Aaden the Tried

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. We liked the cold, it conserved our energy. We were tired from the years, scattered and stretched thin across this land. We went where we could to live out the rest of what we had. Our names became stories and our stories became legends.

It is the way of the dragon, to watch forests become ashes and men become bones. What mortal life man endured, a Dragon could have a dozen more. We are fickle creatures; obsessive and possessive. It has been our demise. The Dragons of the old world are dwindling now - the age of men is here, I feel it.

Men. They are afraid of things they can not understand, they are naive and hateful. Inside walls, they abide by rules and laws that keep them from killing each other. Dragon bones become trophies in great halls and our deaths are shared in ale houses. But only courageous men did not kill dragons, courageous men rode them.

During the age of the Dragon, Kingdoms used us like a farmer uses an ox, to turn his soil - a tool. We would fight our own kind in the stead of Kings, with our riders on our backs in the sky; biting and breathing and ripping at each other until one would fall and one would conquer.

This is how he came to me. My first rider, Samael. He was as much mine as I was his. A man from nothing, a man who could have everything. His years were short so he wanted to know it all. Samael would ask me what the world looked like in the age when I was born, if I remembered my mother's face, had I ever touched the stars. No, I would say, and he would keep walking. Together, we were feared and we were loved.

His mortal life came to an end on a windless evening in summer. The softness of his brow became sharp and hollow with age, his skin baggy on his bones. His hair, once brown, like the dust on a horse's hooves or the underbelly of a forest mushroom, was as white and sparse as the clouds at the end of his day. Yet his memory was sharp. He remembered everything; every battlefield, every victory, every colour of a family's banner, every name of a maiden’s firstborn son. He was a good man.

“Remember when-” Samael started, his eyelids drooping slowly over his eyes, and then he stirred no more. My great tail curled around his frail frame, and his grip loosened against the scales on my skin. Go to your Gods a hero, I thought.

When he died, so did my dragon fire. Where once there was flame, now only smoke and a crackling sound. Was I dying? At last, I thought. Yet in Dragon years, I was young, and I feared I would live many more centuries clutching his memory like treasure. This cave was his final resting place, his tomb, and if the Gods he spoke of were merciful, it would be mine also. Two decades had passed, and I have guarded his bones ever since.

I breathe out a long sigh at the thought, the smoke from my chest billows around me in a great plume, filling the cave and spilling forward into the Valley. A noise startles me. My eyes snap open to survey my surroundings. How long had I been indulging in my solitude, it was hard to know.

I feel his presence before I see him; the quickening of his pulse, his blood hot and wet in his veins, the sound of his heart pounding, and his boots slipping over the stones at the entrance to the cave. The smoke from my breath obscures him from me. Yet he is here.

“Who dares,” I hiss, my voice sounding like a thousand lashing flames, licking against the walls and rippling against every surface.

“Jerrick. Son of Rickard,” a sure voice echoes from the mouth of the cave.

My head cranes in front of my great body, my muscles aching with disuse. “Jerrick. Son of Rickard. Do you know who I am?”

The man speaks, his voice level, “You are Aaden the Tried. Slayer of Achlys the Red Death. Settler of the Great Blood Feud. Bringer of Dying and Passing and Demise. And once the Dragon of Samael the Good.”

His name still hurts me to hear. A hundred decades could pass and I would still feel the same pain. My tail tightens instinctively on his bones, the noise of his chain mail crunching against my strength.

“And still, you dare?” I whisper.

“I dare,” he says stepping into the light of the entrance, the smoke dissipating behind him. He was a long man, with simple clothes that did not fit him right, yet there was a confidence in the way he wore them. A youth to his face, and a blush that spread from the tip of his nose across his two cheeks - so full of life.

“I have come from the town of Riverwell, to be your next Dragon Rider, Aaden the Tried.”

I felt a warmth building again in my chest at his words, I would not know this until years later but this is where my second life began.