A sudden and inexplicable apperance

There weren’t always dragons in the valley, but then up until very recently, there wasn’t a valley either.

Well, valley is probably not the right term for it. If you try to picture a valley, you probably see soft rolling hills, covered in fresh green grass that blows gently off the mountains. Or maybe a deep descent into a mysterious forest, I don’t know.

The point is that that’s not the sort of land feature that appeared just four meters from our doorstep last Tuesday. For that, is more of a crater.

It’s quite a hideous thing really. It spans almost 2 kilometers in diameter (as best we can guess) and drops down so deep that we have yet to figure out how far down the bottom is (I'd guess you could fit a 60 story building in there, but my perception of size has never been excellent). The sides of the crater are as smooth as marble, and the lip of it is sharp enough to cut through flesh (don't ask how I know that).

You’d expect the arrival of such a hole would be accompanied by a very large explosion, perhaps even the end of life on earth as we know it.

Yet when the crater arrived there was no fire, no flame, no burning inferno to engulf all the sins of humanity. Not even a speck of dust wavered in the air. There was just a brief buzzing sound accompanied by the feeling of your ears being popped like they do when you swim deep down into the ocean, and then the crater was there.

It shouldn’t be possible, for such a thing to exist, and yet here it is.

Now, you might be wondering, ‘but you started this talking about dragons, what happened to them’ and you’re probably also thinking ‘dragons sound way more interesting than whatever you’re on about.’

And I agree, but unfortunately so does everyone else. Everyone’s so focused on the sudden appearance of dragons that they all seem to have forgotten the absolute insanity that was the very sudden, practically silent, and virtually inexplicable removal of over 400 million cubic meters of earth.

I just don’t think it’s being addressed as much as it should be. I mean really, where did it all go? You can’t just destroy that amount of matter, it has to have gone somewhere, ended up as something, and that's just the where! Who knows how such a thing would be possible, or why anyone or anything would ever have such a reason to do something so scientifically impractical.

Now, with those very important but still frustratingly unanswered questions out of the way, we can get onto the dragons.

There are about 30 of them in total, as far as we can tell. All of them of varying sizes and assumedly different species.

There’s this huge dark green dragon that some people have taken to calling Puff, mostly due to the resemblance he bears to Puff the magic dragon (which is really only the fact that he’s green, but anyway). He’s one of the more docile ones, which is very lucky because he’s also one of seemingly only a handful that can breathe fire (as indicated by the smoke rising from their snouts).

He’s one of the types that we’ve started classifying as ‘English dragons’, the types that breathe fire, have four legs, and a set of wings.

There are a few others of his kind, including a smaller red one and an even smaller purple one (for reference, the small purple is about the size of two full-grown elephants).

The other types of dragons also seem to follow the general mythos of different cultures. There are quite a few dragons that look very similar to how Chinese dragons are often depicted, with long snake-like bodies, no wings but a great long snout filled with sharp pointy teeth. These ones don’t seem to breathe fire, at least we haven’t seen them doing it yet, but they do have the biggest dragon among them.

We’ve taken to calling the biggest dragon ‘Old Pie’, for some reason. I think one of the Jone’s kids might have said that the dragon looked like an old man. I can sort of see it, Old Pie has a large white mane that encircles their head, complete with big white bushy eyebrows and a very tired stare that tells you they have seen a lot more than any dragon ever should.

We don’t actually know how long exactly Old Pie is, but by our best guesses, their body lays on the inside of the crater and follows it the whole way round at least three times. For the length that Old Pie might be, they’re pretty skinny, they seem to only be about 10-12 meters tall, at least in the parts that are visible.

There are also a handful of smaller dragons, some of them no bigger than a house cat. These dragons are undoubtedly the most adventurous dragons of the lot.

Puff and Old Pie have never been seen moving more than a few meters, and every time it's been either to roll into a more comfortable position or in Old Pie’s case, to slither themselves a few meters this way or that.

These smaller dragons, however, are active little critters. Not all of them have wings that are visible, but all of them can certainly fly.

Some of them fly steadily up the sides of the crater, their little tongues hanging out in a sort of pant as they flap their way along.

Some of the others, the more snake-like ones, have no legs but they do have two wings that sprout just behind their heads. When they fly they sort of twist their tail through the air, moving like a weird organic corkscrew when they fly.

These ones are my favorites. There are only two of them in the group, I like to call them Rock and Sock.

Rock is a little red one, he has a longer body than Sock, but a slightly smaller wingspan. He was one of the first dragons I saw as he crashed into my window last Wednesday morning, breaking much of the glass and splintering a bit of the frame. Luckily he has incredibly tough scales that protected him from getting injured, but I can’t quite say the same for me who had to deal with a mad dragon thrashing around in my room at 6 am.

But me and my dad managed to get him out quickly once we found that if you just lightly held the end of their tails they stopped moving.

Outside we had met his friend Sock, a little blue one, Sock was more cautious than his brother.

Sock kept his distance while we carefully placed Rock on the ground and let go of his tail. He zoomed off immediately, joining Sock before they went flying over the edge of the crater and back into their domain.

Me and my dad had stared after them for about two minutes until we both silently decided to just go back to bed.

Suffice to say that we now have the party story to end all party stories, ‘oh you got lost in Antarctica?’ ‘Well, I had a real-life dragon crash into my bedroom window.’

Anyway, there are a lot of different dragons in the crater, which is all very interesting, but the real question that’s on everyone’s minds right now is where they came from? Along with, what are they really?

Sure everyone’s been calling them dragons for almost a week now, but as you well know, dragons are a mythological creature. They’re not real, so what are these things living in the crater? Aliens? Dinosaurs?

On top of that question, we have quite a few more, foremostly including, what do they eat?

The problem is that no one has seen any of the dragons eat or even drink anything.

Our town is a remote farming settlement in the mountains, the sort of place you would expect to find dragons growing fat off of sheep, yet not a single animal has gone missing.

Not a single sheep, cat, dog, or parrot. Not even a mouse seems to have been touched.

A lot of people have brushed this concern aside for the fact that they don’t seem to be doing…anything. You don’t need a lot of energy for doing nothing, and these dragons really are doing nothing. Most of them never leave the crater and the ones that do don't usually fly more than a few meters outside it, the rest of them barely move at all, some of them we’re not even sure are still alive.

It’s incredibly odd, but then nothing about this situation isn’t incredibly odd.

I guess it’s nothing not expected, I mean a potentially alien race? What's the chance that they act at all like how we’d expect.

Now the majority of the human race has been shocked into inaction by this miraculous appearance of these mythical beasts, but not me.

And I think it’s time that someone went down into the crater.

Now if you were a normal or mostly sane person you would probably think that this is a bad idea, repelling down into a hole of unknown origin and purpose that is filled with potentially perilous creatures for essentially no reason.

And I would have to agree, but even the most cautious of you have got to admit, it going to be one excellent story to tell.