Requiem

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Not long ago, it was known as Riquiel – the Land of the Five Free Peoples. It used to echo vibrant chatter and laughter, the noises of life blending with the roar of the river that had carved the Valley. The memory of that peaceful time was lost to many, but not here. Not in Bankstown.

The sprip sighed and turned their large, bat-like ears back toward their hovel. It must have been getting late. The heavy summer air was starting to turn crisp. Yet, despite the warm smells coming from within, something stopped them from making their way inside to the company of their parents and siblings, and to the promise of a hearty meal.

There was a special kind of sadness in listening to the solitary river, the sounds of pickaxes and minecarts breaking through at irregular intervals. Tungsten. The dragons never tired of their search for more of it, and they had found it here. The hardest metal that existed – they infused it into their scales, galvanizing their already impenetrable dominion over the world. No laughter rang in the Valley anymore.

With one last listen, the sprip turned and started feeling their way back toward the entrance tunnel. It was a relatively short path down to their home compared to the passageways that connected the vast, underground city of Bankstown. They rounded the corner to their front door, their somewhat tangled fur catching on that pesky root that hung there, and heard the clatter of suppertime inside.

Suddenly, the swirls of misty light that heralded the Shadow Visions swept through their mind. The sprip froze with anticipation. The visions came frequently, but were nonetheless a welcome treat in an otherwise sightless world. The sprip contemplated the door and the chaos within. Supper smelled so good. Like roast parsnips and fennel with plenty of turmeric. It would have to wait. It was always disorienting seeing images of the past or future while trying to hold a conversation in the present.

They scurried as quickly as possible to their favourite alcove. It was a small cavern with a shallow pool and large crystals that jutted from the walls. Others often frequented the cavern during their own Shadow Visions, but today the sprip was alone. They clambered onto a horizontal crystal and sat there, unconsciously running their dusty fingers along the smooth facet as the mists cleared and a figure began to emerge in their mind’s eye.

It was a human girl. They’d seen her before when she was older. This time she seemed lost. Or perhaps she was just looking for something. In the distance, there was green smoke rising from the mountainside. Dragon fire. The girl turned toward the column of smoke and stared, her small hands reaching up to make fists in her hair. It was then that the sprip realized she was crying.

She tore herself away from the sight and opened her mouth wide, letting out a wail that the sprip couldn’t hear. She kept stumbling, as if searching. Her desperation made the sprip’s heart ache. They didn’t like these sorts of visions. Unfortunately, this period in time seemed to be full of them. The past held all the joy before the dragons’ rule, and the distant future – at least the snippets that the sprip could remember from their early childhood – were filled with a solemn peace, but lately the slightly nearer future held only grim sights.

Now, the girl was much closer. She shoved aside bushes and brambles, and they fought back, catching on her clothes, and nicking her shins. She kept calling out soundlessly. Tears and sweat left trails on her grimy face. The sprip had seen that expression on her before. It had flashed on her face between hammer strokes that she had pounded down on a long blade drawn from a pit of fire. The memory of the past vision made the sprip’s head spin.

The girl tripped over a root, and landed on her hands and knees. She stopped for a moment, tears dripping off her nose and making little puffs of dust in the dirt where they landed. Slowly, she looked up, her mouth forming what could have been someone’s name through her sobs. She was so close to the sprip that they imagined they could have reached out and touched her if they had actually been there. She tiredly lifted her arm to push the bush in front of her aside, and suddenly she was looking right at them.

They both froze. The sprip felt every muscle in their body clench. They were staring directly into the eyes of a vision person, and somehow the person was staring back.

Abruptly, the vision ended, and the world plunged back into darkness. The sprip could hear their heart pounding in their ears and the distant plop of a drop of water hitting the surface of the cavern pool. They sat there, unable to move. Another drop hit the water.

With an unexpected burst of clarity, they slid off the crystal bench and ran out of the cavern toward the city centre. This must have happened before, and the Archivist at the city grotto might have the answer as to how the vision girl had been able to see the sprip.

The way grew more crowded as they neared the core of the city. They struggled to jostle past other sprips, most of whom were still a lot bigger than them. Small pockets of people heading home from work barred their way, making navigating even wider tunnels treacherous. After getting stuck in a particularly large group, the sprip quickened their pace, hoping to make up for lost time, and collided snout to snout with a disgruntled worker.

“Slow down, child! Listen where you’re going!”

“Sorry,” they squeaked as they dusted themselves off and kept going, forcing their excited limbs to adopt a more casual pace.

Finally, the ground assumed the cobbled texture of the central city cavern. They could feel the air broaden, and heard the hubbub of a thousand conversations happening at once. Traders cried their wares, and babies wailed along, to be frantically hushed by their parents. The smell of various foods wafted through the air – potato bread from the bakery down the block, herbal carrot stew from the apothecary, spicy radishes being sliced at the grocer’s market.

The sprip’s stomach grumbled, but they pressed on. They wove their way through the streets, spiralling toward the centre of the cavern. Their lungs ached and their heart hadn’t stopped pounding since the vision. As they neared the massive central pillar that housed the Archivist’s grotto, they finally slowed, allowing themselves to catch their breath before entering.

The ground in the grotto was pocked with strange dents and squiggles. Each step had a different feel to it. The sprip stopped to listen for the Archivist, but heard nothing.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Archivist?... Excuse me, I have a pressing question I must ask you.”

A frail, muffled voice drifted down from somewhere high above.

“Up here,” it shouted. “Take the stairs.”

Few places in Bankstown had stairs because it was difficult to find the people to build them. Forest gnomes were essentially the only race small enough to squeeze into the sprips’ tunnels, but they had a profound dislike of being underground. They found the musty air stifling compared to the fresh breeze in their treetop villages. Thus, stairs were costly unless they were built by the sprips themselves, which usually resulted in disaster due to poor oversight, or rather complete lack of sight.

Upon finding the stairs, the sprip realized they were rather afraid of going up them. The thin, narrow planks seemed inadequate somehow. Steeling themselves with a deep breath, they took a step, then tripped on the next, smashing their already bruised snout into the third.

“What are you doing down there? I would prefer for my grotto to remain in one piece, thank you very much.”

The sprip winced as they stood back up and awkwardly waddled up the rest of the stairs. The Archivist, it turned out, was very high up, and the sprip was once again out of breath by the time they reached the correct floor.

“Ahh, you are here,” croaked the Archivist before going back to carving a rune into a floor stone. “Come, come, what is it you wish to ask of me?”

The sprip willed their voice to gasp out the words.

“Archivist... Excuse me… The stairs… I had... A Shadow… Vision… And the girl… She looked right at me… She saw me… I don’t… Understand…”

“Ahhh,” replied the Archivist, “unusual, indeed. Unusual, but not altogether unheard of. My child, when was this vision of yours?”

“Just… Now… I came as quickly… As I could…”

“Mhmmm, apparently. But I did not ask you when you had this vision, child – I asked when it was.”

The sprip felt their stomach sink as they realized what the Archivist was asking. Most sprips knew the general point in time in which their Shadow Visions occurred. Visions of future possibilities were equally distant from the moment they were born as visions of past events. Thus, if a sprip had their first set of visions when they were five, and their past vision was of an event that had occurred 90 years prior, then their future vision must be roughly 85 years ahead. As they aged, the visions converged toward their birthdate.

“Well?” pressed the Archivist, still whittling at the rune.

“I… I don’t know, Archivist…”

“What do you mean you do not know? Come now, it is basic arithmetic.”

The sprip squirmed, feeling both nervous and embarrassed about their situation. The scraping of the chisel against the stone did little to ease their anxiety.

“No one remembers the events of my past visions,” they finally replied, having regained their breath, but not their composure. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why my visions are so strange, but no one remembers them. They say what I see is vastly different from how the world is now.”

The scraping stopped.

The voice of the Archivist, suddenly serious, seemed to fill the room despite being little more than a whisper.

“You say no one remembers?”

“That’s why I came to you. I don’t know when my vision happens, and I certainly don’t understand how the girl could see me.”

The Archivist took a deep breath.

“Child, the vision you saw is one you will experience again, because it is your future self who will be there. The girl you speak of is not someone who will be born a world away from you, destined to live a life separate from yours. Your paths shall cross, and if the future is not swayed too far from its current course, you shall meet in circumstances not dissimilar from the ones you witnessed.”

The strangeness of the Archivists words took a moment to sink in. Shadow Visions almost always showed faraway events. Thus, sprips often acted like casual bystanders, confidently observing the world’s history at a safe distance. To be directly involved felt like a violation of the natural order of things. Even stranger was that sprips tended to stay within their own communities, especially since the dragons and their wars made travelling dangerous, so why was the sprip’s future self on some unknown mountainside with a human girl?

“N-n-n-n-no! There was dragon fire there! I don’t want to go there!”

A deafening silence filled the room.

“Dragon fire,” the Archivist whispered. “Child, this is dire indeed. You must tell me everything.”

The city outside was noticeably quieter by the time the sprip had finished recounting what they had witnessed that evening and expanding upon their visions of the past. The Archivist let out a deep sigh, and when they finally spoke, they sounded even older than their already advanced years.

“I know of what you speak. Child, come with me.”

They hobbled down the stairs to the third floor, the younger sprip managing not to trip on any of the steps. When they got there, the Archivist started wandering around, touching the floor stones. Finally, they stopped.

“Ahh, here it is. Yes, the event from the first past vision you remember – the one before the dragons came across the far sea to this continent. It was before even my time, child. The story was passed down to me by the Archivist before me, and to them by the Archivist before them, and so on.

“My child… My dear, dear child… Your vision was of our world five hundred years ago.”

The reality of what that meant hit the young sprip like a ton of tungsten.

“And you will meet that mountain girl nearly five hundred years from now.”