Of Golden Leaves and Dragon's Blood

They found Aidon alone at the edge of the forest five hours after he had gone missing.

The search party returned to our village with him in their arms as a crowd formed around them, concerned neighbors and friends who had heard the news of his disappearance. He had a habit of sneaking out of our house while I was tending to patients despite all my efforts to keep him contained, but never before had he gone this far into the woods, not without myself or one of the neighbors noticing. This time had been different. This time my son had been enticed by the twisting autumn branches, the proud oak and maple trunks weaving together outside the cluster of houses, entranced enough to wander away for five hours while everyone searched frantically for him.

The other villagers parted to make way for me as I rushed to him, their faces solemn despite the relief we should have felt upon his return. But when my eyes fell upon my son, my child of just three summers old, the relief faded from my own chest as a cold, frozen ice crept into my veins in its place.

Aidon’s eyes were golden.

Not green like my eyes, like Father’s had been before he became a Hunter, like his own eyes had been just that morning before he had disappeared. The rich green of his eyes had been tinted golden like the leaves dying on the trees around us, and as he stared up at me, the ice in my veins gripped my heart.

This was not my son.

“Aidon?” I whispered his name though I was held captive by his unnatural golden gaze. “Why did you run off? I was so worried-”

“Twenty cows.” His voice cut me off. Or at least, it sounded like his voice leaving his mouth, but the words did not belong to him. “Fifty chickens. Thirty pigs. You will bring them to the forest and leave them tied together at the temple ruins on the first dawn after the full moon. If you do this, this one will live. If you do not, then he shall be lost to you.” He fell silent, staring blankly ahead with his gold-tinted eyes.

The crowd of neighbors was quiet. They all glanced at each other, Kyra and Vin and the others whom I had come to know in the few short months Aidon and I had lived here, the friends who had filled the hole Father had left behind. But now they spoke not a word of comfort, for what could they say? My son had returned, but something else had come back with him, stained his eyes golden and stolen his tongue. And perhaps more.

“We should get him home,” Kyra finally whispered as she placed a hand on Aidon’s shoulder, but he had no reaction to her touch. Not like Aidon at all, who was quick to hug and hold hands and laugh with everyone in our village.

I nodded numbly in agreement and scooped Aidon up into my arms. Instead of wrapping his own arms around me as I carried him like he normally did, he swayed limply against my chest like a lifeless doll. And as I walked back to our house, the whispers of my neighbors followed me.

“-poor Rysha. First her father, and now this.”

“-doesn’t seem to be all there. Maybe he saw something in the forest that scared him?”

“But what happened to his eyes? They were always green.”

“Could be a witch. I’ve heard stories of them putting children under their spells”

“Or a spirit.”

But they were wrong. Not a witch, nor a spirit. I knew what it was, what the gold in his eyes meant as soon as I saw him standing there in the middle of the crowd. For my father had been a Hunter.

And he hunted dragons.

* * *

It had been four years since the dragonfire had claimed his life, but some of Father’s belongings were still in my possession. Aidon sat on his bed as I sifted through the cabinet that housed Father’s things, his gold-stained eyes tracing the shelves upon which I stored the herbs used in my medicines.

It was still difficult to touch what had once belonged to Father. The scrolls with their burn marks, the dragonblood sword, the notebooks with worn edges all had so many memories attached to them of the man with the golden eyes and the wrinkled smile, but the importance of one notebook in particular outweighed the pain of the memories screaming inside my skull. At last I found it, a simple-looking bundle of paper bound together by a worn leather cover.

In the days before I was born, Father had been a Hunter.

His notebooks were full of the memories of his battles, the fondness for his comrades in arms, the numbers of dragons he had killed during the Hunt when the population of dragons had been eradicated. Or so they said, but Father knew better, and I did too. But the wizards told us the dragons were animals, that they had launched unprovoked attacks against the innocent people of Aetria. The dragons were beings of magic, and while a human could wound them, none could kill a dragon unless they had been born of magic themselves. And so we raised up an army of humans with the power to slaughter them. Humans like my father, who were baptized in the golden blood of dragons along with their blades, humans whose eyes turned golden like the eyes of the dragons and whose lifespans tripled. Humans like Father, whose gentle hands had held me during my sleepless nights, whose same hands had slaughtered dragons and their young just decades prior, all in the name of protecting what we held dear.

They said the Hunters had won, that they had eradicated the dragons, and so the fear of the dragons faded from the minds of the people. But Father’s notebooks said the dragons had instead found ways to hide, to survive. And one of those ways was enchantments.

The ice bloomed in my chest again as I found the page in the notebook, the words of Father etched in fading ink. He had seen it during the Hunt. And, he had told me, since some of the dragons had survived, we could see it again. Half of the words had fully faded, but the half that remained caused the ice in my chest to spread to my entire body.

A foreign voice, though it is their mouth-

-words not their own, nor their actions. It is only the dragon’s will.

-deep, powerful magic. We have forced them to adapt, to evolve. This is only one of many ways. Some have instead found ways to hide, to change-

Gold-tinted eyes.

Aidon stared straight ahead, the sunlight that came spilling through the window illuminating the gold in his eyes, the color of autumn, of dying leaves, as his lips repeated the demand for chickens and cows and pigs that was not his own.

I had brought him here, left the city to keep him safe from the smog and smoke that was choking his young lungs despite Father’s warnings that the dragons may still lurk in the shadows of the forests. Here, to the village where the air was warm and clear, like a fresh breath of summer. But now the slow decay of autumn had possessed my son’s eyes, and the icy fear of winter bloomed in my heart.

* * *

The Goldenleaf Tavern was busy as ever, but the air was absent of the usual laughter and singing.

The tavern stood as the center of the village where we met to share drinks and swap stories under the watchful eyes of Varya, the tavern keeper. A place of ale and wine, of music and mirth, but tonight the voices were muted, the faces solemn.

Since Aidon’s disappearance and subsequent return five days ago, three more children had wandered off into the woods. All of them had returned with the same gold-tinted eyes and message upon their lips. “Twenty cows. Fifty chickens. Thirty pigs. You will bring them to the forest and leave them tied together at the temple ruins on the first dawn after the full moon. If you do this, this one will live. If you do not, then he shall be lost to you.” And we were all afraid. The demand was far beyond what we could lose and still hope to survive the winter.

We would have to choose whether to lose our children now, or give up our supplies and all starve together once the air turned bitter and snow covered the ground.

“We’ve got to do something,” Vin whispered as he stared down at his mug of ale, unable to drink it. I sat beside him and Kyra at our table next to the fireplace. The firelight illuminated the glossiness of his eyes as he no doubt thought about the gold-tinted eyes and vacant stare of his daughter. “We haven't long until everyone breaks into a full panic.” There had been whispers among the others, of what had happened, of what to do. Whispers of fear about giving up our supplies. Whispers that the golden tint in our children’s eyes could spread to the others like a disease.

And if it was a disease, whispers that it would need to be eliminated.

“Maybe I can go out there,” Vin continued. “Try one of the old rituals, appease the spirits-”

His words continued to drone on, their meaning lost to me as I instead glanced out at the rest of the crowd. A sea of villagers, parents, all of them huddled together in the warm tavern as the autumn air knocked on the door and the frost of winter bloomed in our hearts. All of them whispering.

And Varya stood behind the counter near our table and the fireplace, polishing her mugs, her golden eyes fixed on her work as the light of the lanterns shimmered against the violet scars on the left side of her face.

They said she had fought in the Hunt.

Everyone knew Varya in passing. She was the owner of the Goldenleaf Tavern, after all, quick with her tongue and easy with her smile, always offering advice about medicine and crops and everything in between, yet none actually knew much about her aside from a few vague details that they had managed to piece together over the years. But we knew from the golden eyes that she had been touched by dragon blood, like Father, and we knew from the scars of magic marring her face and left shoulder that she had fought during the Hunt.

They said, too, that she had lost her children during the war with the dragons.

“I don’t think it’s spirits,” I whispered as I watched Varya polish the empty mug.

“What is it, then?” Kyra asked. “A witch?”

“A dragon.”

As I spoke the words, Varya’s hands paused.

“A dragon?” Vin shook his head. “No, they’re all dead. Hunters got them.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said to my friends, but my eyes stayed on Varya, whose own golden gaze was fixed on the fire dancing on the logs. “My father was a Hunter. And he said that it was possible, likely even that some of the dragons managed to escape the Hunters’ blades-” I paused mid-sentence.

Varya’s entire body had frozen, seized by the same wintry ice that clawed at my own heart as her golden eyes stared into the flames, the same way Father had stared at his own sword right before the dragonfire scars reignited and took his life. A wave of guilt crashed over me, melting away the ice in my chest and replacing it with a dull, empty aching.

“Rysha? What’s wrong?” Kyra asked.

“Sorry,” I stammered, my focus darting back to my friends. And Varya, too, fixated herself on polishing her mugs again. She readied more drinks and stepped out from behind the counter, a smile plastered across her face as she brought them to a table in the center of the tavern and conversed with the villagers, but Father’s haunted sorrow remained in her golden eyes.

“If it is one of those monsters,” Vin said, “then we need a Hunter. And all of them are dead now, except for maybe Varya there, who’s afraid of swords.”

“Afraid of swords?” I whispered, concerned that she would again hear us as she wove her way back to the counter.

Vin nodded. “I've asked her to teach me to fight. She refused every time. Wouldn’t even get near the weapons I brought her. If she’s all we’ve got, then," the sentence died away with a pained sigh.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said. I had to try something. What remained of Father’s notebooks were of little help. They mentioned enchantments, though nothing about how to undo them. But I couldn’t give up and lose Aidon. After losing Father, I had collapsed into myself, falling into a deep well within my soul, sitting alone inside our house in the city as the roof leaked and the frigid air slipped in through the cracks in the walls while I was too lost within myself to so much as nail down a few boards to keep the wind and water out. But then Aidon had been born, and my hands again found the strength to grind the herbs and brew the medicines as father had taught me, and summer returned to my heart with the green of my son’s eyes.

But now that summer had been transformed into golden autumn, and winter could quickly follow.

* * *

I knocked on the door to the Goldenleaf Tavern as I held Aidon’s limp form against my hip, but there was no answer.

The village had turned in for the night, the fireplaces snuffed out and the lanterns lining the streets dimmed. I knocked again, hoping that Varya was still awake, that I could ask her to assess Aidon’s condition and confirm if it was in fact a dragon’s enchantment. Praying that she would know a way to undo it.

“Varya,” I called. “I need your help.”

I knocked, and I called, and I waited. The clouds swam past the moon through the sea of stars above, and behind the drawn curtains of the tavern windows, there was the movement of a silhouette. Someone was inside and awake. But the door remained closed. And as I stared at the closed door while the night’s darkness swallowed me in its shadows and the cold of the coming winter nipped at my skin, I could feel Aidon slipping away from me and my mind being dragged back to that house in the city, the one with the leaking roof and wind-blown walls, the house that Father had burned to death in as the lingering magic of the dragonfire licked at his skin and my light was lost to the cold of winter-

“Please,” I whimpered, softly into the air, too quietly for anyone but Aidon to hear, “I cannot lose my child.”

The door opened.

Varya stared at me from within the darkened tavern, the moonlight spilling in through the open doorway illuminating her golden eyes. She stared at me in silence for a long moment, and for a terrible few seconds I thought she would shut the door again, but then she beckoned me inside.

During the day, the Goldenleaf Tavern was a place of life and warmth, laughter and light.

But at night, it was a tomb.

The curtains were drawn over the windows, the fireplace snuffed out, the lanterns so dim that I could barely see. The air was frigid, and the coldness, the loneliness of a tavern that lay completely empty reminded me of my house in the city. There I had sat mourning my father. Here, Varya sat mourning her children, also lost to the Hunt.

“Let me see the boy,” she whispered as she re-lit the fireplace and pulled up a chair beside it. I placed Aidon down as he continued to stare vacantly into the distance with his gold-tinted eyes, a lifeless puppet that had once been my son.

She placed her hands on his chin, tilting his head so that his eyes caught the firelight at different angles, and then her fingers gently pried at his eyelids to examine the gold staining his irises. The care with which she held his face, the soft look in her golden eyes, it reminded me so much of Father, and I found myself aching for him again.

“I heard you this evening,” she said softly as she turned to me. “You said that you believed this to be the work of a dragon.”

I nodded.

“You are correct.”

The wintry ice spread through my veins again. I had hoped that I was wrong, that it was something else, something easy. Spirits, witches, those could be dealt with. But a dragon?

I needed my Father.

“So what can we do?” I asked. “My father left notes about the dragons he fought. He said that some had found ways to draw upon the deep magic to survive, and that one of them was enchanting humans to do their bidding.” And the other was ‘changing,’ whatever that meant. “But he never wrote anything about how it can be undone. Do you know a way?”

She stared into the fire again, the orange and yellow glow shimmering in her golden eyes. “There is only one way to end the enchantment against the dragon’s will,” she whispered, “and that way is to kill the dragon.” She turned back to me and stared at me in silence, the unscarred side of her face shrouded in shadow and the violet markings of magic on the other side illuminated by the fire. “So I suppose next you shall ask me to kill the dragon, then.”

“I-” My words jammed in my throat as the memories of Father drifted through my mind, pouring over the ancient tomes and scrolls that he had uncovered in the vaults of the wizards’ libraries, the horror and sorrow in his eyes, the flames reigniting on the burn marks that covered half of his body just as the scars of magic covered half of Varya. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want the dragon to die.”

She blinked, visibly taken aback. “But it has taken your son,” she said. “It is a monster, is it not?” She turned back to the fire. “Are they not all monsters?”

“Father said otherwise,” I whispered. “Though I- I doubt you wish to know what it was that he uncovered.”

“Tell me.” Her eyes locked with mine, the golden irises holding me captive. “I wish to know,” she added, her voice softening again.

I drew in a deep breath as I recalled Father’s words and the notes he had left behind. “The dragons aren’t monsters. They never were. They were our protectors.”

Varya continued to hold my gaze with her golden eyes, unflinching.

“The gods created them to be our protectors. To defend us from the true monsters, the beasts lurking in the shadows. It was they who taught us how to use magic in the ages long past,” I continued. “They who showed the wizards how to breathe life into our cities and flourish in the barren lands. But over time, as we continued to build our cities and raise our towers, we and the dragons drifted apart until we had forgotten the harmony we once shared. And as our towers grew and scraped the heavens, we disrupted the flow of magic in Aetria, and the dragons and all the other creatures born of magic suffered for it. They needed magic to reproduce, but it became scarce, and so they started to all die away. The unicorns, the gryphons, the phoenixes, they’re all gone now, because of us. Only the dragons tried to fight to survive, tried to take back the amulets and gems and the useless trinkets we kept the magic trapped within for our own use, and we labeled them as monsters for it. A pestilence that needed to be eradicated.

“My father fought them, and the intelligence in their pleas as he slaughtered them had given him questions. And it was the grief of the answers that caused the scars of the dragon fire on his body to reignite and finally claim his life.”

Varya sat in silence.

“So no, I won’t ask you to kill the dragon,” I said, “nor will I attempt to fight it.”

“Then what shall you do?” she asked.

I scooped Aidon up into my arms. His body was still limp, still empty, my son still not here. “I don’t know. Beg, I suppose. Perhaps the dragon will have mercy on a mother and her only child. I shall go to the spot in the forest by the ruined temple tomorrow at sunrise. Will you come with me?”

Varya remained silent.

“Very well,” I whispered as I headed to the door. “Please, say a prayer to the gods for me.”

But Varya did not answer. She did not move. Her eyes instead drifted back to the fire, gold illuminated by orange flame, alone in the center of her empty tavern-tomb as I let the door slowly shut behind me.

* * *

Sunrise came, and with it the bitter chill of early winter.

Outside autumn had begun to wane, the sun’s rays slow to peek over the tops of the trees. I kissed Aidon’s forehead as he lay sleeping in his bed and then pulled my cloak tightly around me as I left our house.

Outside, Varya was waiting for me.

I startled at the sight of her sitting on a rock outside of my house, her golden eyes trained on my doorway. She stood when I exited the house and nodded her head. “I shall go with you,” she said, “to see the dragon.”

We walked together, past the rows of houses, the gardens, the lanterns lining the streets, the same path Aidon had taken that fateful morning when he had run off into the forest for the final time. And then the autumnal trees swallowed us whole.

The scent of autumn was heavy in the air, the aroma of decaying leaves and chilling wind in my nose as the blanket of leaves crunched and crackled beneath my feet. I understood why Aidon had wandered off so many times. Had I not held the responsibility of being the village’s apothecary, I would have done the same. And if not for the fear of dragons.

We continued through the maze of gold and brown foliage until we reached the ruins. The young sunlight shimmered on the mound of toppled stone that was slowly being reclaimed by the vines and shrubs of the forest. There was silence. The birds did not chirp, the squirrels did not rustle through the leaves. The world waited, holding its breath, for me to speak.

“Oh dragon,” my voice carried through the autumn air, a small voice in the presence of the looming trees and ruins, “I have come to beg for your mercy. My son is under your spell. He is all that I have. Please, have mercy upon a mother.”

The silence engulfed us again.

And then, a pair of golden eyes glowed from within the ruins.

Golden eyes, gnarled scales, twisting horns revealed themselves in the sunlight of dawn as a massive dragon emerged from the ruins. It limped forward, its claws heavy on the ground as they ripped into the leaves. Its scales were dull, a deep brown that reflected no sun like the tree trunks in winter, the horns protruding from its massive skull jagged like the bare winter branches, its wings torn and leathery, and as the wings moved a blast of frozen air slammed into my body. A deep violet scar marred the right side of its face, running all the way down to its chest, the same color as the scar on Varya’s own body. And its eyes, its golden eyes, they were the same shade as Father’s, as Varya’s, as Aidon’s now were.

I instinctively took a step back as the dragon emerged, but I forced myself to continue speaking. I could not let Aidon and myself be lost. “Please, let my child live.”

But the dragon was not looking at me, I realized. Its golden eyes stared forward, but it was fixed on something beyond me instead.

It was looking at Varya.

“So, we are reunited at last, Enye,” the dragon rumbled, its voice deep and booming like the thudding of a tree hitting the forest floor, “sister.”

“Hello, Cahira,” Varya answered.

I stared at Varya in frozen shock, my attention now completely taken away from the dragon.

“This one is a mother,” Varya continued as her own golden eyes met the dragon’s. “She begs you for her son’s life. Reclaim the kindness in your heart and let her child live.”

The dragon stared at her, the only sound filling the forest the deep breathing of its oaken chest. “After all this time,” it said slowly, “after what we saw, what we lost, this is what you ask of me? Have you forgotten that we were once mothers as well? Have you forgotten who slaughtered our young?” Its voice dropped to a snarl. “Now you come to me, wearing the skin of the ones who stole our children’s lives.”

“And you have become one of the monsters that they feared us to be,” Varya whispered back. “But it need not be this way. This is not you, Cahira. Remember who we are. It was our duty to protect them from the monsters who sought to slaughter them. It still is. Forgive them and live beside them again, as we did in ages past. They are children. They did not understand what they were doing.”

The dragon’s golden eyes stared out past the trees, gazing upon the village in the distance that was just beginning to wake to the new morning. For a long moment, it was silent. “You call them ‘children,’” it said, “but they are not my children. My children are dead, because of them.” It paused, the low rumble growing in its throat. “Perhaps I am now a monster as you say. So then, I shall play the part. I will make all of them pay.” Its terrible golden eyes snapped away from the village, fixing directly on me. “Starting with her.”

The dragon’s oaken chest glowed.

The ice in my veins seized my entire body. I could not move, not as the dragon’s chest shimmered like a smoldering tree trunk struck by lightning, not as the flames built and growled within its throat, not as the golden autumn leaves drifted down around me. I closed my eyes and grabbed hold of the image of Aidon as my last memory.

With a roar of heat and screaming breath, the fire shot out of the dragon’s mouth.

But it did not burn. I could feel the heat on both sides of me, but my skin was untouched by the flames, and I slowly opened my eyes again.

Varya stood directly in front of me, her hands outstretched, pushing the fire to either side of us with a force that I knew was magic. Her hair billowed in the wind of the dragonfire, the firelight shining against her golden eyes and the tears trickling down her cheeks as she stared up at the monster who had once been her sister. “And I will not let you hurt my children,” she whispered.

And then Varya let out a roar.

Everyone in the village knew that Varya had fought in the Hunt.

What we had not known was for which side.

Her entire body shook, shimmered in the young sunlight, as her pale skin shifted into scales of a vibrant summer green, as wings of leaf-like feathers ripped out of her back, as horns twisted and bloomed from her skull like blossoming tree branches.

The wintry ice gripping my heart melted as I stared up at her, proud and tall like a great tree in the full flourish of summer as her golden eyes shimmered in the sun, and in the ice’s place, a young sapling of hope took root in my chest.

Her golden eyes darted back to me. “Rysha, run. Go back to your son,” her voice rumbled.

And then, the second dragon lunged forward towards her sister.

I ran as the sound of roaring dragons and claws raking against scales echoed through the golden trees.

* * *

The warmth and laughter had returned to the Goldenleaf Tavern that night with the disappearance of the gold tinting our children’s eyes.

The village had woken that morning to their children huddling close to them, their eyes returned to their normal color as whatever monster had taken control of them vanished. And Varya had returned as well from the forest, coated in the golden blood of a dragon.

I did not tell anyone that some of the blood was her own.

So we gathered in Varya’s tavern again, singing and laughing, for the shadow had passed from our village. And Varya stood behind her counter, polishing her mugs, a sorrow slowing her movements, but her eyes met mine, and there was a gentle smile upon her lips.

I smiled as well. Father was gone, but a pair of golden eyes was protecting me again, and this time Aidon too. Golden eyes of autumn and green scales of summer, watching over all of us, just like in the ages past, a bond that would not be broken.

A bond of a mother and her children, a bond woven of golden leaves and dragon’s blood.