A Dalliance of Dragons

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Legends speak of a time when the crumbling ruins held not the nests of giant serpents, but instead housed families and trades and even rooms bursting of oltek. These edifices stood as monuments to humanity’s dominion over the very skies that we could build stone and metal a hundred mitres straight up. Majiks drawn from the earth lit torches that chased away the very night and carried the summer into winter, and every person bathed in the luxury of calm. They even built fires so hot they could burn through the finest crafted armors of our smithies. They certainly were not forced to mudcoat their skin to hide their scent, nor hide their villages in the cliffs and high hills. The weapons of humanity past would have sliced a dragon in two with a passing thought, and their forage into the lowlands would have been a casual walk instead of a lottery.

Cinlir crouched in front of me, his skinny frame’s outline broken by faux bricks and dried grass fastened to his camouflage coat. While lying prone he became invisible, a pile of sun-bleached bricks resting in the scrub. Now as I followed behind, however, the pinewood bricks wobbled comically on his back while the patches of dead grass stretched to escape from their leather bindings. When Cinlir peered over his shoulder, the simple widening of his eyes told me I followed far too close for his comfort. My gut tightened at the silent admonition.

I slowed to a half pace, and within seconds my eyes strained to catch Cinlir’s direction so that I could follow, so clever were his steps to avoid detection. I never heard a single sound from him. The others I could make out on occasion. A broken branch, a whisper, a clink of unsecured gear sabotaging our forage to the center of the ruins. Each undesired noise increased out chances of being discovered, and then the lottery would commence. This was my third forage, far less than the others in my village but still enough to know what sloppiness would cost us.

The hiss came from above me, but how high up I dared not verify. Cinlir’s training must have found a home in my skull because I collapsed prone, body frozen, one hand on my sword hilt, the other poised to push the ground away. The thump of blood in my neck sounded loud enough to attract a dozen dragons—how Cinlir foraged week after week without being consumed was a miracle.

No hissing followed, but the scratch of claws upon stone and raining dust stinging my eyes brought me to the verge of weeping. It could not end this way, not today. I futilely willed the beast away as it slinked closer. My left cheek pressed flat against the ground and my gaze fixed in the opposite direction, but I knew it was there. The warmth of its serpentine body, the coolness of its massive shadow, the smell of stone dust between its scales, the vibration of its breathing making my flesh shiver.

One step, two steps, a third placed the dragon directly above me. I could see its neck flexing with each breath, its tongue sliding along the inside of its toothy maw, the soft flap of tissue which could only be its ear. The creature’s most vulnerable spots hovered less than an arm’s length away, and with the sword firmly in my grip, one thrust upward would likely end the dragon’s life and save my own.

And yet I could do nothing. No longer did my training keep me frozen. Abject fear pinned me to the ground now, no matter how much I willed my arms to move, to stab upward, to defend myself, to protect my people, to complete the mission, to be a hero. I could feel the pee trickle along the inside of my thigh and warm the front of my pants. When the nostrils of the dragon flared, my legs quivered and my boot scraped the gravel beneath.

Its head turned and, for the first time in my life, I stared into the eye of a dragon. A black loveless pupil centered in a black iris, nictitating lid sliding across to give the beast every chance of catching its prey. It needed no such help. I had given it every opportunity to devour me. The movement of my legs, the sound of my body panicking, the smell of my waste puddling the ground.

The dragon curled and spun and jumped, its meaty tail thumping me in the back. I cried out in pain and rolled, expecting the clawed feet to pin me down if I remained. But the massive predator no longer stood over me or anywhere near me. It wound through the bushes and rocks and rubble, clawed legs pounding away before it lurched into the air and descended into a thicket.

It was the scream that eclipsed the silence of the valley. Angeli’s voice, high pitched and bathed in pain. She might have said “help” and “please” and any number of words, but a thumping of her body broke each staccato syllable, and after a gurgling coughing noise is all she could make.

Screeches, scratches, hisses and thumps. The ruins seemed to come alive, dragons appearing from each broken archway and skittering down each impossibly tall structure. The beasts all moved toward Angeli (or what was left of her) with a hungered frenzy. Seven of them? Eight? I looked about frantically, trying to find an escape, when something spun me around and pulled me at a right angle to the crunching sounds in the thicket.

Not something but someone. Cinlir had me by the sleeve, sprinting so fast that one misplaced step would send me to the ground. He was a protector, he loved us all. He would risk everything for the village. But I knew that if I fell, Cinlir would leave me. The lottery had begun.

“Let go of your sword!” he yelled back. In all those horrific seconds, my hand never left the grip. From the dragon stepping over my doomed position to climbing to my feet to running away from poor Angeli, I never let go. It took Cinlir’s command to loose my fingers, but once undone, my arms pumped and my stride extended and I was leading Cinlir away from the carnage.

Movement came from all around us. Two or three dozen shapes sprinting across the valley floor, under shadows of towers and over bunches of brambles. All of the movement was human, all of us escaping. All of us except Angeli.

Another scream pierced my heart. A man’s scream, so far behind us that I could not discern who it could be. Then a third came. The losses mounted, and despite our best efforts, they would not stop at three.

Southeastward we ran, generally speaking. The ancient structures and strange debris left from the once mighty civilization made a straight run impossible. We zigzagged each other, disappearing from each other’s views for unbearably long seconds before reappearing in some intersection. I watched Casso trip on a metal bar so old and rusted that it snapped under his weight. I expected him to be the next taken in the dragon lottery, but moments later we were running side by side, passing a pair of dragons feasting on the remains of Helena. Another scream, another plead for help, another lost life. My friends were falling, and all I could do was leave them behind.

The avenue we merged onto held a clear view of the ancient statue of Vulcan about eight or nine thousand mitres away. Its arm extended upward and outward, as if he gestured back toward the dragons who intended to feast upon us. I had no intention of backtracking, of course, even if Vulcan had come to life and pronounced his divine instruction to us all. Our foraging cost us lives, and to return home empty-handed? It could not happen.

Casso gestured to the east and we all turned and saw Cinlir standing on a pile of rubble, calm as can be, tall enough to be seen by human and non-human eyes everywhere. I wasn’t clear how he ended up ahead of me, let alone with enough time to casually look for a perch from which to steal a view. His camouflage jacket no longer held the subtle, expertly sewn-on details. Those pieces he spent hours crafting were most likely lost to the thorn bushes he pulled us through during our flight. He looked behind, one hand up as a visor to block the afternoon sun, his other hand up counting.

“I see nine,” he called down to nobody in particular. “I thought it was eight, but there’s nine now. We should be safe though. There can’t be more than nine.”

Hinly, a young woman who had even less experience than me, asked through exhausted panting, “How can we be safe?”

I touched her shoulder, “Dragons only kill to eat. Once they have fed, they will be docile for a day or two.”

I almost added “I hope” to the end of the sentence but thought the better of it.

“Fed? Those are our friends! What’s wrong with you?” Hinly shook her head and stormed off to weep quietly away from the others.

I thought about apologizing, about my poor choice of words. Instead, I got up toward the front of the group, suddenly self-conscious about the wet stain on the front of my pants. Could I have really killed it? If I had, then maybe we would all still be alive. If anyone saw me underneath the dragon, they did not mention it, and I would not be volunteering tales of my inaction to anyone. My purpose in the village was precarious at best and my shame was already growing like a yellow stain.

Vulcan quickly disappeared from view as we worked our way northeast by east, a somber quiet punctuated by stifled tears and angry grumbles hung over us like an unwanted storm cloud. Dragon lotteries were an unpleasant aspect of life in the valley, a guilt-ridden sigh of relief that came with knowing our only means of surviving the beasts was an exercise of predation (although I did not know the word at the time). Most lived, some died. The same was true of many creatures, so to think that humans would be exempt bordered on arrogance. Of course, the humans who built this city undoubtedly mastered the creatures around them.

The ruins in this section of the city were smaller, and from the looks of it, this section of the valley seemed dedicated to a variety of tradesmen whose purposes were lost to history. I made mental note of some of the markings, some of the shapes of the buildings and the contents within. My hope was to journal those details later tonight, assuming I still had the strength--and the life--to do so. Buried beneath one of these dilapidated structures might lay a useful form of oltek that could help me.

As it was, our destination contained a form of oltek our lives depended upon. Helena discovered the cache weeks ago, and we intended to go out yesterday after the dragons were spotted feasting on a herd of deer. But hard rains and mudslides precluded us from leaving while the dragons’ bellies remained full and delay wasn’t an option. That storm yesterday cost us five lives today, including Helena’s.

Cinlir signaled us and pointed to the ancient building ahead. The doors were constructed of an alloy I did not recognize, and the walls and roof managed to survive whatever apocalypse this city succumbed to. I knew some aspects of what we were looking at, but my memories of such things were old, and my learned knowledge was spotty at best. All I knew at the time was that humans of past ages managed to somehow make walls transparent through some process we could no longer replicate. The words upon the signage were not so durable, so the details of why such a trade would exist I could not ascertain.

Thankfully the door remained propped open, probably by Helena. I was not convinced we would be able to breach the transparent walls, let alone the metal door. Cinlir drew his sword, slipped inside, and all went quiet for several minutes. A nervousness grew outside the structure, and more than a few of us glanced down alleyways and walkways on the lookout for predators. Were the dragons truly satisfied with the meals they exacted?

“Come,” Cinlir appeared briefly before disappearing inside again. One by one, we all went inside to discover what we all risked our lives for. Stacks and stacks of circular flexible material, their edges marked with lightning shaped grooves, their cross-sections layered with materials so strong that only a direct hit from an arrow could pierce them. The shape of such material did not lend itself to immediate use, but smithies back home knew how to forge these circles into light, powerful armor. Maybe enough for the rest of the village.

“There are so many,” somebody said. “How do we get them home?”

“With this,” Cinlir held a thick rope over his head before tossing it on the floor. “Turn them all on their side, run the rope through, and we roll them home. If we move fast, we can be back by nightfall.”

We worked fast, the promise of getting home without being eaten being an especially effective motivator. There had to be a hundred of these strange circles that looked like wheels without a center. At Casso’s suggestion, we grouped them in batches of eight or ten and paired off dragging them home.

That night I remember asking Cinlir if he thought our forage was worth it. His answer still lingers in my memory.

“We needed this. Let’s face it… There are things out there far worse than dragons.”