CW: war, war crimes, and poison in a thinly-veiled faerytale.
A lovely city thrived beside a blue sea.
Autumn brought golden leaves tumbling with the wind. Winter gave crystalline snow and indigo shadows at noon. Spring sent all the perfumes of blooming fruit trees.
In summer, sunflowers bloomed.
At the center of the city slept a dragon, as old and wise as her city, seen only be those who truly needed her counsel and kindness.
She had no gold, except what the city gained in prosperous trade. The city, its people, and their country were her hoard. She dozed dreaming of its music and art, its merry festivals and ancient solemn rituals.
The king of a neighboring land coveted the Sunflower Country for its gold, its fields, its seaports and skilled artisans. He hated it for being a happy, progressive mirror to his own nation of ignorant, superstitious thieves and bullies. He hated the Sunflower Country for merely existing.
He sent rich men who owed him favors to buy the Sunflower Country’s governors.
Listening to their hidden dragon, the people of the Sunflower Country sent the rich men away.
The greedy king then sent harmless-seeming jugglers and acrobats. dancers and players to woo the people and turn them from their elected governors, claiming a deep kinship between the two countries.
But among the Sunflower Country’s cities, a humble bard rose up and mocked the spies. The whole country laughed at their lies, and the spies fled back to their king.
The king simmered in his red palace.
His hatred became obsession.
He went to his poorest, most ignorant, and resentful subjects. He told them the Sunflower Country was responsible for their poverty. That its riches could be theirs (a lie, for he would always take the best things for himself and his corrupt kin, just as he always had with his own country). All the angry peasants had to was consent to become monsters.
For some of them, it did not take much change.
The red king sent his monsters to ravage the Sunflower Country by the sea.
Cities were shattered, fields burned. The people sent as many of their loved ones away as they could, to any kind of safety, then stayed to fight the invaders.
They killed many monsters.
The monsters killed many of them, and stole many more, sending them into captivity and slavery in the red king’s land.
The king spread new lies: all of his atrocities were caused by the Sunflower Country and its humble bard. That the Sunflower Country had always been a part of the red king’s land. That the Sunflower Country had never existed at all.
Believing these lies, more monsters spawned among the red king’s people, and even among his allies in far-off lands.
In the city by the sea, the dragon watched her people become brutalized. They fought valiantly, but she feared for their survival…as people, and as the people of a free land.
Would they become monsters, themselves?
Seeing the king’s monsters looting, the dragon saw a way to use that terrible greed and resentment against her enemies.
From the living and the dead, they stole. A child’s shoes. A porcelain clock. A bicycle. Embroidered linens. Sacks of flour, sugar, and sunflower seeds. A grandmother’s garnet beads, yanked so hard off her dying neck that the golden clasp broke.
The dragon saw surviving monsters haul away their loot to a neighboring ‘neutral’ land whose rulers were vassals of the red king. The monsters sent trainloads of looted goods back to their families and sweethearts.
Those messaged back to their monster kin: ‘We are poor here. Send us more from the Sunflower Country!’
The dragon knew the red king had bought his rule by looting his own country. Murdered his way to power, often with dreadful poisons, the fear of poison, or violent torment and death.
The only one now who risked her soul was the dragon…and she was already a monster in her own way.
So she communed with the old gods: the sparrow who brings springtime out of winter, the drowned maiden-ghosts of rivers and dark lakes, the lord of horses and oak trees, the terrible and just grandmother-of-the-forest. The dragon had long followed her people’s gentler, newer religion. Seeing no sky-god come to help her people, she went to her old kin.
They exacted a price.
She paid it joyfully.
They set curses on all the loot stolen from the Sunflower Country.
Each piece, no matter how rich or ordinary, became deadly poison once it settled inside the red king’s country. The same poisons he had wrought, would rise up a thousandfold against his own people.
The families would die, choking.
The sweethearts would falter with black bruises spreading across their fair skin, and their hair would fall out like winter-rotted straw.
Their children would thrash, howl, and shudder, before going still. The few who survived would become sickly and sterile.
The land itself would wither into poisoned mud in spring, and vast burning forests in the heat of summer.
Even in far-off lands, those who knowingly accepted the spoils of the Sunflower Country, would fall to the dragon’s curse.
Then the dragon set the curse to endure past her death, past the death of any of her people.
She could never go back to breathing strength and heart into her people; exile was the price she paid for that magic. But she saw across the wide world too many red kings, too many monsters, so she vowed to seek them out and help their enemies.
Her last gifts to the Sunflower Country were good aim to the grandmothers with sniper rifles. Deep, clinging mud to bog down the monsters’ trains and trucks.
Sunflower seeds scattered over the corpses of invaders, so the golden blooms would rise through their bleached bones.
Turning one more time back from the borders of the Sunflower Country, the dragon’s keen gaze watched one package of loot on its way from monster soldier to monster general, from general to oligarch, from oligarch to the red king’s palace.
Unwrapped, the package would reveal a crown of carved lapis waves and red-golden sunflowers, the last work of a besieged goldsmith in the city by the sea.
The dragon knew the red king could not resist crowning himself with it.