Parchment of the Blingders
A World of Draconica short story
By Dan Wright
By Dan Wright
My name is Randall Cort and I am a student at St Geordia University. History is my main subject. Not exactly something that my father approves of – he owns The Samurai Panda, the local tavern. I think he always wanted me to follow in his footsteps, but I just had no interest in serving drunken louts for the rest of my life. I had bigger ambitions.
As far as I can remember, I’ve always had a fascination in the history of our planet – and how the dragons shaped and moulded it to create life. But what really interested me was the huge number of mysteries on our planet.
The history of Draconica is mostly well documented – thanks to the amazing scholars that have painstakingly recorded every single detail they could. But even so there are still a vast number of things that we don’t know about. I never really enjoyed a question that didn’t have an answer – so I turned to history to see if I could find the answers to these questions. I guess you could say this was my ambition.
One of the mysteries that has been debated for years is the story of the Blingders. The legends go that the Blingders were one of the richest people on Draconica – but they refused to share their wealth with anyone else, so they hid themselves away in the deepest caves they could find. No one had even known of their existence and to many it just seemed like a fairy tale.
That was until recently.
By chance, an exhibition to Blingder Woods (which is supposed to be the spot where they lived), found a choice discovery. The explorers found a cave belonging to the barbaric Banelords. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that was – you only need to talk to anyone who survived an encounter with a Banelord to know what they are like. IF you can find someone that survived that is! Miraculously, when they searched the cave, they found that all the Banelords had been encased in ice. No one knows why, but if you ask me, only Zarracka Dragonkin could have done this. Stands to reason. Though what she was doing there in the first place is beyond me.
Anyway, they searched the cave and found all sorts of relics and items that the Banelords had either collected from passing travellers, or had horded themselves. Most of it was just rusted junk, made old from years of being held in that dark cave. But what they did find was a scroll that, despite being held in damp caves, appeared to be in amazingly good condition. On investigating further, it had – what was believed to be – the only known recorded writings of the Blingders themselves!
Naturally, something like this was an historic moment. They immediately brought it back to Brittana for all the scholars to study and confirm its authenticity. Draconica has been plagued by many fakes over the years – but after many months of investigating, they concurred that this scroll was indeed genuine. Although how old it was the scholars could not agree on. Some say it was thousands of years, others only a few centuries. How old it was ultimately irreverent. We held the only know proof record of the Blingders existence.
This, as you can imagine, caused up quite a stir amongst the learned of the city and many in the land wanted to study them for themselves. Given that these documents were priceless, and due to the high demand, they were automatically taken to the High Library so that a close eye can be kept on them. They were available to be viewed on request, but special permission had to be granted.
It goes without saying that my interested was aroused – this could be my first chance of possibly solving one of history’s riddles and truly solve the mystery of the Blingders. Procuring permission to read the parchments was not especially hard – the library assistant Caroline (a rather shy but comely lass that studies in the same class as me) put in a good word and arranged for me to see the parchment after closing. She’s a nice girl. I owe her one for this!
It was after sundown when I arrived, just as everyone else had left. The library was kind enough to provide me with a number of papers to make notes and a quill pen and ink. I was given a small room in the library so that I could concentrate without disruption – a rather unnecessary act given that no one else was there. Caroline brought the scroll to me, along with some green tea and some bread to snack on. In my excitement I had missed dinner, so this was a nice gesture.
I was surprised to find that the “scroll” was actually a number of different parchments and not a long scroll as I originally was lead to believe. The paper itself was dark yellow and felt really stiff to the touch. I had to hold it with the most delicate of touches for fear that too much of a grip would break it. Surprisingly, the ink was as legible as if it had been written yesterday. I had heard stories of a special ink that apparently never drained once it was put on paper – but never really thought that existed. My fingers were tingling as I held the paper closer to the light, but tried to keep them steady so that they wouldn’t shake the paper apart and ruin a priceless piece of work. I read the first page:
To whomever may be reading this, I ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the money which he sweats and bleeds for? Why then must he spend half his life giving it to other people? The poor? The sick? The governments? Why should a man work for money only to have the leeches suck it dry from him? That's why we created our own society, where a man can keep what he earns for himself, so that he may never need give it away ever again.
My ancestors were slaves to their own environment. Like many others in their land, they believed in money. They worked a living, worked hard so that they could earn as much money as possible. However, no matter how much they worked for it, they only had to give it away a week or so later. How rich would a man be if he did not have to give any of his wealth away? How better off would his life be if he could only keep what he earned?
For their beliefs, they were exiled. Cast out and left to die in the wild, forced to trek through Venomac Swamps, where they were sure they would meet our doom.
Miraculously, they survived. They came through the other end smelling sweeter than ever before. They travelled to the mountains, where a cave was discovered, rich with gold the likes of which no one had never seen before. My fathers discovered that there was an infinite supply of this gold, enough for us all to never share with anyone ever again.
This is where our dreams could come true. This is where they created a society where a man would never have to worry about governments taking money from their accounts, or for the poor to stop you in the middle of the street and take your purse from you. This was our own Heaven, free from the greedy tyranny that was the world. This was where we would become:
The Blingders! The only wealthy free people!
There was no signature on this parchment to determine who wrote this piece. All that I saw was a symbol of a rosary with a large B in the middle – the symbol of the Blingders. Even though I did not know who had written this, I felt a real sense of arrogance lifting off the paper, as if the writer felt a sense of superiority in his words. It was like the writer was mocking us for feeding our own governments and monarchies and not fight to keep what we had earned.
One thing puzzled me, why would they write this if they had not intended on sending it out?
I moved to the next page, this one in slightly better wear than the last. I deduced that this was written later than the other, though by how much I could not tell. As I read this parchment, I felt the arrogance of the writer lift off the page in a manner stronger than the last. Strange as it may seem, I could almost imagine the writer laughing as he wrote it.
If only you could see our city, surface dwellers. How you would envy us. You think you can create cities and palaces of beauty? You have not seen our world underneath. You have not seen the beauty that we have created. In our world, there is no poor, no sick, no needy, no parasites. We are all rich beyond our wildest dreams! Wealth that is all ours to share.
Though he gave no physical description as to the specifics of their underground society, I imagined vast, golden buildings, shinning like the furious sun, blinding all with their beauty, diamonds being their windows, the very road they walked on paved with gold.
It must have been so beautiful to behold.
I continued on.
You have no comprehension of the utopia we have created here.
Nor shall you.
You may call us greedy, materialistic, vain, arrogant, self-centred or even spoilt.
I call us free.
I felt a surge of anger fill my veins. I began to hate the writer and his pompous attitude, like he was mocking me with each vial of ink that dripped on the page, putting as much hubris into each word. But at the same time, I also felt envious of his way of life. I had to struggle to earn what I could, doing odd jobs for market traders in between my studies – which was barely enough to pay for the hovel where I resided. Father didn’t even pay me any money, he believe I should earn everything I work for. The Blingders were free. What I wouldn’t give to be like that.
Still, again I had to take issue with these letters – not just because of the content, but because I still could not grasp the idea of why they would write this and never release it to the outside world. Did they plan on leaving this for someone to find years in the future? Maybe they thought their society would live for thousands of years and this would be done as a way of showing the others the perfect society they created. Their own, as he put it, utopia.
I took a sip of green tea to try and clear my head, swimming with all sorts of ideas and images. I was trying to visualise what it was like for these people to live and wishing by each passing second that I could have seen it for myself. There were only two more pieces of parchment left so I swiftly moved onto the next one.
The tone of this one was a little more desperate – despairing even. All arrogance of the previous pieces seemed to have disappeared, replaced only by a sense of foreboding terror.
Our worst fears have been confirmed. When I first heard the news, I didn’t want to believe it. How could it be possible? This cave was supposed to be infinite in its riches! It can’t run out.
And yet… it has. For over three centuries, our people have lived in harmony, thanks to the gold that this cave has given us. Now our very lifeblood is being drained slowly. Our greed blinded our judgment; we have now become slaves of our own tyranny.
My people have become restless, fearful of losing the gold we so desperately rely on. In our plight, a war has broken out. We have turned on each other, looting, thieving and some are even tearing down the buildings we spent so many years crafting as we all fight to control the last piece of gold. Our once beautiful city is being reduced to ruins.
The next line came across a little unexpected, considering the former text up until now. It sounded almost like the writer was defeated – having lost all hope.
Maybe this is the reason why governments take our gold, maybe it’s why we give it to the poor and needy. And it’s only now I see why.
Money is the route to evil.
I almost felt pity for the unknown writer – but most of it was satisfaction that he had got his comeuppance after his very brash wording earlier. That changed once I read the last parchment.
This one was less coherent than the others and appeared to be somewhat scribbled – the ink blotchy and words spilled into each other, making it hard to read at first. After struggling with the words to try and transcribe what was written, I finally managed to work out what would be the writer’s last words.
Our city is now a shadow of it’s former self. The dead lie in the streets, slain by their own kind. Friends, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers… all dead.
Some of our kind escaped to the surface world. Their fate I do not know, but for those who stayed behind…
Jeova forgive me… what have I become? My child… she was only two… how could I… all I wanted was her necklace, her golden necklace… but my hands…
I hear them banging on my door. I do not have long. The monsters that have killed my kind are now coming from me. Monsters that our greed created, monsters that our guilt gave birth to. I will not allow myself to become a victim of their brutality. I have seen the horrors that our greed has spawned… and I shall be part of it no longer.
I put the parchment down, my hands numb and the back of my spine feeling numb. The lengths that people would go through just for one piece of shiny metal.
I left the library not long after that, having no need to linger any longer. It was my own curiosity that made me want to read those parchments due to a necessity to solve the mystery of the Blingders. But the parchments had not so much answered the mystery, but brought up a lot of moral dilemmas in my mind.
Perhaps the Blingders serve as a cautionary tale to those who seek wealth and the corrupting nature that it can have on the weak. I suddenly began to appreciate my predicament a little more. I may not have all the money in the world, but I am happy nonetheless. The parchment had tried to convince me that I wasn’t – but after reading it I suddenly realise that it’s better to not have a lot and use it wisely than to have too much and not know what to do with it.
I was rather taken by the unknown writers’ statement in the second to last paragraph “Monsters that our greed created, monsters that our birth gave birth to.”
Everyone knows now that the Blindger woods are dangerous places to go, given that they are residents to the vile Banelords. Therefore, it makes this discovery of the parchment even more amazing when you consider that very few people dare to go through that wood with the chance of surviving.
I wonder – could the Banelords have been the Blingders in a previous life? Where they so ashamed by their own actions that they just forgot how to be human and resorted to savagery?
I guess the Blingders learned a valuable lesson. And we too can learn from this.
Nothing in life is free. Not even utopias.
As far as I can remember, I’ve always had a fascination in the history of our planet – and how the dragons shaped and moulded it to create life. But what really interested me was the huge number of mysteries on our planet.
The history of Draconica is mostly well documented – thanks to the amazing scholars that have painstakingly recorded every single detail they could. But even so there are still a vast number of things that we don’t know about. I never really enjoyed a question that didn’t have an answer – so I turned to history to see if I could find the answers to these questions. I guess you could say this was my ambition.
One of the mysteries that has been debated for years is the story of the Blingders. The legends go that the Blingders were one of the richest people on Draconica – but they refused to share their wealth with anyone else, so they hid themselves away in the deepest caves they could find. No one had even known of their existence and to many it just seemed like a fairy tale.
That was until recently.
By chance, an exhibition to Blingder Woods (which is supposed to be the spot where they lived), found a choice discovery. The explorers found a cave belonging to the barbaric Banelords. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous that was – you only need to talk to anyone who survived an encounter with a Banelord to know what they are like. IF you can find someone that survived that is! Miraculously, when they searched the cave, they found that all the Banelords had been encased in ice. No one knows why, but if you ask me, only Zarracka Dragonkin could have done this. Stands to reason. Though what she was doing there in the first place is beyond me.
Anyway, they searched the cave and found all sorts of relics and items that the Banelords had either collected from passing travellers, or had horded themselves. Most of it was just rusted junk, made old from years of being held in that dark cave. But what they did find was a scroll that, despite being held in damp caves, appeared to be in amazingly good condition. On investigating further, it had – what was believed to be – the only known recorded writings of the Blingders themselves!
Naturally, something like this was an historic moment. They immediately brought it back to Brittana for all the scholars to study and confirm its authenticity. Draconica has been plagued by many fakes over the years – but after many months of investigating, they concurred that this scroll was indeed genuine. Although how old it was the scholars could not agree on. Some say it was thousands of years, others only a few centuries. How old it was ultimately irreverent. We held the only know proof record of the Blingders existence.
This, as you can imagine, caused up quite a stir amongst the learned of the city and many in the land wanted to study them for themselves. Given that these documents were priceless, and due to the high demand, they were automatically taken to the High Library so that a close eye can be kept on them. They were available to be viewed on request, but special permission had to be granted.
It goes without saying that my interested was aroused – this could be my first chance of possibly solving one of history’s riddles and truly solve the mystery of the Blingders. Procuring permission to read the parchments was not especially hard – the library assistant Caroline (a rather shy but comely lass that studies in the same class as me) put in a good word and arranged for me to see the parchment after closing. She’s a nice girl. I owe her one for this!
It was after sundown when I arrived, just as everyone else had left. The library was kind enough to provide me with a number of papers to make notes and a quill pen and ink. I was given a small room in the library so that I could concentrate without disruption – a rather unnecessary act given that no one else was there. Caroline brought the scroll to me, along with some green tea and some bread to snack on. In my excitement I had missed dinner, so this was a nice gesture.
I was surprised to find that the “scroll” was actually a number of different parchments and not a long scroll as I originally was lead to believe. The paper itself was dark yellow and felt really stiff to the touch. I had to hold it with the most delicate of touches for fear that too much of a grip would break it. Surprisingly, the ink was as legible as if it had been written yesterday. I had heard stories of a special ink that apparently never drained once it was put on paper – but never really thought that existed. My fingers were tingling as I held the paper closer to the light, but tried to keep them steady so that they wouldn’t shake the paper apart and ruin a priceless piece of work. I read the first page:
To whomever may be reading this, I ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the money which he sweats and bleeds for? Why then must he spend half his life giving it to other people? The poor? The sick? The governments? Why should a man work for money only to have the leeches suck it dry from him? That's why we created our own society, where a man can keep what he earns for himself, so that he may never need give it away ever again.
My ancestors were slaves to their own environment. Like many others in their land, they believed in money. They worked a living, worked hard so that they could earn as much money as possible. However, no matter how much they worked for it, they only had to give it away a week or so later. How rich would a man be if he did not have to give any of his wealth away? How better off would his life be if he could only keep what he earned?
For their beliefs, they were exiled. Cast out and left to die in the wild, forced to trek through Venomac Swamps, where they were sure they would meet our doom.
Miraculously, they survived. They came through the other end smelling sweeter than ever before. They travelled to the mountains, where a cave was discovered, rich with gold the likes of which no one had never seen before. My fathers discovered that there was an infinite supply of this gold, enough for us all to never share with anyone ever again.
This is where our dreams could come true. This is where they created a society where a man would never have to worry about governments taking money from their accounts, or for the poor to stop you in the middle of the street and take your purse from you. This was our own Heaven, free from the greedy tyranny that was the world. This was where we would become:
The Blingders! The only wealthy free people!
There was no signature on this parchment to determine who wrote this piece. All that I saw was a symbol of a rosary with a large B in the middle – the symbol of the Blingders. Even though I did not know who had written this, I felt a real sense of arrogance lifting off the paper, as if the writer felt a sense of superiority in his words. It was like the writer was mocking us for feeding our own governments and monarchies and not fight to keep what we had earned.
One thing puzzled me, why would they write this if they had not intended on sending it out?
I moved to the next page, this one in slightly better wear than the last. I deduced that this was written later than the other, though by how much I could not tell. As I read this parchment, I felt the arrogance of the writer lift off the page in a manner stronger than the last. Strange as it may seem, I could almost imagine the writer laughing as he wrote it.
If only you could see our city, surface dwellers. How you would envy us. You think you can create cities and palaces of beauty? You have not seen our world underneath. You have not seen the beauty that we have created. In our world, there is no poor, no sick, no needy, no parasites. We are all rich beyond our wildest dreams! Wealth that is all ours to share.
Though he gave no physical description as to the specifics of their underground society, I imagined vast, golden buildings, shinning like the furious sun, blinding all with their beauty, diamonds being their windows, the very road they walked on paved with gold.
It must have been so beautiful to behold.
I continued on.
You have no comprehension of the utopia we have created here.
Nor shall you.
You may call us greedy, materialistic, vain, arrogant, self-centred or even spoilt.
I call us free.
I felt a surge of anger fill my veins. I began to hate the writer and his pompous attitude, like he was mocking me with each vial of ink that dripped on the page, putting as much hubris into each word. But at the same time, I also felt envious of his way of life. I had to struggle to earn what I could, doing odd jobs for market traders in between my studies – which was barely enough to pay for the hovel where I resided. Father didn’t even pay me any money, he believe I should earn everything I work for. The Blingders were free. What I wouldn’t give to be like that.
Still, again I had to take issue with these letters – not just because of the content, but because I still could not grasp the idea of why they would write this and never release it to the outside world. Did they plan on leaving this for someone to find years in the future? Maybe they thought their society would live for thousands of years and this would be done as a way of showing the others the perfect society they created. Their own, as he put it, utopia.
I took a sip of green tea to try and clear my head, swimming with all sorts of ideas and images. I was trying to visualise what it was like for these people to live and wishing by each passing second that I could have seen it for myself. There were only two more pieces of parchment left so I swiftly moved onto the next one.
The tone of this one was a little more desperate – despairing even. All arrogance of the previous pieces seemed to have disappeared, replaced only by a sense of foreboding terror.
Our worst fears have been confirmed. When I first heard the news, I didn’t want to believe it. How could it be possible? This cave was supposed to be infinite in its riches! It can’t run out.
And yet… it has. For over three centuries, our people have lived in harmony, thanks to the gold that this cave has given us. Now our very lifeblood is being drained slowly. Our greed blinded our judgment; we have now become slaves of our own tyranny.
My people have become restless, fearful of losing the gold we so desperately rely on. In our plight, a war has broken out. We have turned on each other, looting, thieving and some are even tearing down the buildings we spent so many years crafting as we all fight to control the last piece of gold. Our once beautiful city is being reduced to ruins.
The next line came across a little unexpected, considering the former text up until now. It sounded almost like the writer was defeated – having lost all hope.
Maybe this is the reason why governments take our gold, maybe it’s why we give it to the poor and needy. And it’s only now I see why.
Money is the route to evil.
I almost felt pity for the unknown writer – but most of it was satisfaction that he had got his comeuppance after his very brash wording earlier. That changed once I read the last parchment.
This one was less coherent than the others and appeared to be somewhat scribbled – the ink blotchy and words spilled into each other, making it hard to read at first. After struggling with the words to try and transcribe what was written, I finally managed to work out what would be the writer’s last words.
Our city is now a shadow of it’s former self. The dead lie in the streets, slain by their own kind. Friends, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers… all dead.
Some of our kind escaped to the surface world. Their fate I do not know, but for those who stayed behind…
Jeova forgive me… what have I become? My child… she was only two… how could I… all I wanted was her necklace, her golden necklace… but my hands…
I hear them banging on my door. I do not have long. The monsters that have killed my kind are now coming from me. Monsters that our greed created, monsters that our guilt gave birth to. I will not allow myself to become a victim of their brutality. I have seen the horrors that our greed has spawned… and I shall be part of it no longer.
I put the parchment down, my hands numb and the back of my spine feeling numb. The lengths that people would go through just for one piece of shiny metal.
I left the library not long after that, having no need to linger any longer. It was my own curiosity that made me want to read those parchments due to a necessity to solve the mystery of the Blingders. But the parchments had not so much answered the mystery, but brought up a lot of moral dilemmas in my mind.
Perhaps the Blingders serve as a cautionary tale to those who seek wealth and the corrupting nature that it can have on the weak. I suddenly began to appreciate my predicament a little more. I may not have all the money in the world, but I am happy nonetheless. The parchment had tried to convince me that I wasn’t – but after reading it I suddenly realise that it’s better to not have a lot and use it wisely than to have too much and not know what to do with it.
I was rather taken by the unknown writers’ statement in the second to last paragraph “Monsters that our greed created, monsters that our birth gave birth to.”
Everyone knows now that the Blindger woods are dangerous places to go, given that they are residents to the vile Banelords. Therefore, it makes this discovery of the parchment even more amazing when you consider that very few people dare to go through that wood with the chance of surviving.
I wonder – could the Banelords have been the Blingders in a previous life? Where they so ashamed by their own actions that they just forgot how to be human and resorted to savagery?
I guess the Blingders learned a valuable lesson. And we too can learn from this.
Nothing in life is free. Not even utopias.