The Serpent's Den

A standalone story fragment from the Eastsong Cycle (fourth epoch)

The lone dragoon glanced back at his horse, who waited alert at the edge of the swamp. Then a silent, uncanny alarm shivered his spine; he whirled about.

He scanned his surroundings as best he could, given the dense foliage and dismal light. Though his sense of leeriness persisted, he discerned no threat, nor any sign of man, beast, or spirit.

A stirring in the murky, shallow water a few paces away caught his ears. Scimitar at the ready, he took slow, cautious steps across the squelching ground. Pouring sweat from the thick, warm air, he knelt in mud and marsh-grass by the water’s edge.

It was a baby leviathan.

He’d never seen such a creature, but it could be nothing else. The diminutive serpent made agitated splashes in its efforts to favor a badly mangled leg. It couldn’t have been longer than his forearm. When it saw him, it snapped unconvincingly with jaws full of teeth like miniature arrowheads. Its slender tail curled protectively around its body.

He couldn’t help but crack a marveling smile. The tiny beast seemed to smile toothily back.

But then the swamp itself seemed to rise up behind the little leviathan, like a shadowy morass that filled his vision. The dark form blocked out the canopy of crooked trees and creeping vines.

His sweat ran cold, but he found his voice and uttered the first words that came to him. “Great is the Wright,” he rasped, “even beyond the borders of the realm. And all the way to the Serpent’s den!”

In reply, the hatchling chirruped, and its mother opened her colossal maw over the trembling dragoon.

---

Note from the Author

Hi, readers! We’ve officially activated the Substack chat feature for Vaporous Realms!

If you’re interested, you can download and log into the Substack app (where you can also read all of your Vaporous Realms posts). If you click on the chat icon at the bottom, you should see a row for Vaporous Realms chat inside.

Feel free to post questions and thoughts there! We’ll use it to post our own thoughts and questions sometimes, as well as occasional quick updates—especially if the Substack website is ever glitching, as happened to us for a few days last week.

If you have questions or difficulties with the chat app, please post here and we’ll see what we can do!