There Weren't Always Dragons

I.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley, but nothing was ever the same once there were.

Hthrgar was a peaceful place once, free from war and horror. I can barely remember those days now. But what shards of memory I do have about the green fields that once we’re on the springtime smells of wildflowers daring the wind for a sway, I hold onto them fiercely.

The first day I ever saw a dragon was the first day I ever saw war or tasted the ugly truth of how small our little village was in a much larger world with much larger concerns. It was also the first day I realized how much control far-off places can have over quiet towns such as ours. We were pawns on a board of chance being moved about by the grease-stained and fatted fingers of a far-removed wealthy few, and we had very little knowledge of any of it.

Oh, Father grumbled from time to time about some gossip that came to the village from one traveler or another, but that was the end of it. A few grumbles chased by a few mugs of his sour home brew. And then nothing more was said.

The war was altogether unexpected.

II.

“Aye, Camun, help yer Da’ with this’n,” I heard my Father yell from across the field we were plowing. “Big nasty business’ ere.”

I looked in his direction, slowing the ugly old mule, unstrapping the plow straps from my shoulders, and steadying the stubborn animal.

“Woah girl, woah,” I said, but she wouldn’t budge much beyond here. She barely wanted to go the distance we had already. I unhitched the plow from her yoke and led her to where my Father stood over a crude discovery in a patch of ground he had decided worthy of trying to tame.

I leaned over him, he was a short man with a belly swollen from years of drinking and too much of my Mother’s good cooking, and studied the ground in front of him. There was a crude and uneven rock sitting right in front of where he had been plowing. The plow must have hit it and stopped him in his tracks. It was ungodly large as far as field rocks went, and I wasn’t sure how either of us would fetch it from the earth.

“You take that side, I’ll take this,” my Father said, already going to work on his side of the rock. I had always been called bookish, no matter how many times I plowed a field or worked the farm, and had a bad reputation in a community of hard workers for taking too much time sizing up a problem before I went to work solving it.

My Father looked up at me and squinted his eyes. The first signs of his growing frustration — whether at me or the rock made no difference. He wasn’t pleasant when drunk or angry, and he may have been a bit of both at that exact moment.

“Let me fetch a long sturdy branch or some tool, we can drive it under the rock and use it as a lever — “I began, but my Father cut me off.

“No need to be lazy Camun, put yer hands under your side and use what muscles the Old Ones gave ye to help yer da’” he said. I looked at the ugly mule who was already sleeping on her feet beside us and wondered which of the pair, her or my Father, was more stubborn.

We were both hard at work on the colossal field rock, digging a small trench around it to better get our hands under it and break it loose from the ground, when the first low vibrations began to shake up our legs. My Father never so much as paused until the noise was all-consuming, but I stopped and looked around.

There was no good source for the humming crawling up my legs and coiling around my spine, yet it was growing more and more pronounced.

“Quit your foolin’ around, no time for daydreams and cloud studies!” My Father said with a grunt, straining on the rock again and visibly angry that I wasn’t.

“Don’t you feel that?” I asked, still looking around.

“Aye, I feel all the weight of this rock and no good help from you,” He said.

I turned to the rock, slid my hands and arms under the thin hollow trench I had carved around my part and began to lift again when the vibrations grew and began to roar. Then all at once, we were caught in a storm of unimaginable strength and horror.

Only, it wasn’t a storm at all. Instead, the entire sky went pitch as tar, from noonday to midnight bell in a blink. And there was a symphony of horrible sounds, all competing for dominance. The wet and steady sound of thud-flap thud-flap thud-flap, the growls and chomping sound of teeth, and the almost oily sound of something sliding through the sky.

What I had first mistaken for a sudden cloud, or even one big thing, was, in fact, hundreds and hundreds of individual things. Giant snake-like beasts slithering across the sky with wings similar to one another and yet each unique in skin and damage, and then, like a person studying a forest who suddenly sees the trees, the image came into clarity.

Something I had only ever read about in books was soaring above us by the hundreds. Dragons, in flesh and coldest blood, flying in unison from the north to the south and growing the sky with their chaos as they did. And another thing, there were riders on their backs.

“Mitgar, what is it?” What is it??” My Mother had come running from the house with my two younger sisters. And no one had an answer that we could have heard until after. The sky was a thunderous calamity of movement.

And as though the day had reached enough mystery already, one final and fate-propelled thing happened next. This was the one thing that forever altered the course of my life. One of the Dragons came hurtling down from the sky with a great roar and crashed not far from our little corner of the Valley.

III.

“Get back ‘ere!” My Father yelled after me as I ran towards the crashing beast from the sky. I’ve studied this event too many times over the years, mostly in nightmares, turning it over in my mind like a worry pebble rubbed smooth, and to this day I cannot begin to fathom what came over me to run after that thing. But I did. I ran harder and faster than I had ever run in my life. I was possessed with a brutal curiosity.

“Camun!” My Father roared as the Dragons, all but one that I knew of, emptied the sky. “Camun! You’re upsetting your Ma’!”

I had considered taking the mule but knew I could run faster on just two of my legs than I could with all four of hers. And sure enough, I was at the ridge of the Valley looking down, studying the ripped-up trail of trees below me. And then I saw it, a Dragon, as real as the ugly rock in my Father’s field and not more than a thousand feet or so away.

I crossed the space quickly and then realized the error of my way. I had moved too quickly and was almost in the same clearing as the great beast was now lying and hadn’t so much as paused to consider the danger. I came to a sudden stop, more than close enough to see it in all its details.

It was huge and beautiful in the most alarming way. Its scales glimmered with a shifting color like the trout in the river just after winter thaws from the mountains. It looked as ancient as those mountains, too. Every jag and sharp corner was a range of old stories from times that predated our existence, and all across its body was a collection of scars and evidence of a hard life.

It growled, and I nearly fell over. I stepped backward and then felt arms wrap around me like twin snakes with a strength that was wiry and unmoveable. A knife whispered from a holster and then was suddenly drawing a thin trail of blood near my bobbing apple as I gulped.

“Move and you die,” I heard a voice say. “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

I moved in the arms and felt them tighten as a sudden sting dug into my neck.

“Move again and you won’t move more till you meet the Old Ones,” the voice said.

“Camun from Hthrgar, a son of a farmer and no threat to you mister!” I yelled.

I was suddenly spun about and came face to face with a young woman dressed as I had never seen one dressed before. She wore armor that matched the Dragon’s scales and looked at me with eyes that were captivating for a paradox of reasons. She held the knife point to my throat.

“We haven’t much time,” She said, looking beyond me at the Dragon, and then I put the pieces together with a shock. She was its rider. “Take me to your farm.”