Dragons In The Valley

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

But that all changed 1 year, 2 months, 5 days and 60 seconds ago.

All I can say is, thank God there aren’t any seagulls. Seagulls are worse than dragons. Nasty big buggers they are. They flock together and gang up on you. Get on the wrong side of them and you could find yourself being ripped to shreds before you have chance to draw your sword.

At least with dragons you have a fighting chance.

Dragons preferred living in the cities. It's an easy life for them in the city, everything's so convenient. It's easy for them to scavenge for food and being somewhat lazy creatures, city life suits them better.

But the increase in pollution made it difficult for them to breathe. It blocked their nostrils so badly that a few of them had actually exploded when they tried to breathe fire. Add to this the poor quality of the food they were getting, which was making them too fat to fly, and you can see why many of them decided to up sticks and return to their mountain roots.

This turned out to be a bad move for most of them.

Mountain life was just too quiet. They had grown accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the city, not to mention they were so overweight it was difficult for them to fly, hunt for food or do anything other than sit on their lazy arse backsides.

Finding mountain life a tad too challenging, they had packed up sticks and trekked down into the valleys and into the larger villages.

In the valleys, the air was fresh, the climate cooler and there was a chance to get some decent grub without breaking into a sweat.

This was good news for the dragons, but bad news for the valley folk.

We aren't afraid of the dragons. Valley folk are fearless folk, well, mostly fearless folk. There are some things we are afraid of, like seagulls, for instance. It was what would follow that scared us. Trouble always followed dragons. The thought of all that bloodshed, lies, deceit and life as we know it being turned upside down was enough to make your legs shake good'n'hard.

You see, we only used to have Welsh dragons in our part of the world.

They're not too big, not too ugly and not too unfriendly. Unlike the nasty snap dragons that live in the metropolitan cities and came over with the immigrants. Now, they are a different kettle of fish altogether and us Wem folk have no tolerance for them. They are proper baddies. Downright evil some of them.

Excuse me for rattling on. I suppose I should introduce myself.

I’m Bill. Bill the tool maker they call me, on account of I’m very handy with tools and also because there are seven other Bills in The Wem. We mostly have the same family names, such as Jones or Davis, so it makes it easier if we are called by something memorable and unique to us.

There’s Bill the gate, Bill the fisher, Bill the voice, Bill the gardener, you get the picture.

Anyway, till 1 year, 2 months, 5 days, 17 hours and 60 seconds ago, we didn’t have any dragons in The Wem. Dragons, having become lazy bastards, preferred to settle in the first village they came to, and as The Wem is deep in the valley, surrounded by a dense forest, most dragons, and people for that matter are too lazy to go the extra mile or 10 to get to us.

As I said, we're not afeared of them.

In fact, we have always been on good terms with the dragons. Hell, we have even fought alongside them. Back in the day, we were like brothers in arms. But this younger generation of dragons, well, they are different. They have no discipline and have I mentioned they are lazy? They just want an easy life.

You can ask anyone in The Wem, and they’d all tell you the same thing. There’s no easy in life. You choose your hard. It’s as simple as that, because behind every mountain is another bloody mountain and the sooner you realise that, the better life is.

The first dragon that turned up caught us by surprise.

We knew about the dragon migration but we thought we would be safe here in The Wem, so we did a bad thing. We stuck our heads in the sand and pretended that we didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. Out of sight, out of mind, as we say. But that all stopped 1 year, 2 months, 5 days, 17 hours and 60 seconds ago when the first dragon was found in The Wem.

Young Martha, Bill the gates, youngest, had found a little un slumped under a bush, almost dead.

Well, you know what kids are like. They want what they want, and young Martha is no exception. To be fair, young Martha is a bit of an exception in other ways. She is fiercely stubborn and by God has she got a pair of lungs on her. Once she starts screaming, the whole bloody village can hear it. Let's just say she might look as pretty as a wood nymph, but you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of her. She has one heck of a foul temper.

As I was saying, she took a shine to it and she wanted to take it back and play nurse with it. The little tinker knew her mother wouldn’t let her have any pets, but she took it anyway. She wrapped it up tightly in her doll's blanket and put it in her pram, used her ma's best lipsticks and makeup, to make a better face, stuck a floppy hat on its head and made like it was an ugly doll.

She pushed it around the village as happy as Larry.

No one took a blind bit of notice. We all thought it was a toy. It was so still and quiet. Mostly on account of the poor thing being too weak to move and so tightly wrapped in blankets it couldn't move, even if it wanted to. And truth be known, we didn't bloody care what was in the pram. We were all so grateful to have a bit of peace and quiet from her carrying's on.

Then, she started demanding food to give to her baby. Well, we all treated it as a joke and thought she was just going through a growth spurt and needed more nourishment. We weren't going to challenge her anyway, just in case she flew into one of her tantrums. But after three weeks, we stopped giving her the food as we thought it was getting too much, and we didn’t want her to get fat.

Martha's quite a resourceful kid, so when she couldn't get the food she wanted, the little tinker started stealing it. The strange thing was she was stealing the best sausages or half a ham. It wasn't normal for a young kid to steal this type of food.

At first, no one suspected Martha of stealing the food. We blamed the wood folk because that was the most logical and because none of us are very good at facing problems. It was only after we found the dragon that we were able to put it all together.

As I said, we didn't have any dragons in the Wem till 1 year 2 months, 5 days, 17 hours and 60 seconds ago. That's when we discovered the dragon. We found out by accident really. The bloody thing had just scoffed half a ham. He had eaten it so quickly he got indigestion and did a bit of a fire burp to release the gases. That's when he accidentally set the curtains alight.

One thing lead to another and before you could blink your eye, he had almost burnt the bloody house down. Fortunately, Bill the elephant was nearby and he was able to use a hose and the elephant to spray the place with water.

That's when we found them. Martha and Chilli, as she called him.

She was standing in the middle of her bedroom as bold as anything. She had ash all over her face, her long blonde hair had been singed at the edges and she had tears of defiance streaming down her cheeks.

She was clutching a little Welsh dragon to her chest and she held that dragon so closely it was like her life depended on it. And, she had the meanest, fiercest look on her face that said, don't even think about trying to take my dragon.

Well, we did try, and we failed miserably.

She kicked and screamed and cried and shouted and he snorted and burnt the furniture. In the end, we agreed to give in on the grounds we had no other choice. We had no control over either of them, so we reasoned it was better to just leave them be. Although, in truth I think it was partly because we wanted an easy life.

I said before that us Wem folk weren't afeared of anything except seagulls, but this isn't quite true. You see we had become lazy and fearful. All the years of peace had changed us. We had lost our fighting spirit. All except Martha that is. Now she had enough fight in her to frighten the whole bloody village and we all knew it.

The long and the short of it is, we gave in.

We told ourselves that if Chilli was prepared to be a lazy sod and let himself be pushed around the village in a pram with dolls clothes on: we weren’t going to stop it.

If he wanted to shame his dragon family, we weren’t going to interfere. He was a dragon after all, and he knew exactly what he was getting himself into.

Looking back, it was a good thing that Martha saved that dragon, because nobody, and I mean nobody, not even great aunt Agatha with her rune bones, could have bloody well predicted what happened next.