A Good Sulk Disrupted Gleefully

20260820

Written for “Smogust’s Story Hoard”, prompt 14.

If you wanted a really good sulk, you had to get away from everything. No distractions. And the bottom of the sea was the best place for that. At least, when you were a dragon. Especially if you could cast an air-shield, so you didn’t even have to deal with currents or fish bumping into you.
Humph. Karzon huffed through his nostrils, sending a plume of smoke sliding along the magical dome overhead. It had been one of those days where nothing had gone right, and a horde of tiny things had gone wrong, and he was done. Might just stay down here for a decade! Or at least, until he got hungry.
He was so wrapped up in grumbling and snarling to himself, at first he dismissed the plink sounds as raindrops. Until the thought slowly wound through his funk that he was underwater.
At which point he slithered over to investigate. Peering through the milky magical barrier, he discovered a set of small figures throwing pebbles. Huh. Some kind of attack? No, their body language was entirely wrong for that.
So he focused and breathed on the barrier, causing a section to turn glasslike - and started as the figures scattered. But he caught enough of a glimpse to identify young merfolk. That explained it. Of course such curious and jocular creatures would see strange magic and try and make a game out of the unknown phenomena.
Karzon snorted again, this time reluctantly amused. And settled himself once more. But he maintained the ‘window’.
Sure enough, the little merfolk soon swam back to investigate. Definitely children - that one there only had one arm, the other still half-formed. And their torsos were much shorter than an adults. He’d never seen merfolk so young.
They clustered around the window, pressing their faces to the barrier and peering with great excitement at him. Clearly they’d never seen anything of the sort, either. The sight of their features flattened and stretched against the magic made him laugh outright, and they gestured wildly at the smoke rings he snorted. Delightfully unafraid.
On a whim Karzon puffed out a much smaller shield, this time imbuing it with a touch of earth, so it was heavier than water. He used his nose to nudge it outside the barrier.
Merfolk knew a toy when they saw one. They converged on the ball, a scrum of clumsy grasping limbs and thrashing tails, then one shot out with the ball held overhead - and threw it back into the air-shield, practically bouncing off Karzon.
Oh, alright then.
Before long he was adeptly smacking the ball back with his wings and the merfolk had spread out into a catching formation, darting to snatch and return the toy. While the barrier blocked sound, their glee was clearly visible - and infectious.
Karzon was somewhat disappointed when a child paused, a webbed hand lifting to their frilled ear, then shouted to the others. As one they turned and waved to him, the ball was lobbed one last time, but gently so it rolled along the ground to his feet, and they swam away.
Had to be dinnertime. Or bedtime. He wasn’t sure how merfolk schedules worked.
Come to think of it, he was pretty hungry himself, now. That had been far more exertion than he’d bothered with in some time.
And… the thought of brooding down here alone was no longer appealing.
So he dismissed the earth-shield and shrunk the air-shield down around his head. Why hold your breath unnecessarily? He could swim much faster this way.
But he made a careful mental note of where he was. The shape of the nearby rocks, the pattern of the seafloor, and where he’d settled relative to where he’d jumped in.
Should be easy enough to find it again.

I took the prompt as “Dragon in a magic bubble at the bottom of the sea”.

Click through to see the awesome art for this prompt (and maybe read other stories written for it while you're there).