Forests and Flames

Tarren knew she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

The forest that, during the daytime, held memories of playing with her friends in the patches of sunlight breaking through the canopy had quickly become frightening as the sun set and her clothes were thin enough that she had begun shivering in the brisk autumn air. In the darkness, she couldn’t see well enough to stop her tiny feet from tripping over the raised roots of the trees surrounding her.

She wasn’t sure how long she had been walking, only that after the fourth or fifth time she fell it became a struggle to return to her feet. She was so, endlessly tired — perhaps she should take a nap. Tarren’s mother often made her take naps, so they couldn’t be dangerous, could they? If she could just rest for a bit, surely she would feel better when she awoke. There was really no need to be terrified of the howling creatures she could hear in the distance, because after a bit of sleep she would know exactly where she was and run home to Mama’s arms.

So Tarren found the biggest, nicest looking tree she could see in the darkness and nestled into its roots. But the thing that woke her wasn’t the sun. It was something much, much worse.

—

Reyna was aware, somewhere in the back of her mind, that she was making an awful racket stomping through the forest like this. Not to mention the mess — what saplings she didn’t crush with her paws were excavated down to the root by her hind talons or knocked over by her tail as she passed. But today, she didn’t particularly care. Today, she was furious.

The loathsome humans had once again encroached on her territory. Reyna wasn’t particularly fond of the other members of her species, and thus had not gotten herself involved in the battles with the humans. She was content to bask in the sunlight on her favorite rock and live out her terribly, horrifyingly long existence away from the backstabbing, gossiping, meddling members of her tribe. That had worked just fine until the humans began inching their way into her territory, planning to make her their next target. As if she wouldn’t notice.

She had woken this particular morning to discover that the humans had gotten it into their heads to make their camp on her sun rock. Reyna was old enough that emotions rarely touched her anymore, but even she could admit that she went into what one could call a fit of rage at the sight. She had used her tail to swipe the tents and sleeping humans off of her rock, into the canyon below. If she hadn’t been so irate, the way they had screamed when they'd woken up on the way down might have been funny.

Now she was on her way to speak to Varos, the dragon currently leading her tribe, who she knew would not be happy to see her. Especially not when he heard of what she had done to the trees on her journey to him.

Reyna could hear the forest readying for her approach as she stalked her way through it — the animals scurrying to take shelter in their burrows or nests or under a nearby root. The flurry of activity made the sphere of silence to her right even more noticeable.

As she turned her head to search out what could be causing the phenomenon, something small and golden caught her eye. She shuffled to the right a bit, then arched her neck over the trees and lowered her head to get a better glimpse.

The moment Reyna realized what she had discovered, she froze. There was a tiny human asleep under her nose. She had never seen one that small — was it just as bloodthirsty as its larger counterparts? Was it pretending to be asleep to lure her in and then attack her? Or even worse, was it a hatchling? Hatchlings were sacred, and this one couldn’t have been out of its shell for more than two or three years. Harming hatchlings was…well, perhaps she could still sneak away and leave someone else to deal with the threat. But then it would grow up into a sun rock stealer, just like its tribemates. And there was no one around, so who would know if she just dealt with it?

The longer Reyna stared at the hatchling human, the less she knew what to do with it. And before she could decide, a third, horrifying, new factor came into play. It sniffed, then it opened its golden eyes.

—

Something was dripping on Tarren. She took a deep breath, but the forest didn’t smell like rain. So she opened her eyes — and found that she was staring directly into the face of a dragon.

Its scales were the color of the blackberries her mother had picked for her that summer. She liked blackberries, so even though the dragon was very large and was still letting its spit drip on her, Tarren decided that she liked this dragon too.

She reached a tiny hand towards the dragon’s snout. Its scales were very shiny, and she was curious if they would be slippery, like the fish that the men in her village sometimes put on the pointy sticks over the fire.

The dragon’s eyes widened as she made contact, and it snarled and seemed to stumble over its own feet as it reared away from her. Tarren shrank back into the roots of the tree she had been asleep in, frightened by the dragon’s reaction. Its scales hadn’t been slimy or slippery at all — they had been comforting, like the warm stones her mother usually put at the end of her bed to keep her feet warm during the night.

The dragon stared at her for a long moment, and Tarren quickly forgot that she had been scared of the creature. A leaf floated down from the tree, and she found that she had satisfied her curiosity about the dragon enough to chase after the leaf instead. But no sooner could she step out from under the watchful gaze of both the oak tree and the dragon than something curled around her middle and pulled her back.

The dragon had lifted her off of the ground and set her directly in front of it, where it was currently sniffing every inch of her. More leaves were falling off of the tree next to them, and Tarren longed to catch one, but though the dragon had released her from the grip of its tail, she felt pinned to the spot by its assessment.

The dragon continued sniffing until its snout brushed her arm, causing the sleeve of her shirt to fall just enough to reveal the top of her shoulder. Tarren wasn’t sure why, but the dragon stopped its sniffing then, and swung its head around to look into her eyes. It looked frightened. And then, to Tarren’s dismay, it took flight and flew away from her.

—

It had the mark. The human hatchling carried the mark.

Reyna had heard stories, passed down from dragons even older than she, of the prophecy. She had always considered it to be less of a prophecy and more of a legend, but now, as she flew away from that place in the forest as quickly as she could, every time the story had been told to her floated through her head. She had been told there would come a human girl, with a mark of a dragon on her shoulder. Just like she had seen on the hatchling.

It was impossible — not purely because the odds of a human being born with a mark like that were minuscule, but because of what the mark was supposed to mean. Legend said that the human born with that mark was destined to bond with a dragon. On her seventeenth birthday, if the bond pleased the sun gods, they would bless the dragons with the ability to produce fire.

Reyna wasn’t entirely sure how that would be possible, or where the fire would come from — but those questions didn’t matter anyway, because she had no intention of getting involved in that mess. She had no desire to associate with living legends. Those kinds of people always led to adventures, which led to her being away from her sun rock.

So she decided to forgo speaking to Varos about the humans who had been sleeping on her sun rock that morning, because she didn’t particularly feel like talking about humans at all anymore. Yet as she flew back towards her home, she couldn’t help feeling like she had left a small part of her with the hatchling in the woods.

Part Two

Sixteen Years Later

Tarren knew she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Instead of allowing her mother to braid flowers into her hair or helping her aunt prepare the meal they would eat later that night, Tarren was sitting on a branch as high up as she could climb in her favorite oak tree, deeper in the forest than she was allowed to go.

Her mother would be furious that she was here — especially today, of all days. But she needed the wind on her face, needed the break from the preparations that had hounded her night and day for weeks leading up to today. Her eighteenth birthday was the day she would officially become a woman, and it was a massive deal to everyone in her village.

Everyone, that is, except Tarren. Her mother told her that even as a child she had never been good at staying in one place for long, and it seemed that she had never grown out of that trait. She felt restless when she was trapped in the village all day, like there was something drawing her to the forests and mountains beyond. Something that her heart yearned for — though she wasn’t sure what.

She sighed, and leaned her head back against the trunk of the tree. The sun was out in full force today, and the clouds were moving quickly across the sky in patterns that piqued her imagination. Tarren was surprised her mother hadn’t come looking for her already — though she wasn’t allowed to wander this far away from the village, she often came to sit in this exact tree — but she was content to find shapes in the clouds until she did.

She was so warm and comfortable nestled in the fork of the tree that she must have dozed off. On any other day, that would have been a small mistake. But today, she berated herself for doing so when she awoke to the forest going silent.

A silent forest was never a good sign. It meant that the smaller animals had heard something coming that her human ears hadn’t picked up — and usually that something was nothing good. A heartbeat later, a shadow larger than any caused by the clouds she had been watching earlier passed over the sun. Her heartbeat stuttered in her chest. There was only one thing that would do that — a dragon.

—

Reyna had been having a lovely morning. She had emerged from the cave that was her home after a long nap, then spent the morning lying lazily on her sun rock. Everything had been perfect. Unfortunately for both Varos and the humans, it hadn’t stayed that way.

Dozing dragons, it seemed, looked exactly like slumbering dragons to the foolish humans who had attempted to sneak around her and into her cave. What wicked trap they were planning to set in her cave Reyna wasn’t sure, but it had been her last straw.

In her opinion, the “war” with the humans had lasted about 50 years too long. She had known Varos since he was a hatchling, and had often found him to be spineless. As Reyna loved nothing more than sunning herself all day, she was prepared to crush any who sought to keep her from doing so, immediately and without mercy. Varos, on the other hand, was content to stay on the defensive when it came to the tribes’ way of life.

So she found herself, for the second time in two decades, flying towards a conversation with another member of her species. The thought was enough to make her squirm mid-air. At least the first time she hadn’t had to follow through.

As she began to remember the last time she changed her mind, something shifted in the air around her, like the way the air felt before a thunderstorm — full of fizzling, crackling tension. It was enough to make a chill run down her spine, and reminded her to open all of her senses.

There it was.

She had to be cursed — what had she done in a previous life to deserve this? What god was taking their anger out on her? Because there, in the forest below her, was the same sphere of silence she had noticed on this very flight fifteen years ago.

Reyna had thought she had been angry that day, but there was no comparison to the veritable forge of rage burning in her gut now. She grabbed her rage by the reins and readied herself to do whatever needed to be done as she landed before that cursed oak tree and the hatchling with the golden hair.

__

Tarren hadn’t had time to run. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. She could have run the moment she saw the shadow of the dragon pass over the sun, or the moment she saw it pause its flight, or the moment she realized it was going to make a landing. Here. In this forest.

But she hadn’t.

She didn’t think that she would ever be able to explain why, only that it was the same reason she continued to wander into the forest, the same reason she continued to climb the oak tree. She just felt drawn to it. So she held her ground as a dragon landed in front of her — and maybe she was going insane, because the only thought filling her mind was that the dragon was the color of blackberries.

The dragon landed only a few paces away from her, close enough that she felt the warmth of its breath as it roared in her face. Tarren blinked.

Though roaring at her didn’t need interpretation, she could feel the rage billowing off of the dragon. It felt like the dry, hot warmth of the stones that lined the stream by her village after they had been sitting in the midday sun. So it felt like the only natural reaction to push the answering feeling back at the dragon: the calming feeling of the stream that flowed beside the rocks, lapping against them, cooling them.

The dragon recoiled from Tarren as she continued to send those feelings towards it, the same way the stream continues to flow over obstacles of its own. She took a step toward it and then another, reaching out a hand. And then at last, or maybe it was again, she couldn’t be sure, her fingertips met the snout of the dragon.

All it took was hearing the dragon — her dragon, her heart sang — speak one sentence into her mind, into their newly formed bond, for Tarren to promptly pass out.

“Is the human attempting to manage me?!”

—

The hatchling (who, it seemed, considered itself no longer a hatchling) had been awake one moment, and the next it was asleep. Wonderful.

Reyna had felt more emotions in the span of the past two minutes than she had in decades, so she did appreciate the time to sort herself out a bit. Maybe the human was simply being considerate, though she doubted it.

It was puzzling. One moment, Reyna had been furious, ready to crush the hatchling under a paw, and the next she had begun to feel calmer, safer than she had in centuries. More relaxed than she felt on her sun rock, even.

The feelings seemed to have been coming from the human, but she had not heard of any humans who possessed magic. Of course, she had to remember that this golden haired, golden eyed human was different, was special because of the dragon mark it bore.

The hatchling in question began to stir. She should have anticipated that creatures who lived lives as short as the humans would consider the amount of time she had been given as satisfactory to sort herself out. Nevertheless, Reyna shifted into a defensive stance more appropriate for dealing with humans.

She appreciated her evenly supported weight a few moments later. Otherwise, she would have fallen over when she heard the human’s voice travel down the bond she hadn’t noticed was there until this moment. Yet there it was, somewhere in the depths of her — a golden, shining cord of three strands, stretching between them.

“Can you…speak?”

Reyna almost rolled her eyes at that. Her bondmate’s first words to her and she decided to say that?

“Yes, human,” she responded, attempting to inject as much exasperation into the syllables as she could. “Of course I can speak.”

The human’s eyes grew rounder, and Reyna smirked, glad that her tone of voice was able to travel through the bond.

The bond. Oh gods, the bond. She hadn’t even considered, hadn’t even realized — it must be the hatchling’s birthday. It was the hatchling’s birthday and she had somehow formed a bond with it. With the hatchling with the dragon mark. Reyna muttered the filthiest curse she knew, because there really must be a god somewhere out there who hated her. Now she was stuck with the hatchling, stuck with a lifetime of adventure —

“I have a name, you know. Tarren.”

Reyna’s thoughts stumbled to a halt. She hadn’t realized the human could hear her, hadn’t realized she was still pushing her thoughts down the bond. Perhaps she should stop swearing so much, if the hatchling was likely to hear.

“Hello, Tarren. I am Reyna. How much of that did you hear?”

—

Tarren grimaced. She had heard Reyna’s entire inner monologue, and had felt incredibly intrusive the entire time, but hadn’t been able to figure out how to stop it from happening. And now she had a lot of questions.

“Pretty much all of it. So it’s true, then? What the storyteller said about my birthmark?”

Reyna seemed to pause. “I am not sure. I never believed the legends that were told of the one with the dragon mark. But I have never heard of a dragon that was able to speak with a human the way that we are speaking now, so at least some of it is true.”

Tarren deflated a bit at that. It wasn’t that she didn’t love the idea of being bonded with Renya or bringing fire to the dragons — all of that sounded like a wonderful adventure. But the thought of being judged by the gods was more than terrifying, and she hated the idea that her destiny seemed to have been chosen for her. She had always had a wild, untameable spirit, and simply being part of the gods' plans did not sit right with her.

“I’m not fond of that idea either, hatchling.” Tarren jumped at the words that indicated that she had made the same mistake Reyna had earlier.

“I’m not a hatchling anymore,” she said, scowling. “It’s my seventeenth birthday today.”

Reyna didn’t respond to that. The dragon’s head had turned to Tarren’s right, her eyes narrowed into slits. A low growl rumbled in her throat. Tarren froze as a branch cracked nearby, and Reyna turned to curl her tail protectively around her.

The creature that stepped out of the trees wasn’t one that Tarren had expected. In fact, it was worse. It was her mother.

She was about to be in so much trouble. There was definitely no talking her way out of this one — she was currently in what most humans would consider to be the most dangerous position possible. So she said the only thing that came to mind.

“Hi, mom.”

—

The human’s mother had found them. Reyna hadn’t been sure how it would play out — in the world of dragons, touching another dragon’s young was enough cause for the dragon to demand your death. Instead, it seemed they were currently on their way to what she assumed was the cave Tarren’s tribe resided in.

The mother had responded suspiciously well, as if she had always known that she would find her daughter speaking with a dragon. Perhaps she had, if she was a believer in the prophecy.

When they approached what Reyna assumed was the border of the human lands, Tarren’s mother asked them to wait while she explained to the villagers what they were about to see. Reyna appreciated that, since she had no desire to be poked by their tiny spears today.

She returned with a human that Reyna assumed was the tribe leader — a wrinkled woman that had to be nearing her time to fade into the Beyond — and they were led into the tribe’s territory. Reyna was shocked to see that they did not live in caves, but instead in versions of the tents that the humans had set up on her sun rock fifteen years ago. She was careful not to squish any of them, or any of the small trees they encountered along their path. That seemed like a good way to get herself poked by the many humans who emerged from the tents to watch their procession and follow after them.

As they walked, Tarren’s mother braided what looked like a crown of flowers into her bondmate’s hair. The flowers mimicked the ones that they began to see strewn about as they approached the center of the tribe, decorating the space around a large fire. The human she assumed was the tribe leader led Tarren to stand before the fire, and motioned for Reyna to take up a place next to her. It seemed as though they were either all taking this change in plans remarkably well, or that they had planned for this all along. Reyna wasn’t sure which one she was more comfortable with.

The humans continued to flow towards the fire from their tents, some in places that Reyna couldn’t see. So she wasn’t sure how the tribe leader knew when they had all arrived, but it seemed that she did, because once the final human had joined them, she began to sing.

—

Tarren’s heart had decided to migrate to her stomach and take up residence there. Being the center of attention of her entire village was not something she had been looking forward to, and she was currently clinging to her bond with Reyna for dear life, attempting to draw some confidence or comfort from it.

But then, at midday, when the sun was at its peak and the world was at its brightest, the storyteller began to sing. She told of the way their tribe was formed, the way they had been blessed by the gods to find their home among the inhospitable land, and the way they had begun to flourish. She sang of their ways of life — of how new children were birthed into the world and given names that would please the gods, how their parents raised them to honor the earth around them, and how they entered adulthood with this very ceremony and the cycle began anew.

She had heard this song sung many times, at other villagers’ coming of age ceremonies, but she had never felt it like this. And then the storyteller began a song she didn’t normally sing. A song that told of the dragons, told of the way that they snatched up traveling humans, invaded their lands and began the Great War.

But there would come a day, the storyteller sang, almost whispering now, when a bond would be forged. And Tarren flinched when she uttered words that had not been part of the legend she was told as a child, words that would change things.

The bond would bring fire to the dragons, yes. But it would also have the power to end the Great War.

So as Reyna and Tarren turned to look at each other, eyes wide, the storyteller began to beseech the sun gods for their favor. She asked them to look upon this newly forged bond and bless it. And as the midday sun shone down upon them, the beams of light so distinct that they shimmered, Reyna and Tarren began to glow.

—

It turned out that glowing hurt. Glowing felt like a million embers in her bloodstream, heating it until it evaporated into mist. Glowing made her bury her consciousness so deep into herself that she discovered she wasn’t entirely in herself anymore, but also in Tarren. They shared the pain between them, shining brighter and brighter until the humans in the audience had to look away lest they be blinded. And when they finally stopped, when the glowing presence that they then realized must have been the gods left them, Reyna tilted her head towards the sky and the sun and those gods and spit fire.

Then, she turned and looked at her bondmate. Tarren smiled.

“So, what do you think about forming a dragon-human alliance and taking down the gods?”

Tarren laughed. “I think that sounds like an adventure.”

And for once, Renya didn’t detest that word, adventure. For once, she wasn’t against the idea of leaving her sun rock behind. Because Tarren would be with her, and what she felt dozing in the sun could no longer compare to the shimmering warmth she felt inside.