Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

Elixa and her friends find themselves in the magical realm of Sugarland! King Cupcake of the Kingdom of Cake has invited them on a quest, to travel to the Sundae Mountains and slay the dreaded Candy Dragon, but everything in Sugarland might not be as sugary sweet as it appears.

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“Welcome, brave travellers! Welcome to the realm of Sugarland!”

The man who addressed them, if he was a man, towered over the four teenagers. He dressed in a militant sort of regal finery, with chocolate chips lined up on his breast like medals and a cape the colour of red velvet cake trimmed with frosting. Instead of a head, their greeter had a giant pink cupcake covered in sprinkles.

Elixa and the other three teens looked around in amazement. Everything in the immediate area appeared to be made of candy or cake. Behind the man with the cupcake head was a castle shaped like an enormous white wedding cake. It came complete with a bride and groom on top, but also had turrets and arrowslit windows. The ground beneath them was some kind of sponge cake and instead of grass and bushes there were layers and clumps of frosting. Chocolate horses grazed around the square near lollipop trees. Even the clouds above, against the azure sky, looked like pink wisps of fairy floss. Ringed around them were people with heads made of individual slices of cake, or candied fruit, or oversized chocolate chips.

“Where are we?” Jycob asked in amazement.

“You are in Sugarland, in the Kingdom of Cake!” The man with the cupcake head swelled with pride. “I am King Cupcake, and these are my loyal subjects.”

The frosted pink top of King Cupcake’s head flopped as he spoke to form a kind of mouth. The king had only two dark holes for eyes, as if someone had stuck their fingers into his face and gouged out a couple of sockets. The creepiness of the empty eyeholes was mitigated by a pair of sprinkles, one blue and one green, that acted expressively as eyebrows. On the very top of his head, where a birthday candle might sit, was instead a very tall and narrow crown.

“Brave travellers of meat and skin, may I have your names?” King Cupcake asked.

“Of course, your liege,” Jycob said, getting into the swing of things. “My name is Jycob and these are my friends, Marco, Valerie, and Elixa.”

“Hi.” Elixa raised her hand awkwardly.

“Brave travellers, I know you have come from afar and you may prefer to rest awhile. But, if you are feeling capable, I have a quest that the four of you may join!”

“A quest? Yeah, of course you have a quest,” Marco said.

“The Candy Dragon lives high in the Sundae Mountains east of here. For too long, it has menaced the good people of Sugarland and the Kingdom of Cake! My men and I will soon set out to hunt the beast and slay it, and we would be honoured if you would join us!”

Everything King Cupcake said sounded cheerful and sugary sweet. Even when speaking about menace and slaying, he talked like a childrens’ entertainer. The other cake people looked on expectantly, although some appeared to do so without eyes.

“Of course, we would be honoured to accompany you and to help slay this beast.” Jycob bowed before looking at the others. “Right, guys?”

“Of course!” Marco said, a little mockingly.

“Sounds good,” Valerie said.

“Very well!” King Cupcake almost shouted. “If you would accompany me this way, we will outfit you with armour and weapons suitable to our quest.”

The four of them only wore ordinary clothing, t-shirts and jeans or a short purple skirt in Valerie’s case. The king led them to a row of cookie-topped tables with peppermint stick legs. There, they were given matching sets of armour to put on over their normal clothes. The chainmail vests appeared to be made of the same material as candy bracelets or necklaces. They came with greaves and vambraces also shaped out of pressed sugar. They were then allowed to pick their own weapons.

“It’s all made of candy, everything is!” Jycob marvelled.

Jycob picked up a battle axe and gave it a couple of experimental swings. Its two blades looked like halves of oversized mints, one with red stripes and the other green, their outer curves sharpened to razor edges. Its handle was braided in candy rope.

“It’s hammer time!” Marco said.

Marco wielded a mace with a spiked jawbreaker for a head. In his other hand, he picked up a shield made from a giant cookie. Valerie selected a bow and a bunch of arrows made from licorice, the bow black licorice and the arrows red.

Posing, Valerie looked like an elven princess. Bright red hair spilling down her shoulders in waves, she was tall and toned and athletic. Both Jycob and Marco were as tall and muscular as action heroes. Jycob’s features were more chiselled while Marco had a dangerous smoulder about him, his jawline shaded in stubble. In spite of the ridiculousness of the colourful candy armour, it did make them look rather heroic. Feeling her cheeks warm, Elixa turned away even though she was fairly sure the flush wouldn’t show. No matter how she might have looked in the armour too, she couldn’t help feeling short and plain and out of place.

Concentrating on the remaining weapons, Elixa picked out a simple sword made from peanut brittle. The material was glossy and slightly translucent with chunks of solid peanut trapped within it but the blade’s jagged edges looked terribly sharp.

“Maybe I’ll get lucky, and the Candy Dragon will have a nut allergy.” Elixa turned back to the others.

Marco shuddered. “Don’t even joke about that.”

“Are you ready to get underway, brave travellers?” King Cupcake asked. “Then please, proceed to your noble mounts.”

The king’s men collected horses for them to ride. The animals all looked as if they’d been moulded from chocolate. When the four teens drummed their hands on the horses’ flanks, it sounded like the mounts were hollow inside like Easter bunnies. They moved as fluidly as real animals though, and supported the humans’ weight as they climbed into the saddles moulded to the horses’ backs. King Cupcake’s mount was larger and made of white chocolate instead of brown, with far more detailing in the face, mane, and tail. Squires and knights busied themselves around the king and the four teenagers.

“What is your name?” Elixa asked the squire helping her.

“Carrot, m’lady.” The squire’s head was made from a slice of carrot cake complete with orange frosting.

The king’s other squires were all half the size of the king himself, smaller too than the teenagers. King Cupcake’s chief squire was a particularly short individual, the size of a child, with a candied cherry for a head complete with a long, curving stem. The knights tended toward bigger and burlier builds with heads made from chocolate chips or chunks of heartier cakes, like chocolate mud or fruitcake. Their fondant armour gleamed with silvery edible paint.

“Careful now, Cherrington!” King Cupcake said cheerfully, as the squire adjusted his stirrups.

“Sorry, my liege,” Cherrington replied.

“All set?” King Cupcake checked with the others. “Hurrah, onward! The hunt begins!”

The four of them, along with King Cupcake and around twenty squires and knights, moved away from the wedding cake castle. The houses surrounding the castle, beyond its jelly moat, were composed of oversized cupcakes and muffins with windows and doorways and chimneys. They saw what appeared to be a cathedral made from a giant birthday cake, mounted by a candle shaped like a cross. Citizens thronged through the streets, the peasantry generally half the size of King Cupcake with heads of cake slices, chocolate chips, or fruit.

“So, they’re made from cake, and they live in cakes, and they also eat cake?” Marco said, seeing one peasant with a head made from a slice of strawberry shortcake eating a chunk of muffin pulled off a nearby building.

“Don’t question it too much,” Jycob said.

“We go to slay the Candy Dragon!” King Cupcake yelled, to great applause.

Valerie spurred her chocolate horse closer to King Cupcake. “Are you the ruler of all of Sugarland?”

“Only the Kingdom of Cake,” King Cupcake said. “There is also the Principality of Pies, the Empire of Ice-Cream, Candy County, Jelly Junction, the Sherbert Sultanate, the Donut Duchy, San Soda Pop, the People’s Republic of Peppermint-,”

“I get the idea,” Valerie stopped him.

Elixa rode her horse alongside Jycob. He seemed focused on the road ahead.

“Do you think there’s something a bit off here?” Elixa asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it’s kind of too easy, isn’t it? There’s always something off with these magical kingdoms. This place is just too, sweet.”

“You hear yourself, right?”

“I just think there’s got to be some kind of catch.”

“Maybe it’s just, nice, this time. A nice little candy adventure.”

Outside the cookie gates of the Kingdom of Cake, Sugarland opened into flat plains and low, rolling hills. Trees were either replaced by lollipops or made from gummies. Gummy fruits hung heavily off of soft branches. The road they followed was paved with honeycomb, sticky and crunchy. Off to the sides, the fields smelled minty, the blades of grass bright green and sugared. Chocolate rabbits ran through patches of peanut buttercups.

“My liege,” Jycob shouted ahead. “What can you tell us about the Candy Dragon that might aid us in this quest?”

“The Candy Dragon is a most fearsome beast!” King Cupcake said. “Instead of fire, it breathes molten sugar! Its claws are sharpened candy canes that can tear apart your average Sugarland citizen like wet sponge cake. It emerges from its frozen cave high in the Sundae Mountains to gorge itself on chocolate and candy once a month but the rest of the time it sleeps in a deep sugar coma. That is how we will catch it, while it is sleeping!”

Eventually, they stopped at a stream to let the horses drink. Fizzing and popping, the stream looked too cloudy to be water. Gummy fish leapt out of it like salmon. Valerie crouched beside it.

“It’s lemonade, fizzy lemonade!” Valerie said.

“If we stay too long here, we’re going to have to visit the Magical Land of Free Dentistry next,” Marco said.

They continued along the honeycomb path through thicker strands of lollipop and gummy trees. Ahead, mountains of ice cream grew from the land. Whipped cream covered the peaks like snow and rivers of syrup cut down their sides. Cherries which Elixa estimated to be the size of buildings and bananas as big as nuclear submarines rested in the cream or jutted from the valleys between them.

Led by King Cupcake, the group climbed into the Sundae Mountains’ foothills. Humongous scoops of every flavour of ice cream surrounded them on all sides. Strawberry and chocolate and vanilla, passionfruit, mango, pale blue bubblegum, caramel, toffee, and dozens more. Lime green mounds of peppermint rivened with giant hunks of chocolate, vanilla with equally huge cookie chunks, others with giant peanuts or crushed nuts. 

Elixa spotted movement between the ice cream mounds. Jycob noticed it as well, and some of the knights and squires appeared tense.

“What was that?” Jycob asked.

“Fear not, those are just the Marshmallow Trolls!” King Cupcake said. “They are soft and cowardly, harmless as long as we move confidently and in greater numbers!”

Elixa got a better look at several Marshmallow Trolls as they continued on. They were short and stumpy, bodies and limbs made from puffy pink or white marshmallows. Her horse wickered nervously and she reached forward to calm it. The trolls shied away from the group but watched them with empty, black eyes.

The hunting party passed some hot chocolate hot springs. The brown pools steamed, mixing with the ice cream shorelines. Marshmallows the size of mattresses bobbed and melted on the surface in a constant cycle. They climbed higher and the winds grew stronger and colder. The giant scoops of ice cream became larger and frostier. Then, up ahead, King Cupcake pointed to what looked like an icy cave bored into the side of a slab of Triple Ripple.

“There it is, the cave of the Candy Dragon!” the king announced, as cheery as ever.

King Cupcake and some of his knights accepted freshly lit birthday candles the size of torches from their squires. Holding them aloft, they dismounted and started toward the cave. Some of the horses whinnied and were quickly silenced.

“We will investigate first!” King Cupcake said, not lowering his voice. “When we find the dragon, that’s when we’ll call on you for help!”

Elixa tensed as the king and his knights headed toward the ice cream cave. Cherrington, Carrot, and the other squires hung back with the horses. Even after their journey, Elixa didn’t entirely trust King Cupcake. If something was about to go wrong, surely this would be the moment it happened.

An ear-splitting shriek cut through the air. King Cupcake and his men froze, as did the squires. The four teenagers, still on the backs of their chocolate horses, looked up and searched the sky. A vast and predatory shape, at first shadowy then alive with bright colours, appeared through the haze. Batlike wings, a serpentine neck and head, dangling talons, and a long, sweeping tail. The Candy Dragon.

“It’s here, it’s already awake!” King Cupcake shouted.

The Candy Dragon circled to study the creatures that had invaded its domain. They could feel icy wind billowing off its wings. Against the grey sky, the Candy Dragon was brilliantly colourful. From what Elixa could see, it appeared to be built entirely from a motley of various candies. Its serpentine body had been twined together from vines of black and red licorice. Its scales were layers of hard candies of every shape and size and description, impenetrable. Sheets of bubblegum stretched between struts made from Christmas candy canes to create its wings. On the end of its tail was a spiked gobstopper covered in swirling colours, similar to the one on the end of Marco’s mace but even bigger. Its teeth were yellow, orange and white triangles of candy corn. Its eyes were made from bright red candy hearts, blazingly red. Bright enough to leave ghostly trails in the air as its head moved.

“Take cover!” King Cupcake yelled.

Hovering in place, the Candy Dragon unleashed the full force of its breath. As the king had warned them, it didn’t breathe fire but instead spewed a stream of fizzing, crackling, brownish molten sugar. It crashed against the slope of Triple Ripple above its cave. The ice cream steamed and an avalanche poured down the side of the mountain. With a comical amount of bumbling, King Cupcake and his knights retreated toward the horses, bouncing off one another, tripping, and rolling down the slope.

Marco laughed, dismounting from his horse. He carried with him his mace and cookie shield. Overhead, the dragon vomited another stream of molten sugar into the mountainside. The air thickened with a rich smell of caramel, oddly mouthwatering in spite of the circumstances.

“This is ridiculous!” Marco said.

“Marco, wait!” Elixa watched the way the molten sugar bubbled and steamed.

“It’s breathing sugar, you guys! It can’t actually hurt us!”

Marco jogged to an open shelf of orange sherbert ice cream, frozen rock solid underfoot. Exposed, he raised his jawbreaker mace and waved it at the Candy Dragon.

“Here I am, Mr Dragon! Come and get me!”

The Candy Dragon turned its attention to the defiant teenager. Candy hearts narrowed and it billowed toward him. Marco didn’t flinch, even as its candy corn jaws yawned open. A crackling torrent of brown liquid roared down on top of Marco and completely engulfed him. Heat washed across the mountainside and the others instinctively shielded themselves.

As the dragon flew on, and the molten sugar dripped off of him, Marco began screaming. He dropped his mace and shield. Both of them started disintegrating as soon as they hit the ground, as if dipped in acid. Colours from Marco’s candy necklace chainmail ran down his chest. He looked at his own hands in horror. Patches of bone showed through the fingers. The heat of the molten sugar burned away the upper layers of his skin, reminding Elixa of the melting marshmallows in the hot chocolate hot springs. Flesh sloughed off his arms and chest and fell to the ground around him in ribbons.

“Oh, my-, shit!” Jycob yelled.

Still screaming, Marco looked toward the others in desperation. They all screamed as well. Marco’s eyeballs boiled and started running down his cheeks like undercooked eggs. His features drooped. After a moment, Elixa realised it was because his face was literally melting off the front of his skull.

“What is happening?” Elixa shrieked.

“I told you, the Candy Dragon breathes molten sugar!” King Cupcake reappeared behind them, out of breath but as cheerful as ever. “Molten sugar does burn at three hundred and fifty degrees, you know!”

The horses whinnied and panicked underneath them. Unthinkingly, Elixa and the other two jumped off and started to run toward Marco. There didn’t seem to be anything they could do for him, however. Under his feet, ice cream melted and pooled, becoming slippery. Blind, with boiling sugar eating away his flesh, Marco staggered to the lip of the cliff face. Elixa, although guilty about it, felt a sense of relief as he fell backward over the edge and plummeted out of sight.

“What was that?” Jycob yelled, stunned by the rapid turn of events.

Some of the king’s knights rallied, and tried to form an attack on the Candy Dragon. The dragon circled out of reach and unleashed its powerful molten sugar breath. The knights were creatures of chocolate and cake, the dragon’s breath had an even greater effect on them than it had on Marco. They popped and fizzed. Their armour and bodies seemed to lose all cohesion and they simply fell apart, dissolving into piles of slop.

A couple of chocolate horses, caught at the edges of the blasts, fled, screaming, down the slope in the direction they’d come. Craters ate their way into the hollows of the horses’ bodies as they ran, molten sugar burning holes in their backs or the sides of their heads. Melted chocolate splattered the ground behind them like blood. The thick smell of burnt caramel filled the air, getting more and more powerful.

Valerie recovered first. Hefting her black licorice bow, she loaded a red licorice arrow and let it fly. It zipped through the alternatively frozen or steaming air toward the dragon as it circled. As soon as it struck, however, the arrow bounced off. Valerie notched and let fly with a couple more arrows. Each time, the arrows merely bounced off the sugary beast’s sides.

“They don’t work, the arrows do nothing!” Valerie said.

Cutting through the sky, the Candy Dragon swooped, billowed, and landed right in the midst of the remaining collection of squires and horses. The beast was huge, as big as a building. Chocolate horses were bounced and scattered like toys, breaking as they hit the mountainside or falling straight off the nearest cliff. Cherrington, King Cupcake’s cherry-headed chief squire, turned to flee too late. One taloned foot came down and crushed him into the frozen ground.

“Carrot!” Elixa shouted.

The carrot cake squire who’d helped Elixa briefly back at the castle tried to run. The Candy Dragon lunged and snatched him in its jaws. Carrot simply exploded as he was seized between the dragon’s candy corn teeth and it yanked its head back. Moist bits of cake and orange frosting scattered over a wide area.

Determined, Valerie was the only one to hurry closer to the dragon. Licorice bow and arrow in hand, she took aim at the dragon’s face. The arrow flew toward one of the candy creature’s eyes but at the last second it ducked and the arrow bounced off its colourful brow, framed in rock candy. The Candy Dragon fixed its glare on her and lunged.

Valerie couldn’t move in time. The Candy Dragon’s bubblegum wings swept around. At the outer joint of each wing, where a bat’s thumb claw would be, was the crook of a candy cane. Each crook appeared to have been sucked and licked until they formed a pair of vicious points. Crossing them like a pair of scissors, it caught Valerie with both hooks. Valerie was impaled from both sides, and then ripped in two. Her head, arms, and upper torso went one way, her waist and legs, wearing the flirty purple skirt, went the other. Brilliant red blood and a spray of entrails arced through the air between them.

“The day is lost!” King Cupcake said. “Retreat, retreat! Run for your lives!”

King Cupcake recovered his white chocolate stallion and heaved himself back into the saddle. In spite of all the chaos, Elixa and Jycob’s horses waited for them. Panicked, they scrambled onto their chocolate mounts. The animals wheeled around and took off down the mountain, racing along the path they had climbed.

Hooves hammering the frozen ice cream, Elixa and Jycob fled just behind King Cupcake. A few of the knights and squires tried to follow but the Candy Dragon rampaged after their horses. Soon, it was only the three of them left, but they managed to leave the dragon behind. Cold wind whipped their faces.

“You should have told us how crazy dangerous that was!” Jycob said.

“I don’t understand? I told you that the Candy Dragon was a most fearsome and loathsome beast! With molten sugar breath and candy cane claws!” King Cupcake replied.

“Yes, but, it’s a Candy Dragon! This place is called Sugarland! We weren’t expecting that!”

They neared the hot chocolate hot springs. The ground became softer, less frozen and more uneven. The horses, however, didn’t slow down. Charging down the slope, King Cupcake’s horse caught its foot in an ice cream rut. The leg twisted, buckled, and then snapped off entirely. With a shriek, the horse pitched forward. Elixa and Jycob were following too closely behind to avoid the accident. Their horses crashed into the white chocolate stallion as it rolled end over end, tripping and falling as well.

Elixa screamed as they were caught in a wild jumble of limbs. The ground was up and sky was down. Kicking, bucking horses filled her vision. The chocolate horses took the brunt of the fall after hurtling down the slope at speed. Their hollow bodies broke apart. The king’s white mount, and Elixa and Jycob’s brown ones, their limbs snapped cleanly off, necks crunched, and bodies imploded and fragmented. Elixa, Jycob, and King Cupcake were all thrown free and came down in a bank of ice cream.

Elixa took a few moments to recover and then sat up from a pile of cookies and cream. Something screamed, a terrible animal sound of pure agony. She was relieved to see it wasn’t Jycob as he pulled himself upright as well. Brown and white pieces of the horses were scattered all over the slope. Legs and curved triangles of chocolate like egg shells or bits of broken piggy banks. Some of the more complete pieces were still kicking or squirming.

The sound Elixa heard, the screaming, came from one of the horse heads still attached to a neck and fractured section of breast. Elixa thought it might have been her own horse. The sound was so genuine, so horrifyingly real, she didn’t think to question how it could be coming from a head with no lungs, no body. Drawing her peanut brittle sword, Elixa staggered through the upturned ice cream. The decapitated horse’s eye on the side facing her, detailed in darker chocolate, rolled insanely. She raised the sword in both hands and planted the blade in the side of the head. The chocolate collapsed and finally the animal stopped screaming.

Silence settled over the Sundae Mountains. Elixa and Jycob took a moment to catch their breath amidst the bloodless carnage of the chocolate horses. Further up the mountain, there was no sign of the Candy Dragon or any of the knights, squires, or other horses.

“Now what?” Jycob said. “This place is messed up.”

King Cupcake picked himself up and wiped some ice cream off his outfit. The pastry-based royal’s cupcake face was unreadable. Elixa didn’t know what to say to him.

Steam and the smell of chocolate rose off the nearby hot springs. As had happened when they’d passed through the area earlier, they caught glimpses of movement between the ice cream mounds. King Cupcake unsheathed his sword. It made an audible ring despite the fact the blade looked like it was made of biscuit.

“What is it?” Elixa asked.

“The Marshmallow Trolls, they’re massing!” King Cupcake said.

“I thought you said they were harmless?” Jycob said.

“Not entirely.” King Cupcake shook his head. “Harmless, as long as you’re travelling in large numbers. They will not attack a bigger group, but those who appear easy targets? On foot and helpless?”

“Oh, come on.”

Scores of Marshmallow Trolls poured from behind several ice cream mounds. They looked short and pudgy, waddling like penguins, their bodies made from pink and white marshmallows, but there were so many of them. Without hesitation, they swarmed toward Elixa, Jycob, and King Cupcake.

With a yell of passion, King Cupcake launched himself at the nearest part of the horde. At no point did he lose a sliver of his high-spirited cheer. His biscuit blade flashed and hewed through the heads and outstretched limbs of the nearest trolls. With flesh made from sugar and gelatin, the wounds parted bloodlessly and did not seem to harm them much.

“For Sugarland!” King Cupcake roared.

The king waded into the Marshmallow Trolls’ mass, hacking and slashing. Although individually they were much smaller, the Marshmallow Trolls quickly overwhelmed him with numbers. Swarming all over the king, they opened surprisingly toothy mouths and began to chow down. Fighting to the last, King Cupcake was pulled apart and eaten. In less than a minute, there was nothing left of him but crumbs.

Elixa and Jycob backed up the side of one of the ice cream mounds. They soon found themselves surrounded on all sides by pink and white trolls. Rows of shark-like teeth poked from between their marshmallow lips.

“Oh, man, this is unbelievable,” Jycob said.

“We don’t have a choice, we’re going to have to fight!” Elixa said.

“Let’s do it!”

Jycob threw himself at the nearest troll, cleaving with his minty battleaxe. The Marshmallow Troll’s flesh parted like silk, vertically splitting the troll almost entirely in half. Jycob yanked the axe back and swung, taking off the top of another troll’s head and removing several outstretched limbs. Elixa joined him, slashing wildly. She felt almost no impact as the blade connected with Marshmallow Troll flesh.

Elixa and Jycob carved a swathe through the horde of Marshmallow Trolls. Marshmallow limbs and globs of bloodless flesh splattered the ground behind them. No matter how many they killed though, the trolls kept coming. And unless the blows they took were instantly fatal, the wounds appeared to do nothing to slow them down. Elixa and Jycob were separated. Hacking and chopping, Jycob’s axe got bogged down in a gluggy mess of marshmallow and ice cream.

“They’ve got me! They’ve got me!” Jycob yelled.

Elixa tried to cut her way to Jycob but there were too many of them. Marshmallow Trolls climbed his arms and back, and started to bite. Blood pulsed out of the wounds as they pulled away lumps of flesh in their mouths. One of them bit deeply into the side of Jycob’s throat. The artery tore and a firehose spray painted the troll’s face. Jycob’s eyes were very wide, his face pale and bloodless, as he sank beneath a feasting pile of trolls.

Elixa spun and started slashing her way through another row. She ran for one of the scooped ice cream mounds that crested above the trolls. Climbing it with her sword in hand, she looked back. Dozens and dozens of Marshmallow Trolls surrounded the small hill with more appearing out of seemingly nowhere. There was no sign of Jycob other than the bright red blood coating several trolls where he’d gone down. Scores of round, puffy faces with pitiless eyes turned to watch her. Elixa knew she couldn’t escape but she decided to take as many of them with her as she could.

“Come on then! Come and get me!”

Before the marshmallow mass could close in, a terrible screech echoed through the mountains. A torrent of steaming brown liquid hammered into the Marshmallow Trolls and carved through tens of them in an instant. Trolls disintegrated as soon as the molten sugar touched them. The caramel smell of the dragon’s breath filled the air.

Instantly, the Marshmallow Trolls forgot about Elixa and started to scatter. The Candy Dragon wheeled around, bubblegum wings furling and unfurling. Blasts from those wings were enough to bowl the pudgy trolls over and send them rolling across the mountain. It vomited another geyser of molten sugar, devastating the trolls. Landing, it crushed more of them beneath its talons and started feasting. The dragon chomped its way through another half a dozen fleeing trolls.

In less than thirty seconds, the surviving trolls disappeared back into their hiding places. Elixa remained alone on the battlefield with the Candy Dragon, and dozens of puddled bodies. The dragon finished chewing and swallowing, and it turned toward her. Its candy heart eyes blazed. Marshmallow goo dripped from its jaws.

Jycob and the others were dead. Horribly dead. King Cupcake and his men were all gone. There was only her and the Candy Dragon, and no means of escape. Balanced on the ends of its candy cane talons, the dragon began to charge. Elixa raised the peanut brittle blade of her sword.

“For Sugarland!” Elixa cried.

Elixa’s boots struck the ground as she raced from the mound. The Candy Dragon’s jaws yawned open and its yellow, orange and white teeth gleamed. From the back of its throat, it unleashed a flood of boiling molten sugar. Heat washed over her, endless, burning, eating through her clothing and skin and flesh.

xXx

Elixa ripped the full sensory mask off her face and stumbled backward, gasping. Underfoot, the omnidirectional treadmill moved with her to keep her from falling off the edge of her platform. Apart from the mask and helmet, she wore a form fitting bodysuit and a harness that anchored her to the platform as well. Together, they could simulate sensations like touch, blows, heat and cold, even the sensation of sitting or riding a horse. Sweat pasted Elixa’s hair to her forehead and she breathed heavily as she adjusted to the real world.

Around the gaming room, the others watched her emerge. Jycob, Marco, and Valerie, they all looked sweaty and pale after coming out of the metal. All three were still rigged to their own immersion platforms with their masks removed.

“That was intense,” Jycob said.

“Yeah,” Valerie agreed.

Out of the meta, the other three resembled their avatars but were considerably less muscled and chiselled. Jycob was tall but he had a gangly build, with pimples crossing his forehead like an angry rash. Marco was much shorter than his avatar and a little overweight. Instead of rugged stubble he had the beginnings of a starter moustache clinging to his upper lip. Valerie was also shorter and skinnier than her gaming avatar, her hair red but not as bright or sleek.

“Did you yell out, for Sugarland, at the end there?” Marco said.

Elixa looked embarrassed. “It seemed like the thing to say.”

“And what about you?” Marco turned to Jycob, laughing weakly. “When I died, did you say, oh my shit?”

“That whole thing was crazy,” Jycob said. “Who even comes up with something like that? Someone sick in the head. We must have lost a bunch of ranks with that performance.”

“Meta Roulette never dumped us into a game like that before,” Elixa said.

Meta Roulette was a common game played by VR gamers like the four of them. Climbing into the immersion suits, they let the meta dump them straight into a random game or situation and then had to play their way free. With tens of thousands of games and scenarios on offer, they rarely saw the same one twice.

“It felt almost too real.” Jycob rubbed his neck where the Marshmallow Troll had bitten him. “That gore, Marco, I don’t know if you really saw it but man, it was so detailed.”

“I saw what was happening to my hands and arms, right before my eyeballs melted out of my freaking head,” Marco said. “I could feel the heat, you know? It was almost too much, it freaked me out.”

“I know what you mean.” Valerie ran a hand across her midsection where the Candy Dragon had torn her in two.

A five minute warning flashed above the room’s entryway. The four of them could never afford equipment like the omnidirectional treadmills, the immersion suits, or the full sensory immersion masks, so they used their social credits to hire one of the four person gaming pods in the entertainment quarter for an hour almost every evening.

“I think I’m done for today anyway,” Jycob said.

“Yeah, same time tomorrow?” Marco asked.

“Yeah, yeah, I guess so.”

The four of them said their goodbyes in the elevator alcove. All of them rode to different levels of the arcology where they lived and went to school, and their parents worked. Elixa’s mothers rented a standard family unit on Level 138D. She travelled there in silence, staring straight past the spectacular views of the sprawling city and other enormous arcologies visible from the travel elevator.

“AllSee, search for Sugarland, King Cupcake, Candy Dragon, VR game,” Elixa said to her AR glasses as she walked the hall to her family unit, past dozens of identical doorways.

As with virtually any search you could think of, the AllSee returned thousands upon thousands of results. None of the results linked the concepts together clearly, however. Elixa experimented with filters but she couldn’t find any search that returned results actually pointing toward the game she and her friends had just played.

“Mom, Mama, I’m home! Sacha?” Elixa called out as she entered the apartment.

No one answered. Both her mothers would be at work, pulling triple shifts as was the norm, and her sister was probably with friends. Elixa went looking for something to snack on. Nothing sweet. She didn’t think she could even look at a piece of candy right now. In fact, thanks to the scent replicators in the full sensory masks, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to eat anything with caramel in it ever again.

Finding nothing worth spoiling dinner for, Elixa headed for the room she shared with her sister. As the door slid open, a splash of colour caught her eye. On the centre of her sanitised white bedsheet, she saw a single cupcake with pink frosting and multicoloured sprinkles.

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Sean: That’s right, the first addition in this year’s DRACTOBERFEST! If you weren’t around this time last year, I got through more than half of the year taking monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, writing my little stories, and I realised despite them being right there in the title, and occupying a pretty large section of the book itself, I hadn’t actually written any dragon stories. Hence, why I decided to dedicate the whole month of October to draconic creatures. Some of them would be among my favourite stories for the year, so please check them out!

Work has been rather intense these last few weeks and I’m hoping that will improve now. I don’t believe in waiting for inspiration, I believe in making yourself write every single day and forcing the inspiration to arrive but I’ve had very few spoons in the old cutlery drawer and it has been feast or famine. Some stories you’ll see coming up have been punched out in a day or two, like the first draft for this story I believe, but others have felt a bit more Sisyphean in nature. My biggest drawback is I really don’t have the mental energy to find more audiences for these stories so please, if you know anywhere that would receive these stories well please drop me a line or feel free to share!

Next Story’s Inspiration: Faerie Dragon