Bad Luck

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

The first one appeared wrapped around Falina’s hut when she woke up one morning. She opened her shutters to let in the fresh autumn air and then promptly gave such a scream that it brought every last villager running, some armed with shovels in case it was wolves and others carrying buckets of water in case it was a fire that had escaped from its confines in the chimney.

No one could explain it. Even I hadn’t seen it lumber into place, and that meant it must have showed up at some point between two and four in the morning. Then again, I doubted a dragon made of stone had managed to walk so silently through the Valley that he hadn’t woken up a single villager. It was far more likely that he had been carried into place by… well, by someone.

Someones, more likely.

The stone statue curled around Falina’s home was a solid eight feet high laying down, and it must have weighed a couple thousand pounds. Its lips were curled back to reveal grinning fangs, and its eyes were carved in such detail that I swore they would blink if I stared at them long enough. Every scale had been shaped distinctly by the sculptor, and the twin horns that curled up from the creature’s head looked like wisps of smoke that had turned solid in a gusty breath of winter wind.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how such an impressive statue got here, much less why.

As far as I knew, we hadn’t pissed off any of the Mountain folk, but they were the only ones who could have crafted such a heavy statue, much less carried it.

Plus, it wasn’t like they needed a reason to mess with us.

It had never stopped them before.

But as I helped Falina climb over the stone statue now, I felt a slight shiver shoot up the back of my legs. The pale stone was completely solid to the touch, but for just a second, I wondered if my hand would disappear inside it if I just pushed hard enough. Maybe it was like hardened quicksand, and if I pressed at just the right angle, I might find my whole arm stuck inside the dragon’s mouth.

“What is it?” Falina hissed. “Do you sense something?”

“Maybe,” I murmured.

“What is it, Thea?” she whispered again. “Is it bad luck? Is it the Mountaineers? Is it--”

“Sweetie,” I sighed. “If you don’t stop talking, I won’t be able to listen long enough to sense much of anything.”

“I know, I’m sorry!” Falina blurted. “It’s just that you’re the best hunter in the village, and you’re the only one who’s been… you know… touched.”

It was a nice way to say that I sensed things that weren’t always there. Well, they were there but not in any obvious way. Not in any way that someone’s eyes or ears could detect, and not in any way that made the other villagers jealous of me. It was more in the way of a prickly feeling when something was wrong, a glimpse of shadow out of the corner of my eye, a light hum in my ears right before an accident happened.

As I rested my hand on the stone dragon statue now, every alarm bell in my body went off. A soft hissing filled my ears, my skin tingled, and the soles of my feet throbbed with the need to run away as fast as possible. But only a second after I felt every sense panic, the feeling fled, and I was left touching a stone statue that seemed strange but harmless enough.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I thought something was there, but now… it’s gone. Maybe it is a prank or some kind of test to see if the Mountaineers can get a rise out of us.”

“I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction,” Falina said, but the way she swallowed told me she would very much rather give the Mountain folk the satisfaction of seeing her upset, especially if the alternative was to sleep inside her home surrounded by a stone dragon.

I offered for her to stay at my house that night, but she insisted that she wouldn’t be afraid of a statue. She planned to stay up all night and see if anyone came to remove the statue as quietly as they had installed it, and I stayed on my roof all night where I could watch her home and do the same thing.

I didn’t even know I’d fallen asleep until the first rays of sunlight fell warm across my face, and one of Falina’s cousins called up to me that she hadn’t come to the fields at sunrise.

Since nobody else seemed eager to climb over the stone dragon still surrounding her house, I volunteered to check on her. I clambered to the top of the dragon’s skull, patted him between the eyes, and then slid down his snout so I landed on my feet right at her front door. I knocked in case Falina was indecent, but when nobody answered, I found my mouth suddenly so dry that I couldn’t even lick my lips.

“Falina?” I whispered, as if she would hear my murmur when she clearly hadn’t heard my knock.

I glanced over my shoulder at the stone dragon head behind me, and I swore the creature’s eyes had moved so he could watch me sweat. His fangs even seemed to be more exposed than before, as if he was grinning at my distress.

“You are a statue,” I said firmly just before I turned back around and pushed open the door.

The inside of the house was cold and dark. The shutters were closed against the sunlight, and it didn’t look like she had burned a fire all night in spite of the chill creeping in through the cracks in the walls of the old home. When my eyes adjusted to the dimness, I noticed the unmade bed in the corner and the figure with blankets drawn up over her head.

“Falina?” I whispered again.

My fingers trembled as I grasped the blanket up by her head, but I could already feel the cold radiating through the covers. She wasn’t old enough to have heart trouble, and there was no sign of blood or a struggle. Maybe she was only so exhausted that she couldn’t hear me, and maybe she’d been too tired last night to light a fire, and now her body was frigid.

I pulled back the covers.

It was Falina, but not Falina.

She had turned into a statue made of pure stone. Her hands were tucked under her head like the change had simply come on her while she was sleeping, and her knees were slightly pressed toward her chest like a child. Her position looked so natural that I had to touch her to be sure, but the moment I touched her pale grey body, the coldness of the stone sent a shiver up my arm.

My chest constricted like someone was squeezing my heart in their fist, trying to wring out the last beat so I would collapse and turn to stone beside Falina. I realized my hand was still touching her stone corpse, but I couldn’t seem to make myself draw it back. If I drew it back, then all of this would be real.

I would have to tell the rest of the villagers what happened, and I would have to tell Falina’s cousins she had passed peacefully, when I knew for a fact that nobody just turned to stone without feeling at least for one wild, spine-wrenching, blood-freezing moment, that death was coming for them like a swiftly rushing avalanche.

I must have stayed there for ten minutes with my hand on her stony shoulder. Only when my fingers began to prickle with cold did I remind my feet how to move, and only when I felt someone watching me from behind did I manage to turn back toward the entrance of Falina’s home.

The stone dragon was the only one there, and if his frozen grin looked a little more satisfied than it had a few minutes ago, it wouldn’t have made a difference. He had shown up, and now Falina was gone with no way to know why or how or what to do next.

I hoped the village elders might have more ideas than I did, but it turned out that no one had any explanations for it. Old world magic unearthed by digging too deeply, perhaps. A curse of the gods for something, though no one could say exactly why. Bad luck for Falina for being happier more often than she was sad, one of the worst sins that a single woman in the village could commit.

Mostly though, the rest of the folks in the village were just happy Falina’s bad luck hadn’t fallen on them.

That was before the second stone dragon showed up a few mornings later, curled up around Yaniv’s house. He went into hysterics, although his wife remained quite calm, but neither hysterics nor calm ended up making a difference. We found them both turned to stone the next morning in their beds, just the same as Falina.

Anfa’s house was the next to be encircled by a stone dragon. She fled the same day with her two children and a single pack of their possessions, but when I came back from hunting the next morning, I found all three of them turned to stone just on the other side of the pass that led out of our long valley, only they looked like they had been frozen in the middle of trying to run to safety.

When I stood up from studying their stone arms stretched out in terror, their legs turned to rock in the middle of a stride, I knew this was not bad luck. This was no divine punishment or curse of the Mountain folk. I might not know what it was yet, but I was certain of one thing:

This was only the beginning.