Metal, Fire, and Magic

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. Once there was nothing, not even a valley to speak of. And then suddenly there was the forest, green and glowing with life. Next came the village, a gathering of miners working in the mountains and hunters claiming the bounty of the forest. Last of all came the towering city of Acae, which stretched its metal grip all the way up the sides of the mountain slopes, reaching ever nearer to the sun.

The humanoids of Acae mixed metal and fire and magic, and birthed the dragons. With burning meteors and gemstones for eyes, coal dust for their blood and a tangle of cogs and wires for a heart, the dragons burst up out of the towers, into the city streets and destroyed everything before them.

But this massacre wasn’t out of any kind of malice for their creators. They didn’t resent the humanoids, or think themselves superior. The coal dust mixed with the friction of their cogwork insides and turned their breath to flame. When they spoke to greet the world they had just entered, all before them burned. Their furnace tounges melted the metal towers of the university and observatory. The potent ingredients kept in the shops of the magic traders’ district caused explosions that leveled almost half the city. Not one humanoid survived.

Left behind, unsure how to heal this hurt, or even how to mend each other, the dragons huddled in the black remains that had been this continent's brightest asset. A few braver beasts stretched and squeaked the metal joints of their oversized wings and set out to explore the forest beyond.

Over time they became trophies for adventurers to hunt down, or ghosts of old mountain caverns, the slow tick of their eternal hearts warning travellers that something was hunting them. Over time most of them vanished. Finally, only Kalek stood tall on the mountain he had claimed, and knew with all the certainty a dragon can have that he was now the very last of his kind.

Kalek was not the wisest or strongest of dragon kin, so he was quite unsure why he over any of his siblings had managed to exist so much longer. His limbs were forged of a blend of gold and copper, with silver cogs and wires within, and gleaming polished sapphires for his eyes. His wings were formed of a tough thick material called Havensped, which was weaved by magicians and threaded with gold. Since the fall of Acae, no hands had attempted to forge it again. The rare scraps that a fortunate adventurer could uncover would fetch a pretty price in any market.

It had been centuries since the dragons’ birth, and in all that time neither Kalek nor any of his fellow dragons had figured out a way to reproduce. They had tried compiling the base materials that formed them - the metal, and the cogs, and scraps of their own wings, and the coal dust. But no matter how hot they burned their flame tongues against the metal, and no matter how they manipulated their claws to twist little cogs and tighten thin threads, none of the new dragons they forged would live. Deep in Kalek’s cavern were the remnants of his last few attempts.

He looked out over the valley, the picture fractured and distorted through the perfectly carved angles of his gem-formed eyes. Though his makers could never have known when creating him, the use of an angled diamond cut instead of a polished round stone allowed Kalek to see in all directions at once. It was harder to be surprised, easier to sense danger.

And all too easy to glance around and realise exactly how lonely he was. His last friend had been Ira, an emerald-eyed dragon whose cogs had been stopped by a cunning ranger, whose deadly accurate arrow had shattered one of her eyes. With her fragile internal mechanisms exposed, it was not long before one of the ranger’s companions, high above in the trees, managed to throw a nasty concoction of explosive tar into her.

They had taken all the pieces of her with them, so he couldn’t even try a resurrection. Kalek believed he might do anything, if offered the chance to gain one of his kin. Over his long lifetime, he’d searched far and wide, and only found terror and anger in the eyes of the humanoids, and hopelessness in the eyes of his fellow dragons.

Kalek didn’t know why he’d come back to the valley of his birth, after all this time. Perhaps he liked the symbolism. Perhaps the old ghosts of the burnt town called out to him to join them at last. Kalek slunk back to his cave as the sun set, his eyesight not nearly as keen and all-seeing by moonlight.

The next morning he crept his way down the mountain slope and into the empty valley. There hadn’t been dragons, or any other beings, in this valley for a long, long time. The forest had regrown thicker and wilder now there were no people needing the wood or the space. It had crept right up to the charred ruins, some plants dancing between the ash and sprouting fresh and green like they believed it was possible for life to grow here again.

Kalek, head held low, wound around the markings of where streets had once been, past shops he barely remembered enough to recall their names. His birth had been so long ago he didn’t even remember the face of his creator. That was one of his regrets.

Kalek wound his way deeper into the town until he reached the old tower, brought low and charred black. But the stonework had been moved since he was here last. It had been pulled from where it had fallen and reordered into a wide circle, built around the ring of the tower’s foundations. Trees had been ripped from the forest and twisted into a curved, tangled wall. Kalek stretched his wings and flew up and over the branches. The curve of the canopy carried up and over, leaving only a small circular opening at the top, like a round vase.

Kalek dove inside, where it was dark and cool, with small sunbeams breaching narrow gaps in the branches. In the centre of what was quite probably a nest was quite probably the last thing Kalek had been expecting to find in the old city.

He lifted a claw to rub at the surface of his eye gems, in case it was just a smudge from the ash that was causing him to see this. But his eyes were clear and the item remained. Bone white, with faint black markings that vaguely resembled cogs and bolts, standing the height of a seven-year-old male humanoid, curved in a similar way to the nest, except with no gap at the uttermost peak.

It was unmistakably an egg.