Pendragon

There weren't always Dragons in the valley. Nor had there been a Dragon to be found anywhere else for that matter. Once upon a time dragons were thought of as creatures of fantasy. And yet here they are.

Not so different from stories of old. Only they had not painted a full picture. That's what brought Aulden to the valley this day, and everyday since he was a child.

Aulden, a young man barely past his teen years. His face had yet to fully take on a manly appearance. The hairs on his face patchy and as unkempt as his hair. Running his hand through his brown hair, Aulden looked for a spot to observe. His hazel eyes honed in on a rock that lay next to the river Ayalen.

Grabbing his pen and notebook Aulden began to flip through the pages. He spent years documenting Dragons. A past time he and his grandfather enjoyed. His father, a fisherman, spent much of Auldens life on a boat leaving him in the care of his mother and grandfather. The two of them sparked his interest in nature. His mother would often take him into the surrounding Forrest Ithekar. She educated him on herbs, how to make poultices and poison. Mara had always told him the best way to find a cure for any poison is to know its components. He had her face and hair, but his eyes belonged to his father. Or so he was told.

His grandfather, Silas, had taken it upon himself to teach him how to be a man. So he would take Aulden on hunting trips. Showing him how to track and more importantly how to shoot. It wasn't all lessons on killing. Old Silas had engraved the importance of observation on all of those trips.Those blue eyes hardly missed a thing. Silas could determine the type animal and its size, its weight, and the direction of its travel all from a glance at the surroundings.

It was on these trips that Old Silas and Aulden came across their first dragon. A yellow dragon came between them and their quarry at the Audarra Valley. The first time Aulden saw that magnificent creature he knew he wanted to know all about dragons.

His curiosity had been flamed and he needed to know more. Old Silas was no help as dragons had only appeared when he had been but a boy. Dragons had been a mystery in his time. Many decided that learning about the creatures would be dangerous. A danger without their technology.

The world he had grown up in was a vastly different one than the one Aulden had grown up in. Though technology had not fully disappeared with the coming of the Dragons, much of what humans had developed was now gone. The coming of the Dragons caused a flux in the Earth's magnetic waves disrupting electronics all over the world. It had been a slow crawl to reestablish some of what they had lost, but they were making progress. Still this world is very different than the one where Silas had grown up in. There had not always been dragons in the valley.

Aulden had been born into a world full of dragons and the mysteries that came with the creatures. But there had not always been dragons in the valley. Not much was known of these creatures. Or for that matter how they came to be here. If they truly had existed thousands of years ago what happened to them? Why where they here now? All questions Aulden aimed to answer and more.

All the stories depicted large reptilian creatures with wings and always the ability to breathe fire. And in almost every story dragons loved gold and hoarded it. Those stories only held a fraction of the truth.

Apart from their reptilian nature and the wings, much was incorrect. For one, not all dragons where massive creatures. They came in all shapes and sizes. The yellow and green dragons where the smallest. No smaller than a wolf, these dragons were no less vicious than their larger counterparts.

Many stories depicted dragons as fire breathers, but in truth only red dragons could breathe fire. In Aulden's studies he found that each Dragon had a special connection to nature and the color of the Dragons scales identified their affinity.

The most common in the Audarra Valley were the yellow and green Dragons. Though he had seen more than a few blue Dragons roaming the valley. In his studies he found that the green Dragons shared an affinity with flora. He found a green breathing a mist on a wounded tree mending it and making it grow stronger. On another excursion he found a yellow Dragon herding a flock of deer. It's call herding them. It attacked those who meant to do the flock harm.

There was so much that was unknown about these creatures. There weren't always Dragons in the valley. But now that they were here Aulden was going to learn everything about them.