The Dragon Age

There weren't always dragons in the Valley…

That is by far the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written. But then, in the last five years, the world has become such an alien place that it won’t be the strangest thing I write here. You see, had you asked me five years ago if dragons were even real, I would have laughed in your face. Future readers of this will no doubt be confused by the idea of dragons being mythical beasts given their prevalence in the world today, but I tell you truly that until the Old World ended and this New World began, dragons did not exist.

It is so hard for me to return to writing in my diary after all that has happened. It feels wrong for some reason, almost as if I'm trying to bury my head in the sand. But it's also necessary. Someone needs to write things down. Someone needs to leave a record for future generations - if indeed there are future generations. And I have taken it upon myself to be that somebody. Not because I'm special in any way. The last five years have shown how foolish it would be to think of myself as special. No, the reason is the opposite. I've found myself so useless in this new world of ours that writing seems to be the only thing I can offer to the group. Although, even here I am met with derision from many of the group who feel my efforts are pointless, or at least started far too early, with our survival still in the balance. I can only hope that they see that my decision is the right course of action because as time goes on, and we move further away from events, our memories will change them. We may forget important steps taken or avoided; something that could jeopardise future endeavours. With this in mind, I shall now describe the last days of the Old World.

Five years ago, I lived with my parents in the countryside, just off junction six of the M25, in a tiny village called Godstone. It was a typical English village; a church, a post office, a village green, and a host of people with huge egos, intent on belittling those around them to make themselves look big and important. This last observation was not limited just to my village, but to the whole of humanity. We were all so full of ourselves; top of the food chain! Huge feats of engineering, leaps in medicine, air flight, even space flight! And yet, when the end came, there was nothing we could do, no cure for Mother Nature turning in her sleep.

And now those feats of mankind are as nothing because we learned a hard, cold lesson - only a few people in the human race actually knew how these building were built, or how to make the medicines we took for granted, and how useless space travel is when everything has gone and we, the few survivors, are left grubbing in the dirt like the animals we are just to survive each new day.

22nd December 2026. That was an important date. For years leading up to the date, there was growing hysteria; books were written, films and documentaries made, deodorants named. All the idiots of the world joined together in harmony over a date 'prophesised' as the end of the world. Of course, when in didn't materialise and the 22nd passed without fuss, the idiots went looking for a new date to ruin peoples’ week with.

And on the 28th, the earth turned.

It was about twenty past ten on the Monday evening. I was in my car driving home from a late shift at work. The snow of previous days was slowly melting, but inside my car the air conditioning was at a cosy thirty. I was just coming out of the bottleneck on the A22 near the Caterham Valley turning when my car just left the road - upwards! One minute I'm doing 50 mph on a quiet night at the tail-end of the silly season, and the next moment, the ground simply fell out from beneath my car and I'm heading into the embankment at the same speed, but with a feeling of weightlessness and dread. The impact left me unconscious.

When I awoke, I was hanging upside down with my seatbelt pressing into my chest, blood trickling from my forehead, and excruciating pain in my left shin. And the sun was shining. I couldn't see it from my inverted position, but I could see the dirty snow through the empty space where my windscreen had been. I could see the red of the blood as I wiped it from my forehead - it was daytime. Fearing that I had been there for some time and trying to think up a scathing comment for the emergency services when they finally arrived, I looked at my watch, which read 22:23hrs. The electronic seconds were still counting upwards to sixty. Pressing the date button revealed that it was still the 28th. I had no idea what was happening and was in too much pain to even contemplate rational thought. I unclipped my seatbelt with some effort and screamed when my injured leg slammed into the underside of the steering column and then the steering wheel, as gravity dragged me to the roof of the car.

Somehow managing to twist myself around, I tried to open my door but found it wedged shut. Staring out of the empty windscreen socket, I realised that was probably my best exit strategy. The front end of the car must have hit something first as it was buckled upwards, allowing a crawlspace between it and me. I dragged myself backwards through the hole, being very careful with my leg, and managed to sidle clear of the wreckage. I was covered in sweat, blood, and cold, wet mud by the time I finally decided to rest against a damaged tree trunk, maybe only ten feet away from my mangled car. I could see a short path of destruction that my car had taken to its final resting place. From my raised position, I couldn't see the empty road that I had left apparently only a few minutes ago. I couldn't see the turning for Caterham Valley, but in what I thought was that direction, and in every direction I looked, drifting ominously into the clear, blue skies were thick tendrils of black smoke. There wasn't just one or two, there were so many that from where I was sitting, bearing in mind my head injury, it looked as if a forest of shadow-trees were sprouting out of the earth intent on taking over the planet. I think I passed out again then.

I awoke to rain. It wasn't a mild shower, but a deluge of large splashes hammering into the back of my head from my slumped chin to chest position. It felt as if someone was standing above me popping water balloons onto my head. Raising my head didn't help as the rain began slamming into my forehead, hurting my wound and giving me a headache. The rain itself was salty to the taste. It was still daylight and my watch showed that I had been unconscious for about twenty minutes. Finding a torn branch beside me that looked sturdy enough to serve as a rudimentary crutch, I managed to lever myself up and stumble, hop and wince my way until my back was pressed against a large tree, getting myself out from the rain's wrath. I was soaked through and shivering uncontrollably, whether from the cold of the rain, the pain from my leg, or both, I was unsure, but I slid down to the base of the tree and sat staring out into the clearing, listening to the drum of the rain on the underside of my car.

Looking again at my car's final journey, I could see something that I hadn't noticed earlier. The path of destruction did not make sense. Sure, I could see a huge divot where the front of the car had hit the ground. I could see a deep trail where the car's momentum had carried it to its resting place, where it had finally tipped onto its roof. What didn't make sense was that the car was sat in the middle of a clearing, fully enclosed by trees. Looking closer through the downpour I could see where the damaged tree was that I had passed out against earlier. The damage was halfway up the trunk! Stranger still, the next tree in line with the car, the trail of destruction and the damaged tree was another tree that showed signs of damage further up its trunk that the previous. To my eye it looked as if my car had entered the clearing from the air at a diagonal angle! It was a trail of destruction that you’d expect to see from an airplane crashlanding in a forest, not a VW Polo known predominantly for land travel. I passed out again shortly after.

The rain had stopped when I awoke, and the blue skies had returned. My watch read 23:55hrs, same day. Smoke was no longer drifting up in the distance; I assumed the rains had dowsed whatever fires had been raging. I could hear angry birdsong coming from the trees around me. I hadn’t heard that earlier. I could remember it being eerily quiet. After just a few minutes, I longed for the return of silence.

I just wanted to get home. I was a twenty-four-year-old man suddenly wanting nothing more than a hug and a few soothing words from my mother. And that’s when I began to worry. How localised was whatever happened? How much damage had it caused? Were my parents okay? I had to find out!

My head suddenly clear, I checked my injured leg. Gingerly sliding the leg of my trousers over the shin to expose my skin, I was relieved to find that the skin hadn’t been punctured in any way. While seeing a cut or wound from something impacting my leg would have been bad, I think I would have freaked out if I’d seen my leg bone sticking out. There was a lot of discolouration along the entire length of my shin and it all felt terrible to touch. I didn’t know if I had broken a bone inside, but I decided to play it safe and make a splint.

I was never a Boy Scout, but I had seen enough survival movies to know that a couple of straight sticks and a torn sleeve or two were enough to lash together a workable splint until I could seek proper medical attention. Tightening the splint had never looked that painful in the movies. My screams silenced the birds and I had to blink away a flood of tears.

Composing myself, I grabbed for my makeshift crutch and stood, easing myself away from the tree, and slowly hobbling in the direction I believed my home to be.