The Fortune's Harvest by Sydney Dunbar
Dragons & Wyverns Short Story Challenge
2nd place
The Fortune's Harvest
A dragon-hunting ship prides itself on its collection of rare pearls harvested from ferocious sea dragons - until a secretive new deckhand infiltrates its ranks to reclaim what was stolen. When the truth is revealed, the captain’s prized treasures become the cause of his destruction, and both the intruder and the ship’s scholarly apprentice must reckon with the devastating reality that the hunt might never have been for treasure at all.
Trigger Warnings: Violence (moderate), Death (moderate), Emotional distress and grief (mild), Loss of offspring (severe)
"The Howling Fortune doesn't just hunt dragons, it hunts treasure. But do we learn anything about either?" Asherah ignored the voice. She always did when he tried to talk to her. Hugo, they called him. The apprentice navigator, or scholar. She couldn’t remember. Couldn’t care less.
Hugo's earnest voice carried on the sea breeze as he wiped his hands on his ink-stained coat.
She didn’t look at him as she swabbed the deck. Newly hired hands were expected to watch, listen, and learn the daily routines of a dragon-hunting ship without question. Her eyes tracked the beginnings of the watch change. As the ship swayed, the lanterns flickered and set some of the deck in shadows - including the door that led down into the belly of the ship.
"The captain says dragons hoard treasure," Hugo continued, wiping sea salt off his crooked spectacles, “but what if it’s more than that?"
Pearls, the crew whispered. Fortune, they called it.
Asherah scoffed - she knew better. Hugo glanced down at her as he pulled a leather journal from his pack.
“I’ve been studying them,” he explained - mistaking her scoff as disbelief rather than disgust, “the captain trusts no one with the collection room lock, but I was just in there and I think something happens to them when we take them from the sea-”
Asherah looked at him, just as the bell rang overhead.
“You know nothing of what you speak,” she said lowly. Hugo’s eyes widened. “Your voice-”
Before he could continue, she moved, slipping into the shadows between crates as sailors shuffled positions. Hugo's philosophical musings faded behind her. She had no time for questions about fortune, dragons, or the moral weight of theft.
Asherah descended into the ship’s moaning belly. The engine room hissed and groaned, steam curling through iron grates. Asherah's borrowed boots made no sound on the metal stairs. Three days she'd been on this ship. Three days of binding her hair beneath a cap, of swallowing her voice into something flat, of letting the sea-born stone around her neck anchor her to this fragile body. Three days searching.
The collection room door loomed ahead, iron-braced and marked with tallies. Dates. Harvests. She pressed her palm against the cold metal and pushed.
The door was unlocked, she realized - the apprentice must have left it.
The realization was immediately overshadowed by what was inside. Most of the vault was obscured by the gloomy darkness, but shelves lined the walls, each one holding coral cradles. And
in those cradles -
Pearls.
Dozens of them. Wyvern Pearls, the sailors called them. Glowing softly in the dim light, their surfaces shimmered with iridescent blues and greens.
Asherah's throat tightened, her heart pounding.
These were her people's eggs, stolen from the sea, and dying in shallow beds of dead coral. She could see it in their dullness, the way their sheen had faded. They were cloudier than they should be, their light flickering like candles snuffed out.
She was too late for them. Her heart dropped.
Please no
Her eyes caught on something in the far corner.
It sat on a pedestal, cubed and ancient, adorned with bright larimar stone that gleamed like captured ocean. Draconic sigils covered its surface, swirling in blue essence that pulsed faintly in the darkness.
Asherah's breath stopped. This was the language of her people, of the deep. Her fingers reached out, trembling, and the moment her skin touched the larimar, the sigils flared. They tightened and spiraled, responding to her blood, her heritage, her right. This was her nest.
The one she'd built in the kelp forests. The one she'd hidden in the darkest trenches. The one that held her eggs - the last living clutch of her bloodline.
And someone had stolen it.
Behind her, the iron-braced door slammed shut, and she whirled.
Not that it mattered. She was almost entirely obscured by darkness. She reached forward until she found the braces of the door. Pushed. Pulled. But the door wouldn’t open. She was trapped.
“I was wondering when you’d make your move.” Asherah froze.
Behind her, she heard the strike of a match, and she turned. Captain Nathaniel Cain sat in an armchair at the furthest corner of the collection room, a glowing lantern, a tin cup, and a bottle of rum on the table beside him.
As well as a flintlock pistol - holding cold-iron bullets, no doubt.
Even sitting, Cain was a mountain of a man, scarred and massive, his face marked with claw-like gouges that ran from temple to jaw.
Asherah’s chin rose as panic clawed its way up her throat as understanding dawned. It was all a trap.
"I know everything that happens on this ship. Three days I've been waiting." Asherah watched him warily as he pushed to his feet.
“Did you really think I’d leave my prized collection open for the taking?” He questioned. “Your prize was stolen - you don’t deserve these treasures,” she growled at him. He crossed the distance between them in two strides and tore her cap away, her dark hair spilling free, long and tangled with salt. He grabbed her hair.
“I earned these pearls. I’ve lost men. Ships. Even-” He stopped himself, and she could see it in his eyes. Hatred. Maddening grief. It wasn’t just men and ships he had lost. He lost someone important.
But so had she. She clawed at the hands in her hair.
“You lost them to a hunt you never should have begun,” she sneered. His grip tightened on her hair, her skull throbbed. Damn this fragile human form.
She reached for the stone at her neck, but he clasped it instead.
"No-"
"I know what you are," Cain growled. "Seasnake. Siren. You can’t hide yourself from a man of the sea." His scarred face twisted with hatred. "If sirens are protecting these pearls, they must be worth more than I thought."
Asherah fought against him. If she could just remove the stone-
"You're only a siren," Cain continued, keeping her against him, “blast your kind and your songs. Can’t sing outside the water, can you?” She bared her teeth at him. "I had to kill a very angry dragon to get this nest," he said slowly, "fought for hours. Tore through my crew. I thought it was just hoarding treasure-"
His words struck her like a blow.
"That was my mate," Asherah whispered. Her mate, her beloved Leomaris, had been killed protecting their unborn hatchlings.
The words hung between them like a blade.
Cain's expression shifted - not to remorse, but to something else. Satisfaction. “Grief isn’t just human, is it?” he asked with a smug, hateful smile. She struggled furiously but he held fast. "You know what’s inside - what it died protecting." She growled at him, snapping her teeth.
"You will never get them.” Cain laughed, shoving her face toward the door. "This door was designed to keep my treasures safe," Cain jeered, “no one gets in without my permission. And no one gets out."
He yanked her back to face him, his scarred face illuminated by the dying pearls.
"Open the nest. Show me my prize - then I’ll end you like I ended your precious mate.” She waited, feeling the dip and pull of the ship. He knew the sea, but she was part of it. At the next sway, she pulled down, his hand pulled at the rope that held her stone - It clattered to the floor, and Asherah felt the anchor holding her human form shatter like glass.
He slapped her.
“What game are you playing, siren?” He growled, “open the damn chest!” She shook violently, the pain nothing now, but could only smile at him - her teeth becoming dagger-sharp fangs.
“All dragons are not sirens,” she told him in a hiss, “but all sirens are dragons.” Cain barely had time to register his confusion before her body exploded. Bones cracked and reformed with sickening pops as scales erupted along her skin. Cain stumbled backward, releasing her hair as it flattened and transformed into scales.
"What-"
The collection room became a storm of destruction.
Asherah’s body expanded, her hands rippling into claws that gouged deeply into the metal walls, her limbs stretching in the confined space and smashing into the shelves. Her neck grew, serpentine and powerful. The dead pearls tumbled to the floor, shattering like glass against the iron. Coral cradles cracked and scattered.
She was too large for this space - far too large. Her tail whipped out, smashing into Cain, who was thrown against the wall, his head cracking against the iron bracing. The vault door groaned under the pressure of her expanding form. The iron frame warped. The hinges bent inward.
The door that was meant to keep treasures in now locked them both inside. Cain staggered to his feet, clawing at the warped metal. But it wouldn't budge. The lock had jammed. The frame had buckled.
The door wouldn’t open for him. He had built his own tomb.
Asherah turned her massive head toward the outer hull. Her instincts screamed for the sea. For water. For home.
But- her nest, her children.
Below her, the nest had opened - responding to her dragon roar. The larimar pulsed before dimming completely.
Hope flared in her chest as the pearls glinted.
But then she saw cracks, and fractures. Parts of her eggs had been chipped like glass, and
were surrounded by the tiny, skeletal bones of her unborn children.
The roar that burst from her throat was born of rage and grief. So thunderous that the hull splintered with a deafening crack. Seawater exploded through the breach, a torrent of cold brine flooding the vault. Cain screamed, scrambling for higher ground, but there was nowhere to go. The water rose rapidly, swirling with debris - shattered pearls, broken coral, splinters of wood.
Asherah tore at the breached hull, bracing against the deluge of seawater. Behind her, she heard Cain's gurgling cry - reaching for her. She watched him through slitted eyes in grim satisfaction as the vault filled completely.
The captain drowned in his own collection room, surrounded by the pearls he'd stolen, locked behind the door he'd designed.
Above deck, chaos erupted. Sailors shouted, scrambling for lifeboats as the ship tilted dangerously. The steam engine hissed and sputtered, dying with a final, mournful wail. And then she emerged. Asherah burst through the hull in her true sea dragon form. She was serpentine and magnificent, easily the length of the ship, with scales gleaming like polished gemstones in the moonlight.
The ocean enveloped her, comforting her like a lover in her bittersweet sorrow. The moment she was submerged in water, the wrongness that had plagued her for days - the dryness, the constriction, the suffocating weight of human form - vanished. She was home.
Asherah turned to watch as the Howling Fortune groaned its death rattle and began to sink, bow-first, into the dark water. Her sorrow had no name, her grief all-consuming. Her love gone, her children lost.
But one dragon-hunter was gone. She could live with that bittersweet knowledge.
Hugo clung to a piece of driftwood, soaked and shaking, watching the dragon's silhouette against the moon. In his clenched fist was a fragment of a pearl - still faintly glowing. He'd followed the new hand to the collection room - had heard everything - and had grabbed a pearl, just one, as the ship exploded. Now he stared at it all with a dawning realization. They hadn’t been collecting treasure at all.
They were collecting eggs.
He looked up just in time to see the dragon’s tail disappear beneath the waves, a flash of iridescent scales catching the starlight before the sea swallowed her whole. Something in Hugo stirred - he was only an apprentice, no one had ever listened to him.
Not anymore.
The Howling Fortune sank with a final, shuddering groan, taking Cain and his collection to the ocean floor.
The harvest had ended - but the hunt for knowledge had only just begun.