The Valley

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. In days now gone, when the Veiled Queen reigned from her Palace of Pearls, they could be seen riding on the wind far above, their gilded wings shining like a thousand motes of fire beneath the Sun. They ruled in the Mountains in those days, and we folk of the Valley lived in bright abundance in our simple, verdant little corner of the world. We would watch them with adoration and awe, knowing that so long as the dragons held governance in those heights, no evil could endure down here. Their power was sovereign and unassailable, and we rejoiced in the surety that it was there for us. I remember when I was a boy, we'd wave and shout to them sometimes. The young ones would, on happy occasion, swoop down and call back, laughing and proud and ever-teasing. They'd roll upon the air and dazzle us with their resplendent coats, glittering in every color and more. Then their mothers would holler down in stern voices, calling them home. We'd be sad, then, but only for awhile; for as long as our fathers gave our tithe to the Lairds in the Mountains, and the Lairds gave their tribute in turn, the dragons would always be up there.

In days now gone, their breath wrought great mansions in the high places; warm abodes where they'd hold Court with the Lairds and bask lazily upon their heaps of tribute, giving freely of their timeless wisdom. The Lairds were good in those days, and they harkened to the good word of the dragons, and we were safe.

In days now gone, before the murder of the Veiled Queen, before the fall of her House into utter ruin, before the Tyrant Laird sickened the land with his stygian ubiety, the dragons were our friends.

But those days are gone.

Now the Valley is a dread place, where ghosts drift between the twisted trees, cursing the dragons and the Tyrant Laird. They wail a piteous and unending dirge which creeps up the Mountainsides to the pestilent fume that hangs rank upon the summits: The Song of the Valley, they call it up there - Oh! There's one outside my window, now. Hello, ghost - Within that terrible fume, the mansions of the dragons now lay cold and desolate. The Tyrant's men won't go to those places, though any power they held has long ago come down, down. Down from the Mountains. Down to us. Oh, yes. There are worse things than ghosts in the Valley now.

I remember when they came. It was nigh on 10 years ago. All was confusion, then. Black vapors had drifted in from the North and settled about the Mountains. Bats wheeled and shrieked in the sky. A blight fell upon our crops and cattle and children, one which no herb or magick would cure. The Wither-Pox, they called it. Every gray morning was rung in by the cursing of farmers or the weeping of mothers, or both. Most days the Sun refused to shine, and on the days that it did the stink of death was nearly too much to bear. Cruel rumors came to us from the outside. They said the Queen was dead. They said the Lairds knew what had happened, had even taken part. No word would come from the Lairds, though, and the dragons were gone from our sight. Imagine our joy, then, on the day they came scrambling down for us. Imagine our folly. We learned that day that the dragons were not our friends.

They came upon us slavering and ravenous, tongues lolling, mad eyes rolling in their heads, saying hateful things. All was fire and blood. We gave no fight. We wouldn't dream of it; these were the dragons. These were our benefactors. Our benevolent protectors... and they were killing us. There was no joy in them, as one sometimes glimpses in men in those moments when we righteously vanquish our enemy. It was merely the systematic slaughter of low creatures, like wasps in a bees' nest. And low was their thought of us. They said as much, over and again as they slew. Maggots, they called us. Worms. Parasites and ingrates. They croaked and wheezed as they spoke, as if the effort would break them. But they did not break. For long days after we hid, they stalked and muttered, swinging their heads here and there, blowing great gouts of flame. We watched from our holes with eyes wide and wet, too afraid to yet ask why.

Ah! That damnable ghost won't let up; he's frightening my granddaughter and breaking my concentration! I'll see to him.

It was just Old Chronister. He was harmless in life, but he's quite the bother in death. He's moved on, now.

Where was I? Ah, yes. We hadn't known in those first days what had transpired in the high places, or far off to the North and the Palace of Pearls, or why the dragons had turned on us with such cold anger, but, as we drew in the courage to venture out of our holes, we got some clue. New banners flew outside in the Valley, and up a ways in the holdings of the Lairds. Purpure with a Tenne face, grinning, leering and wicked: the banner of Laird Skum, we would come to learn. What word we received from the Lairds came in the form of hastily scrawled missives, nailed to the posts beneath the banners. They read: The Mountains and the Valley are hereby declared the holdings of Laird Skum. All who dwell here shall renounce any and all fealty to the Veiled Queen, and never again utter her name, under penalty of death. So, that was that, it seemed. Their threat of a death penalty was flaccid, at best, though. Few soldiers have come to the Valley since then. There is only us and the dragons.

And so its been for ten or so years. Ten years of perpetual fear, and that nagging question: Why? Like a man whose lover has gone without a word, we shamble here and there in confusion, wondering what we could possibly have done so wrong. Well, that's what it has been like until very recently, anyway. Fear only lasts so long. And then it ferments, and becomes something worse. Like that jilted lover our anguish has putrefied. It has turned to anger, hatred. A reckless and childish hatred with no real beginning or end. And like a child, our anger has made us bold.

We killed the first one about 3 months ago. Well, I say we, but what I mean is younger men. We had all known that some of the more malcontent among us had hatched such schemes, but few of us gave it much thought. Then one afternoon a group of them came hauling a bundle of blood and horror behind them, and they hoisted it up and staked it by its neck. It was strange. The thing was small. The size of a draft-horse, maybe. Had they always been so small? Did my youthful eyes deceive me all those years ago? It hung limp from the stake, membranous wings full of holes and dragging in the dirt. Its coat of scales was all full of holes, too, with red, raw skin oozing pus beneath. What scales remained were dull, and did not glitter, as I had remembered them. Quite the opposite, in fact. It almost seemed as if they refused to catch the light. The proudest of the men, their leader, I suppose, gave some inane speech about courage and honor, and other such tired platitudes. But, these old ears are too wary and too weary for such empty words.

My son, on the other hand... I saw the light in his eyes. I had seen it a thousand times in the eyes of children and fools without enough wisdom to know their place and keep to it. It was a fever-light. He and a smattering of the others had indeed caught that fever, that burning sickness they call glory. It was on him, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. These old lips are too weary and too wary to try.

He's in the next room with a few of those feverish souls as I write. I can't make out the words, but the tones are more than enough for me to glean their meaning. Fervent whispers, sour grumbles, angered protestations and triumphant declarations. These boys are planning to go to war. I can't blame them, really, not wholly. We have an enemy at our gates, after all, and they've just seen one slain. They can't know that the thing they saw is but some sickly runt; a pale shadow of its betters, and that the real enemy is a terror and majesty well outside of their bravest reckonings. How could they? My son was eleven years old when the dragons came to call. Some of his compatriots were four, maybe. They haven't the faintest notion of what awaits them, coiled up and eager to pounce.

My granddaughter has quieted, now. As I look upon her, and consider what a terrible injustice it is that she was born into this hell, I can feel some of that which my son must feel. I find I don't care why the dragons betrayed us. I don't care what terrible might they may once have held. When I look upon my darling Gabriella, and consider that those things are out there, and that they'd kill her if ever they did the same; my blood boils as sure as does the blood of those boys in there. Kill them, I say. Kill them all. Stake up every last one of them along the Valley Road so that the Lairds and their Tyrant Skum and all the dragons of the world can see them and know: the people of the Valley will not suffer you! The people of the Valley will never suffer anyone again!

But, alas! I'm old. My sword arm is skinny and weak. Its all foolishness, anyway. Even with the aid of a thousand swords from the Eastern Sands, and a hundred Knights of the Pearls, we could never hope to overcome the dragons. And as it is, we have only a few dozen brave and stupid farm boys, dreaming to slay a dragon with a hoe. What we should do is gather enough food and supplies to travel South a ways. There are no dragons, and we've reason to believe Laird Skum holds no sway there, as of yet. They are an industrious and kind people in those parts. They would welcome us there. We could make a life, maybe some coin, and if the Tyrant ever did turn his baleful gaze that way we could pick up and keep going. That's what we could do. That's what we should do.

Another shout of triumph from one of the boys. This one seems to have pleased them. The ghosts' wailing is reaching a crescendo, now. They are restless tonight. Perhaps they know what lunacy is afoot in my house.

Its a shame Griselda isn't here. She might have been able to convince them to reconsider their course, that there are more subtle avenues one might take. She was our Wise Woman, and she died a few months before they brought in the first dragon. We grew up together, and I'd always been fond of her. It was only in the years following the attack that she seemed to take any interest in me, though. She'd come to my house some evenings, and we'd talk late into the night. She did most of the talking, in truth, but she seemed pleased with what contributions I was able to provide. She had been reading, she said, these past ten years. Reading, reading, reading. Her predecessor had bequeathed to her a veritable library. Many of the volumes were old, she said, and their secrets lay behind words and ideas she couldn't quite comprehend. But, she learned what she could, and she had been working on a theory. More like a notion, perhaps.

It was her belief that the dragons were suffering from some malady, some curse wrought by the Old Ways, that men forgot long ago. Many black rumors swirled about Laird Skum; that he drank blood, that he made sacrifices to strange Gods, that he was a powerful sorcerer who wielded dark magicks. Of the last, she was quite convinced. She believed that he had, somehow, learned the secrets of the Old Ways. That he had brought some ancient hex out of molded tomes and sent it down to the Mountains to drive the dragons insane. That the dragons had gone insane there was, of course, no doubt, but the Old Ways have been dead for a thousand years or more. To think that this Tyrant may have unlocked them gave me a sick feeling in my guts.

And so, I argued with her. This is exactly what she wanted, I'd venture to guess. Its probably why she chose me as her confidante in the first place. She knew that I was stubborn and frightened and content to be content. She needed someone to argue with her, to give her the voice to argue back. It must be, she'd say. What other power was there in all the world that could chase a dragon from home and horde to quaver in the Valley with smallfolk? What other power could the Tyrant have that would break the Veiled Queen, and sever a bloodline three-thousand years strong? What other power could blot out the light of the Sun? She asked all these questions with a mounting conviction, and the certainty that she knew the answer: The Old Ways. What of it, then? I'd ask.

That was always my rebuttal to her in those talks. Always, until she arrived at her final thesis, that thing she was too afraid to utter aloud, lest someone laugh in her face or write her off as merely a crazed old woman: that in order to combat the dragons and the Tyrant, we must relearn the Old Ways. They were always spoken of like a chore being put off, she said, and that it was time we rolled up our sleeves and did the work. The Old Ways. I was dubious, as anyone would be. The Old Ways were practically a fairy-tale. But, there was an excitement in me, too, as I'd not felt since much younger days. The Old Ways? Maybe. May-be. With the Old Ways, she said, we could cure the dragons of their madness, and with them we could cast down the Lairds who betrayed us, and march upon the Tyrant Laird Skum himself, and destroy him in the name of the Veiled Queen. With the Old Ways, she said, we could do much more than that. We could regrow the fruits of the Valley, and strengthen its forests and its people. We could make it a strong place, a place of learning, a place of power. We could make it the seat of healing and magick, and undo any wrong that may plague the good lands and the good folk. With the Old Ways, she said, we could bring justice to the world, all from our little Valley, and scrawl our name throughout the histories of the world. She really was getting to me. I was beginning to believe it. The Old Ways! Yes, it could be so! And why not us? Why not, tell me? She commenced to bring books by the cartload to my house, and we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.

And then she died.

Just like that, the fire went out of me. And when those foolish boys dragged that carcass into the village, all I could do was sigh. There would be no cure for the once-proud dragons, save for iron. There would be no cure for the Valley, save for death. There would be no justice. Without Griselda and her books, the most we can hope for is some infinitesimal kind of vengeance, and even that hope is far loftier than this old man is comfortable with.

The conversation in the other room seems to have died down, now. Now, all I hear is the scraping of chairs, the shuffle of feet, and the rattling of iron. The sounds of action. Brave, stupid action.

My son has just come in and spoken. From his lips came words I have dreaded for long weeks, words I'd hoped I'd never hear, not before Time took me and the wind drove my ashes to the far-flung corners of the world.

"Father," he said "the time has come."