Tara

~written by Disillusionist (254672)

Ursa’s magic was regarded as legendary by the swamp-folk, yet she still wanted more. She whispered words of sorcery to the air, trapped a Nature spirit, and infused one of her eggs with it. The resulting hatchling would surpass even her in power—what a successor this child would be! A worthy recipient and vessel to the knowledge and magic imparted by the Gladekeeper herself!

Thus, from the moment Tara hatched, she was closely tended by her mother. The riddles of the natural world were presented to her, and Ursa watched proudly as her daughter unlocked each puzzle one by one. A quick mind and keen perception...Surely this child would be her heiress! For weeks they toiled, day and night, candles burning well into their guttering hollows before Ursa would let the youngling rest. Jubilant at Tara's quick grasp of curses and countercurses, protection circles and ancient rites, and this groundwork well established, Ursa eagerly introduced the child to the rituals and experiments needed to claim magical mastery of nature...and here her pride began to wane.

The child was squeamish. She cringed as the athame was pushed into her grasp, and she blanched and trembled at the sight of blood. “It is necessary,” Tara was told. “You will get used to it.” But she never did. When she was tasked with brewing remedies, she did so with admirable facility—but the idea of brewing poisons repulsed her, and she always refused the task.

Life and death...Couldn’t she understand that these were two sides of the same coin? She was a bright child, so surely she did....But she couldn’t seem to accept it. In frustration, Ursa sent her to apprentice under another witch, Maple, the 'Village Witch', the better to hone her magic, thinking it merely the result of stubbornness that the hatchling had failed to 'present' before now. But this, too, ended badly, for Tara proved to be completely barren of magic. She was finally called home by some sad news—her father, Silas, had died.

After the funerary rites, there was no comfort for squeamish, unmagical Tara. Her mother received Maple’s report with grim bitterness. The pride she’d once felt for her daughter now soured to rancor, and instead of the once-promising hatchling, she saw nothing but a failure.

To make matters worse, it was no secret that the Swamp Witch’s efforts to raise a successor had failed. Sooner or later, she would fade away, and the balance of power in the Swamp would tip. Other dragons began jockeying for position, mindful of the day when they, too, could rise to power.

They were more cunning and ruthless than Tara could ever hope to be. Though she was regarded as worthless, that meant nothing—someone might still decide to remove her or use her as a political pawn. Cirsei's reptillian eyes and crimson shadow seemed to stalk her everywhere she went, and always Tara felt sure that her next meal, her next drink, the next time she tired enough to close her eyes unawares, would be her last. And so Tara left the Swamp, which had nurtured and borne her. She walked until the marshland turned to forest and birds sang in the trees....

Shadows passed overhead. Moments later—a blast, a conflagration. The harpies had hurled something—an explosive? Tara stared in horror as cries of fear reached her ears. The birds and beasts...the dragons. There were dragons living here!

Though her clan had thought her worthless, she was determined not to be. Perhaps she could be of use even now, when all seemed lost....

She turned her back on the darkness and bravely faced the flames.

~written by Disillusionist (254672)
all edits by other users

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I.
"You’re not broken, little one. You’re not less useful."
Tara forced herself to look up, to meet the kindly old swamp witch’s warm eyes. Maple rarely had a good word for her apprentices, but she lavished affection on Tara, knowing that she needed it most.
"You’re different than everyone else, you know?"
The two of them were in Maple’s small hut, surrounded by bundles of herbs and bottles of fermented berries. Benevolent statuettes of Pearlcatchers gazed down on them.
Tara had tried the easiest spell known to dragonkind — she had tried to make a light appear behind the Pearlcatchers’ eyes and turn them into mini-lanterns. But try as she might, she couldn’t produce a single spark. No. All she gave herself was a monumental headache.
She pressed the chilly poultice against her forehead and tried to lose herself in Maple’s kind words.
"Even if you can’t do what we can, you’re still special. Never forget that. You have your own unique strengths that make you better at some things and worse at others, you know? Life is not a race or a competition. It’s a canvas, and you have to paint it with whatever paint is available."
Tara’s fist clenched on the poultice. "But I don’t like the paint I’ve been given."
"No? Well that’s too bad. Look at what I can paint with just brown." Dusting a canvas off, Maple showed Tara an intricate forest scene done only with brown ink. The leaves on the trees rippled as if alive, in the sunlight.
"More magic," Tara said bitterly.
"No. Just dedication. And kindness, even to the color brown." Maple laughed in her strange, quiet way, but she wasn’t surprised when Tara left her home later that evening.
II.
Trudging through the ankle-deep snow in the wintry forest, Tara forced herself to look up.
If only memory was magic — she could remember every word of every book she had read. Complex un-cursing diagrams floated before her eyes. She could draw out every symbol of magic in detail. She had stores of riddles packed away in the cellars of her mind.
And yet, she couldn’t light a single spark.
Some dragons found it so easy. Magic bubbled up to their fingertips and out of them.
But all she had was her stupid memory.
She loved riddles and curses, though, and undoing both of them. She liked the strange, lateral ways in which she had to think to accomplish that.
But she would have traded all of her knowledge to be able to make a flower bloom from the snow.
She knew she shouldn’t have left Maple’s swamp cottage in high winter, but she was a stubborn dragon at her very core. Each footstep broke the rime of ice on the plush white snow, letting her sink in to her knees.
Sighing, puffing out clouds of warm vapor, she gazed through the lattice of branches up at the full moon. It was a silent night —
Until it wasn’t.
A brilliant white light suddenly filled the heavens.
Tara flung her paw before her eyes, gasping.
The white light had a sound, too, like wind whistling through the trees. Crackling followed it. Then the smell of sulfur.
Amazed, Tara forced her eyes open, and saw that the source of light was a brilliant white globe.
It plummeted toward the horizon.
Tara braced herself.
The crash rocked her world. She fell to the snow, panting.
Then, to her alarm, the white light wasn’t going away. Instead, the wintry trees had picked up a stray flame.
She recognized the type of white-blue fire leaping in arcs from tree to tree. The snow should have slowed the flames’ advances, but it wasn’t. The edges of the fire radiated bright white plasma. The trees burned even though they were damp.
And that meant one thing:
A curse.
With renewed purpose, Tara hurried forward.
III.
“Miss! What are you doing?!” A Skydancer shielding her children’s eyes gaped as Tara hurried past. “The fire’s stronger that way! We’ve got to leave!”
“Let me through. I’m trained in this sort of thing.” Was she, really? Was she trained in anything?
Tara shook herself.
The Skydancer gaped at the Pearlcatcher. Something about her — a sense of purpose, a sense of duty — made the Skydancer step aside. “But Miss…you’ve got no water!”
“I don’t need any,” Tara said grimly. She marched forward, into the icy-hot flames.
The world was growing brighter and brighter. She knelt and deftly helped an old Pearlcatcher wrap his paw. He limped away, urging her to run.
And yet…she couldn’t.
Something about the cursed flames was calling to her. Their sweeping dance invited her to step nearer.
Shaking her head, she realized it was the curse itself calling her. Beckoning her forward.
She knew what she had to do.
IV.
Coming to the center of the white-hot inferno, she saw the problem.
The meteorite — it was some kind of Fire egg. A hulking, ugly black-red shell pulsed with lava and spit out sparks. Every so often, it let out a gushing torrent of cursed white flame.
Tara gritted her teeth. It was under the thrall of the most complex curse she’d ever seen. Perhaps a curse that hailed from beyond this planet. Could she possibly stand against it…?
Never mind that.
She remembered Maple:"'Even if you can’t do what we can, you’re still special. Never forget that. You have your own unique strengths that make you better at some things and worse at others, you know? Life is not a race or a competition."
And what was she good at?
Breaking curses.
She recited the ancient words in flawless draconic. The vowels rolled off her tongue. In response, the burning egg let out a whistling, howling, demented sound. It seemed to be crying in pain.
Tara’s eyes flashed. She leaned into the sheet of flame and spoke louder. Her voice grew louder and louder, louder than it could’ve been for any dragon, until it shook and rocked the earth. And in response, the flames leapt higher and higher, clawing for the stars, scraping the black sky. And still Tara spoke on without hesitation, without taking a breath, the long curse-killing spell pouring out of her.
With the words came all her fear, loathing, and self-doubt. As the night grew darker and the moon wheeled toward the horizon, any watching would’ve said Tara was bathed in soft white light — light that kept the fire away.
Slowly, the spell began to break. The flames turned from glistering white to ember-throated red. And with the breaking of the curse, and the flames’ transformation into true fire, the snow began to work its own secret magic.
As dawn broke across the forest, the glittering snow snuffed the flames. Soon the world was bathed in thin gray smoke. It hung in sunlit sheets between the trees.
Tara pitched forward, face-first, onto the egg.
The kindhearted members of Oakheart Clan gingerly stepped up to check on her. Solus came nearest of all. He knelt down and pressed an ear to her back.
Tara’s heart was beating fine. And as Solus withdrew, she let out a little contented snore.
V.
Though Clan Oakheart remembers it all as Firefall, in which half the forest burned, they also remember Tara.
Her bravery in the face of monumental odds serves as a tale to inspire hatchlings. Indeed, at Greenskeeper Gathering, the tale is retold by puppets, with Tara menacing a huge flaming beast. Sooty and Tara chuckle to themselves about the inaccuracy of this re enactment, but they never complain. It makes for a better tale than what really happened. That's the magic of stories.
And though Tara will never be able to use magic, she knows that she can accomplish just as many equally valuable things with dedication and bravery.

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