The Tale of Umbriel Van Buren

Umbriel is one of my favorite characters, and probably the one I've commissioned the second most--there's just something compelling about a kooky girl becoming an anthropomorphic dragon. This artwork is once again by the highly talented Narubi, so please be sure to favorite the originals: one, two, three, four, five.

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The Tale of Umbriel Van Buren

1197 AD

In a roar of wings and flame, the dragon matriarch burst out of the cedar grove, the knight in hot pursuit on his steed. His arrows, aimed true, had damaged the matriarch's wing muscles, so her flight was erratic and untimely unsustainable. Half a mile away, she came to rest on the ruins of a Crusader fort that had been sacked by the Saracens.

"Come then, human, and meet the screaming death of your forebears," hissed the matriarch.

The knight raised his visor, revealing a clean-shaven face set with brilliant blue eyes and framed by a shock of midnight-dark hair. "I am Cyrus the Slayer, renowned dragonhunter in the service of Philip II Augustus, and you do not frighten me! My liege has commanded that this land be rid of you, that his men will no longer suffer your predations, and I intend to see his will done!"

The matriarch--Leira was her name--coiled her neck around a piece of ruined masonry. "It was the predations of your kind that brought the wrath of I and my kin down upon you!" she cried. "For where the Saracens only sheared the sheep, you have flayed it and left none for our repast!"

"Treacherous words from a treacherous wyrm!" Cyrus cried, lingering just out of range of Leira's fearsome fiery breath. "I offer you one last chance to sign the deed with your burning blood and renounce these lands as have your kin!"

"Never! My kin are weakened by fear and stupidity. They forget that we dragonkin my call upon the old magic in ways humans never could. Force me from my home if you dare!"

Cyrus spurred his horse forward in response, flipping down the visor with a flick of his head. Using the ruins for cover, the great wyrm launched a powerful fireball, which Cyrus nimbly steered his horse around. A second attack landed dangerously close, but the asbestos woven into the knight's armor kept him (and his horse) safe from serious harm. When Cyrus was close enough to use the ruined walls as a shelter, he dismounted with a flourish and sent his steed running in the opposite direction. The great dragoness suck her head out to launch a fireball and thus revealed her position within the ruined stonework. Using a cracked stone as a foothold, Cyrus launched himself upward. The matriarch saw him too late, and the last panicked swipe of her tail went wide.

The dragonslayer plunged his specially tempered sword into Leira's breast, and the wyrm fell writing and screaming with a mortal wound.

"Your will be done, sire," Cyrus said. He withdrew his blade and wiped it off, leaving the dragoness to bleed her last onto the dust.

"Hold, slayer." The matriarch's voice was ragged but clear. "Your kind will be the death of mine, and force us into hiding or oblivion. And for that I curse you and your kin, to the end of their line, with what little of the old magic remains in my bones. When a second child of a second child enters your line/On the eve of their fullness your seed shall be mine. In my death I burden you with our rebirth." The dying magical beast continued to curse Cyrus with her last breaths in a variety of tongues.

Cyrus ignored her, instead riding off to report how he had successfully tracked down and slain the dragon matriarch terrorizing the countryside near Acre. He gave no credence to the curse--the last, futile gesture from a vengeful and treacherous wyrm--until he arrived in the Hall of Mirrors in the Acre balance occupied by Philip II Augustus. Before reporting to the king, Cyrus checked himself in the mirror--and, to his horror, saw evidence of Leira's curse wrought upon him

For his blue eyes were now a deep and lustrous green.

Present

"Watch it watch it watch it!" Chris Lefterogiannis cried. It was his house (well his parents'), his party, his Nu Phi Omicron freshman pledge carrying a tray of drinks…and his guest Umbriel Van Buren who was pirouetting backwards to demonstrate an Italian ballet she thought looked funny. The ballet move was at the end of a conversational chain she'd started, moving there from repairing renaissance tapestries, the best way to laugh spontaneously, and rhetorical questions about the symbolic depiction of geoducks.

Dark-haired and slim, with striking green eyes and an artist's sensibility about her, Umbriel lost her balance and toppled into the pledge. She'd never quite lost her gangliness despite two decades of life on this earth and two years at Oceanside State, and she came down heavily on her coccyx as dropped glasses shattered in amber fountains all around her. It would have been almost beautiful if the drinks hadn't cost Chris, and by extension Nu Phi, and by extension the Lefterogiannis financial empire, hundreds of dollars.

"S-sorry," Umbriel said. She stumbled to her feet, taking care not to get any glass in her sandals; by some miracle no liquid or glass had gotten on her short-sleeved top or short jean skirt. "I guess that move looks even funnier when I do it, huh?" She grinned sheepishly before a friend's arm shot out to guide her away from the carnage and toward the open, sea-facing balcony.

Behind her, the pledge was frantically trying to scrape together the broken glass with one hand and sop up the spreading booze with an apron clenched in the other. He was moaning softly, either about the wasted nectar of college life or the paddling he was sure to get for not being able to get out of the way fast enough. Chris was seething, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, but he was quickly guided away by his friends before an outburst--the whole point of the party was to build up cool cred for Nu Phi in general and Chris Lefterogiannis in particular, and a shouting match was seriously uncool. Still, a "Why did I invite that klutz to my party? Sure she's cute, but it's just not worth it" was barely audible over the hubbub.

1971 AD

Knowing full well that dragons were capricious creatures literally in tune--and indeed formed from--the magical background of the cosmos, Cyrus took Leira's warning seriously. He handed down a ruling that none of his descendants could have more than one child, one which held for generations until the 1970s intervened in the form of his many-times-great grandson Bert.

"A ridiculous fairy tale," he said in response to his mother's entreaties, just before locking her away in an old age home. "This family can no longer afford to be bound up in petty superstitions. Not when there's so much living in the here and now to be done!

Bert was true to his word after committing his parents, he sold the family lands, heirlooms, and even the dragon-poem itself. Written on stretched dragonskin, no less, it went to a rare book collector in Atlanta who collected both curses and writings made on endangered or extinct creatures (a dodoskin book was another treasured keepsake). Bert used the proceeds to fund a massive worldwide bender that started in Monte Carlo and wound up in Vegas after detours through Macau and Sun City.

"If that shtupid family cursh was a real thing," he often said to perplexed onlookers, slurring his words considerably, "shurely it would've happened shenturish ago. No family can keep it in their pantsh for a thoshand yearsh!"

Bert was no hypocrite; her practiced what he preached, often under the influence of substances that Congress was rushing back into session to ban. Before he finally expired of a speedball overdose while dancing on a roulette table in Caesar's Palace, Bert sired two children from one-night stands: one with an Atlantic City cocktail waitress, and one with a valet driver at the MGM Grand. Neither, understandably, knew anything about their erstwhile father or the family curse…though both inherited Bert's vividly green eyes.

Present

"Why can't you be more careful?" Umbriel's friend Halley had dragged her out onto Chris Lefterogiannis's balcony, away from most of the breakable things in his house. Still, Umbriel had managed to overturn a dessert tray, bump awkwardly into seven people, step on multiple pairs of shoes, and leave a smear where she tried to walk through a closed sliding glass door. "You're just lucky that Kaiser Chris is in a good mood tonight, Bri."

"I thought it might intrigue some of the more thoughtful boys there," Umbriel said, putting her hands up in a mock ballet pose, though she'd never danced a single step of it in her life. "Anyone can describe the step; I wanted to show them."

"Bri, none of the boys are going to be intrigued by that, especially if you wreck their booze. I've told you before: you're pretty; just stand around and they'll get curious and come to you."

"I don't want them curious," Umbriel said. "I want them light-up happy, I watt them to see me as a cup overflowing with plenty of intrigue and mystery and late summer nights gazing at the stars." She threw her arms wide, beaming, only to quickly withdraw them when she accidentally whanged a nearby partygoer on the head. "Sorry."

"Oh, you're overflowing all right," Halley sighed. "Look, we came here to mingle and meet people…to do a little something special for your 21st instead of sit in the apartment and watch movies with a bottle of wine."

"But that's what I'm trying to do," Umbriel said. "Everyone here has built up these paper walls around themselves…I'm trying to invite them to tear those down, to confetti-ize them with me, and make some art conversational or otherwise."

Halley massaged her temples. "I understand that, Bri. But you can be…a bit much. A little klutzy and a lot to take in, and you know I say that with all possible love and affection."

"W-what are you trying to say, Ley?" said Umbirel. Her clear and carefree expression clouded, a premonition of storm in her sea-green eyes.

"I'm saying that I need a little time away from you, that's all," said Halley. "Stay out here for a bit, watch the sun set and the stars come out. I'll go in, mix, help clean up that mess, and come back out for you in a little bit, okay?"

Everyone that Umbriel had talked to who'd deigned to talk back instead of moving away with a weird look--especially Chris Lefterogiannis and his bunch--Halley had introduced her to. For all her talk of happiness and intrigue, Umbriel was terrible at approaching other people in a way that didn't overwhelm or weird them out. Without her moderating influence, Umbriel was practically alone.

"I-if you want, I suppose-" Halley was gone, slipped back through the sliding glass, before Umbriel could even finish her thought.

She approached the people on the balcony, but for some reason they didn't really respond when she asked if they knew how Carpathian artists depicted executions or offered to tell them the terrible secret of Phonecian art. Her attempt to give one of the deck boys a demonstration in juggling left him soaked with beer, and by the end of her circuit she'd accidentally barked as many shins and unintentionally elbowed as many kidneys as there were on the deck.

Eventually, with a sigh, Umbriel walked down the steps (she took the last seven at once as the result of a serious stumble) and walked out onto the beach. There was a barbecue and a nascent bonfire, but she avoided both in favor of the wilder side of the cove, away from the massive mansions and vacation homes.

1991 AD

Bert's posthumous second son Ron inherited all of his father's vices while the ancient virtues of Cyrus seemed to have skipped him (as well as his father) over. Instead, he inherited only the family good looks and penchant for throwing up on blackjack games. Growing up amount the glitz and glamor of a gambling mecca, by the time he was 18 Ron was working the casino and pool hall circuit as a two-bit hustler with little skill, little success, and only an uncanny ability to survive savage beatings to his credit.

Well, that and the ability to occasionally use his hustle to pick people up in bars. Out west, a liaison with a hostess in a family bathroom led to the birth of Belinda. Her mother was a struggling musician, and Belinda became a successful musical prodigy and concert violinist--the diluting of Cyrus' ancient virtues seemed to have come to an end with Ron's father Bert. Naturally, though, since her father abandoned her to flee town ahead of an angry mob of pool sharks nine months before she was born, Ron didn't see a cent of his first daughter's lifetime earnings. His musical tastes ran more toward things that were easy to bob to while drunk on multiple substances, so he never saw his daughter's familiar emerald eyes shining from a CD cover in the classical section, either.

Even further west, and safely out of reach (for the moment) of people to whom he owed gambling debts, blood money, or alimony payments, Ron took up hustling again and was able to talk is way into the back seat of a Geo Metro with another casino waitress. Hostessing to pay her way through art school, she--one Alicia Van Buren--gave birth to Ron's second daughter, Umbriel, after the girl's father had an arm and a leg broken by angry racketeers and hobbled his way back east. He still moves in hustler circles today, known as either "Unlucky Chucky" or "California Slim."

A spark of the old Cyrus line emerged in Umbriel; she trained as an artist from a young age and demonstrated a prodigious talent for it, as well as a strong sense of justice and a goofy earnestness that one could easily trace back to the old dragonslayer. From her father and his debased branch of the proud family tree, she inherited extreme bad luck, klutziness, and an miraculous ability to inadvertently self-sabotage at every juncture.

Of course, never having known her grandfather or father, Umbriel had no knowledge of the dragon's curse. Until, that is, the eve of her fullness.

Present

Sneaking away from the party was pretty easy when no one was looking for you.

Umbriel rounded a sharp corner at the edge of Lefterogiannis Cove, following the beach while Chris's house and its neighbors disappeared from view. The ocean waters were glass-smooth and the sun was in the final stages of setting, lighting everything up brilliantly, beautifully. There were a lot of gnarled and rotting tree stumps poking up out of the sand--probably why there were no houses built over there--but Umbriel was easily able to pick her way through the sand around them, and thought they added a certain ambience lacking from overly-groomed beaches.

"And they think they've got the best view on the beach," Umbriel said quietly. This was what she wanted to make people feel, this sense of overwhelming beauty and light. But of course she was always mucking it up with ill-timed remarks or breaking something, and now she was out on the beach alone while everybody at Chris's party had their backs to the sun or were watching football on the bigscreen. Umbriel tried to reach people through conversation, art, and motion, but all it seemed they ever reached for was the broom and dustpan.

Judging by the position of the sun, it was almost Umbriel's actual birth hour--her mother had embroidered it on all sorts of things, so she'd never forgotten it. As the shadows lengthened, Umbriel winced and rubbed her stomach. She was starting to feel a little ill; "Shouldn't have had all that booze…at least not while I'm underage for a few more nanoseconds. Or maybe those hors d'oeuvres, which had seemed more like an abstract art project or a commentary on the evils of consumerism than actual food.

Umbriel kicked her sandals off and walked to the water's edge, letting the cool sea soothe her. It worked for a moment, but soon the unsettled feeling grew worse. "M-maybe I should head back," Umbriel said. "Leaping into the beauty the world offers is one thing, but the hospital's still a better choice for unchoicey stomachpumpery."

As she talked, the sun slipped past the appointed mark, and she became, officially and in the eyes of the cosmos, 21. It was, quite literally, the eve of her fullness as Leira had long ago cautioned.

Stretching, Umbriel tried to ignore the growing unrest in her gut. As she held out her arms, something caught her eye: the nails on her right hand. They should have been uncolored and cut short--like always--but instead there was a slight tinge of color, as if from cheap lacquer, and the nails came to seemingly filed points. "That's…a little unusual," Umbriel said. "Did I get this done at the party and just forget in a haze of trying to expand minds and excite intrigue?"

Her other hand had the same strangeness about it, and as Umbriel examined them both the wrongness surged inside her, pushing bile to the tip of her throat. Her outstretched fingers began to spasm as if she was undergoing some kind of highly localized seizure…only with each twitch her nails grew longer, her nails dropped a shade on the color spectrum, and her hands roughened as if she were doing increasingly heavy loads of dishwashing. Not only that, but isolated patches on her forearms began to itch and ache; for a moment it looked like she was gaining new freckles, but as the patches quickly expanded Umbriel saw that the rough patches on her arms matched those on her hands…and both were rapidly taking on a greenish, jaundiced look.

"D-did somebody slip something in my drink?" Umbriel said. She inhaled sharply; speaking had drawn her attention to the unpleasant glassing in her mouth, as elongating and sharpening canines clashed with her normal teeth. A headache that had been growing since she first felt a little ill on the balcony spiked in intensity, and two small round knobs appeared on her forehead--as if clumsy, airy Umbriel had sustained yet another serious blow to the head, except that these lumps were too regularly spaced, too bony and hard…and seemingly pushing further out with each beat of her rapidly accelerating heart.

Umbriel almost lost her balance--that she was able to keep it in spite of the weirdness rapidly engulfing her was a minor miracle in and of itself--as the spasming took hold of her toes. Already long and delicate, each new ebb seemed to make them lengthier and stronger, while pushing her colorless toenails outward into pointed shapes that were unmistakably the beginnings of razor-sharp claws. In fact, the distinction between nail and toe soon vanished-as it did almost simultaneously on Umbriel's hands--leaving a smooth transition from flesh to claw--even as that flesh was rapidly shedding its familiar milky-white glow for what could only be described as emerging greenish scales.

"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh…what's happening to me?" Umbriel cried, convinced by the pain and the other sensations flooding her slim body that what she was experiencing was real. "I'm…I'm…ch-changing…RAARGH!" An intense bolt of pain made Umbriel grasp her aching stomach, while loosing an almost animalistic cry--or roar.

Grasping her side, Umbriel's developing claws tore parallel strips out of her shirt…and the green beneath indicated that the scales were swallowing her up ever more rapidly. Her feet continued to elongate, making balance ever more difficult, and her back was seized with intense contractions as her entire midriff grew longer, exposing skin rapidly transitioning to scale and a series of worrying bumps sprouting all along her spine. Umbriel reached out and wrapped a hand--a claw--around a nearby stump for support as she doubled over further.

"Urk…ugh…AAGH!" It felt like Umbriel's insides were on fire, but she wasn't able to speak through the pain. At least partially responsible was the state of her face, which was rapidly transitioning away from anything recognizably human. The lumps on her forehead had progressed to full-on horns, several inches long apiece, while other features seemed to have disappear to make way for them--like Umbriel's external ears, which had been absorbed by the quickly scaling skin of her face; the small earrings she'd been wearing plopped uselessly to the sand, one after the other. Her hair, too, was changing--in this case, it was rapidly disappearing, almost as if being retracted into Umbriel's living scalp. It had once reached her shoulders, but now barely brushed where her ears had been. The greatest change, though, was her nose, which had flattened and widened around the emerging bulge of Umbriel's mouth, which was stretching itself away from her face in an effort to contain a forest of enamel growing sharper by the minute and a tongue rapidly drawing pointed and prehensile. The pain and shock of her delicate and beautiful features being subsumed was almost too much to bear; desperately, Umbriel turned her eyes to the rest of her body using a neck grown long and knobby as the transformation followed the gentle curve of her spine.

The her shirt was tearing apart, as Umbriel's thin and awkward body began to bulge out with new and unfamiliar muscles (and her small A-cups, which had developed sudden duoble-D aspirations), but at her back--just visible through the craning of her metamorphosing neck--Umbriel could see something pressing upward agains the fabric. Her body was so beset by the pain of transformation that she hadn't felt them growing, but two unmistakable lumps were emerging from her shoulderblades. Tiny but growing spiked poked out of them, and two strange tendrils--almost like fingers--were emerging from the ragged hem of her disintegrating shirt. A similar spike was coming into being on either of Umbriel's elbows, but…it was impossible to think rationally, impossible to puzzle out what other indignity her body might be forcing on her.

Umbriel could also see--and, now that she was aware of it--feel something slithering in her skirt, in her underwear…something lithe, scaled, snakelike. A terrified mental image of the snake-tailed manticore she'd studied in Italian Art History 102 flashed through her mind. As the whatever-it-was moved through her panties and skirt, leaving a massive telltale bulge a mind's-eye of the mythical Gorgon followed. When a tiny green nub emerged from below the hem on her skirt, and Umbriel realized it was just s swelling and lengthening tail, the delirious relief she felt was almost enough to counterbalance the continuing--indeed, climaxing--pain and spasming that were wracking her still-metamorphosing body.

"AAAAGH!" Screaming provided the only release for the intense sensations, though the geography of the beach made it unlikely that any of the partygoers could hear Umbriel--it was probably better, she mused in the furthest corner of her mind, that they didn't. With the changes at a crescendo, she reached out both hands--now full, albeit still five-fingered and opposable, dragon claws, to steady herself agains the dead beach tree. Her miniskirt and undergirding panties gave way with a sharp snap, and a long and thick tail tore itself free, scattering the tiny pieces of cloth that remained as it did so. Freed from its prison, the tail grew rapidly, only stopping when it was nearly a third of Umbriel's body length. Her shirt, pressed from the back by the mysterious growths and from the front by Umbriel's broadening chest and swelling breasts, had already burst off. The strange "tentacles" were revealed to be leathery wings; spindly and awkward as Umbriel had once been when they emerged, they quickly flared outward, adding inches of scales and bone in mere seconds. It wasn't long before they were capable of supporting even her new and increased bulk in flight.

The bumps and protrusions emerging along Umbriel's spine revealed themselves to be spines of a different sort: a line of sharp spikes emerged between her new wings. Her legs bowed, not under the pressure of their suddenly thickened carapace or increased muscle mass, but because Umbriel's feet were no longer capable of supporting a plantigrade stance. With a final convulsion accompanied by sharp cracking sounds, they reached their final length and newly developing tendons forced Umbriel to her toes, now grown robust, clawed, draconic. The emerging pattern of scales was different on her belly than her back--just as the great Matriarch Leira's had been.

Even as the transformation was finalized elsewhere, Umbriel's face continued to change. Her horns grew still longer as her hair dwindled to just a black shock and then nothing--not a single strand of her midnight-dark mane was left. And her draconic muzzle reached its apex, even as the pain of its growth squeezed Umbriel's eyes tight and teary. Her teeth interlocked smoothly, and growing scaly lips finally caught up to them, covered them. Aside from the vague outline of her jaw, perhaps, there was little to show that the dragoness's features had once belonged to pretty, etherial Umbriel Van Buren.

The pain and discomfort faded in each of her limbs--new and old--as the metamorphosis slowed, as bones locked into new places and shapes, as the last pale bits of humanity scaled over like old wounds. It lingered only in Umbriel's stomach, but after a moment's intense discomfort she parted her jaws and let fly with a massive gout of flame, which immediately cooled the searing fire within her. Umbriel's eyes slowly opened--they remained the exact same shade, but with slit pupils befitting her new form. Releasing the dead stump, she stood upright--the upright of her new, larger, longer body--and regarded her reflection and the body visible below her powerful new jaws without fully processing them.

At the exact moment the clock nudged over, the dragon's curse had been fulfilled: Umbriel had been transformed into a perfect fusion of human and the long-extinct line of the dragon matriatch. Umbriel stood for a moment, in shock, unsteady, regarding her new form (and holding her new tail) with a mixture of apathy and mild interest. Then, all at once, the reality of the situation caught up with her like a freight train.

"Oh my god…I'm a…I'm a…MONSTER!" Ashamed and terrified, she instinctively attempted to use her wings to fly away from the pile of shredded clothes that indicated where she had changed...only to run directly into a highway billboard and inadvertently set it on fire.

She was, after all, still Umbriel.

The new dragoness lit up the skies of the valley that night, in a haze of confusion and panic, as she attempted to somehow get away from herself, from what she'd unexpectedly become. Eventually, Umbriel's consciousness simply faded out …and she awoke some time later, past dawn, high atop a transmitter tower overlooking the valley, apparently human and naked save for shreds of billboards, banners, and circus tents that she had flown through. She heard steps below her as a phone company technician climbed the steps up to her platform, having seen her from the ground.

"What are you doing up there?"

"Would you believe…avant-garde performance art?" Umbriel replied sheepishly.

And so it was that there came to be an ever-present chance that Umbriel Van Buren may suffer a "dragon attack" and see the hidden part of herself, of her curse, manifest itself as a draconic transformation lasting anywhere from an hour to a month. Umbriel still never could figure out what triggered the transformations, but she has at least become less likely to panic and commit inadvertent arson or accidentally fly through commercial airliners.

But at any time, heralded only by queasiness and the occasional flaming burp or black smoke billowing hiccups, Umbriel Van Buren might find herself paying for her ancestors' dragonslaying by experiencing modern life as a perfect melding of what were once enemies.