Temple Wings

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. I can remember running around with my friends day after day, fighting each other with sticks and rolling around in the dirt. Our mothers would scold us and make us wash up before dinner. We would do it, of course, but we wouldn’t be happy about it. Then one day, from the sun, they dripped with molten sun spots and burned everything in their path. Men in white armor lined with pieces of bright light came from the woods and grabbed everyone they could. The sun burned brighter and moved closer to watch. Those who resisted were slaughtered. My best friend was one of them, and I can still hear her scream. I can hear it now, it echoes through the depths of the mountains as I let out muddled sorrow. The last memory I have of her, on her knees, arms and throat slit as an offering before her body became agonizing fire and then ash. I watch her die all over again. Then my other friends, our other village families. All lined up in the center of the Valley’s main trail, they were cut and they were angry, and they screamed. Every single one. It blocked out the wind until they became it themselves. I screamed with them, but not at the sun, it was at the guard that held me. I squirmed and snapped my teeth, because next was my family. My father, a man hidden behind dirt and grime with the purest of smiles. My mother, a small woman with a heart bigger than her body. My brother, a couple months old but was already determined to gnaw through my finger. None of them were forced to the ground. The last thing I saw on their faces were looks of shock as tendrils of light slithered through the clouds and pulled them up into the sky until they were a memory. The guard tossed me to the ground and sneered down at me.

With a laugh he said, “good luck surviving out here”, and with a blink he, and everybody else I ever knew, was gone. The sun shrunk in the sky and set like normal. And rose like normal. It continued that way for fifteen years.

Mountain peaks poke through the thick clouds now, and I can see the fire on the cursed land. The cuts on my skin from the climb provide blood, and blood provides warmth as I glare into the bloody light above me. The memory of that day shrieks in my veins, almost as if it happened yesterday.

I did not expect you to make it this far.

It isn’t a voice that fills my world, it’s a popping in my ears. Sun spots burn almost black, but when they burst they don’t leave the surface. I don’t feel any heat. A woman from many years ago, who had offered me food and shelter, told me that every word the sun uttered, it took a star too, a universe.

“Prophecy,” I whisper to no one but the rocks that have rubbed my hands raw these past few days on the climb. The prophecy the guard spoke of all of those years ago as he held a knife to my throat. Even now, I do not know what it means. Nobody has. There are rumors and words people mutter under their breath when I pass by; forbidden, hackles, slaughter, light, dark, endless. A snot nosed kid made me a fool in some town I can’t remember the name of when I asked about the sun’s prophecy. It is said those that knew the prophecy were taken by the sun thousands of years ago, executed or kept prisoner, but not a soul knows of the validity. The kid had rolled his eyes as if it was information I should already know. I asked why there were rumors then, I grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and held him against the stack of hay I was making my bed for the night. He just told me that people were cruel, that the scars on my face could be sign of any devilish work.

“What do you want from me!” I scream.

Every word the sun mutters, a star burns out, and I can feel it in my eyes, I can see it in the sky.

Such a lost soul you seem to be. So lost you have been all of these years, and you are not ready still.

“Give me back my family! I will do whatever you want, just give them back to me!” This line was familiar to my throat. Days on end, I would scream through the pine trees and their hearts into the never ending expanse of the universe and the sun itself. I sobbed and cut at the ground, my wrists for an offering. A drop of blood, and with every drop was a bit of my hope. For fifteen years, it remained silently mocking me. The world continued to die and fill with dragons as the population went underground and chose their lives over their home.

You have cried for this moment, I have witnessed all of it, you have not trained, you have hidden, but it is time nonetheless, prophesied the pathetic is a win for my gods.

“Just give me back my family! Give them back to me!”

You don’t even know if they are still alive.

Blinding novas burst inside of my skull as more stars vanish with each individual word. It was right, I don’t. I don’t know if they survived the journey from the ground through the sky. They could have been killed like the rest, the sun could have staged all of it to keep me going through all of these years.

“No,” I suck in some of the icy air and wait for it to fill my lungs and my body. “You need me. You needed me here.” The wind quiets itself. “If they were dead, I’d know it. I would be with them.” The sword sheathed to my waist begins to hum. “I’ve thought about it, about you, every day for fifteen years. You slaughtered my Valley, you took my family, sent dragons to destroy this world, and nobody knows why. Not even me, the girl you cursed with a mark that the majority of the population fears. The old ones treat me like livestock, the children stare. Why whiten my eyes if I can still see? What are you making me blind to?”

After the guards disappeared and my village became the wind, I screamed into the sun for the first time. I screamed until my throat bled and then I screamed some more. Before the sun started to set, I felt a new kind of pain. It was the kind of pain we as children read about, unearthly and celestial. I clawed at my eyes in hopes of it stopping. I forced my body to pond at the bottom of the Valley, I needed to see my reflection. The grass passed by so fast, it felt as if I was flying. I fell to my knees and stared at myself for hours. Narcissus, a character in one of her books on her bookshelf, would have been ashamed. He would have turned away and took his own life.

My iris and pupils had melted and traveled to either side of my head, leaving her eyes a plain bright white. On my temples and into my hair, the skin bubbled black and blue into the shapes of dragon’s wings. Where the skin bubbled and popped and formed little craters out of my skin that quickly turned to, the hair fell into the pond and never grew back. I knew from that moment on I was cursed. I sobbed until morning, and every night after that I would shed at least one tear.

“You made people fear me.”

The best warriors are often the most feared.

“I am not a warrior.”

Not yet.

“Not ever! I just want my family!”

It is your destiny.

“Not one that I wanted. Take it back!”

YOU PATHETIC CHILD!

Dragons roar up through the clouds with the sun’s scream and I watch as the tendrils leaked from its center. They cut through the molten creatures and slice towards me. I reach for my sword that I had bought on the side of some road a few years back. It had come in handy when I needed it, but I didn’t know how to use it. Now, my body moves like liquid, and the sword cuts through the rays of red light. Both tendrils burn away before they touch the ground. The scream I unleash is not filled with sorrow or grief, but with power. Heat rises from the sides of my head, the scars ripple with pressure until they burst and two massive waves of black and blue fire burn through the air and singe the rocks at the peak of the mountain. My body beats off the ground, and I’m forced into the air at inhuman speed. My skin feels like a wrung up cloth, every vessel and nerve in my body tightens and snaps like the body of a snake. I’m not fast enough. I see more dragons closing in from underneath the clouds, I claw at my skull, to no avail, to put out my fiery flesh, but it’s the sun that grabs onto me. The wings burn away like the seeds of a dandelion, and my flesh is returned the regular scarring. I go to smash my hands against the red light, but my body moves through the air faster than sound itself and my entire world goes dark.