The Isle

(This is something I wrote for a Writing Prompt on reddit. I edited it a bit and decided to post it here too.)

The Isle has been there since anyone can remember. People avoided it while sailing to our village. There have been stories though. Stories of fools, who ventured to search it, with hopes that the tales were true.

The tales say that the isle, The Spine, as people started calling it just decades ago, is exactly that. A spine. The spine of a dragon named Thur.

Thur was the dragon used by the rebels who tried to kill King Rown, seven centuries ago. The stories say that the rebels managed to infiltrate the castle. Rown and his family retreated in the catacombs beneath the church. The rebels surrounded the catacombs entrance for three days, waiting for the royal family to surrender, or die of hunger. In the meantime, Tallion, a powerful mage, and the leader of the rebels, used Thur to break into the royal vaults, and rob them.

Tallion and his rebelion’s efforts were in vain. The king had an advantage. The catacombs were hiding a secret tunnel underneath the city. Rown, along with his family used those tunnels to escape unnoticed, and went to the mage’s tower, in the forest next to the capital. Archmage Gillian, the leader of the mages at the time, summoned three spirits of beings from another world. These beastlike creature had spears of thunder and wings of light. Their heads like those of birds. The mage ordered them to slay the dragon, which was flying to the rebel’s cave, with loot from the royal vaults.

There was barely a fight. The dragon didn’t last long. The spirits outnumbered him. They threw the spears in the dragon’s wings, tearing them. Thur couldn’t fly anymore, he had to land on the nearest isle. A small isle, close to shore. It was there that the dragon was killed.

With the king safe, the mages unleashed fireballs, blizzards, all kinds of magic at the rebels, but destroying the church in the process. The dragon’s head was retrieved from the isle. The story says you can still find it in the dugeon underneath the castle.

With time, only the spine of the dragon remained. What happened to the rest is unknown.

It is said the royal army retrieved most of the gold back from the isle. But stories say there might still be some left on the isle, from all those centuries ago. Who knows? Nobody that we know who went there ever came back.