Crispin Fletcher, Dragonhunter

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

There hadn't been dragons for years, maybe even centuries, although that seemed a very long time ago indeed. At least no one living in the small village of Eldenvale or its surrounding farmsteads had ever claimed to have seen one in all of their long years. In the case of wizened, shrivelled old Edme Thatch who had no teeth and only ate soup, that was as far back as anybody could remember. Possibly even further.

Once the day’s work had been finished, the lanterns swinging in the chill breeze outside had been lit, and the hearth fires were blazing and casting warm shadows across the darkened common room of the Springmead Inn on bitter winter evenings, stories would occasionally be told of mighty dragons. Other stories were told as well, tales of cunning gnomes and wicked hobgoblins and the like - all very entertaining adventures and fables in their own manner, filled with riddles and omens and third sons of third sons and such - but the stories of dragons were the favourites amongst the village children. There was something noble and majestic about dragons, something that promised the excitement of danger and malevolence yet at the same time the perils of wisdom and great rewards. Those stories were many years old in the telling, passed down from Village Lorekeeper to Village Lorekeeper through the misty years as part of the rich oral history of Eldenvale, but in the cold bitter light of the winter mornings they were just that again.

Stories.

No, there weren't always dragons in the Valley.

Mostly there were just sheep.

The shepherds who returned from their lonely nights out in the Valley only told stories of eagles wheeling high overhead, circling and searching for a lone lamb in the springtime. Or of the occasional wolf throughout the year, more of them in number and desperation during the winter, seeking to take an animal from the flock when the shepherds let their guard down. Where there weren’t sheep there were just cows, quietly chewing their cud and generally doing nothing interesting at all, as cows were inclined to do. And where there weren’t cows there were just crops, fields of wheat or barley or tobacco, with every third one left fallow for the season.

But in the wild imagination of the wide eyed village children, everyday concerns such as sheep, cows and fields weren't anywhere near as exciting as dragons. Certainly you could ride a cow - if it let you - or chase the sheep when the shepherds weren't watching, but that was about it. If you were discovered lingering too long around the fields with nothing important to do you were set to work instead. There was no fun to be found turning over fertile dirt or pulling weeds from amongst the crops. The village children were usually careful to stay clear of the fields when they managed to steal some time for themselves away from the watchful gaze of parents and other villagers who could easily set them to work and waste a full afternoon.

No, there were no dragons in the Valley, and everybody knew that.

But when Emil Sallow's house, gardens and little woodturning workshop, isolated and tucked deeply away where the Springmead River quietly flowed down into the Valley high above the village, suddenly burned down one early summer night along with a great swathe of the nearby forest, little Crispin Fletcher knew otherwise.

The villagers said that it was just the pitiful complaining of an old man living alone in the woods high up near the Valley's head. They said that the fire had started because the foolish old man had carelessly let his lantern fall on his way home during that darkening, windy evening. A minor disaster that could have been averted had the old man kept his wits about him. But Crispin had listened to the old man's reckless claims those first evenings that summer with wide eyes and open ears.

'I could hear the beating of its great wings!' the old man had insisted to any who would still listen in the Springmead Inn, a mug of lonely mead in one hand and the other supported in a woollen sling across his chest. However foolhardy the villagers of Eldenvale considered him, the Village Seer wouldn't leave him injured without appropriate treatment. 'Loud and deafening, it was, and it made the very forest tremble with its passing!'

He raised and shook his free hand for emphasis, some of his mead sloshing over the lip and landing on the flagstone floor.

‘Keep yourself still, Emil Sallow, and stop spilling your drink over my floor!’ Fiora Orvyn scolded the elderly man as she waddled her great bulk from the table where she was busy clearing used plates and cutlery. An apron stained with the night’s common spills and tidying barely stretched across her girth but when it came time for the harvest she worked as hard as anyone in the fields to bring the crops in. ‘I don’t care if your arm is broken and you’ve set your house alight! You visit my Inn, you keep your manners in hand. Here, boy, tidy that spill for me.’

She tossed her wash towel at Crispin who thought he had been all but forgotten sitting quietly on the corner of the hearthstones. It landed over his unkempt brown hair, falling over his eyes before he managed to get a hand up to catch it. His dusty olive-green tunic and still silence clearly had not blended him into the darkness as well as he had thought.

He said nothing but bent down to wipe the spilled mead from the floor. He knew better than to argue with Fiora Orvyn.

‘You wouldn’t be scolding me, Fiora, if you’d heard those great wings, my girl!’ Emil continued, the fact he still referred to Fiora who had a grandchild of her own as ‘girl’ only emphasising his own considerable age.

'That was just the gale blowing through the trees, Emil,' Crispin's father, Eldenvale’s local wheelwright, waved the explanation away with a dismissing draw on his mug. He nodded quickly at Crispin, only a small motion that most wouldn’t have noticed, approving of his son’s respectful obedience. 'It was a windy night and you let your lantern fall in your senility. Go back to drowning your wits in your mug and leave us to do the same.'

But cupping the damp cloth in his hands and quietly stepping across the common room in his laced calfskin shoes, Crispin knew what the sound of wind in the forest sounded like. He had run wild through the forest’s hidden wooded paths all throughout the long, never ending years of his childhood, eleven whole harvests now.

No, he thought to himself with a shake of his head and a spark in his eye as he returned the damp cloth to Fiora’s benchtop. The sound of a dragon's wings must sound different to wind blowing through the trees, surely. Even a wind as strong as there was that night. No one could mistake a common sound like the wind for the looming approach of a great dragon.

And then there was the dragon's tooth, he remembered as he made his way back to his seat on the corner hearth stone, desiring the company of the older villagers and their talk again.

The dragon’s tooth the Mayor kept on display in pride of place upon the great hearth of the inn, between Fiora’s precious vase with a selection of seasonal flowers, and a small framed painting of the Mayor's dead mother painted by a travelling peddler years before. The dragon's tooth that had been bitten directly into solid rock somewhere in the distant past with such ferocity and force that it must surely have broken away from the monstrous beast’s mighty jaw. The dragon's tooth that pierced right through that fragment of rock the full length of the Mayor's finger before ending in a wicked point. The dragon's tooth that even now could not be pulled from the rock and almost seemed to be made of stone itself.

He looked up at it, sitting silently and ominously upon the hearth above him to his left. As if such a thing as wondrous and mysterious as that treasured relic could ever be anything other than real.

No, there weren't always dragons in the Valley, but Crispin Fletcher knew that once there had been, somewhere back in the forgotten past before even old Edme Thatch had been born. There had to have been. There was a dragon tooth sitting right there on the great hearth next to him! There weren’t always dragons in the Valley, but they were back again.

Well, at least one of them.

And that mild summer evening sitting quietly and forgotten once more in the dim light of the Springmead's common room, Crispin Fletcher decided that he would be the one to find it.