The Dragon King’s Substitute Bride
Chapter 20

MIDAS

"Let us pass Hermani."

"I am afraid I cannot do that...your highness."

"Dragon king I do not understand why you entertain this. Let me out."

But Midas refuses to listen to his dragon. He cannot give Er'gan control to attack just yet.

Not without his making sure she is safe.

The elf queen lifts her head and sniffs the air. Her narrow nostrils twitch and flare and suddenly her eyes widen slightly in realization.

"What do you hide a human behind your back. I thought you hated their kind?"

He feels Hera start behind him, her eyes drilling holes in the back of his head but he chooses to ignore it. "I hate your kind even more yet here you are, living in my forest."

The elf queen raises one perfectly arched brow and clicks a long slightly curved nail against her sharp teeth.

"Curiouser and curiouser. Who are you little human and why does the dragon king defend you?"

A surge of protectiveness surges through Midas, catching even him by surprise and when he speaks, his voice is an angry growl. "Speak to her again Hermani and blood bond or not I will cut out your tongue" "Testy are we? Now I am even more interested. Who is she?"

"I was not aware of the fact that I now answer to you and that what I choose to do and not to do is any of your business."

Hermani smiles but it doesn't reach those cold, emerald eyes. There is no warmth in it, only pure unadulterated malice. "You see that is where you are wrong dragon king..."

She raises the same finger and points it at his wound again. "Everything... everyone who dares step to foot into my forest is my business."

She makes that same twisting motion with her hand, her gaze cruel and piercing.

Midas braces himself in expectation but the pain is even worse this time and it rushes up his body with a burning fury.

A grunt escapes unbidden from his lips.

"My lord!" Hera calls out in alarm her grip on his arm tightening, searching his face.

When she sees the pain etched there, for a brief second, she forgets she is in danger as well. She yells at the woman standing with a grin on her white, ethereal face.

"What are you doing to him?!"

But Midas doesn't hear her call out.

The sounds of the forest fade out until it seems like it is coming from far away and soon he can barely hear anything at all. Nothing else seems to be able to penetrate the fog of pain around his head. The pain isn't entirely physical.

It had been his fault.

Perhaps not their arrival in the elder forest itself, but their continued presence in his realm, their claim on a land that was never theirs to hold in the first place.

That had been entirely his doing.

Since he could walk his mother warned him about taking things from strangers no matter how charming they looked.

"You are crown prince Midas..." she would say as he held him down and tried to brush a comb through his unruly white locks that even then hung all the way down to his shoulders.

"...you are heir to the dragon throne, the most dangerous seat in all the 7 realms and there are people who would take it from you and see you dead. You must be careful."

He would nod, not really listening. Even then he had been hard headed.

Hard headed and entirely too trusting.

That was why when the pretty woman with shining green eyes, hair like pitch beneath her hood and red... red lips had given him that big, shiny apple in the market he had taken it without a second's hesitation. Apples were a rare thing in the dragon realm and a big one like this was nothing but a delicious, scarce and treasured treat.

She told him to eat it at night because if the guards saw it they would make him share and wouldn't that just be a shame? Besides it would be sweetest in the darkness, when the moon was a gleaming solitary eye in the pitch black sky. Her smile had unnerved him even then but she ruffled his head and called him the dragon king and he pushed past the tinkering in his belly.

And young Midas was nothing if not patient. He waited till he was alone in his room that night, the sound of the tolling bells signaling when it was safe to bring out his precious treat.

But it hadn't tasted very good at all.

He had forced himself to chew and swallow but the fruit left a bitter disgusting coating on his tongue and the back of his throat.

So he threw it out the window, watching it roll and roll, a tiny shadow disappearing beneath a gloomy hedge bush.

Before he slept he remembers thinking how maybe the nice, pretty lady with the pointing ears probably wasn't so nice after all.

What Midas hadn't known then was that the apple had been no true precious apple at all, it had been a lure fruit poisoned and laced with the dark magic of a controlling spell.

And when next Midas came to, he was completely alone and no longer in his bed.

Instead he now stood under the dense canopy of menacing shadowy trees, in the middle of the Elder forest with no memory of how he had managed to get there.

Dazed and disoriented as he was, he had known screaming would be no use and even then, the echoes of the fierce, brave ruler he would be stirred in him.

He boldly began to try and retrace his way out the forest and maybe he would have made it but then they set their flesh eating monsters on him.

Black, fearsome looking beasts with runes of dark magic writhing beneath their dark fur.

The cats had chased him, herded him deeper into the forest and right into their trap.

They surrounded him, attacked him and when even confused and hysterical, he would not go with them quietly, they had stabbed him. Slicing open the flesh of his skinny child thigh with that poisoned gleaming silver dagger like it was nothing. The dark elves needed a lair to hide out after being exiled from their home in the 4th realm and they had chosen the elder forest of the dragon realm in it's place.

But now they needed to make sure they would not be driven away from their new home as well.

So they had cast a spell on him, lured him into the forest with that apple and now sent word back to his father, the King.

It was a simple message. "Let us stay in the Elder forest or lose your son and only heir forever."

The king's response had been immediate; requiring no thinking because there was only one option.

He made a blood bond with the woman who had given Midas the apple that had not really been an apple.

The dark elves could make the Elder forest their home. From the minute sun sets till the moment it break over the horizon at dawn, the land within the forest was theirs.

To roam freely and act as they saw fit. To kill, hunt and feed on whatsoever or whosoever trespassed within its borders when the sun no longer kept watch over the sky.

As long as the bond held, the royal family would never attempt to enter the forest under the cover of darkness and drive them out. In return, the dark elves would never again leave their forest to cross into the dragon capital or its surroundings. The minute the bond was sealed, the purple river had appeared around the forest, marking their territory.

Midas would never forget the face of the woman from the village square; the elf queen who had tricked him.

She haunted his dreams, green eyes blazing, her blood red lips stretched into that cold evil smile as she pushed a rotten apple full of worms into his tiny hands and many a nights, he would wake up in a cold sweat, the wound in his thigh burning. But he had never seen her again.

So he locked away the memory.

Until today.

"Midas..."

Her panic, teary voice, frantic and worried beside him pulls him out of the pain induced trance.

He glares at the elf that must be over 200 hundred years old yet appears the exact same way she had that fateful day in the village.

Would you like a juicy red apple?

He grits his teeth, rising to his full height. "I will ask you one last time Hermani. Let. Us. Pass."

But Hermani smirks. "You see dragon king..."

She takes a step back, her nails growing longer, sharper, redder with each word.

"... my people have grown and the elder forest is no longer enough. There is almost nothing left to hunt and no one strays in here by... accident anymore. We need more land." The stoic elf body guards begin to slowly move closer.

And Hermani stretches out her hands, a smile on her beautiful face. "With you gone, what to stop us from taking everything? The entire dragon realm would be ours." "You forget something Elf..."

"And what is that dragon king?"

The corner of his mouth tugs up in a dangerous smirk. "The blood bond was between you and my father..."

She sneers at him. "And?"

He straightens, the dragon King standing tall in all his glory. "I am not my father."

And in a blur of motion he whips out a small dagger and hurls it at the elf to the right.

The knife passes cleanly through the center of his forehead and his legs fold beneath him, the tall, white elf warrior crumpling soundlessly to the ground. "Now Hera!!"

He doesn't look but he hears her take off in the direction he instructed.

The elf queen, distracted turns her head sharply towards Hera's receding figure. "Do not let her escape!"

Midas lunges at her, swords unsheathed. "Your business is with me!"

She step sides the attack at the last minute but he manages to nick her in the arm and dark almost black blood drops to the ground.

The other elves see their queen in danger and at the sight of her blood, they forget about Hera and attack him.

He slashes and doges, feints and blows but they are fast, almost as fast as he is.

He doesn't let Hermani out of his sights or his attacks. He cannot afford to let her go after Hera.

So he focuses more on attacking her than fighting off the elf guards' attacks.

A knife pierces through his arm and he cries out, a roar of pain that shakes the forest.

He hopes she has gotten far enough.

Another knife slices through his calf and he kicks at the assailant.

"Dragon king..."

"Yes Er'gan"

"Let me out."

A dark cruel smile tugs up the lips of the ruler of the dragon realm.

"With pleasure."