The Shifting Sands

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. If Shadi remembered right, they’d come about twenty years ago, when she was just a child. She adjusted her spyglass as a sudden gust of wind kicked up the sand from the dune she was hiding behind. Shadi ducked down, swearing softly and wiping grit out of her eyes with her free hand. Would a dozen bolts would be enough to protect her if she was exposed? It was an uncomfortable thought. She’d taken few chances, wearing thick robes over her tunic and a face covering to blend in better, but she knew their attention was easily drawn by sudden movement.

Thankfully, the creatures far below remained unaware of her presence.

Decades ago, the beasts had come streaking in from the coastline, all teeth and claws and leathery scales on magnificent wings. Some of the dragons had been the size of market stalls, and livestock, pets and people had gone missing in those early days. No one knew where they had come from, though the general consensus was that they were from a distant, primal land. Of course, the soothsayers at the temple of Ha’at insisted that the dragons were a punishment from the gods for the blasphemous civil war gripping the nation.

Never mind that the dragons had come before the war had started, poking a hole in that claim.

Shadi had her own theory, but in order to prove it, she had to get close enough to observe the behavior of the dragons. And that’s what she’d been doing every week for the last several years. She sighed and stretched out her leg; it was starting to cramp because of how long she’d lain there. But there was still work to be done. Her satchel was nestled into the sand nearby and she reached for it, undoing the drawstring and pulling out the scrolls she’d brought with her to make a few notes. The ink would dry instantly in the heat, so she had to hurry to mark down her observations for the morning.

There was a low roar from the valley below, from the big blue one she’d named Rizan. He was the alpha, of that much she was certain. All of the others deferred to him when it came to kills, mating and whelps. The azure dragon’s scales glittered like a field of sapphires when the light hit him just right. It was nice to think that her eyes glittered in the sunlight too, but they were only hazel with specks of green. She made a note, double checking her math. Rizan was forty-five-foot-long if her measurements were correct, with talons the length of short swords. It would be a violent and painful death to get caught by him. She’d watched him tear an emerald hued challenger to pieces only a few months ago.

The dragons were restless, and there were a lot of them. All the hatchlings from two years ago were about the size of horses, and in the years she’d been documenting the dragons in the valley, she’d come up with at least a hundred specimens all ranging in size from ten to forty feet. She didn’t always have to come to their nesting ground, no, the beasts hunted in the dunes at night, approaching the outskirts of cities and towns. But in recent years they’d grown bolder, leaving the valley for weeks at a time on their hunts. Tearing up trees. There were even reports that dragons had been sighted circling cities from far above in the sky.

Travelers and merchants on the road sometimes went missing. Loners.

Like her.

Should she have told someone where she was going? No, it was considered bad luck to get this close to the dragons anyway.

Still.

Not wanting to entertain that thought any further, Shadi rolled up the scroll she was working on and put it back in the bag, grabbing a pomegranate a moment later. No time to deal with the seeds. She squeezed the hard rind of the fruit with her thumbs, inching along and feeling the seeds pop within ever so often. After a few minutes of repeating that she cut a chunk out with the dagger she kept on her belt and began to squeeze the fruit directly into her mouth, the dark red juice much cooler than her surroundings, and much more refreshing too.

Her stomach ached to be back in Chandar, the crown jewel of the desert and the best place to get sweetbreads and pastries. She missed her family, too. Well, except for her harpy of an aunt, but there were plenty of other relatives to think about. Her brother Amin was in the military, and was very concerned about the push the rebels were making towards the capitol. His last letter had expressed discomfort concerning his orders, but that was almost as bad as what her younger sister Faridah was worried about.

Shadi took a guilty sip from her waterskin. When she’d run away from home to be a scavenger, their parents had focused all of their hopes of increasing the family status onto Faridah. Barely nineteen and they were planning to marry her off to a merchant twice her age. The thought made Shadi sick. It was a fate she’d avoided but she couldn’t help but feel partially responsible for her sister’s current predicament. She glanced over the dune. The valley was desolate these days. The dragons were an invasive species and they’d hunted and killed everything that had lived in the oasis over the last two decades. The water was drying up, and the trees had been torn up and shredded to make nests.

The valley of Tchu’ta had been a miles long oasis that had somehow survived the emptiness around it for centuries. Undone in so little time. There was a low roar again, answered by a few that were higher-pitched. Shadi twisted around to look. The younger specimens were flying low to the ground down in the valley. Play-fighting like dogs. Dogs that could spit a venom so acidic it was like being struck by liquid fire. Several hundred feet below her, maybe, but she’d recorded the distance the bigger ones could spit as more than twice their length.

There was a sudden squawk from off to her right, loud and low, and Shadi choked on her water, coughing as she wheeled around frantically for her spyglass and her crossbow.

Foolish. Dammit.

How could she have been so stupid? Less than twenty feet away, a grey-scaled dragon was sliding through the sand, it’s tail twitching behind it like a rudder as it moved, undulating in her general direction. Occasionally, she had witnessed the old and infirm being cast out of the flock when they weren’t devoured. Such outcasts were forced to stay on the fringes of the valley away from the nests, made to follow after hunting parties and if they were lucky, got a little bit of the carcass once the stronger dragons were done with it.

But she’d never seen an outcast this far above the valley.

“Ret preserve me,” she murmured under her breath, hoping that the god of the wandering wind was listening. The grey dragon had milky eyes, perhaps from an injury. She’d studied them long enough to know that this wasn’t an elderly specimen. It was too small. Fifteen, maybe eighteen feet long. One of its wings hung torn and limp from its back, gnarled scars twisting what was left of the membrane.

The reptilian head swung from side to side, serpentine tongue tasting the air, tasting for her. Shadi wanted to cry. She’d been so careful. She reached for her satchel and put it on, the contents shifting as the metallic scroll casings clinked together. It heard that. A head the size of a chair stopped and focused unseeing eyes on her position. Shadi swallowed, or tried to, sand and spit making clay in the back of her throat as sweat began to bead on her forehead. Her camel was tied to a palm tree fifty feet away, hidden behind another dune. She was going to have to make a run for it. Her finger traced the trigger on the crossbow nervously. Dragons were notoriously hard to kill. It wasn’t impossible, but their scales were as hard as steel. It took a concentrated effort to get through that, and usually a siege weapon or two. Otherwise, you needed to aim for the eyes or the interior of their mouths.

The problem was that if you were close enough to see either of those, you were dead. It was Shadi’s fervent hope that her weapon could protect her if it came down to it. Getting the bolts made had cost her everything she had, and the jeweler had looked at her like she was insane. Tipping the bolts with diamonds sounded ludicrous, but it was a hard substance. It took a diamond to cut a diamond, and she hoped dragonscale wouldn’t hold up to it.

She also hoped to still be alive within the next minute. She ran, and as soon as her boots started hitting the ground, she heard a low rumble from behind her and a sound like rain as the dragon churned through the sand, powerful talons carving through it like water. Shadi zig-zagged, trying to throw off the pursuit. It pounced. Its bulk slammed into the sand to her left and she let out a yelp of fear, almost losing her balance and watching in horror as her spyglass fell out of her bag. It couldn’t be helped; it was awful to lose but there was no way to get it to it. She ran, adrenaline pumping through her veins.

The headscarf suddenly felt too constricting, and she pulled it off in order to breathe better, huge sucking gasps of fear as her long dark hair cascaded behind her. She turned and fired, screaming as she saw its head was less than four feet away from her. The bolt whizzed overhead and the dragon paused to look above it, the way one might look at an annoying insect before it turned to look at her with milky orbs. There was an intelligence in those eyes she’d never seen. Hostile. Dismissive? Shadi cursed in a frenzy. She only had eleven more. She slotted another bolt in, ducking behind a dune. She could see her camel now.

Gods of the wind and sun, if her camel died she would soon follow. She lunged out from behind the dune to fire again and paused, her panicked mind trying to make sense of what was in front of her. Where had it gone? It couldn’t fly, not with that wing. Her eyes darted left and right, shallow breaths keeping pace with her heartbeat. Then the dune she was hiding behind exploded in a spray of sand and teeth and claws. Shadi screamed. The camel heard the noise and let out a noise of discomfort, pawing at the ground. The dragon just narrowly missed clamping its jaws on her head as it snaked through the sand and a dribble of acidic venom dropped from its jaws to smoke on the ground below.

Shadi fired again, and this time a bolt struck the dragon in its foreleg. Struck, didn’t bounce off. The beast roared and slammed its leg on the ground, its head drooping to inspect the wound. Teeth clamped around the bolt and snapped it off before its leathery red tongue shot out to taste the air again. Shadi ran, shooting and praying to anything that would listen as she got to her camel. She hoisted herself up as the grey beast charged, barreling towards her with a mouth open wide in a silent roar. That was bad, that mean it was getting ready to spit. Shadi aimed for the interior of its mouth as she pulled out her dagger with her free hand and cut the camel’s rope, kicking its sides with her heels.

Normally Balthazar was a stubborn camel, but the proximity to a dragon overrode his demeanor. She fired, and though she failed to hit its mouth, the bolt buried itself in the dragon’s snout. It reared back in pain, thrashing its neck from side to side as it tried to dislodge the bolt from its face. Shadi urged Balthazar onwards, the fear of a painful death at odds with an academic thrill and a worry.

When the dragons flew together it was reminiscent of a flock of birds. That an outcast was so far out of the valley gave a little credence to her theory. There weren’t always dragons in the valley. And if the beasts were looking to migrate again, then there was a lot more to worry about than the rebels in the east.