Song of the Earth
Prologue
There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. They came and went like flocks of geese, but in a peculiar pattern. One which failed to follow the changing of the seasons and left the growing human populations of the Valley increasingly befuddled. A brave shepherd once ventured up the fertile slopes to question a beast four times his size, but although he spied an intelligence in its vermillion eyes that he had never found in his sheep, the beast seemed incapable of human communication. Still, the shepherd returned to his village alive and unsinged and eventually an astute farmer noticed that his crops always fared better when the dragons were at home, and their preference for wolf as part of their diet kept many a flock of sheep in swelling numbers. And so, for centuries, the small settlements of humans coexisted in harmony with their occasional neighbours.