Firebend

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

First there were ghosts. The prime wizard said they were friendly; that was before one of them possessed his three-legged cat and scared him into a nightmare-ridden retirement.

We got rid of the ghosts with a little pinch of salt and a lot of magic.

I was 7 when the last ghost left the valley, its mournful wailing echoing off the jagged cliffs surrounding our little village.

After the ghosts, it was the pixies.

Cute little devils, they found immense joy in flying around a person’s head, buzzing painfully until said person ran off screaming into the hills, not to be seen until the next morning when they would sheepishly walk into the village and be met by a host of gleeful pixies. I quickly found that if you ignored them, they soon tired of torturing you and sought another, more exciting, victim.

I spent most of the days during my eighth year in peace while the whole village feverishly burnt foul herbs and chanted spells. This only made the pixies more aggressive.

One night I convinced the old lady next door to play her lute all night. She knew three notes, and none of them were in tune.

By morning, my ears had committed mutiny, and the pixies were gone.

There was a year of relative peace.

That year, I learned how to milk a cow and take a bath.

I also saw a baby human being born and vowed to never have one, though I wasn’t entirely sure how to keep that vow.

My mother changed my name to Aries that year because she was bored.

I was ten when the unicorns marched down the mountain and paraded through the village, looking down their prissy snouts at us.

They looked nice enough, but people kept disappearing after that.

I wasn’t scared of the unicorns. Or so I thought. One day when I was in the woods picking pocononut berries to make spicy juice, I felt hot breath on my neck. I whirled around, contraband knife at the ready, to see that it was only my best friend, Kasper. He thought the knife was great, but the cut on his newly muscled arm got infected and I set out bravely to get a cup of unicorn tears, hoping their healing powers were more than rumors.

When I found them in a glade full of bones, the unicorns made it clear that I was not welcome in their community. I promised to teach them a special dance if they would help me. After reluctant and condescending nods, I started dancing. Before I could really get to the good stuff, they slowly filed out of the valley, disappearing into the fog surrounding it, never to be seen again.

When I examined the bones, I realized that they weren’t human but instead were made of flour and water and a slightly sweet substance I was unfamiliar with.

I felt a new respect for the hidden cooking talents of the unicorns, and a brief sadness that I was unable to really bond with them.

So when the fairies came, I decided to befriend them. After being cursed twice, once with a sneezing spell and another that left me temporarily paralyzed, I was fairly successful. I showed them how to braid their hair into stiff, pointy horns and they taught me to cast a spell that would render someone speechless. It was a great year. That is, until the Wizards Guild became jealous of the natural power and magic the fairies possessed and decided to raid their lair. When I ran through the night and warned the fairies, they called me a coward and told me to go home.

The next morning, the fairies were gone, and everyone had been placed under the speechless curse. Everyone except me.

That was the year that we all created and learned a sign language. Through signing and a lot of silent cursing, one of the wizards taught me a spell that lifted the curse, a spell that involved very questionable mushrooms.

When everyone got the ten months of not talking out of their systems, the Wizard’s guild decided I was destined to be a wizard and commenced my training. I had no natural magical powers and was severely dyslexic. They decided I was stupid.

I kept training because I got to play with dangerous weapons and perform dangerous spells.

I quite purposely gave the new Prime Wizard a few extra warts and accidently turned Kaspar into a frog.

This ended up being convenient, because he was able to communicate with the elves that moved into our valley on my twelfth birthday. The only problem was that Kaspar didn’t have very good social skills, so when he accidentally threatened them with total annihilation, I attempted to smooth things over through sign language. But the elves were too busy chasing Kaspar to pay attention to my soundless motions, so I pulled out a makeshift wand I had whittled and hit them with the levitating spell I had luckily been practicing. When my wand snapped from the pressure, the traumatized elves hit the ground running, leaving behind their priceless ancient carvings collection.

For his (slightly modified) part in the whole ordeal, Kaspar was returned to his human form.

For an undisclosed adult reason, the wizards had a grudge against Kaspar’s mother and thought it was hilarious to see him hopping around so helplessly.

That was when I first realized just how useless the wizards really were.

When I was thirteen, I learned how to avoid making babies when I walked into my cousin’s tent without announcing my presence. I also discovered that if I used three wishes, the Djinn that was plaguing us would have to leave. So I caught the Djinn in a bottle that I found behind the village tavern. Before I could wish for the death of my arch nemesis Waverly, the village beauty, the Djinn perished from the fumes of whatever the bottle had contained in it the previous night.

The next year, it was serpents who practiced the dark magic of invisibility in order to sneak up on their prey. Their prey were humans.

When the new Prime Wizard’s sleeping spell didn’t work, I began hunting them one by one with a bow and arrow. Having never been hunted in a non-magical way, they were terrified. They left the valley with no casualties, except for one fat serpent who had feasted on too many frogs and was unable to slither. Kaspar took offense at his eating spree, due to personal experiences. No one knows what happened after they disappeared into the woods together, but Kaspar came back, and the serpent didn’t.

By fourteen, I was either directly or indirectly responsible for ridding our valley of most unwelcome newcomers.

My fifteenth year was filled with boys and fighting and a ridiculous amount of wizard training.

And then the dragons came.