The Promise of the Valley

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The ridges and hollows sat empty and unfilled, waiting for vitality to course through them. The Valley stretched halfway up the continent in length, similar in shape to today. The tallest ridges running up the east and west were bald and rocky, shoved upward during the formation of the continent, and the basin and foothills in it were covered in oak and hawthorne trees. The mountains and forests were motionless and lifeless, paused in their development, and poised for change.

In the center of the western ridge was a peak that could be seen from most of the continent, casting a long shadow. Over time, while the Valley waited, a force had been building inside the summit, gathering momentum and strength. A pressure built up inside the peak, drawing from the very center of the planet, pushing and centralizing and focusing until the mountain trembled and strained. This shaking intensified over an era, until the walls of the peak were exhausted past their joints and crevices, and the force threw itself out through the summit and shook the planet.

There was blinding, lasting light while the force collected itself, strengthened by its passage through the point of the peak and into an immense bloom. As it consolidated and concentrated, the force solidified, and took all that strength and withdrew into the peak again, curling its tremendous size into black-scaled coils that filled the passages and caverns.

That restless, writhing mass of bronze and golden and green flashes on a black body, is Archelaos, or the Beginning. He gave his name to the highest western peaks, the Archaleans, that stretch from the low-slung spine of Long Hope to the high bald North Passes.

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The driver of the carriage heard these stories whispering in the air as she rode, unnamed voices reciting the history of the Valley. Ahead, two donkeys pulled the carriage, their chuffing hoofbeats fading into passing birdsongs and breezes to mix with the words.

Under the driver’s seat were bags full of miracles, used to capture the attention of the villagers of the Valley. Years in the continent outside the Valley had provided the driver with incredible objects, from a magnifying glass to make a flame, to hammered copper wires that transfer heat end to end. Now, high in the rainforest passes, the carriage passed along close paths and jungle, a procession of quietly pounding hooves, creaking leather and wood, and the whispers of primordial histories.

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After the light and bloom that birthed Archelaos, a long dusk fell. Low clouds and long shadows left a golden and close air over the valley. For another hundred years, the particles of light and droplets swirled and floated, developing colors and darknesses until every shade that we now see started to alight and settle in their places. Flowers found their vivid violets and pale yellows, and the gray of stone and lush green of foliage filled into vibrance when the particles settled onto them. As they fell slowly from the skies a bright, full blue was left behind, and their golden hues rained from the clouds like paint, leaving them pure white.

A being called Dusana took shape in the columns of cloud, and she started to play with her forms. First she would extend and stretch upwards until her white wingtips would contrast blindingly against the sunlight, and next she would lean far down to sweep her mists across the ridges and trees. She could dance and leave stripes across the sky, or rest and let herself roil softly upwards, always soaring.

For an immeasurable time, Archelaos and Dusana watched each other, frightened and enticed. He saw her unhurried dances and sweeping inclusion of everything from air to dirt, and began to love her for her grace. She saw him filling the planet with strength, churning within the Archaleans and balancing the ground against her air, and over time they became the two halves of everything. She would sweep across his peak and leave a halo of fog, always present, and he began to lovingly draw the droplets from that fog and use it to bring life into his ground.

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The driver halted the carriage, and climbed down. There was an aegis tree by the road whose boat-shaped leaves would slowly tip and pour rainwater into the next leaf below it. The driver watched as a leaf would fill, reach its tip point, and gently deposit the water down the line of leaves and finally to the roots. It looked like an uncanny act of physics, but the driver knew that the borders of the Valley had been passed, and physics had changed. Upon closer inspection, these small wonders would show the incredible mechanisms behind them. The driver put her mouth under a tipping leaf, tasting the cold water, and felt the quiet protest in the air, and the tiny beating of wings.

This region of the Valley was a strange place, difficult to understand. Logic worked differently here than in the continent, and could be disorienting. The expanse of jungle in front of the driver, stretching northeast from the road, is called Ingress, where time doesn’t exist and everyone who ever got lost is waiting all at once for one another to arrive. The people of the Valley live with and understand uncountable perplexities like this, and their uncommon perspectives and reasoning could be startling. Or, in the driver’s opinion, thoroughly enjoyable.

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In the Archalean caverns, small pieces of something soft started to move and roll. They worked their way to the opening and out of the deep closeness, into thick fog in all directions. The low brush of a bald meadow fell away sharply ahead, scattered with wind-stunted trees and bare rock. The pieces moved forward and the fog whipped past, blue sky and the tops of clouds showing through occasionally, and long-range views across low green hills and far blue mountains. Here it wasn’t raining, because it was above and in the clouds. The wet of the air floated, but didn’t fall. There was a slow movement, gathering speed, drawing the pieces through the air and into the lofty white columns of cloud below. Before long the pieces were flying forward and fusing, and around them the air and cloud columns turned grey and violent, pushing them together. There was a smashing flare of electricity and then everything calmed as the pieces met and melded and dropped.

They fell from the bottom of the white and grey column, and the green hills waited as they moved towards them. The line of approach was straight and fast but deliberate and correct, and the pieces could feel, even see, glowing veins below the trees. Pulsing veins, where a spring of moisture and magic could push through the ground and onto its surface to find ways to stream and gurgle down the valleys and hollows. The veins were ready, but dry.

The pieces rushed past the forest canopy and smashed onto the mossy rocks and waiting ground. There was a surge of water and an emergence of intense spirit, and the ground and its cracks welcomed the pieces and the trees celebrated them and drew them in, and they fused and leaped out and across and through as springs and creeks. They laid themselves amongst the hollows of the Valley, a flush through the veins, and when they settled into their eternal, stationary movement, a blue and green dragon was now there, under the springs. These Dragon Veins became the valleys where life and magic concentrates and flows, and the pieces had passed out of the depths of their father and through the clouds of their mother to form Hanam, the water dragon. She lives hidden right under the water’s surface and in its spray, constant in her shimmering movements, her riverstone heart pulsing life into the springs and veins.

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The driver found herself thinking about the Dragon Veins of the Valley. She hadn’t seen them since she was a girl, when her older cousins had taken her to try and catch glimpses of Hanam. They had never seen the Dragon of the Veins, but one day the driver had gone off alone into the deeper woods on an old path lined by stone carvings of short, smiling men, and when she reached a spot that the foliage was such a vivid green that it shone all colors back at her, she had known that she was at a source in the vein. She watched silently as the trees seemed to flex in and out, and listened until all that she could hear was silence, and in this moment of mindfulness she could see spoondrifts of bright, pure scales, shining through the creek spray like the air shimmering over a fire.

She had told her favorite cousin about it after finding her way back out of the woods.

“You were restful enough to sight Hanam? Best remember that rarity. Those scales show some of the oldest colors of the world.” She pressed the cousin for more, but all she could get out of him sounded like some limp, broad prophecy. “Y’know what they say, the child is the father of the man. Remember those colors.”

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In the centuries following the births of the Three, there was an explosion of life and diversity in the Valley. Every small first occurrence of anything was a flashpoint. The first time that the lithe forms of the trouts gleamed and hovered in the rivers, and the first time they leapt up and over the falls below Long Hope, the largest continued to rise and soared away in the flashing form of a lesser river dragon. When the leaves fell during the first autumn, the dead leaves rolled and consumed themselves until their rolling and biting became the squat, petrichor dragon of the forest floor. All of these dragons burst forth from the Three, multiplying in their purposes and beauty, and as the lines of descendants grew, the defining traits of the Three were passed on to the dragons of the present.

Hanam’s restraint made her children, the Hanids, watchful and wise, though their guarded nature could put them in positions of servitude. The dragons of the line of Hanam tend to the minute workings of the valley, deliberate and careful to preserve balance. One son, Axios, flits around the Dragon Veins on tiny wings that are a blur of ruby and silver, and uses his snout to snuffle and disrupt the soil around the small streams. Without noticing his flash of color and the buzzing of his flight, the rivulets appear to trickle from spot to spot randomly, but he works furiously to direct the water to its most beneficial path.

The line of Dusana, the Dusanids, carries her forceful playfulness, and her unpredictable urges. Joining her in the skies every dawn and dusk, her daughter Thetima spreads her enormous wings like the sails of a ship and glides at incredible heights. Huge but almost invisible to the eye, she flames furiously from her throat and burns the atmosphere itself into auroras of orange, red, and yellow. Once she has exhausted her ability to flame, she returns to a hidden moonglade of orange trees in the north, where she feasts on fruits full of the particles that fell from the sky during Dusana’s creation, to replenish her colorful flames.

While the quiet and vital Hanids apply themselves to the maintenance of the Valley’s system, and the Dusanids sweep grand and fickle arcs of beauty through the skies and weather, the Archids live under and within the crust of the Valley. They have a loud strength, and an inarguable set of methods that they use to lift, push, and settle the landscape itself. Aco lives deep below Long Hope, where he flexes his gnarled wings outward under an enormous strain, carrying the spines of the ridges that rest upon them further north and south. Once a year, he rests his wings, withdraws them to his body, and then exerts them up into the crust again to continue spreading the ridge. While the Archids labor, all of the Valley’s dragons are constantly reacting and adjusting their own beautiful tasks to the ever-changing landscape.

In this way, without the burden of good or evil, and tasked only with maintaining the uncountable glorious functions of the unstable Valley, the dragons developed themselves in a natural balance. Their evolution was guided by needs and found a perfect form for each of those needs. The Valley became a landscape of grand vistas that can stop the breath, the heavens full of Dusanid brush strokes weighing lightly on the rising and falling terrain of the Archids, and both bursting with the uncountable, arresting tasks of the Hanids.

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The air and jungle around the carriage was full now, alive with the tiny dragons that are the constant working of the Valley. It was easy to smile at their bustling energy, and the driver let herself feel their emotions and laugh for a moment. Every one of them, even the tiniest dew-collectors, left behind a scented wake of passionate feeling, or sensation, and these busy Hanids were filling the air with their wonderful industry. The voices in the wind and leaves even seemed more forceful and clear.

Just ahead, the driver could see the jungle thinning, and knew that she was reaching the balds of the North Passes. In a day she would reach the cliff overlooks, and would be able to see across the Valley flat to the great painted city of Thet. From there, the Valley would seem like a writhing bowl of fluctuation, and the driver would stunned again by the sheer magnitude of the Archids, groaning masses of life stretching as far as the eye can see, into the foggy distances. Then the carriage would find its way down the rocky switchbacks and across the river flats, past the now empty spaces of her childhood, and towards the colorful Thetan walls.

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In those early days, an iron dragon named Besart was formed, who merged the lines of Achelaos and Hanam. Under the eastern ridges, at the Mouth of the Brine, he walked the salt river’s brackish waters, dissatisfied and disinterested. The beauty around him was plain to his eyes, because he knew every bit of it and the dragons responsible for the bits. He saw sap roll down pine bark, and knew the tiny Hanids tumbling inside each of its sticky droplets, and could see the slow rise and fall of white hills, the backs of the enormous and stolid Archids of the Downs.

He came upon a saltwater flat within a forest, where the trees hung low and the air was stagnant. Besart went into the center of it, turning and looking around, and found nothing familiar. No movement, and no life, and no dragons. He stared into the dark, still waters, and there below him he saw the trunks of two trees, laid across each other in a cross. One was coal black and absorbed every bit of light, and the other was beaming white and pushed every bit of light back off. They truly were laid across each other, neither on top but suspended in their space simultaneously, and seemingly outside of the passage of time. Besart wondered what this was, and who had created it, but here was the enigma that he sought. He reached out to touch it, breathing sharply and excitedly.

He felt a fire on his skin, and the heavy pressure of the stale water, and the mud below the trunks, and as he felt all of this he heard a ringing in his ears that became louder and louder, and he let out a ragged breath. The water opened into a steaming tunnel around the air from his mouth, and he could see all four things, the heat, the water, the muddy floor, and his breath, as they found each other and mingled. There was curiosity and purpose in the air all around him. He watched, not afraid but not without fear. It didn’t feel sinister, but he knew that something had just fundamentally changed, and that a new balance and symmetry would have to be found in the Valley.

As Besart breathed again, a form pushed itself up from the mingled four things, and standing in front of him was an unfamiliar shape, without wings and with smooth skin rather than scales. It looked defenseless, yet somehow had a ferocity in its features and a strength that was felt and not seen. This small girl was the first human. She shivered, but held his gaze and smiled.

Overcome by pride, and unsure of how to present himself to this unexpected being, Besart raised onto his haunches. He extended his rust-colored body to its full length, clenched every muscle, and felt an enormous flame growing in his chest. Besart felt it build and was a little afraid of the size of the flame, and if it would hurt him, but he readied himself, set his stance, and closed his eyes. He roared as the fire bloomed up through his throat, and shook his head in long arcs, feeling it erupt from his mouth and nostrils and into the trees.

Panting, Besart looked down at the girl. She was calm and unmoving, and they stared at each other while reflections of the fire in the surrounding trees flickered in their eyes. They stood immobilized until after the trees had collapsed and reduced to cinder, forming a perfect circle of cleared forest and swirling, steaming water, discolored by ash. At that moment, moved by great affection, Besart, the iron dragon, spoke to her, and laid down the Golden Oath.

-

As the driver heard these last words, they were spoken loudly and clearly. The carriage was passing out into an open square, surrounded by stacked stucco houses with brightly painted walls of blue and orange and white. The air had a vibration to it, and every object, from the begonia blooms on the vines to the fish in the market stands, pulsed minutely. The entire scene had a surreal effect, and the driver felt a thrill looking around at the lively people, and at the dragons of all sizes streaming in and out of the jungle. The Archids of the Downs could be seen, high white hills in the afternoon haze behind the stone walls, and the driver could hear their lowing and groaning floating across the wind like distant thunder.

In the center of the Plaza, the driver stopped the carriage beside an incredible iron statue of a dragon, towering out of a pool, where its feet grasped two crossed logs. Its wings stretched wide, a brilliant flame of brass flowered from its face, triumphant and regal. The plate at the statue’s feet read “Besart”, and etched into the brass flames were the words of the great Golden Oath, spoken by the winged father of humanity, who gave his breath to create us:

“I will live for the people, since someday I must die for them. I swear this on the Archaleans, and may I have many good things if I swear well, but ruination for me if I do not.”