,” I said seriously, and looked over my shoulder to where young Orcith was icing a reindeer, “I saw a Black Eagle. You know what to do, don’t you?”
“I know what they want,” he hissed, and was quiet again. “They want Orcithe. That would pain you, would it not, if she died?”
“Yes,” I gulped, and shivered. “Could you help me… and her? They’ll think of some way to get her.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Ripper snarled, clacking his foreclaws together and sitting up. “You know how, if those Eagles see me, they shall fly off since they are not prepared. Still, they would not give up and would return… that is the way of the Eagles.”
“Exactly.”
“Besides, with my reputation, they would fly off anyway,” he said slowly, savoring the thought, “but I will take no chances to that. That is why I thought we should have a little fun with them.
“ORCITHE! NO! Come back!”
The telepathic voice of a happy dragonet burbling as she trotted out the door was too much for the Black Eagles to bear. It was so delicious, the smell of her as she came romping out. “What? No snow?”
“NOW!” Blackbeak yelled without further thought. Blackclaw followed him swiftly as both of them stooped.
“NO! Not yet,” Blacksoul yelped, flapping his wings. “DON’T--"
The purple dragon tilted her head up and gasped. That was Blackbeak’s first clue to realizing that purple dragons didn’t have such long fangs. He couldn’t stop, he had to grab her, he could…
Blacksoul, the wise young one, disappeared immediately into the weather torn sky. Ripper had caught his prey.
“Good job, Ripper!” I exclaimed when the costumed attack dragon trotted inside after washing the black blood from his claws in an icy puddle. “Thank you so…”
“Much,” finished Orcithe, and she jumped from where she had been hiding in her box to nuzzled Ripper, nearly bowling him over. “Thank you! I didn’t know there were Eagles out there!”
“If they were thinking, they’d smell my underscent,” Ripper snorted, tipping his head out of the purple costume that he had worn several years ago on Halloween. Orcithe had been sleeping on it. Ripper was very embarrassed by the attention. “They should have been thinking. There were three of them, but I killed two of them. Two less of the problems, eh?”
“Where’d the third go? He’s not going to come back, is he?” I asked worriedly, thinking of all of my small dragons as targets.
“No. Not after this. It would shame him… this was not one of their official missions, it was a sneaking out, and he won’t return if he enjoys living without his head off.”
Blacksoul seethed as he shot away towards the Nesting Site. His eyes were narrow slits as he growled to himself. His wings burned with shame as he disappeared into the overcast sky.
