Falling Toward Dragons

CHAPTER ONE

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

But there were today.

Finn ran down the cliff-hugging trail along the north face. Little rocks broke free under his left foot and tumbled off the edge. Some landed on the path down below. Others broke off wide and fell toward the lake that filled the valley floor. He was too high up to see them hit the water, and he didn’t dare lean over to peer over the edge. He’d lost his balance and fallen before, but he hadn’t been this high up last time and only fell about thirty feet before the water broke his fall.

He was at least a hundred feet up now. Maybe more.

Still, he ran like the path behind him was on fire.

Down below, a great bellow of sound sent vibrations up the stone cliffs. He felt the echoes in the soles of his boots and grinned like a madman, because he was.

Mad, that is.

“Where the bloody hell are you going, Finnigan?” Blary Keele shielded his head from pebbles that rained down on him, shaken loose by Finn’s footfalls. He scowled as Finn came barrelling around the S bend and swept onto the next trail, continuing his descent. As he got closer to Blary, the big butcher tried to block his way by standing in the middle of the path. His gut hung over his leather belt and the twine keeping his boots up was tied so tightly that his calves looked like they were about to burst free, just like his fledgling sausages. “Stop right now! Do you hear me, boy? You’re going to get yourself killed!”

Finn couldn’t slow down. He saw his chance unfolding before him and he didn’t have much time. They wouldn’t be down by the water long, and this was the only way he could come at them from a higher elevation.

Finn waved his arm to the side, motioning for Blary to get out of his way.

The butcher just folded his thick, hairy arms and shook his head in disapproval. “Your mama is going to lose her mind!”

As the distance closed between himself and the butcher, it became quite clear to Finn that Blary was not going to move, and he either had to go over or under the big man. He was close enough that he caught a whiff of those fledgling sausages rolling off him. Finn’s mouth watered, but he kept his focus on his route.

Up and over would be a higher risk of getting grabbed.

But under?

Finn grit his teeth, dug in his heels to take off speed, and slid right to the edge of the trail. Loose dirt and stones poured over the edge. Blary let out a startled yelp of sound and lunged forward to catch Finn by the back of the shirt when he realized what was happening, but he was too slow. Finn caught air and felt like he was flying for the briefest moment— until he was falling. He tucked his legs, landed hard on the path below, rolled, and came back up running.

Blary cursed up a storm up above before hollering up the cliffside. “Odette! Your boy is trying to kill himself again!”

The path descended at a steeper incline for the last four S bends, and Finn barely managed to keep control of his legs. He had to lean backward to keep his weight distributed, otherwise he’d fall head over feet and tumble all the way down until he crashed at one end and inevitably broke something. He couldn’t afford broken bones. His mother didn’t have enough money to support them as it was, and his work carrying lumber up the paths helped them break even. Without his physical ability, they’d be drowning like the rest of the valley dwellers who couldn’t afford to move higher up on the cliffside.

As he ran, he passed many of said dwellers tucked up against the rocks picking at peeling skin on their feet or muttering to themselves about the dragons in the valley.

“Bloody fucking nuisance,” one said as Finn blew past in a blur of tattered fabrics and sweat-slicked skin.

“Foul smelling wretches,” another grumbled.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky with one that can actually breathe fire and he’ll burn this hell hole to the ground,” a third hissed through a mouth missing all its teeth.

Finn kept on running. Down and around another S bend. He couldn’t have been more than fifty feet up now. Maybe less. He could smell the water and the salty scent it gave the stone at the bottom of the valley. When he was a young boy, it had mostly been grass and dirt down there, full of crops and fields of agricultural prosperity. Back then, a lot of the dwellers lived in huts on the ground. Some liked to sleep under the stars right in the middle of the fields.

The valley had been a paradise until the heavy rains filled the bottom and erased the fields. The crops drowned a long time ago and all the dwellers had to move upward, carving their lives into the stone to survive. Water run-off from the surface made waterfalls over the paths. The angry water made it treacherous to travel during the rains, so everyone had to stay indoors until they passed, but they simultaneously supplied drinking water.

Finn had learned a long time ago that there was always something to be gained out of danger living in the valley.

That’s why he needed to get low enough to jump.

If he timed it right, he might be able to get close enough to one of the dragons to break off a scale or two. One scale would put food on his and his mother’s plates for half a year. Two scales and he could help his friends. Three?

Well, that was too crazy an idea to even entertain.

“Finn!” His mother’s cry filled the valley.

He knew if he looked up, he’d find familiar faces peering down at him, wondering what the hell he was doing running down into the valley when the horn had blown telling everyone to run up and inside. He knew they’d be whispering the same things they always did.

What an oddball, that son of hers.

He’s just trying to get attention.

He’s so desperate.

He’s a dreamer. He has no sense.

Maybe those dragons will do us all a favour and just swallow him whole.

He took another S bend. He’d never been this close before. Not ever.

A screech split the air.

Wind blasted upward, knocking Finn sideways against the cliff. He caught his shoulder and tore his tunic on the stone. The cliffside bit into his skin, and blood dripped onto the dirt at his feet.

Finn shielded himself as the wind picked up and angled himself toward the cliffside. When he heard splashes down below, his heart fell into his stomach.

The dragons were moving down there.

Had Blary just sabotaged his best shot at pinching a scale?

Finn clenched his teeth and dropped to a crouch to make himself smaller. His brown clothes blended into the stone, and the first dragon that swept up into the air and caused the wind didn’t see him.

But Finn saw it.

He watched with only one eye open, peering over his hunched shoulder as the dragon appeared from below. He saw the snout first, dark green and glittering with beads of water that wicked off its scales as the beast picked up speed. Next came the eyes, which were the same color as the sky on a cloudless day and split down the middle by a narrow pupil. Black spikes along the neck gave way to a powerful body before the wings exploded over the edge and kicked up more rocks. Finn was forced to look away and keep his head down as a second dragon followed, this one smaller than the first, but with a wingspan that nearly touched either side of the valley walls. Finn narrowly missed being knocked clean off the edge.

He’d come this far. He was so close.

As soon as the first horn blew that afternoon and the dark green dragon circled overhead, he’d felt courage in his bones that wasn’t usually there. The dragons hadn’t been here since three summers ago, and he didn’t have the strength then that he did now, or the speed. He’d never been afraid of the dragons like the other dwellers, or his mother, and he saw their arrival today for what it was.

A chance to change his fate.

Finn leaned toward the edge.

Fate is never changed without a leap of faith, he thought.

He stayed low to the ground and peered over the edge.

Down below, a mere twenty feet—two more S bend turns—was a solitary dragon. The third was the smallest of the trio, and a male. His scales hadn’t darkened yet. They were a sickly white and speckled in blue splotches. Eventually, his whole body would be blue, but that was probably another several years off. He was fledgling, maybe twenty feet long from snout to tail, with a wingspan of the same distance. He splashed in the lake, occasionally leaping from one cliffside to the other and clinging onto the stone with his talons. Before plunging back into the water, he’d let out playful shrieks. Either the fledgling didn’t care that his parents had left him alone, or he expected they wouldn’t be gone long.

Finn craned his neck and looked up. The adult dragons had broken free of the valley altogether. The largest, the dark green male, circled slowly above, while the female was nowhere in sight.

Perhaps it was feeding time.

Finn gulped.

Maybe this wasn’t the best idea, after all. A fledgling with two circling parents was well protected. Even if Finn could time it perfectly and get himself a scale or two, he’d have two angry parents diving straight down to eat him.

The dwellers would carve ‘we told you so’ into his headstone.

Finn shifted his weight and moved to a crouch on the balls of his feet. He hadn’t come all this way to quit. High rewards came with high risks. If he didn’t do this, nothing would change for him or his mother. The water level would continue to rise, and inevitably they would be pushed out of their lower level dwelling and forced upward, where they wouldn’t be able to afford the lifestyle of timber huts, palm roofs, fresh fruit, and all the things living closer to the surface provided.

They would have to leave the valley, and nobody who ever left the valley survived.

At least that’s what all the old lore books said.

Down below, the fledgling threw his head back and let out three happy chirps, like a baby bird. Finn couldn’t help but smile. The dragon’s scales were hideous, but the creature was cute in his own right.

He’s a misfit, Finn thought sullenly, just like me.

The fledgling dove down into the water and resurfaced a short while later, fanning out his wings so he would float.

Finn knew a better chance would not come.

So he jumped.

The wind tore at his tunic and hair. He fanned himself wide, spreading his arms and legs, hoping to catch as much wind as possible to lessen the impact. He’d lined himself up perfectly. The fledgling was right below him. He would land right in the middle of its back. Lucky for Finn, the fledgling wasn’t old enough to sprout spikes along his back of his own. Otherwise, Finn would have been falling to an anticlimactic skewering.

Just when he was close enough to smell the dragon’s sweet, sickly breath, the fledgling dove under the surface and disappeared.

“Shit!” The curse slipped from between his teeth seconds before he broke the surface and plunged into the depths of the cold, dark water.

How did I miss? You idiot! You were so close!

Bubbles swarmed up his legs and under his shirt. They tickled as he tried to swim to the surface. He’d lost the element of surprise. Now the fledgling knew he was here, and they were in the water together. Finn wasn’t sure if his difficulty breathing was from the cold shock or his fear.

Suddenly, the water surged around him. He was pushed to the side by a swell of water rising from beneath him and knew the dragon was returning to the surface. Finn swam for dear life, hoping the dragon wasn’t coming up right under him, jaws wide open, sharp baby teeth ready to taste its first human. Up above, someone screamed his name, and he thought dimly about how he’d doomed his mother to watch her son die all because he’d gotten caught up in the idea of making them rich.

The dragon burst out of the water with a shriek of its own. Its eyes, blue like its father’s, fastened on Finn, and he saw a sea of confusion and fear in the wide pupil.

A dragon, scared of me? Why?

Its neck came out of the water before its wings broke free, and Finn realized his chance was still in his grasp. He reached out, caught hold of a back leg, and held on for dear life as he was pulled straight up and into the air as the dragon picked up speed and began to fly out of the valley.

The fledgling screamed bloody murder.

Up above, the father screamed back.

Finn struggled to hold on and retrieve the knife secured in his belt. The fledgling was a sloppy flyer and bumped into the cliff walls as it tried to shake him loose. Finn held fast and managed to free his knife. Holding on with one arm, he slid the blade of the knife up under a scale that was a few shades lighter than the rest and turning transparent: a sign of dead scale. He lifted the handle of the blade and the scale popped off with no resistance. He caught it, nearly dropped it, and tucked it into the pouch hanging off his belt.

One down.

He freed another one and added it to the bag.

His cheeks hurt from grinning so big.

“Let go!”

Finn soared past his mother, who stood on one of the trails, waving her arms over her head. She looked small from his vantage, and terrified. How high up was he? He peered down and realized they’d climbed quicker than he expected. He was nearly forty feet in the air.

Trying for three scales might kill him.

He spied another pale white one on the underbelly.

High risk, high reward.

Finn reached with his knife, stretching himself out, and managed to break off the scale. The fledgling screamed again. Up above the valley, the father roared, tucked its wings, and dove.

Finn’s heart almost stopped.

If he didn’t let go now, he would become dragon food. Even if he did let go, the father might follow him right down into the water and eat him anyway.

Still, the odds were better in the water.

Finn let go.

The lake came rushing up to meet him. His limbs flailed as he tried to orient himself to break the surface with his feet. It didn’t work. He hit the water sideways. Every bone in his body screamed with pain. He let out a pitiful sound under water, releasing all the air from his lungs, and almost inhaled a mouthful. The momentum of his fall slowed, and he began swimming toward the surface, praying that a giant mouth full of teeth wasn’t going to break through at any second and devour him.

He wasn’t sure what death would be worse: drowning or being eaten by a furious daddy dragon.

The latter would make for a cooler story. Hattie, the flute player at the dweller’s pub, might even write a song about him. Finn didn’t mind the thought of pretty Hattie singing the heroic tale of his death… although if left to her own devices she might refer to it as a suicide. He had jumped into a lake with a dragon, after all.

Finn’s lungs burned as he reached for the surface. He needed air. He reached for it and gave a final kick. He was just a few feet away.

And then everything went ablaze. The water around him increased in temperature rapidly as fire burned on the surface. Finn used his arms and legs to push himself away and deeper, desperate to escape the rising heat of the dragon’s breath but finding that there was no escaping it. Bubbles began to pop on the surface as the water temperature reached boiling. Finn swam harder, desperate, until the heat became too much and the lack of air in his lungs left him disoriented. He no longer knew which way was up or down.

All he knew was that his mother would have to make the journey out of the valley to bury his body alongside Gabriel and his father.

Gabriel never would have done a thing like this. He was too responsible. He understood consequences. He did the right thing, always. Even when he died, he was doing the right thing.

As darkness closed in around him, Finn told himself his mother would be better off without him, and that he would see his brother and father soon. He made peace with it as his lungs filled with water.

Above, the flames vanished.

The darkness became impenetrable—so impenetrable that, as Finn fought to keep his eyes open, he couldn’t see the face of the person who dove in after the flames abated, grabbed the front of his tunic, and hauled him to the surface, where he spat up water in a coughing fit before slipping under the surface again. Whoever his rescuer was, they were small, because they could barely support Finn’s weight. He struggled to stay afloat as the stench of sulphur filled his nose. The water was intolerably hot, and steam rose off the surface, flooding his nose with the wretched stench.

“Use your legs, you dumb oaf,” a girl’s voice said. She drove her elbow into his back as if to spur him into kicking. “You can’t sink to the bottom of the valley and waste those pretty scales now, can you?”

He felt her hand tear the pouch holding the three scales from his belt. He tried to reach for it, but his lungs were still half full of water, and he was disoriented.

She clicked her tongue. “Score.”

He still couldn’t see her.

She giggled and whispered in his ear. “I’ll keep them very safe, handsome. I promise.”

“Please… don’t take them,” was all Finn managed before he passed out.