A Tale for Tarragon

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley…”, my mother would say just before she recounted the tale of our former home in the Ashlynn hills of Tarragon. I was just a small child in those days when she and my father tried to flee the fire that came from the mountains in the West. My father managed to save my mom and I from the flames, but a wooden beam from the roof ended up falling on top of him as he reentered our house to save whatever he could of our remaining possessions. The blaze grew so wildly and quickly that we didn’t have time to recover him before the flames engulfed his already lifeless body. Something terrible had been burned and branded into my mother’s mind in that second and it haunted her memories from that moment on forward. Whenever she’d tell the story of that dreadful day, her face would always portray a deep longing to forget what had happened, but she couldn’t stop thinking about my father and all that we had lost. The only way we’d really communicate was through her stories, she lived through her stories as they seemed to be the only thing that brought her true solace. Her reality had become too much for her to handle it seemed and she eventually succumbed to the burden of its weight.

My mother died from what I assumed was a broken heart just a few months after fleeing the lowlands of Ashlynn, her untimely death left me speechless, and I could not eat or sleep for what seemed like weeks. I was only 7 years of age at that time and completely alone in the world, I survived off the kindness of strangers and scraps from other people’s rubbish. I slept in the abandoned courts of the palace grounds alongside of the many stray animals that roamed the area. I had become a stray just as they were, with no true home or family to call my own. The only thing that kept me intact were the fleeting memories of my parents that fought desperately to stay alive in the deep recesses of my mind.

I remember being told that Tarragon was once surrounded by a beautiful and enchanted forest, my mother would always say it was undoubtedly the marvel of all territories in the region. She would also speak of trees that taught knowledge to all who sought it and many other magical creatures that once lived there but had now gone into the surrounding mountains to escape the fires. The skies of the Ashlynn hills, once beautiful, bright and blue; were said to be forever darkened by thick clouds of black smoke that seemed to go on for miles and miles. Clouds that were once providers of such sweet shade and comforting rain, now poured down burning black tears of hot ash that burned everything it touched and nearly suffocated anything that breathed it in.

But the place where I once called home was not so much ruined by the fire as it was ultimately destroyed by the immense greed and evil intent hidden in one man’s heart. This man was an evil King named Marduk who ruled a territory called the Dark Lands on the opposite side of the mountains from Ashlynn. He had heard about the treasures still hiding there somewhere, so he prepared his forces to overtake the city in its weakened state after the fire. He had heard about a specific jewel hidden somewhere there still that contained the power to destroy entire villages in a matter of seconds and it was indeed the last of its kind. It was said to have been taken from the chest of the last remaining magician of the kingdom upon his death and given to the King Zamien of Tarragon. No one truly knows where the magician got it from or how he managed to hide such a powerful thing, all they knew is it had to be protected and kept out of the wrong hands.

On one fateful night, a large and vicious army sent by Marduk stormed the city under the guise of darkness and overtook their small remnant of guards left to protect the city gates. The army then burst through the city streets like a rolling wave of locusts ready to eradicate all in its path that hadn’t already been destroyed by the fire. They were sent for the jewel but fortunately one of the Tarragonian guardsmen managed to hide it somewhere in the temple of the palace just before the troops entered. It was never found and because of this, Marduk ordered his army to shed no mercy on the people of Tarragon. Every inhabitant that remained in the city after the fire, including the King, Queen and all members of the royal court were brutally and savagely killed that night. It did not matter to him whether they were young or old, all were slain at Marduk’s command and tossed into the dark depths of the Aegean Sea. It was through this unrighteous act that the soul of the land I formerly called home had been changed from an enchanting forest into a fiery abyss of an unwelcome and frightening new presence, because it was now home to a huge dragon who mercilessly wandered the woodlands.

One thing I could fondly remember was the way my mother always kept a small glimmer of hope even in the worst of times before she passed. She seemed to have a natural ability for seeing the good in things even if the situation seemed bad. There was always a shard of hope left at the conclusions of her stories that gave me faith in better days to come no matter how dark the present times seemed. I’d always imagine someone eventually finding the jewel and restoring the land back to all its former glory, just like a great phoenix rising from the ashes of its perceived destruction. And as the legend goes, Tarragon will one day indeed be restored, but not until the jewel is returned to its rightful place in the Crystal court of the temple in Tarragon.