The Eve of Dragons

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. For a time it was thought that nothing stirred there at all, except for the dead. No one knew this better than the Sly, who hollowed out the Valley’s hills to fill with the bodies of their brethren, and watched as its rivers washed away the blood. Not even the Sly children at their wildest age dared set foot there, for the old nursery song made it clear what awaited them:

The Valley is a place for resting

Disturb that rest and you’ll be testing

The fates, the wraiths, and all the banshees

Whose allied breath shapes the Valley’s dew.

The Valley is a place for mourning

Disturb the wake and you’ll be sorry

For the Sly’s battle is still warring

Long after the warriors withdrew.

The other Eastern races often frowned upon the Sly’s song, wondering how a people could fear their own dead. In the Durgan culture, it was believed that death was a gateway to a better world, where there was no suffering. For the Aerée-Si, all the wisdom of the cosmos was granted to a soul upon passing from life to death, and it went on to become one of the fates guiding the paths of the living. The Farisians, a people of magic and mages who were perhaps most opposed to the ways of the Sly, cherished the end of their lives. They believed each life cycle was another step on a ladder, and to die was to be reborn as a higher entity.

But the Sly had seen how death could corrupt a soul. They knew their fallen were no longer who they had been in life, and would not take kindly to the living no matter their race or religion. Those who died miserably or unjustly, like the Sly warriors in the Valley that day, became anchored in the liminal realm between life and death: the realm of magic. The Sly knew that the more death that befell a place, the thinner the veil between realms became. Volatile creatures of magic flocked to burial sites and battlegrounds, while trapped souls haunted and possessed all life who wandered there.

Since the Battle of the Valley, the Sly vowed to die in peace, to pass through the realm of magic and into nothingness on the other side. They kept to themselves in the Forest Kane, far from the politics of the other races, and taught the Valley song as their gospel. Sometimes as they were sung to sleep, the Sly children would see that deadly war playing out behind the elders’ eyes, and they knew to heed their words.

It wasn’t until the Eve of Dragons that a Sly set foot in the Valley again. It was a night not long after the birth of a child, born from a mother who had long been thought dead. A prisoner of war in the Farisian palace since the battle, the Sly woman by the name of Loam escaped with her life and her unborn son and sailed on a slave ship to the outskirts of the continent, back to the forest where she was born.

Broken and bleeding, Loam trudged into the Forest Kane on the brink of collapse, and was welcomed by the open arms of her Sly kin. Some were old enough to remember her and wept at her return, while others could barely contain their curiosity. By the time Loam was strong enough to tell her story, her belly had swelled to capacity. As she sat around the midnight bonfire and fixed her gaze on the flames, she told the Sly of the fellow warrior she’d met in captivity, a Sly man by the name of Teak. She told them how he’d lost an eye and an ear fighting in the Valley, but was still the most beautiful man she’d ever laid eyes on. She did not weep as she spoke of his last nights, slowly succumbing to a disease that had him wheezing and trembling into death.

As she told her story, the oldest of the Sly wracked their minds for a warrior named Teak who’d fought at the Valley, but no one came to mind. They burned with shame for forgetting him, but there had been so much loss that day that their memories were now muddled with faces and names.

The next night, still weak from her journey, Loam suffered through the birth of her child. As the midwife placed her son in her arms and made to retreat, Loam gripped her wrist to hold her back. She spoke her final words in a rasp, her eyes filling with unshed tears.

“Please don’t kill my baby.”

When the midwife relayed these words to the elders, they pitied Loam for the trust she had lost during her captivity in Farr. Each of them swore to care for the child as if he were their own, and named him Teak, after his warrior father.

The elder Sly knew from the beginning that Teak was not like the other children. He was smaller than the average Sly infant, and his veins were too visible beneath his thin skin. His hair, which had appeared true black as a Sly’s always would, would shine strangely in the sunlight, taking on a rust red hue. Some of the elder Sly suspected what this must mean, but none had the courage to say it.

More concerning was the infant’s refusal to sleep at dawn. The Sly were a nocturnal people, enlivened by starlight and shadow; yet no matter what they did, they could not keep the child down when the sun rose. The elders took their turns caring for the young Sly, bundling him in his hammock beneath the brightening sky, rocking him to sleep with songs of ancient origins. But Teak would only cry and cry, punching the air with tiny fists until dusk arrived, when he would finally close his eyes.

Luckily for the Sly, infancy never lasted long. As soon as Teak learned his words, he also learned the rules. He was forced to sleep under the sun with the other Sly children, just as he was taught to crack open the shells of nymphfruit, to discern edible leaves from the toxic ones, and to trap and skin soft-bellied rodents. He was taught the dangers of Forest Kane in daytime, told stories of vicious creatures that craved Sly flesh, and of course, listened to the elders sing of the haunted Valley beyond the forest line.

“Are there birds in the Valley?” Teak asked one morning, puncturing the silence that followed the Valley song. He was sat crosslegged on his hammock under the canopy of leaves that formed the forest ceiling, and the darkness of night was just beginning to lift.

“Everything in the Valley is dead, you dolt,” said Bone, a boy his age who slept kitty corner to his own hammock. This garnered a laugh from some of the children who were still awake.

“Be kind, Bone,” said one of the elders. He was a soft-spoken Sly elder, who often defended Teak from the other children, though he never looked him in the eye. Now he fixed his gaze on the woods behind Teak’s left shoulder as he said, “But I’m afraid he’s right. The only souls in the Valley are the lost ones.”

The sun was halfway above the horizon now, and golden light was leaking in through the dense trees, fanning across the forest floor. Teak had been following the sleep routine as best as he could, fighting against the restless pull that overtook him whenever the sun rose. He had learned very quickly that he couldn’t roam the forest all day and expect to stay awake for gathering during the night. Nonetheless, he often reserved a few hours just after noon, when the rest of the Sly were fast asleep, to wander into the forest. If the Sly elders noticed the growing circles beneath his eyes, they didn’t care. If they noticed his hammock empty in the middle of the day, they didn’t follow.

Teak didn’t mind that they looked the other way when it came to him. He enjoyed his solitude, away from the other children who teased him for being too small, too slender, too Farisian in colour. Some would call him Chantris, after the Princess of Farr, because she too had hair that turned red in the sun — and because if there was anyone the Sly were taught to hate more than a Farisian, it was Farisian royalty.

But more importantly for Teak, being alone in the day meant being alone with the birds.

The birds had a freedom that Teak always envied, and were beautiful to boot. He admired their impossible colours, the sheer power of their wings, their willful defiance of gravity. He listened to their songs echo through the trees, and drew their wingspans in the dirt of the forest path. He felt a kinship with the birds of Forest Kane that he never once felt with a fellow Sly.

“Now, heads down. Eyes closed. It’s time for sleep,” said one of the elder Sly, and he and the other soft-spoken Sly shuffled back toward the clearing where the elder Sly would drink and tell stories until late morning.

As Teak lay back in his hammock and stared into the trees above, something materialized in the leaves. He flinched so violently he had to grab the edges of the hammock on either side of him to keep from falling out.

It was an Occulus bird, sitting eerily still on a branch above, staring down at him with unblinking eyes. He hadn’t spotted it before, and his brain had only just now picked out the shape of it from amongst the sea of green. Occulus birds, which were about the size of his head with a wingspan four times that, were masters of hiding in plain sight. They were covered in reflective scales that mirrored their surroundings, with the only exception being their curved beaks and talons, which were smooth and clear as water.

It always sent a wicked shiver down Teak’s spine to imagine being on the end of an Occulus’s stiletto-sharp beak, to see himself impaled in its reflective scales. But he knew the Occulus birds were harmless, feeding only on those smaller than themselves. He stared back into the iridescent eyes of the bird above, noticing a small patch of scales in the hollow of its throat that were dulled beneath a grubby patina.

Feeling safe under the bird’s gaze, Teak began to doze, only to be woken by the feeling of warmth dappling his cheeks. He squinted against the sun directly above him, a starburst of white light fractured by branches and leaves. The world was cast in a green hue and buzzing with the noise of diurnal creatures, so loud they almost drowned out the soft snoring of the children. Being a nocturnal creature like the Sly, the Occulus bird had long gone back to its nest.

Teak rolled out of his hammock, his bare feet soundless on the leafy forest path. He grabbed a gnarled branch from a nearby tangle of ivy and used it as a walking stick as he trekked deeper into Forest Kane. He recognized the calls of several of his favourite birds, some chittering on low tree branches, others screeching from somewhere far away. He caught a glimpse of a rainbow-coloured Fishbird flicking through the air with tiny, fin-like wings struggling to keep it afloat. He watched a Mouseslayer swoop down from the trees to snatch a berry from the forest floor, squawking menacingly before taking flight again. Then, just as the sun reemerged from behind a cloud, Teak spotted something glinting at the base of a nymphfruit tree. He wandered off the path toward it, and stopped short.

Lying on its side in the dirt, its neck bent at an odd angle, was a baby Occulus bird.

There was a reason these birds only hunted during the night. They couldn’t afford to fly in daytime, since the light would bounce off their mirrored scales and draw the attention of predators from every angle. The baby Occulus bird shone like a supernova beneath the afternoon sky, the sparkling of its scales the only movement about it.

Teak felt a stabbing sensation in his heart. He knelt down to the poor baby bird, dropping his stick beside him, and gathered it in his cupped hands. The limp body barely weighed anything at all. He wondered if it belonged to the mother bird he’d seen earlier that morning.

He stood with the body, shifting it delicately to one hand. He knew the Occulus birds built their nests deep within the nymphfruit trees, right up against the trunk so as to be deep in shadow. He carefully pulled at some branches and peered into the heart of the tree, spotting the nest. It was an intricate creation, made of braided strands of Tulltree bark. Inside it, he could see five Occulus babies dozing, their delicate chests pulsing with new breath.

Teak’s eyes stung with tears. He looked down at the baby bird in his hand, irrefutably dead. He noticed how small it was, compared to its brothers and sisters, and how its shining scales had dulled slightly in death. He took in the sleeping forms of the other birds, how they seemed at peace with the absence of their kin, and suddenly he had the most awful feeling that the bird’s fall wasn’t an accident.

“I’m sorry,” he said to it, his voice thin. There was an ache deep in his chest, and he felt an itch growing on his chin and under his eyes, tingling like pins and needles. He’d felt this itch once before, when he was very young. The Sly were sat around the bonfire talking about his mother on the anniversary of her death — his birthday. They’d been discussing how brave she’d been, how she’d travelled so far with Teak growing in her belly. The tingling itch on his chin and beneath his eyes grew into a burn, and he watched as their fire went out in one fell swoop, as if snuffed between two giant, invisible fingers.

Teak let the branches of the nymphfruit tree fall back into place and knelt on the ground with the bird still laying broken in his palm. He covered it with his other hand, a makeshift coffin, and he sobbed. The weight of a wasted life grew heavy in his heart, and it hurt more than he could bear.

In his mourning, Teak didn’t notice the flare of the itch on his chin and beneath his eyes. He didn’t notice the spreading warmth between his hands, or the feel of smooth scales gliding over his palm.

It wasn’t until a shiver wracked his spine and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck that he was alerted to the wrongness of the wriggling between his palms.

He lifted his hand.

He watched as the Occulus bird struggled to stand.

He watched as it opened its mouth, let out a sound so small he might have imagined it.

He watched as it stretched its sparkling wings and turned to blink at him, taking in its surroundings with small, jerky movements of its neck.

Teak’s body was frozen, torn by the nagging instinct to recoil and the more primal urge to squash the threat. The bird was still as it was — too small, too fragile, too light — except for the new sheen to its scales and the swivel of its once-broken neck. It sparkled more intensely now, and Teak could see his own face reflected back at him from the bird’s breast. But most incomprehensible of all was how the bird blinked at him with a naive, unwavering trust, like how a baby would look fearlessly down the shaft of an arrow if its mother was holding the bow.

Teak’s apprehension melted away. He held the bird close to his chest as he stood and peeled away the tree’s branches once again. Gently, slowly, he placed the bird back in its nest with its sleeping siblings.

When Teak returned to his hammock just before evening, the itch had gone from his face, and he felt numb with confusion. He didn’t sleep the rest of the day, and rose at dusk with the others.

Teak tried it again a few nights later, on a bug he found outside the clearing. It was a large copper beetle, its eight legs curled in on itself, frozen in death. It didn’t budge between his hands.

He tried it on the carcass of a decaying rodent, kneeling in the dirt for hours as the others slept, but the rodent remained frozen in death.

Soon, his gathering during the night became so demanding, so exhausting, Teak barely had it in him to wander during the day anymore. Sometimes, when the children would call him Chantris until his ears rang, or when the elders continued to avoid his gaze no matter what he did, Teak would feel the ghost of the itch on his chin and beneath his eyes. Yet still, he could not bring life back to the dead.

By the time he reached hunting age, when the Sly boys’ voices would drop several octaves and the girls would let their hair grow wild, Teak had accepted that the bird he found was never really dead. He never checked for its heartbeat, or looked close enough at its chest to watch for breath. For all he knew, he had been lacking so much sleep that he could have been teetering on the edge of madness. There were many explanations for what he had seen in the forest that day, and none that involved magic.

So as Teak attended his hunting lessons on the night that would soon be known as the Eve of Dragons, he was no longer looking for bodies.

Instead, the bodies found him.

Over a dozen of them, laid out in the middle of the clearing. There were beasts of all sizes — ruffled, blood-stained rodents, shrivelled reptiles, canines and cats with bulging, sightless eyes. Every one had a feathered arrow shaft sticking out of their eye socket or buried in their haunches. Dark blood soaked the ground beneath them, the copper tang of it clinging to the air, making him gag.

“24 hours was all it took,” said one of the elders, her voice booming across the clearing as the Sly children gathered around the edges. “And this is what your elders brought back for supper.”

The Sly children muttered excitedly, until the elder held up a hand. “Don’t mistake my words to mean this is an easy task. It is not. To kill a Midday Mimicking Bird, you will need to learn to hold your breath for many minutes, and slow your heartbeat to a crawl. To get a Woodcat in the eye, you must tempt it with flesh by risking your own. To even spot an Occulus bird in the dark requires decades of discipline and patience; to shoot one takes a hand steadier than a rock.”

Until the elder mentioned its name, Teak hadn’t even seen the bird. In the dark there was no glint of light off its scales, no flash of iridescent eyes. But now as he looked for it among the dead, he could see the discoloured shape at the center of the clearing where the dirt was not actually dirt, but a reflection of the night sky.

Teak’s heart was beating loudly in his ears. While the rest of the Sly stood at attention, he was moving forward into the clearing. He had to see, to make sure. He ignored the muffled voices rising around him. He wrenched himself out of the grasp of one of the elders.

He had to see, to make sure.

Teak fell to his knees beside the Occulus bird, his stomach heaving at the sight of the arrow buried where its shimmering eye used to be. He saw in the hollow of the bird’s throat where a patina had dulled the shine of its reflective scales.

When Teak looked back on this moment, he would remember the itch on his face. He would remember catching his reflection in the bird’s scales and seeing the blotches of red on his chin and beneath his eyes. He would remember a whisper:

“What’s wrong with his face?”

And feeling the bird move beneath his hands. He would remember the squelch of the arrow as he pulled it from the bird’s eye.

“Teak, step back from it. I’m warning you” —

He would remember that warning, and the way it was cut off by screams as the bird’s wings began to flap once again.

“—it was dead, it was dead” —

He would remember the voices getting louder, overlapping.

“—Farisian rash!”

“—a changeling!”

“—red hair”—

“Calm down, calm” —

“Shoot him!” He would remember Bone screaming. “Shoot him!”

But after that, Teak would only remember running. He didn’t know where his feet were taking him, only that he couldn’t stop until he arrived. He didn’t fight the pull he’d felt since he was a child, dragging him further and further toward the edge of Forest Kane, until the trees became sparser and the noise became quieter.

When he fell to his hands and knees in the Valley, the first thing he noticed was the silence. It was as if the world had come to a standstill — no chirping birds, no buzzing insects, no chittering rodents. Apart from the forest at his back, he was surrounded by dark, rolling hills, sloping against a backdrop of mist-shrouded mountains. The only smell was earth and pure air. He wondered what this place would look like in the day, all verdant green and slate grey skies. He was again reminded how much he hated being confined to the dark, and wondered if, among the warriors buried in this place, there was one who missed the sun like he did.

Was this what the great Sly race had become? A people who killed beautiful things? Who hid in the forest like cowards, seething over a decades-old loss? Who had no room in their hearts for magic?

Where had all the warriors gone?

Had all their brave blood been shed in the Valley that day?

Teak pressed his palms to the cold earth. He curled his fingers into it, feeling blades of grass give way beneath his nails. His face itched and burned, and he cried as he clawed deeper into the damp soil.

A keening sound tore from somewhere deep within him, and all at once, the ground began to hum.

It was as if a swarm of restless insects were buzzing just beneath the surface. The louder it got, the more the earth trembled, until Teak had to rip his hands from the dirt and fall back on his haunches to steady himself. As his hands clapped down on the ground behind him, there was a sound like the roots of a thousand trees torn from the earth at once. Geysers of dirt and clay and grass erupted all around him, obscuring his vision. Something was beating the air, blowing his hair back from his face, and the sudden stench of sulfur gagged him. Teak cowered with an arm over his face, certain his death was near. He felt numb with fear, but beneath it, he felt glad he could die in the place of warriors.

But death never came.

As the wreckage of the explosion settled, Teak removed the arm covering his face and watched, dumbstruck, as a flock of a hundred dragons beat their wings against the starry sky above. He didn’t know what else they could be; he had never seen anything, not bird nor reptile, that resembled them. They were each large enough to eat half a dozen Sly and still come back hungry, and their wingspans rivalled the height of some of Kane’s tallest trees. The collective beating of their wings stirred the air into a tempest, and Teak had to cover his ears as their baleful shrieks shook the earth around him.

Teak struggled to stand among the ruined terrain. The dragons had come from the ground, each and every one, and had turned the Valley’s hills into rubble. He had just reached his feet when there was a sound like a thousand pyres igniting, and a wall of flame sliced through the base of one of the ruined knolls. As he craned his neck to find the source of the fire, several of the dragons opened their mouths wide, bearing teeth the size of an elder’s arm. They breathed, and their breath was blinding fire arcing across the sky or singing the valley below.

Not a lick of flame touched Teak, who still stood motionless where no living Sly had stood for a very long time. The dragons flayed the Valley with their elemental breath, but left a perfect circle of earth around him untouched. Teak simply watched as the world was lit up like an ember, so bright it may as well have been midday.

One by one, the dragons glided back down to earth, beating their wings as they touched down. Gusts of heat warmed his skin to a sweat. In the flash of flames, he had noticed the colour of the dragons’ eyes — molten gold, just like his own. Just like all of the other Sly. When he looked at them, he saw familiarity. He saw the only race he had always known.

This was what the magic festering in the Valley had done to the bodies of the Sly warriors. This was what had become of their brave kin. They stared back at him with the same trust he’d seen in the eyes of the baby Occulus he’d brought back from the dead.

They were more beautiful, more free, and more powerful than any bird he’d seen before.

Teak thought of the Sly back in the Forest Kane. He thought of how they were so afraid of death, they had confined themselves to the forest on the edge of the continent and banned themselves from the Valley where they had once battled the Farisians. He thought of how, if they knew what they would become in death, if they saw the beauty of wings and flight, they would be free of their cowardice. They would be free as the Fishbird and the Mouseslayer and the Occulus were free. They would know that death was nothing to fear, that the Farisians had had it right all along.

On this, the Eve of Dragons, Teak would remake his race. He looked at his brethren standing before him, huffing smoke as they awaited his command.

“Come,” he said. His voice was swallowed by roaring flame, but they heard him nonetheless. They crowded in closer to him, a hundred dragons moving in tandem. When they bowed their heads, Teak placed a hand on the nearest snout. He relished the feel of the smooth, iridescent scales on his skin, tougher than any chainmail. The heat billowing from the dragon’s nostrils astounded him.

One mighty breath across the clearing was all it would take, and the Sly would be remade into warriors.

Teak dropped his hand. He looked each and every dragon in the eye, feeling their magic thrumming through him. He latched on to the trust in the eyes of his brethren, and sang them a song:

The Valley is a place for the Sly

A place where the brave once came to die

To be born again from earth to sky

Freer in their magic than in life.

The Valley is a place for children

Wiser than their elders and brethren

Who call on the warrior dragons

To reap the fruits of their sacrifice.