The Rendering

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. They came with The Rendering, when the sky tore open and the world was redrawn, dragons clawing through the tear in the sky like hungry urchins squeezing through the cracks in the wall at the soup kitchen, looking to grab a free meal behind the Guardian's backs before the food ran out. The Rendering had been before Marius had first drawn breath, but not so long the old timers did not still marvel at the new reality of scaly, clawed monsters sailing through the scarred heavens above them.

Marius sat on the tree stump and chewed on a scrap of dried meat, the wind easing and sighing gently through the leaves of the weeping silver birches over his head.

"Here be dragons," he whispered to himself, and slanted a thoughtful glance at the periwinkle sky, his view of the pale Second Sun crisscrossed by the swaying branches of the tree. It was his favorite place to hide and ponder, a secret spot that only he knew of, where he could sit in peace and consider his place in the world.

A world that made little sense to his restless mind, always seeking answers to the questions that drifted endlessly through his mind like cold little snowflakes that refused to melt. They piled up in ever larger drifts in the corners of his mind, ceaselessly whispering and calling to him at all hours of day and night, wheedling him for an answer to their frigid demands.

No one knew where the dragons had come from, nor what purpose they served, yet it seemed to Marius he was the only one who found this lack of knowledge disconcerting. Sometimes, he thought he could travel the Valley far and wide, it's full width and breadth and perhaps, even beyond it's far-flung boundaries, and never find another living person who cared why the dragons had come. As long as the dragons left them alone and stayed high in their dens among the snowcapped peaks, no man or woman in Marius' experience seemed in the least bit concerned that there were hideous creatures hovering on their doorstep.

Except, thought Marius, they weren't really hideous, at least not from this far away. Staring off into the distance at the mountains that hid the Third Sun from the Valley Dwellers view, his eyes soon found what they sought.

Flitting about the mountaintops, the flock of dragons he had been watching all morning sparkled like precious gems in the fading light of the First Sun as it set beyond the northernmost mountain range, the ones the old timers called The Ragged Peaks. In this light and from this distance, they looked more like brightly colored hummingbirds weaving an intricate aerial pattern amongst themselves than a collection of fire breathing monstrosities.

Nothing about these creatures made sense to him. He would never live to see a Rendering himself, and could rely only on the stories told around the Gathering, but the Tellers all claimed that never before in all the Valley Dwellers history had there been a Rendering that brought upon them a creature from another world. Why now? Why here? What purpose could they possibly serve?

These were all questions left unanswered for so long that people had stopped asking them, but Marius feared the answers with an inner sense of impending doom that he could not explain. Surely somewhere in this land was another Dweller who could explain to him what he could not even verbalize himself. Surely somewhere, there was another living soul who felt like he did, who questioned, wondered and feared the unanswered questions as much as Marius, and perhaps with more luck than he in finding the answers.

"That, my son, is a question for Sir Thomas," muttered Marius to himself and smiled wryly at his well practiced imitation of his father's response to any question he could not or would not answer. As for the identity of the mysterious Sir Thomas, that was another chilly little question that went as yet unanswered, one Marius had long since stopped asking. No one knew who Sir Thomas was or might have been, or where the expression came from.

Much like the dragons, thought Marius, and closed his eyes as the clarion calls of the far away dragons echoed off the walls of the jagged mountains, a distant, eerie, almost musical sound that haunted his dreams every night.