Free The Dragon and the Witch by K.T. Tomb

as anything I’d ever seen. And like a movie, I eavesdropped on the past—on the night of my birth. I moved off the rock and toward the wall as I watched the events unfold. Hazy as it was, I could see everything detail of every second of that night of my birth exactly eighteen years prior.
    My mother sat on the very rock where I had been sitting and as blood covered her nightgown, she delivered me on that rock, her hands reaching down and pulling me from her womb. Nude and crying, I sucked at my fingers.
    As I watched the scene unfold, I saw a love in her eyes that I’d never known she’d had for me. The way she cradled me in her arms, her soft voice singing a lullaby. She placed her finger in my mouth and I suckled it, my nude body warm against hers. As I watched the past unfold, tears streamed down my face.
    She loved me, so why did she get rid of me? I wondered.
    My mother moved me from her finger to her breast and she fed me, my eyes barely open, the cave dark with the moonlight shimmering through small pinholes in the cavern above and reflecting off the water. With the utmost care, my mother carefully wrapped me in a shirt, swaddling me as she used the water from the fountain to clean my face, eyes and mouth.
    I’d never known how much she’d loved me until that moment—until that vision played in my mind with perfect harmony. Her touch was gentle. Her humming voice was soothing and as I watched, I saw a shadow as big and fierce as I’d ever seen come into the cave.
    I yelled at the top of my lungs, “Run! Mom, run!” But she couldn’t hear me. This was an echo of the past and nothing I said would change the end result. So, I had to watch her softly give me a bath as a predator stalked her in the cave.
    With my hand over my mouth and tears running down my face, I shook my head, begging the vision to stop, needing it to end at that moment. But I realized my needs would not be met. And so the ghastly beast stepped out from behind the shadows and showed its grotesque face and all I could do was cry out, “Nooooo! It can’t be. Not you!”
    A younger Tolbalth stepped out and stood in front of my mother. His eyes were glossy with fierce anger and he stepped down hard, shaking the ground. My mother glanced up, gasped and pulled me into her chest, stepping back and away, almost slipping on the blood from my birth.
    “What do you want?” she said. “You can’t be in here. You have to leave.”
    Tolbalth said nothing. Instead, he cocked his head back, preparing to spit fire at my mother. She pulled baby me into her chest.
    As I watched the past unfold, a desperate scream was lodged in my throat.
    My mother threw up her hand. “Wait!” She cried out. “Not my baby. Kill me, but don’t hurt her. Zadie doesn’t deserve to die.” She softly kissed my head and set me down on the ground in front of the fountain of water. “It’s me you want,” she whispered, as her frantic eyes moved from the huge dragon to her newborn baby.
    He cocked back and blew a stream of hot fire toward my mother, but instead of engulfing her in flames, he used the flames to encircle her and cage her in. Then he transformed into his human form—the man I knew so well—the one I called my father.
    He glared at my mother as the infant Zadie cried uncontrollably, wailing out against the heat of the cave. He stepped toward my mother and in a rough almost unrecognizable voice, he said, “You will know the pain of losing a child. You will suffer the fate of such a loss because killing you would be too easy—killing you would only end your misery in seconds.”
    “I don’t care what you do to me, but you better not hurt her or I’ll rain hell down on you,” she screamed out from behind the circle of flames.
    “I’m in hell,” Tolbalth roared. With those words, he picked me up and glanced down at me. Not with the same loving eyes I had grown to know, but with a disgust I’d never seen before. And then, he held me in the air and