Lindy HOWELLS

Under The Glacier

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. In fact there didn’t used to be a valley at all. This massive crack in the earth used to be a lush seemingly unending river with trees and rich mossy banks that give life and sustenance to hundreds of species, including us humans. Actually before it was a river it used to be a glacier, miles and miles long and miles wide that, if I remember from school, wraps around the entire planet like a belt. It was the last remaining holdout of some ice age that covered the whole earth, if you believe what they teach in school. Personally it seems a little far fetched, the whole planet covered in ice? Or maybe it was half of the plant? I can’t remember, but the point is that things weren’t always the way they are now, because things now are even more different. The water is all gone. The industrial revolution hit and seemingly overnight the world changed. Trains replaced horses, cars replaced trains, and then airplanes were replaced with rockets and before we knew it, we couldn’t find anything green anymore. That’s slightly exaggerated, we still have trees and greenhouses on rooftops, but they’re sad samples of what I’ve seen in pictures. Supposedly there used to be fields and forests miles deep that covered mountain tops and flats, grasses that held the earth together with roots over hills and marshes. But the weather started changing, it kept getting hotter and hotter and before we knew it, the river was dry. Well that’s not entirely accurate either. The water levels dropped lower and lower until it became just a fog, this dense fog that filled the chasm left behind by the glacier turned river. We used these giant industrial vacuum things so we could condense the fog back into water. And it worked, for months it was a miracle of another resource to pillage. Until the dragons showed up.