The Red Shadow

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

Even she knew that much.

Eliza’s only view of the world was a small window looking out from the sub-basement of the fortress. All others looked inward at the lush gardens and overflowing fountains. No one who called it home wanted a reminder of the waste that the outside world had become.

The courtesans and scholars alike continued on in their merriment and meticulous commitment to whatever bookish pursuit had captivated them.

No one spoke openly of the dragon, not when they were a rumor brought in from what few merchants still traveled the desert wasteland. So parched and sun scorched that they could almost be convinced to take a gallon of hoarded water rather than the payment they initially ventured the waste for. No, most of the dwellers thought it was just fanciful storytelling to endear a better price from them.

No one spoke of the dragon when Eliza’s mother offered the vision of a haunting red shadow turning the golden sands they all refused to look at an ashy gray, their precious trees doomed to bear rotted fruits and the fountains to crumble from disrepair, no one left to tend to them when we ourselves became dust in the sand.

No one spoke of the dragon when strange screams could be heard in the open air courtyard, or if you were inside near one of the perimeter walls where once, long ago when the gates closed on the world and those outside could be heard banging and pleading for sanctuary, for a swift death, or just from insanity. They spoke briefly in debate of if these were the screams of their ghosts, but that quickly stopped when the walls grew hot, and the screams grew louder and closer. Enough that we could recognize they were not screams of anguish or fear, but hunger, and perhaps a bit of excitement at finding a new hunting ground.

No one spoke of the dragon even when we could no longer pretend the silhouettes in the sky were just some new odd bird. By that time we didn’t need to say a word about it. We knew it meant the end.

But of course, these were the descendents of, or extremely old aged originals of the fortress. The dwellers were not the sorts to confront their horrors. The scholars wouldn’t even entertain a subject so close to their reality. Their specialty was hypotheticals.

Eliza talked about it, but no one talked to Eliza. Only tolerated because of her mother’s place as the fortuneteller and guardian. Long driven mad enough that her visions could be entertaining rather than a reminder of what the dwellers had abandoned.

Her uncle Theon listened to Eliza. Theon would hear her every word and thank her for it. It wasn’t that no one listened to Theon, he was their lord and protector in the fortress. But the toil from the endeavor, and grief of its cost had made him an invalid, shut up in his room with only his sister’s magic to sustain his failing body all this time later.

Everyone would listen to Theon, but no one could hear him shouting from his tower, and the dwellers were avoiding him anyway lest he break their illusion that everything was fine.

“Why would I bother climbing down? I won’t make it back up and telling them won’t change anything.” He chuckled sadly at her when she had finally gotten the courage to ask him directly why we would not do anything.

“Besides, it’s not as if they don’t know.” He continued.

“Theon, they don’t even care enough to come and ask if the fortress can protect us from the dragon, or possibly dragons.” Eliza had questions and objections, she always did. Her life had been spent in limbo, technically an heir to two all-powerful beings who held court over a paradise, but what use is being an heir if they’re immortal and crazy or exhausted. So without magic of her own, her status made her precocious rather than powerful. Or petulant if you asked the dwellers.

“You think there could be more than one?” Theon pressed her. Exhausted yes,

But he was her uncle, and he listened to her.

“Unless they reproduce like phoenixes then we have to assume there is more than one out there.” She explained.

“Imagine that” Theon gazed away from her, not losing interest, but gaining a sort of nostalgia. “If phoenixes were real.”

Long ago, Theon and Eliza’s mother Sophie had been just children, in love with fantasy stories about hidden doors to other worlds, schools of magic, and kingdoms where winter would last years and years. They came of age as the world was dying from a poison that humans had made themselves. This part of the story was always sparse when they told Eliza, They were only 20 when they hid away in the fortress, the nuances of how the world were ruined were beyond the comprehension of two siblings playing dungeons and dragons and being told they were too old for the things they loved.

As the world decayed it brought new gifts, what at first could be brushed off as mutation, soon went so far beyond anything that the great minds of the time knew that magic became a better descriptor. Small things, flowers rapidly developing new colors, soon turned to household pets learning to talk. People jump to great heights and children were born with horns or wings.

Theon and Sophie were not the only ones who jumped at the chance to harness it. They were, fortunately, among the few who survived the effort.

Those who tried to fly forgot that they would soon come back down, and human bodies, we soon found, can’t survive long with the added strain of extra appendages.

The twins had spent a lifetime hiding from their mundanely evil reality in books and games and films, lost in thoughts of spells and the wonder of their wishes being brought to life. Right at the age when they were told to grow out of it, when such a long held longing would turn to a confusing sort of grief before an acceptance of the world as it was. They were given all they needed to bring childhood wishes to reality.

Is it any wonder then that they never really grew up.

“Theon, I'm serious!” Eliza was at her wit’s end trying to force action from someone who had spent the last century coasting off the glory of an early success and avoiding the consequences of his actions.

“So am I! Why did we never think of building a phoenix? Not entirely practical, but you’d only really need one so I think we could have justified it.”

“You still can make one.”

“In theory, but that would require a degree of coordination with your dear mother that I don’t think either of us are up to at this age, eh Soph?”

Eliza’s mother was apparently too busy building a house of cards to answer.

In theory, these two combined had the power of a god, and even still today used that power to maintain their utopian fortress as a playground they no longer got to enjoy themselves.

A place where the dwellers are kept in air pumped clean of the gritty sand, where only the safest but of magic flourish. Housecats chat amongst themselves in hallways, the fruits grown are always perfectly sweet. Theon and Sophia still mostly did the same things they had before the magic existed, they laid around their rooms enjoying their distractions to avoid facing reality.

Although they’ve never told Eliza what happened between gaining their powers and building the fortress. They’ve even gone so far on occasion to suggest that perhaps this was the first and only thing they did with their powers.

Eliza never believed them, she knew them both too well. Equal parts fantastical and frantic, methodical and manic, the twins were the sort to relish small victories like hovering a coffee cup with a weeks long celebration.

Like everyone else in the fortress they typically ignored their mistakes and miseries. For them to have become these sad hidden beings, rarely even partaking in the literal dreamscape they’re wasting themselves for, Eliza knows they didn’t just close the doors of the fortress to hide from the waste.

They were still just children hiding from what they did wrong.