The Forest Grove

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

There was a time before.

There was a time when the ancient forest trees were the guardians of the people who worshipped them. There was a time when the solstice festivals were alive with music laughter and singing between the people and the trees, and the equinox was a time for creativity and the grove transformed into a thousand colours. There was a time when our people would celebrate and dance through the forest with no fear. The forest grove seemed to dance with us.

The mountains bordering the Valley held no precious metals for quarrying. The streams brilliantly foamed and gurgled, but no gold was found beneath the beds. The forest was the only jewel of the land. The branches and leaves provided shelter and the warmth required for the winter months. The undergrowth and soft moss was always there to cushion our feet and our heads when the festivals stilled and we lay to watch the changing colours of sunrise.

Their arrival was not sudden.

It started gently, with the deer disappearing.

Then the gentle awakening music of the magpies quieted.

And a single child was lost.

The whispers throughout the Valley roared of the change coming. That the child had been killed, or worse, taken.

When the healer packed her cart and left, we knew something terrible was destined for the Valley. She had just days earlier been gifted the burning flesh of a man who had been retrieving a fallen branch from the forest floor and walked down the wrong path. His screams echoed across the Valley. When the deathly hush fell, the silence washed the Valley blood red.

When the Druid closed his door and it did not reopen, the rest of the Valley learned true fear. We had known fear before. We had known of the frozen winter taking the elderly from the waking world. We remembered the hunter not returning to his young wife as promised. The Druid did not return.

When they burnt the forest grove the trees stopped speaking to us. Then they fell totally silent.

The people left the Valley in droves. For days and weeks, the winding track through the forest and up the high side of the Valley was awash with people, livestock and carts. We that stayed behind were either too old to travel, or too stubborn to acknowledge that the green harmonious Valley had been turned to ash.

Ruadan begged me to leave.

“Please Ori - there is nothing left for us. She will never come back to us.”

I could not leave. His eyes dulled to black when he left. He pressed a kiss to my forehead and joined the snaking track of people escaping.

I walked through the valley of ash and pressed a hand to what remained of the ancient grove tree. I longed for her to whisper a truth, to whisper that the Valley would be saved. I willed her to show me that the trees were alive. But she slumbered on silently. She had whispered to me once before, almost a decade ago, to tell me that the babe in my belly would show us the way. Perhaps she could sense my doubt, and that was why she did not whisper again.

The shadow of a cloud passed low overhead and I flinched, but the dragons had only ever come at night.

I looked deeper into the dark smoking forest and braced for the long lonely life ahead of me. I could not abandon my hope.

For the child that was lost is mine.