Words of the Wind

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The land wasn’t always plagued by fire and war. There were once beautiful, lush pastures divided by sturdy roads leading to shy villages and sprawling cities. To many, Jorvarth was once a peaceful paradise nestled between the Crying Cliffs and the Moaning Mountains. And yet, to many, Jorvarth was a melancholic memory. Each charred home, razed mill and torn town, served as a macabre reminder of all that was lost. To Klia, however, none of what once was before the dragons came to Valley made any difference to her.

Klia didn’t care about what things used to be like. It didn’t bother her that much of the countryside was abandoned. She didn’t mind that ash would fall from the sky when the wind picked up. In fact, she liked it. It was like a soft snow, but even better. Snow cold make you really cold. Ash could be cold, but not the same cold like snow. Klia had long ago decided she liked ash better than snow. Her mother, on the contrary, hated when Klia would come home in the evening with a soot-covered tunic that had, just hours earlier, been a clean sky-blue.

She sat in the pasture on the sloping hillside beside her family’s domed, stone hut. Her father always claimed they were one of the lucky ones. They had lots of grass and their sheep loved to eat grass. She tried eating it once, just like the animals did, but it tasted terrible. Ash tasted bad too. She had to try everything, otherwise, how else would she know what tasted good and what tasted bad? Actually, not everything. The sheep sometimes left droppings that smelled awful, she never tasted those. Either way, she wasn’t sure why her father thought grass was so lucky.

Klia grabbed a fistful of ash and soil from the ground beside her and plopped it atop the pile in front of her. When she woke earlier that morning, Klia had decided she wanted to build a mountain so she could touch the sky. How else would one build a mountain than pile stuff on top of more stuff? She glanced up at the Moaning Mountains to the west. Their peaks scratched the bottom of puffy white clouds. She wondered if that tickled the clouds. It tickled Klia when her mother rubbed her belly.

Back to building the mountain.

Before long, Klia discovered she was surrounded by a moat of her making. This wouldn’t do. If she kept moving the dirt from one spot to another, eventually it would fall back into the moat when the mountain got too big. She knew as much because this wasn’t her first mountain. Though, admittedly, she didn’t know a whole lot yet about building mountains because she’d never actually touched the sky.

Klia moved to a new spot, carrying as much soil, ash and pebbles her little arms could scoop up. “Move, please.” She ordered, bumping into one of the sheep. The animal bleated softly and stepped aside. “Thank you,” Klia replied. The girl climbed the hillside, trying to get more of a head start on her new mountain. If she used a spot that was already tall, it’d be easier to make it taller.

Klia stepped over the small stone wall marking the edge of the grazing area. There wasn’t as much grass here, which was just fine because you didn’t need grass to make a mountain. She knew that because the Moaning Mountains didn’t look to have grass on their slopes and they were tall. In fact, the bottoms of the mountains were blackened with groves of burned trees refusing to fall. She knew they used to be green, her father had said so. When he did speak about it, which was rare, he also sounded so… broken. He missed the green slopes. Klia stared for a moment, trying to pretend the mountains were covered in green trees and emerald shades of grass. Nope. She liked the ashen landscape better. It was pretty.

“Pa’s not gunna like that you went beyond the grazing area, Klia.” Her older brother, Willem, warned.

“I’m right here. I can see the wall.” Klia retorted.

“You know those aren’t the rules.”

“But the rules are dumb. This is a better spot to build.” She kept piling dirt and pebbles upon her little mound.

“Pa say’s there are rules for a reason.” Willem lectured. He was only, maybe, a year or two older. Klia couldn’t always remember how much older he was. She just remembered that, somehow, the extra age made him think he knew better than her.

“Don’t you remember why?” He prodded.

How was she supposed to concentrate on building mountains if he kept bothering her? “Of course.” She answered, sheepishly. Remembering was hard sometimes. Her parents made up so many rules. They said the rules hadn’t always been important, but nowadays they were. How was she supposed to remember everything they said? She didn’t know how to read or write yet so she couldn’t write them down. Even if she could, she didn’t want to. They were silly and didn’t make sense.

“Fine, stay up here then. We’ll see what Pa has to say when he finds out where you are.”

“By the time he gets here, I’ll be on top of my mountain.”

“That’s the point, Klia, you’re too far away from the house.”

“I need more dirt,” she said to herself, ignoring Willem’s wisdom.

She was frustrated now. Every plop of dirt on her small mountain was more or less a rebellious pout. Willem turned and bounced down the pasture toward the hut. She was alone for a moment. It was wonderful on top of the hillside. The view stretched farther than from within the pasture. The wind was more active up here, too. She loved that.

A breeze gusted by her, pulling some ashes off the top of her mountain, but she didn’t much mind. It felt good. The wind wove like a gentle winding stream through her curling lochs of dirty red hair. It swirled passed her ear, lingering just long enough to wipe any other sounds away. Except for one.

A voice.

Distant, yet near. Perhaps it was Willem, bouncing down the hill passing the sheep. Again, slightly louder, she could her something speaking. It wasn’t real words, though. “Willem, go away.”

It didn’t go away.

“Willem!” Klia finally turned, angry, but her brother was down by the hut. He was too far away to have spoken to her. She checked behind the small stone boundary of the pasture thinking the sound came from there, but she found nothing. “Was it you?” She asked one of the sheep who stared at her while munching on grass. Its jaw crunched in a circular motion. It didn’t respond.

Klia returned to her mountain. A small portion had been blown away, but not so much that she couldn’t fix it.

Again, the voice. This time closer, more intimate. “What?” Klia asked to no one as she looked around nervously. Every gust of wind that followed seemed to bear a single word, only they weren’t words she knew. It didn’t sound like words. It was… different. Then she remembered the wind wasn’t supposed to speak. Maybe she had built her mountain too high and she was feeling faint. She’d heard stories that high mountains could make people ill.

The wind stopped abruptly and the voice disappeared. The air hung still for a moment and Klia felt relieved, though still tense.

Then the clanging of bells sounded in the distance. It was a resounding, foreboding sound that Klia had remembered hearing only twice before. Both times her parents grew frantic. It was the only time she’d seen them truly scared. Her parents had taken her and her brother into the wet, stone cellar of their home. This time, home was so far away.

Her father called her name in the distance. She couldn’t see him but decided to leave her mountain and run toward the house. Suddenly, the still air broken into a torrent, sending trails of ash flying into the sky. A thundering bellow broke from above and rumbled within her bones. Klia felt the back her neck and the tips of her ears tingle. Her heart was thumping in her chest, pounding in her ears. A shadow bigger than ten oxen passed overhead and the ground shook violently.

Klia fell forward down the hill and came to stop in the middle of an empty pasture. She was dizzy and disoriented from tumbling. Where had all the sheep gone? She could see a blurry figure that looked like her father running toward her. Her mother screamed from behind him.

Klia turned around and looked up the hillside. Atop the hill sat a menacing beast with scales as black as a starless night. Its wings were spread wide, masking the entirety of the mountains rounding the Valley. She gazed up at the dragon’s muscled neck, then to the monster’s horned head. Suddenly, she found she couldn’t breathe. She was too frightened to remember how. The serpent’s most striking feature was its eyes. Two black globes of incomprehensible horrors bore down on her, fixed, hungry.

Her father screamed her name. He seemed so far away. The dragon… so close. She stood, knees quivering, hands trembling. The beast craned its neck backward and the dark scales on its chest began to glow a hellish red. Klia heard her name again, so distant, so fading.

A gust of wind rushed passed her. She could her a voice, as if coming from right inside her own head, yet the voice didn’t belong to her. It was serene, pure, though foreign. She felt a sudden sense of energy, a desire to speak. But what should she say?

The bloody glow ran up the neck of the dragon to its jaw, opening to reveal rows of jagged teeth.

In that moment, as everything faded and the dragon shrieked, spewing searing fire from its gaping mouth directly toward her, a voice rose above fear and instinct. It was overwhelming, like a tempest desperately begging to thunder. Klia repeated the sounds of the wind just as the devouring flames consumed her.

…

Cirian watched as the dragon fire torched his daughter. He stopped running and stood motionless, overcome by disbelief, terror and failure. A father was meant to protect his daughter. He had failed as a son, failed a soldier, was failing as farmer, and now, he’d failed as a father.

…

Lyria covered her mouth. She didn’t know if she was screaming or vomiting or if nothing was happening at all. Tears burst from the corners of her eyes, flooding her vision. But she knew what she had seen. Her baby girl, gone.

…

Willem clutched his mother’s dress. His knuckles were white. I told her! He was furious with her, yet had never been so afraid of anything. I should have brought her back with me. I should have made her come back. Like fire ate at his sister, so too did sudden guilt and regret twist in his stomach. He shielded his eyes with the folds of his mother’s dress. It was too hard. Klia. He could have saved her. Klia.

…

It wasn’t hot. It wasn’t cold. It was kind of like ash. It just was. The flames swirled around Klia much like a firm breeze might. Given the right moment, a stiff breeze could be comforting and reassuring. This wasn’t dissimilar. Though the fire licked at her skin and tangled her hair, it didn’t burn her. She knew what burns felt like, she’d once touched her mother’s cooking pot as it hung over the cookfire. Never again.

The flames suddenly vanished and the sun and clouds appeared again. The grass pasture she had fallen down in was gone. Floating embers glowing a warm orange drifted down to the newly scarred ground. Before her the dragon stood, slowly closing its jaw. The serpent’s eyes didn’t seem so full of terror, not like before. They were concerned, black globes with glimmers of a haunting curiosity. Doubt. The dragon roared once more and flapped its massive wings, taking to the air as easily as a feather might fall.

Klia turned to her family. Her father, just down the hill, was as white as freshly fallen ash. Her mother, in the door of their hut, was gaping with more fear than the clanging warning bells had brought. Her brother peered out from behind her mother. He seemed more afraid of her than of the dragon. They regarded her like she was a threatening stranger. She wasn’t their child anymore for parent’s don’t look at their children the way hers looked at her then. Unhinged trepidation. Though remembering could sometimes be hard, Klia would always remember the way her parents stared at her in that moment, for that was the last memory she had of her family.