My four-year-old son loves stories, and lately he’s been asking me to come up with them out of nowhere. No books. No cheat sheets. Just pure, hardcore freestyling. So one night last week I ended up telling him a story about a dragon named Magon. The cool thing is, I also linked it to the Memory Eater.
It also turns out that last week at preschool my son learned about authors and illustrators. He was really excited about illustrations, especially since he loves art, so I decided to turn Magon the Dragon into an actual story and let him illustrate it.
Without further ado, since it is Friday and I haven’t come up with something funny in awhile, here's our creation:
Magon the Dragon
Magon, a purple dragon taller than the tallest keep in the land, stands before a bookshelf in his cave. His viper eyes are sunken in, but they jump from painting to painting. One in particular makes him yearn for the days of old. He picks the painting up and stares with envy. His former self, a fat dragon resembling a blowfish, reclines in a field of multicolored flowers while dangling a wagon above his open mouth. A dozen peasants fall inside. Such a pleasant afternoon snack.
Magon incinerates the painting with his fiery breath the same way he incinerated the peasant who painted the portrait of him during that wonderful time. A time when humans were in season. Now there are only a few hundred left, and they’ve all banded together inside a single castle in the east. The defenses are too strong for Magon, and as the all skin and bones dragon stares at a painting of him surfing down a grassy knoll with a board made of humans, he realizes that the top shelf may remain empty for the rest of time.
But there is a painting of Magon holding a wand over an open fire, and at the end of that wand is a roasted wizard. In the background, behind an army of trees, are dozens of sad humans. And it hits Magon.
“Humans must really like wizards.”
Magon pulls an old wand and book out of a troll skull container. After doing some boring reading, he aims the wand at himself and says,
“Make me old and frail,
with one hangnail.
Give me gray hair and glasses,
but a hat that will rock the masses.
I’ll wear a robe and carry a wooden staff,
but may my thirst remain to tear humans in half!”
And with the flick of his wrist, Magon the dragon becomes Magon the wizard.
*
“Ye shall halt!” hollers one of two fully-clad knights guarding the main entrance to the castle. The knight cocks his battle axe behind his head. “I am about to decapitate you!”
Magon quickly waves his hands around—one holding a staff—the other holding a wand.
The other knight says, “Why do ye hold both a wand and staff? Tis overkill, is it not?”
“I couldn’t decide on which one to bring,” mumbles Magon. “When I left my tent and all. Over in another land.”
“Wizards are dead,” says the knight ready to chop. “Magon the dragon roasted and ate all of them.”
Cowering from the blade, Magon says, “But I come forth to entertain the king! Tis a gift from the last wizard in the land—me, of course.”
The knight with the axe sniffs the air once. Twice. Thrice. He sniffs some more and says, “I smell a dragon.”
Magon snorts as he laughs and says, “You’re silly.”
“No,” the knight says, “I’ve slain many a dragon, and I tell ye, I smell the vile creature’s barf odor lingering in the air.”
Some ridiculously fast pageboy took that information and relayed it to the king and is now back at the main entrance blowing his horn and shouting, “Hear ye! Hear ye! King Lumpers desires entertainment, so bring forth ye wizard!”
The knight holsters his axe but not his nose. “Right this way, you lucky wizard bastard,” he says. “But heed thy warning—I shall keep my eyeballs ball and chained to ye every move.”
“Even when I’m in the shower?” says Magon.
The knight kicks over a cart full of fruit, and nobody can see it, but behind Magon’s shield-sized beard is the biggest smile never captured in any of his paintings. The angry knight may desire truth, and King Lumpers may desire entertainment, but Magon the dragon desires a midnight feast of human kabobs.
*
It’s night time, and everyone is seated in the bleachers of the jousting field. King Lumpers doesn’t stand from his throne because he weighs over 400 pounds and doing so would take too much effort, so he hollers, “Oh wizard man! Oh wizard man!”
Magon looks up from the field. Magon smells the blood of the men who died on the soil. Magon is so close to fulfilling his dream. To filling the empty shelf with paintings of him tearing this castle apart.
“Woo me!” the king hollers. “Woo me right in the face!”
Magon knows a lot about wooing. Case in point, three years ago, to obtain maximum terror, Magon stuck thirty peasants to the roof of a stable by using spears. For each day of the month, Magon would eat one of the peasants, then use the spear to clean his teeth. By the time he got to peasant number thirty, Magon had another brilliant portrait painted of the most horrified human expression.
“Watch this,” says Magon as he takes his staff and catapults it through the air. The uneven piece of wood wobbles in an arc and ends up clothes lining nine humans in the face. The lute players play a fail song. The remaining human audience goes, “You stink!” And the king begins to eat a pig’s leg.
Magon looks down at his curled, stinky, bare feet and says, “Didn’t expect my opening act to bomb.” When Magon looks up, the angry knight is holding a decapitated head an iron trowel away from his face.
The knight bellows. The knight licks his lips. The knight curtseys and says, “Good day.” He pauses, then says, “Ye yearns to eat this head, do you not?”
Magon tries to swat the knight away and says, “No thanks. I’m sort of in the middle of a show here.”
“Well my bad,” says the knight. He shoves the decapitated head into his pocket and starts to walk backwards. “I shall take myself into the shadows.” As he retreats, he points at his eyes, then at Magon. “Remember—my eyeballs—ye moves.”
“Haven’t forgotten—thanks.”
In the time that passed, someone in the stands made a sign that reads, “Tis it time to do labor yet?, cause this guy is the privies!” and is pumping it into the sky. Now people are laughing.
Just blow all of them up with a fireball, Magon thinks. When they land, they’ll be cooked and ready to eat. It’s that simple.
Magon shakes his head and everyone thinks he’s loony. Then I’ll get owned by the guards. He pulls his wizard hat tightly over his furry face. There must be a better way to do this, but if I get booed out of here, I’ll lose my chance to slaughter the kingdom.
Then it hits him, so he plucks his head from the hat and shouts, “Boy! Boy near my staff! Would ye be so kind as to toss it back to me?”
The boy does so, and everyone watches with great anticipation. The king nods to one of his jesters and says, “Thee second time tis a charm.” He waves another pig’s leg around.
Magon clenches the staff in one hand and cocks it all the way behind his head. The audience holds their collective breath. It’s so quiet, the only things that can be heard are insects and farts.
Magon suddenly yells at the top of his lungs, “ARGHHHHHH!” and launches the staff into the air. The uneven piece of wood wobbles in an arc and ends up clothes lining nine more humans in the face. The lute players don’t have a song for this fail. The audience starts throwing tomatoes and battle axes. And the king is in a food coma. Someone offers him a piece of candy, but he says the only remedy is a good show. He also says, “Off with ye wizard’s head.”
The angry knight is on the field rushing toward Magon with his battle axe raised. He shouts, “Battle on!” He shouts, “War cry!” He goes to shout a third time, but Magon aims the wand at him and shouts back, “Unleash an explosion!” A glowing ball shoots out. It goes right through the knight. Right through the crowd. Right through the king. Then up into the air and BOOM!
Everyone eats popcorn as the explosion reveals a sparkling butterfly ten times larger than Magon in dragon form. As the knight is three ticks away from slicing Magon’s head off, King Lumpers yells, “Heed thy attack!” The king steals some popcorn from his jester and says, “I love butterflies,” and then the crowd goes wild.
*
After such a wonderful show, the king grants Magon stay in the keep. It’s the perfect spot in the castle. Eat all the guards as they sleep, then pose for a picture. But as Magon tosses and turns in his log bed, he can’t shake the excitement the crowd brought him. In fact, it’s during this time that Magon leaps out of his bed and then leaps outside his bedroom to come yet again face to face with the angry knight.
The angry knight yawns and holds up yet another severed head. “Ye know ye want to eat it.”
Magon takes the head and tosses it over his shoulder. He grabs the knight by the shoulders and shakes him excitedly. “I really don’t!” he shouts.
The knight yawns again, and Magon and the angry knight become best friends.
Magon skips around the castle, and instead of eating people, he greets them. He says, “Hi, I’m Magon the wizard!” and they say, “Righteous,” before falling back asleep. See, Magon always felt he needed to fill his empty shelf with killing, but never did he think of a reusable resource such as happiness.
The king asks him to stay forever, to which Magon accepts. He eventually goes on to meet everyone in the kingdom, even a man who says he has a device which can erase memories. Magon is so happy that he erases the fact that he’s really a dragon. In the end, Magon lives out his remaining years as a wizard. He meets an elf babe and has the angry knight as the best man in his wedding. And he has three kids. And everyone is happy because Magon the dragon disappeared. And they spread throughout the land. And that’s how humans inhabited the entire earth.
I’ve been reading a lot lately—a few short stories from Fantasy and Science Fiction’s 60th Anniversary Anthology (wasn’t impressed at all), Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (simply a creative masterpiece, although the last third of the book goes off the deep end), and now I’m reading Diary, also by Chuck Palahniuk. I also started Jodi Picoult’s The Tenth Circle and have Something Wicked This Way Comes waiting for me on the bookshelf.
