The characters (part 6)

THE GREAT DRAGON

(This is the sixth in a series of character descriptions from The Death Wizard Chronicles, my six-book epic fantasy.)

Who is Bhayatupa and what is a great dragon?

Bhayatupa is, by all accounts, the single most powerful and feared dragon to ever exist on Triken. The great dragons differ from the lesser dragons and the dracools because of their immense size and fantastic magical powers.

At the time of The Death Wizard Chronicles, Bhayatupa was more than eighty thousand years old, second in age only to Vedana and a few other demons. He was almost 300 feet long from snout to tail and weighed close to 30,000 pounds. His scales were a bright crimson and impervious to injury, and he breathed fire and spewed liquid flame. His brain alone was the size of a boulder, though his extreme intelligence was dwarfed by his selfishness and deceit.

Until the appearance of Invictus, Bhayatupa had feared no being and was called Mahaasupanna, which meant “mightiest of all” in the ancient tongue—and for millennia beyond count he had ruled vast kingdoms and was revered by everyone, including the other great dragons. Even Vedana, the mother of all demons, feared Bhayatupa the Great, though she boasted that he was her creation, a claim that Bhayatupa treated with disdain.

Despite his immense size, Bhayatupa could fly higher, faster and more gracefully than any other being. This was due partially to his wide, strong wings, but more likely was made possible by magic, for surely no being of such girth could move quickly on the ground, much less fly. Bhayatupa also had very flexible jaws and a thick, red tongue, and he was able to speak in the same way that a human could speak, being fluent in hundreds of languages, many long forgotten. He also was wise in the ways of the demons and knew all their spells. His physical strength alone would have made him deadly, but when combined with his magic, he was powerful beyond ordinary comprehension.

Bhayatupa’s lone weakness was an insufferable fear of death. Because of his unbridled narcissism, Bhayatupa could not bear the thought of his existence ever coming to an end, and he obsessed over it every waking second.

Photo by Shutterstock.

Up next: the dracools.