Legend of the Dragonlords: First Saga: The Dragonslayer's Tale

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

That's what old Rigel said, but old Rigel also said inhaling the fumes off a wizard's trash pile would give you magic powers and all it really did was give Flick a weird headache and diarrhea.

"And no one's evah gonna confuse shite fer magic," Flick muttered to herself in a rough approximation of her mother's thick accent. Flick talked to herself often, in a variety of voices, though usually just her own. It helped her think things through, to stand outside a problem, or debate both sides of an issue.

"Sure," she said, "but also because no one else wants to talk to you."

"Let’s stay focused," she scolded herself, kneeling at the edge of the stone cliff. It was slick with moisture from the ever-present mist, which was caused, people said, by the powerful heat of the family of dragons who'd taken up residence in the deep river valley some generations back.

Rigel's garbage-addled brain aside, most agreed the dragons were a somewhat recent addition to the Valley.

"And not fer the bettah." Her mother's voice again, though Flick agreed.

The Valley had once belonged to humans, so went the tale, and a more lush and fertile valley could not be found in all the known world. While it may have been known as "The Breadbasket of Empires" in the pre-dragon times, today those empires are all worth less than the nickel it costs to gawk at their ruins.

The dragons had put an end to any human imperial ambitions, though none who'd lived through those ambitions would have wept for them. In all the romanticizing of the good old pre-dragon times, talk tended to elide over the successive occupations of their very fertile "Breadbasket", and how whatever empire had its boot on their necks rarely had any food to spare for their bellies. Few reminisced fondly over the forced conscription for the endless wars, both internal and external (and those that did stopped getting invited to the good parties), nor was anyone exactly pining for the repeated purges of towns and villages, depending on whom the people were meant to hate that year.

So no one missed the various empires, per se, but many were inclined to wonder why their only choices were subjugation by brutal tyrants or a slow painful extermination by a family of immortal reptilian monsters.

Because the humans of the Valley were being exterminated, that was certain. The heat of the dragons constantly boiled away the life-giving waters of the river, often faster than the spring at the heart of the Valley could replenish it. Game fled the Valley and most crops withered. Livestock was a gamble, given dragon appetites, but anyone who chose not to raise livestock tended to swiftly become it. Any living that the people of the Valley managed to scrounge was nominal at best, yet all attempts at evacuation were met with wholesale fiery slaughter.

Some suggested sending for help, leading others to put forward that anyone strong enough to kill a whole family of dragons would be strong enough to turn around and subjugate the Valley afterward, and as stated, the people of the Valley, while anti-dragon, were not, in fact, pro-subjugation.

So, they couldn’t leave, they couldn’t send for help, and the last person to suggest the dragons might leave on their own was fed to them.

This, incidentally, led to the Valley’s first ever emergency election, owing to the fact that the people had just fed their mayor to a family of dragons.

Which, truth be told, rather took the civic spirit right out of the people of the Valley, so they voted for whichever candidate told the best jokes and had the nicest smile, then they settled in for a long slog through their slow, exceedingly warm extinction.

As far as Flick was concerned, there was only one thing for it.

She'd have to kill the dragons herself.

It wasn’t a joke, even if everyone laughed at her whenever she said it. She knew exactly how to do it. She had it all worked out, down to the last detail: a foolproof plan to rid the Valley of its fire-breathing lizard problem for good.

It was simple, it was straightforward, and there was nothing too smart about it, either. No, she'd worked all the fiddly bits of clever out of it and stripped it down to a lean plan with a few moving parts.

There was only one problem.

Of those moving parts, the most vital was a powerful wizard.

And wizards were the ones who'd brought the dragons to the Valley in the first place.