Dragon Armor

By Rachael Koppendrayer

Emptying multiple generations’ worth of junk from the rafters of an ancient outbuilding was not a task for the fainthearted. I’d already helped my parents haul three wagons of long-forgotten heirlooms and rubbish to the town hall for the upcoming auction intended to raise money to hire a law-keeper.

Assuming the arsonist who had appeared out of the blue this spring for seemingly no reason didn’t burn down the hall and everything in it first. Then we’d have no way to afford a knight to guard us from his—or her—mysterious vendetta against the village.

A burlap sack was wedged between the rafter and the ceiling. I poked around until I found a good grip and tugged. The contents shifted slightly with a creak, but it remained wedged tight. Adjusting my grip, I jerked again and nearly lost my seat on the rafter when it broke free.

With a cacophony of clangs and jangles, the sack hit the ground and split open. A pile of metal tumbled out onto the dirt floor. I dropped from the rafter to land neatly next to my find. I picked up the piece nearest me. It was a knight’s breastplate, dented and tarnished; not iron or bronze, but something feather-light, almost fragile in its thinness. It must have belonged to a woman, given the shape. I fastened it to my chest. It was a respectable fit for something that, by its style, clearly came from a different century.

For fun, I attached the other pieces to my body. It covered me from head to toe. The helmet was fixed with a curtain of scales that just brushed my shoulders and could be attached over the lower part of the face, leaving only my eyes exposed. Not a bad fit. Some of the joints gaped open at my elbows and knees, but that could have been my inexperience.

“Ysmay? Is that you?”

I spun around. Amazing. I could move in the armor as if it wasn’t there. “Hey Da.”

He smiled. “That must be my great-great-grandmother Ayleth’s dragon armor.”

“Dragon armor?”

“Something the mages cooked up to resist dragon fire. Arrows and spears go right through it, though. Once the dragons were hunted to extinction, it became useless. But I hear you could run straight into flames and not even singe your eyebrows.”

I opened my mouth to ask more about Ayleth, but warning bells in the distance cut me off. We ran outside. A black cloud roiled up from the direction of the village.

No time to remove the armor. We each mounted a horse and raced toward town.

A line of villagers stretched from the burning apothecary to the well, hands passing buckets at a well-practiced rate. Flames danced dangerously close to the thatch of the neighboring building.

I was about to dismount when a flicker in the distance caught my eye. Another fire?

I kicked my horse. Bane, our local hedgewitch, lived over there. He’d been pivotal in stopping the fires up until the last one, when someone—presumably the arsonist—nailed his shoulder with a crossbow. Infection had kept him bedridden since. With the entire village occupied, now would be the perfect time for the arsonist to kill him.

Sure enough, flames licked the roof of his home. As I neared, a cloaked figure shoved a beam against the door, sealing it shut.

“Hey!”

The figure glanced at me, and took off like a startled pheasant. The urge to chase the arsonist down burned hot in my veins. If I could catch the villain, the whole village would be safe.

But Bane was surely in that burning building, with no one to save him.

No one but me.

I leapt off the horse, shoved the beam aside, and pulled the door open. I sprinted straight into the flames.

Heat and smoke enveloped me, but although uncomfortable, it wasn’t painful. I’d likely have some odd-looking burns where the armor didn’t quite meet around my elbows, but it did what it had been enchanted to do five generations later.

Though my lungs and throat burned with the hot air, I pushed through, room by room, until I found a figure lying on a bed, flames licking the walls around him.

“Bane!”

He didn’t move.

I shook his shoulder.

A hoarse cry of pain answered me, and I realized my gauntlet was pressed directly into the bandaged hole below his collarbone. Whoops.

He flailed weakly, and I caught his wrist.

“Come on, get up.” I pulled him to a sitting position just in time to avoid a burning beam crashing onto his pillow. Wild-eyed, he glanced around and rose unsteadily to his feet. With my arm around his waist and my shoulder wedged under his armpit, I maneuvered him through the collapsing cottage and out into the comparatively clear air just before the roof caved in.

Coughing, I helped Bane sit on the steps of a cottage well away from the blaze and pulled my helmet off. My hair crackled in the dry heat, but as far as I could tell, I still had as much as I’d started with. I couldn’t stop a grin. The armor worked.

“Ysmay,” Bane croaked, his eyes wide, “is that dragon armor?”

“My many-great-grandmother’s ago.”

He shook his head. “I thought it had all been discarded generations ago, the spells lost to time.”

My grin widened. “Not all.”

A shriek sounded from the other fire, and light flared.

“I should help.”

“I might have one water spell in me, if you’ll help me,” he rasped.

I pulled the helmet back onto my head, then offered him a hand.

Dragons might be extinct, but fire wasn’t. And with an arsonist still at large, someone needed to rescue those trapped in the blaze.

Thanks to my dragon-hunting ancestor, that someone was me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author and color pencil artist Rachael Koppendrayer has always loved to write and draw, whether it was doodling in class or writing and illustrating her own version of fairy tales. She is the illustrator of Isaac’s Ice Cream Tree, a children’s book by author Angela Henderson, and has published several flash fiction pieces with Splickety Magazine and Havok Publishing.

---

More Stories | Author Website