A whisper in the dark

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. They stayed higher in the mountains by the source. My grandma remembers her grandma’s story about the first day they came to our town. She’d whisper tales of the shadow of death and disruption to us, and tell us how everything stopped for two whole heartbeats when the deathly wings covered the sun.

Our kings live in the mountains. They built there to get closer to the magic. As their buildings went up and up and up, the dragons started moving down and down and down.

The kings are stupid men. They build fortresses to capture the magic that flows over the stony peaks and try to fish it out of the rivers. Magic does not travel this way. It crawls across the skin of dragons.

The first time I saw a dragon was in the summer when I was nine years old. A boy in my class has bragged all week about putting his feet in the river. How it’d felt when the water had washed over his feet, the feeling of the gritty sandy bank between his toes. I was sure he was lying. Fear of the river is the one thing that unites every person in this down.

Nobody can swim. That’s one reason to be afraid of the moving water. The more important reason is because dragons live where the water flows. The dragons being there means the magic is there too.

I hated that boy. He was always full of shit. All day, all I could think about was what would happen if I went to the river? Would I be able to brag in class too?. Everyone asked him about the river. He got to tell his story to so many people. If I put my feet in, would someone notice me? Or would I always be at the back blending in? Would I be poor and boring and a bit ugly for the rest of my life?

Straight after school I took the detour off the path and snaked down towards where I could hear the water, with every intention to dive in it head first and show myself that I wasn’t afraid.

I stomped my way in the direction of the water sound. I never knew water was so loud up close. I’d never seen water like this before. Moving. Alive.

As I stared into it, I was sweating from the overload of the thumming of the water and buzzing of the insects and the dank feeling of the air. The acid rose in my throat in the way it does when you have too much vinegary wine too quickly.

I stood on the bank and peered over the grasses to the edge of the river. I was watching the water move like scales over the rocks and twist and turn the belly of the river bank. Then I spotted it. Eyes staring straight back at me. Their body was like a newt the size of a cat - not the colossal beings of the past. The moment I clocked the eyes waiting for me silently in the water, I felt the acid of puke rise in my throat, turned, and ran. I ran as fast as I could go.

I shot through the porch and slammed the door behind me. I vomited on my feet. This time the eyes I caught were my mothers. I heaved again. Black bile spilled out of my stomach and ejected all over the floor. My mother knew exactly where I’d been and exactly what I’d done.

A woman from the village tied me down and burned my feet for six days. She told me she was smoking the magic out from my toes and making it escape out of my mouth. She did it until all I threw up was normal undigested food and bile. My feet burned so badly they’ll always have marks to remember what I did.

On the seventh day, they made me go and see the boy from school. He didn’t lie. He’d gone to the river, and he’d gone in. When I saw him, he looked like someone had thrown ink on his body and it had bled into his skin. His eyes were the strangest part. They looked like the wells where the ink had been kept. Blue black, deep, moving, and soulless.

The woman from the village made me sit in the corner and my mother held my head to tell me to watch. They said I had to watch so I understood my own fortune. The woman had been burning the boy too. I could see his scars. It hadn’t escaped like it had done with me. Instead, it had rooted and held on. Threading itself to his insides and mixing with his blood.

The woman pulled a knife from her belt, put it on the boy’s neck, and sunk her whole weight into the knife. He began to hiss and scratch and scream. It was like nothing I’ve ever heard. It sounded like the earth tearing apart between his jaws. My mother covered my ears as she held my head but it didn’t drown it out.

She pulled the knife across his throat. Not one smooth motion like someone killing a pig, but back and forth like chopping wood until the black ooze started to pump out of his body and onto the floor. Everyone except the woman had to be careful not to touch it.

I didn’t close my eyes to stop watching, because it wasn’t like seeing someone die, it was like tipping out a bag after putting something in it that didn’t belong. None of the boy was left inside at this point.

People did notice me after that. Word was passed across the wetlands that I was the girl who went to the river and got her feet burned. They whispered when they passed me in school or in the market. There’s that girl who went down to the river and was infected with the magic. I could hear their whispers, a consistent flutter in my consciousness.

The worst whisper of them all was the magic. Never quite audible, but always there, getting louder every year. It screamed inside my mind in the same way it screamed out of that boy. Sometimes I manage to convince myself that it’s just my memory playing over and over. The pit of my stomach tells me that’s not true.