The Return

There weren't always dragons in the valley. In fact, most of the time, it was a peaceful place. Decades could pass without incident, and such spans of uninterrupted peace were sure to create a false sense of complacency among the many villages that called the valley home. There was no rhyme nor reason to their periodic intrusion; their only constant remained the assuredness of their eventual return.

"Dragons? Grandmother, dragons are a myth," the youths would say, their fresh memories untarnished by the raw violence that periodically poured from the mountainside.

Even those who had suffered the draconic tithe in their early lifetimes sometimes forgot their own plight. It was easier for some to pretend that their own memories– and the genetic history of their people– were naught more than horrendous dreams.

Others still chose to suppress the memories of carnage and death in favor of fickle optimism. They convinced themselves with every passing year that the winged devils would never return and that the suffering they had experienced was the final instance of humanity's struggle against the primordial serpent.

Yet always, whether the sense of safety was born from youthful ignorance or trauma-induced denial, the people of the valley were wrong.

The dragons always came back.

And as the sorrowful survivors crawled out from the smoldering husks of hill-forts and hovels, they swore up and down to their gods to never forget the attack. They vowed to rebuild, prepare, and fend off the ravenous beasts upon their inevitable return.

But as fields were replanted atop the ashes of their predecessors, the villagers would forge spears again into plows. Then, invariably, when peaceful years of recovery turned into decades of stability, the people would forget their own tribulation, and the cycle would begin once more.

The young soldier walked his regular patrol route, and he thought absolutely nothing of dragons. It had been six generations since they had last come. Not a soul yet alive recalled them firsthand. His path stretched nearly twelve hundred paces one way and primarily kept him atop a precariously narrow outcrop halfway up a sheer bluff. The bluff itself had been cut by the valley's central river long before humans had acquired sapience, and the outcrop was cut by nonhuman hands a little after. His boots shuffled lazily in the worn-down ruts where a thousand feet had trod before, but his mind was far from the well-traversed route.

In fact, he was quite unhappy to be patrolling the bluff at all. This night, whose moon sheared a flawless disc of ivory into the otherwise obsidian sky, was supposed to be his night off. At twenty-three years old, he was nearing the final year of obligatory service in the militia. Under any other circumstances, he would have held seniority over the other young men of his outfit, but the previous three days had created an unusual collapse in regular unit structure. Due to a rotten shipment of meat from the North, nearly two-thirds of his comrades had been incapacitated with severe gastrointestinal distress. Thanks to sheer luck, an imperturbable bowel, or a combination of the two, he had avoided succumbing to the rancidity of these rations. However, he was forced into involuntary adoption of a few guard shifts that were now open to any militiamen alive and well outside the infirmary.

The lantern he carried only illuminated a few dozen yards about him, but he knew that he was approaching his turnaround point as the gradual slope of the outcrop began to level off. He was grateful for this since it meant that the return trek would be significantly faster (and easier on his sore legs) than the initial portion of the journey. Since he had made the initial ascent within the span of thirty minutes, and since the entire patrol was required to last ninety minutes, he decided that he would pause at the pinnacle of his journey and relax before making his return to the drafty guard shack that awaited him at the bottom of the bluff.

Undoubtedly, his fellow guards would do the same on their own patrols. The hour-and-a-half allotted for the two-mile hike was meant to ensure a slow, deliberate pace full of investigative pauses and attentive observation. Yet, such attention to detail was almost exclusively fruitless since the path on the outcrop seldom yielded anything of interest. Though the valley remained the only passable land route between the North and the South, night patrols were typically dreaded stints of boredom for young militiamen. Smuggling was most efficiently conducted by sea, and travelers, merchants, and missionaries seldom waited till after dusk to bed down for the night. Night duty was a lonesome charge, friend only to the nocturnal philosopher or the aspirant poet.

The soldier, of course, was neither.

He was a simple man with simple goals, and the sudden interjection of an unwelcome night patrol was not among them. He perched the lantern on the path's surface beneath him and slumped against the bluff, sliding down against the smooth stone into a more comfortable seated position. He looked back to his left and gazed into the darkness from which he had ascended.

As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he could see his village. It was the northernmost settlement in the valley, and it accordingly straddled the river just as it emerged from between the towering bluffs. He could not discern any meaningful forms in the unyielding night, but he saw at least a hundred yellow lights flickering through square-cut windows. He knew that Renda Mayed would be moping solemnly in his absence within one of those adobe-built houses.

Had he not been reassigned to the night shift pending the recovery of his cohorts, he would have been with her at the tavern on this cool, spring night, dancing and drinking the evening away. Renda, the butcher's daughter, was as clever as a fox and more beautiful than the winter's first snow. She was a prodigious accountant and her father's uncontended apprentice in his trade. The soldier could not recall a time in his life he had not known her; over the years, their tender friendship had expectantly matured. He hoped that she would agree to marry him upon the completion of his term of service.

He unclasped the fastener under his chin and slid the bronze kettle helmet off his head. He set it gingerly next to the lantern, thoughts of sweet Renda still dancing through his mind. He reached his right side, grabbed the ceramic canteen that hung opposite his ax, and lifted it to his lips. He let the cool water within trickle into his mouth. It was a refreshing escape from the patrol but a poor substitution for the ale he would have been consuming in the tavern. He wiped his face with a soft linen sleeve and let the canteen drop back down to his side.

He pushed the bitter thoughts of his canceled plans from his mind and turned his face back away from the village. He looked up towards the moon and nearly froze with shock as his blood ran cold.

He had seen a shadow cross its luminescent face.

"No," he thought, "I'm just exhausted. Too many damn patrols. My eyes are playing tricks on me. It was nothing."

But then, he saw it again: a vast pair of wings that eclipsed the lunar surface with nearly imperceptible speed. His jaw dropped as he stared, dumbfounded, into the night sky. The sinister silhouette darted in front of the moon once more, and this time he was sure.

It's getting closer.

But what was it? A bird? A bat? Had either of these been the case, he should have heard the creature's wingbeats. The size of the shadow that had crossed his vision meant that such a small animal must've been incredibly close. It was distant, which, to the soldier's horror, meant that it had to have been something massive.

"No… it can't be…"

He grabbed his helmet and scrambled to his feet, his hands shaking as he made multiple attempts to clasp his helmet strap.

"They're just a myth. Old stories to scare children into compliance. Nobody's ever seen one. They're not real."

He unknowingly deceived himself, but he persisted nonetheless. If he was wrong, and the thing in the sky was what he feared, the survival of the whole valley depended on his ability to warn the militia commander. So he wrenched the lantern up from the ground and immediately started a cautious trot down the path.

He was almost halfway back to the guard shack when a sudden down-gust of wind pushed him face-first into the path. He cursed aloud as he felt the shock of pain from his knees. His canteen and lantern were shattered in the fall, and he tried to conduct a self-inventory in the now all-encompassing darkness.

It was impossible to tell the difference between the blood from his skinned knees and the newly emancipated canteen water, but after a careful feel-over, he was certain that he hadn't sustained anything more than superficial injury. He took a deep breath and rose once more to his feet. Whatever had caused the impossibly strong draft of wind, he would need to make it back in total darkness.

He steadied his breathing and oriented himself in his mind. The sheer drop of the outcrop was directly to his right, and the cliff face was to his left. If he moved too quickly and lost his footing, he was confident that the fall could be lethal. However, if he didn't make it back to the village in time, everyone and everything he knew could be in grave danger. As his mind subconsciously connected the dots, he knew that only one aerial creature was massive enough to have caused the down-gust that had caused his fall. He wasn't going to let it beat him home.

He steeled himself and reached his left hand toward the cliff face. His stomach dropped when he impacted nothing but air resistance. A thousand thoughts of horror raced through his mind.

"Did I get turned around? Was my orientation wrong? Did I slide down to a broader part of the path?" He wondered as he felt his pulse racing in his neck. "No. I need to breathe. I need to calm down. The trail was almost two arm-spans wide here. I could easily have ended up closer to the edge."

He reassured himself of his own competency and carefully inched toward where he thought the cliff face was. To his momentary relief, he found the wall only two steps later. He sighed audibly as he prepared himself once more for the blind journey back to the village. He heard the nearby crash, crash, crash of gargantuan wings breaking the atmosphere, and he knew it was the time for action.

He took a step forward.

Then another.

Then another.

Sliding along the face of the cliff, he blindly inched his way down the outcrop pathway.

"I need to make it back. I need to warn them. I need to–"

An ear-splitting shriek pierced the night, cutting off his train of thought. Every muscle in his body instinctively tensed. Without warning, his foot caught in the travel-worn rut in the pathway, and he answered the disembodied scream with a primal cry of pain. In a panic, he twisted his body, contorting like an animal caught in a trap.

His foot came loose from the rut.

He reached out both hands to steady himself against the cliff face but once more found only empty space. Too late, he realized that he had misjudged his direction in haste and alarm; too late, he realized that the cliff face was behind him. He tumbled headfirst from the outcrop, the distant lights of his village his only companions as he plummeted through the air.

He saw those welcoming hearths in near slow motion as he fell, and he wondered if Renda Mayed would mourn him when his mangled body washed up on the riverbank. Then, as a column of azure fire seemed to erupt from the heart of the village, he was immediately glad that he would never know her fate. The pillar of flame illuminated the entire night sky like a bolt of lightning amid torrential rain, but there was no deluge to mitigate the destruction inflicted by this inferno.

There it was: at the peak of the blazing spire, the talons and jaws and terrible ebony wings he had seen crossing the face of the moon mere minutes before. The beast seemed eerily majestic, indomitable in its superiority to the feeble droves it now incinerated.

The column of fire disappeared, but the blaze remained in the village below. It was the last thing the soldier saw before he plunged into the water– an impact that would mercifully cause him to lose consciousness yet sadistically preserve his life through the carnage to follow.

By the time he awoke, beached on an ash-covered sandbar, his village was no more. Through the pangs of a splitting headache, the soldier came to a single conclusion.

The dragons had returned to the valley.