A Path of Shadow and Courage

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

More precisely, there weren’t always dragons in every part of the Valley.

After all, the latest attempted census by Calidor’s dragonologists estimated that the entirety of the Dragon Wilds was home to a mere two hundred and twenty dragons. Roughly sixty of those were bachelors who resided on the outer mountain ridges and wrought havoc on the farms and plains of the wider continent. Scholars guessed that another thirty were hatchlings still too young to leave the watchful eyes of their parents. It would be unreasonable — illogical, even— to assume that the remaining hundred or so dragons could always be in all parts of the Valley.

The people of Calidor were scholars at heart and prized reason and logic. And while the leaders of the cave city had labeled him a deserter and traitor, Cade Montressa was Calidorian to his core.

The path of his future had gone far off course, but he had a plan to correct it that was rooted in reason.

If the dragons could not always be in all parts of the Valley, then it stood to reason that the dragons would not necessarily be near this particular stretch of earth in front of the cliffside village of Enniedoch. It also stood to reason that in the absence of dragons, guards tended to become lazy. That was the logical conclusion when the sole purpose of stationing guards outside the walls was to dissuade dragons from drawing too close.

Cade crept carefully from his hiding place among the twisting roots of a towering alorum tree, stretching around the trunk to peer across the forty-foot clearing that lay between Enniedoch’s wall and the dense forest. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the leaves and a crisp breeze tickled the hair at the back of his neck as he watched the half-unit on duty.

The three guards at the main gate leaned against the wall, chatting somberly amongst themselves. Cade saw only the sergeant and two corporals; their captain and lieutenant were likely inside the village, helping with preparations for Bakari’s funeral this evening. Without the higher-ranking officers or any signs of nearby dragons, the guards were predictably taking advantage of a clear afternoon to enjoy the sun and fresh spring air.

Ultimately, they were as distracted as Cade had anticipated they might be. Cade just needed them to stay that way long enough for him to slip over the wall, avoid interrupting the funeral, deliver his message, and escape unnoticed.

Simple. Simple, so long as there weren’t dragons in the Valley.

Cade’s plan was straightforward, reasonable. Enniedoch had been built along a u-shaped cliff-face, with the high wall enclosing the bottom and securing the community spaces on the ground. The north face of the cliff continued onward for a distance after it bordered the clearing. He would make his way through the cover of the forest, sneak across the clearing along the bottom of the precipice to the north end of the wall, and then climb twenty feet of stonework to drop down into the smithy yard on the other side before anyone noticed.

Twelve years had passed since he lived here as a child, but he had it on good authority that little had changed. The north corner smithy had been his mother’s, and, in theory, he should land in the bushes behind the scrap metal pile. He’d built a fort there when he was seven, the summer before swift fever had swept through the village and taken the life of thirty-seven villagers, including his mother.

Cade’s path had taken a series of unpredictable turns after that— relocating to the cave city of Calidor, adjusting to life as Corporal Danth Montressa’s son, training to enter the Guard, becoming the youngest lieutenant in Calidor’s history, finding the love of his life, and destroying his entire future with one decision and self-imposed exile.

Those final two turns were what he was here to fix.

With the guards playing their distracted role to perfection, Cade padded further into the trees. He pulled his cloak tight around him and cinched the strap of his pack, noting with a frown that the buckle slid another notch further than it had last week. He glanced at his hunger-thinned frame and considered his options.

Five months ago, when he was training daily and eating well, scaling a twenty-foot wall would have been easy. But the winter had been long, food had been scarce, and his body bore the cost of simply surviving. The bracer on his arm with its small piece of sand colored Thabir Heartwood had granted him the ability to withstand harsh conditions and fatigue far longer than should have been possible. The magic had kept him alive but not even magic could maintain his body’s shape or musculature over such an extended period of time. And neither endurance nor the Thabir’s striking ability to move water would be able to pull him up a wall.

Thankfully, magic was not in short supply in the Dragon Wilds and Cade had come prepared.

“Sorry, old friend,” Cade said softly to the brown leather bracer, his voice a low rasp after months of disuse. “But I think a different expertise is better suited to this task.”

He carefully loosened the straps that had kept the wooden medallion in contact with his skin and pulled the bracer free for the first time since leaving Calidor. The sudden wave of hunger and fatigue nearly knocked him off his feet and he braced his hands against the nearest tree to suck in deep breaths and stop the forest from spinning.

Slowly, he slid to the ground and let his body adjust to life disconnected from Duramency.

“You know,” he growled softly to the bracer in his lap, biting back a groan as the world spun again. “If we had planned this whole fiasco better, we wouldn’t need to climb a wall right now. We could have stolen Heartwood from the Haven instead of from that opportunistic traitor. This would have been so much easier if we could walk in under camouflage. Or if I could just send her the message from here without having to find a way inside.”

Cade looked at the bracer as if expecting a hearty retort.

“What, not a fan of telepathy?” He asked, and the Thabir medallion gleamed dully in response. “Yeah, me either. It always felt like someone was tickling my brain.”

Cade tried to push back up to his feet, but the world tilted and he sat back down heavily. He set his arms on his knees and gripped his head in his hands, trying to breathe deeply.

“How about electricity, then?” He asked the bracer, desperate for a distraction from the sensations buffeting his body. “Imagine the distraction a bolt of lightning would cause. Now that would be fun.”

Another breath and he found his balance enough to tug off his pack and unbuckle the strap.

“Ah, well. No use wishing for what we don’t have.” Cade put the brown bracer in the bag and pulled out a nearly identical one made of black cloth. “I might not have an arsenal of Heartwoods to choose from, but at least I have you.”

He slid the black bracer on his arm and tightened the straps, feeling the exact moment that the Alorum Heartwood made contact with his skin. The familiar tingling of connection sent a shock wave through him, and he sagged backward against the trunk of the tree. Only a small amount of energy was needed to establish the circuit between himself and the Heartwood medallion, but in his current state even a small loss felt like too much.

His body shivered under the connection to the new type of magic, the feeling familiar yet entirely distinctive. Connecting to multiple Heartwoods in succession was like meeting brothers; they were recognizably related, but the personalities were all their own. Where the Thabir was a low hum of stability and a caress of encouragement to carry on, the Alorum shouted in warning and punched with strength. Cade could feel his body becoming alert, the very fibres of his being being bolstered with armor and strength.

The Alorum enabled him to withstand any force, the defence of the ancient tree automatically engaging to protect him from harm. He could push the ability outwards with impossible strength if he desired, pouring his energy into a strike that could knock even a small dragon off its feet. That power would take his weakened body up the wall and protect him from breaking bones when he dropped to the other side.

The levels of a person’s energy were finite, however, and Cade needed to be careful. Every person entrusted to wield Heartwood learned early on that gauging energy was the key to survival. Pouring too much into a strike or forgetting to replenish one’s energy supply could result in the wielder forfeiting their life. If the way in which his body was screaming at him for attention was any indication, Cade’s levels were dangerously low. The thrum of hunger and fatigue that the Thabir had held at bay for so long had risen to a roar; that pain would not abate, even while his muscles were primed for strength and power.

Cade moved stealthily to the edge of the treeline and shook out his shoulders, hoping that the long shadows cast by the setting sun would help to hide him as he stole his way along the base of the cliff. With a careful eye on the guards at the main gate, he waited. If only the one would turn, he should be safely out of their eyesight.

Not yet… Just a moment more…

The guard turned and Cade’s muscles tensed, ready to run.

Sound and wind filled the air, the whoosh of great wings beating matched with gusts of wind that shook the leaves and rippled the grass. The guards near the gate straightened with attention and pushed out from the wall, faces gaping upwards as they drew shields and swords.

Cade groaned and squeezed his eyes shut in frustration before glancing toward the sky himself.

There were dragons in the Valley.

Not just one—of course not— but more dragons than Cade had ever seen in one place. Eight unreasonable dragons. They circled on the breeze, stacked above each other in an effortless aerial display. The three near the bottom soared lower with each turn until one after the other they pulled up and then dropped gracefully into the clearing with barely a sound.

They folded their wings along their long bodies and sat carefully on their haunches, the three of them nearly filling the entirety of the clearing. The guards near the gate gripped their weapons tightly and gaped at the dragons, who stared back with a clear sense of expectancy and purpose.

Cade himself was frozen by the extraordinary turn of events. His mind was just beginning to function again, questioning whether he could use the dragons as a distraction and sneak to the wall without being seen or attacked—by either guards or the huge creatures—when the unnerving sound of movement came from the forest behind him.

He turned slowly and stifled a gasp. There, advancing carefully between the alorum trees, prowled five more dragons. He had forgotten about the others in the sky when the three had landed in the clearing, but evidently, they had found places to land in the forest and were now coming to join them in front of the village. They wove their way around the thick trunks and crushed saplings and fallen branches underfoot with decisive snaps.

Each was equally as large as the three in the clearing, at least fifty feet long with enormous heads and wickedly curved horns. Their scales gleamed in the fading sunlight, the bright tones a cacophony of color amidst the black and green of the alorum forest. Iridescent blues and purples, burnished reds and golds, a pearlescent white that gleamed in the dappled sunshine. They moved with a grace that belied their size, their gait more akin to the proud stride of a stag than the purposeful stalking one would expect of an apex predator.

The dragons strode forward until they reached the treeline. There they stopped, bodies edging just beyond the trees, and sank down to sit on their haunches in a mirror of the three in the clearing. One with a mosaic of coppery orange and yellow scales settled in the opening next to Cade’s hiding place. He pressed closer to the tree and crouched among the roots, hoping that neither the dragon nor the growing audience in Enniedoch would see him.

The villagers were beginning to gather in watchful wonder. They crowded within the gate and climbed the wall; they stood in the doorways of their cliff-hewn homes and gazed down in trepidation. The full six units of guards stationed in the village took up strategic places, the captains with their swords and black Alorum bracers standing between the dragons and the largest groups of people. The lower ranked guards flanked them, weapons at the ready.

All waited to see what the dragons would do. No one could spend their life in the Dragon Wilds without the crucial understanding that dragons were both fundamentally creatures of habit and regularly unpredictable. They followed a careful code that humans did not fully understand despite the dragonologists’ best efforts, and thus their behavior could be seemingly fickle.

The arrival of eight fully grown dragons outside a human settlement was unprecedented and therefore unsettling. Dragons of this size could only be matriarchs—the oldest females of the valley, the progenitors of nearly all the dragons in the Wilds and the ones who purportedly led dragonkind. As far as the scholars could tell there were currently nine matriarchs in the Dragon Wilds. For eight of them to be present here together… Cade settled deeper into the roots of the tree, grateful at least for the Heartwood on his arm that would defend him and make him impervious to any dragon strike.

The world waited in silence. The people watched the dragons, and the dragons stayed still as stone, waiting for a sign known only to them.

They waited.

And the sun dipped toward the horizon.

They waited.

And the sun sank lower still.

They waited until the moment the sun grazed the edge of the mountains, and then the dragons moved as one.

Eight heads lifted towards the darkening sky with its last strips of color and began to roar.

The sound reverberated off the trees and shook Cade into his bones, going on and on for long minutes until he wasn’t sure where the cry ended and his own thoughts began. The bellows came together in a type of harmony and balance that felt eerily familiar, like a song his mind didn’t remember the words to, but his heart had known since infancy. A song of mourning, full of regret and sadness and longing. Grief balled up in his chest, a fierce pressure that made his lungs ache when he breathed. The memories of all he had lost and been forced to give up filled his mind in vivid detail and he nearly threw back his head to roar with the dragons.

And then, silence.

The dragons ceased their cries, and the earth was blanketed in the heavy absence of sound.

Cade shook his head to try to clear the pressure from his chest and the memories from his mind. At some point his eyes had closed, and he welcomed the darkness for a moment longer as he breathed deep and tried to regain his center.

When he blinked them open again, dragon scales filled his vision.

She crouched directly in front of him, her body encircling his tree and neck bent to look him directly in the face. The coppery orange of her scales had been dulled into shades of rust by the darkening sky, but her eyes were luminescent liquid gold and lit with curiosity and wariness. She watched him for a long moment and her nostrils flared less than an arm’s length from his face. Warm breath grazed Cade’s face and he held back a shiver of fear, desperately willing his hands to raise slowly beside his head in a gesture of peace rather than reach for the sword strapped to his back.

A growl rumbled low in her throat and Cade let out a shaky breath. In all his years of guard training and duty, he had never been so close to a dragon this big, nor one he hadn’t been trying to dissuade by force.

“Hello there,” he rasped softly.

Her intelligent eyes blinked slowly, and her head tilted slightly to one side. The growl rumbled again, this time rising in pitch at the end as though she were voicing a question.

“Why are you here?” Cade asked in response. Surprisingly, he found himself waiting for an answer.

Instead, she inched closer until her nose was flush with his forehead and inhaled his scent. The breath huffed back out quickly and violently, the dragon equivalent of a sneeze that coated Cade’s face in heat and moisture.

Cade jolted back in shock, the black Alorum medallion warming against his arm as he tensed in reflexive preparation to defend from an incoming attack. The dragon also had pulled back several feet, her face screwed into what Cade could only define as an expression of surprise. Her long snout was scrunched up like she had smelled a foul odor, her golden eyes blinked rapidly, and she shook her head quickly back and forth as though trying to dislodge an itch by sheer will.

Cade reached up to touch his singed eyebrows and pulled his hand away to find it damp with what could only be dragon saliva or snot.

His jaw began to twitch, and he pursed his lips in a strangled effort to keep in an undignified snicker. His shoulders shook with the effort, cheeks aching until the laugh burst forth, boisterous and quaking.

The dragon stilled in her shaking and tilted her head to the side in curiosity, eyes squinted in uncertainty.

Feigning confidence he didn’t fully feel, Cade stared back. An eternity passed in an instant as the disgraced former lieutenant locked gazes with the copper matriarch, the moment broken only when the dragon’s head snapped with attention towards the clearing.

Within the space of a breath, the dragon pulled back, unwrapped herself from around the tree and stood up on all fours. Wind gusted behind Cade as giant wings flapped into motion and he whirled to see the three dragons in the clearing take to the sky.

Those in the tree line stepped in pairs into the newly unoccupied space and followed them, until only the copper dragon remained. She glanced down at Cade in his hiding place, snorted once more, and then strode into the clearing. Alone in the open space she spread her wings wide, pausing as if to give the rapt audience the opportunity to marvel at her beauty, and then took to the sky in one elegant flap. The dragons flew swiftly, disappearing over the mountain and into the dusk that cloaked the Valley in shadows.

Cade blew out a relieved breath and sagged back, his mind racing to process the events of the past few minutes. He swept a hand across his sticky face and chuckled in disbelief; if not for the mucous clearly coating his hand, he would have assumed the encounter to have been a fatigue-induced hallucination.

When his heart rate returned to normal, Cade peeked around the trunk of the tree. The three guards by the gate had been joined by the rest of their unit and all six were armed and peering warily into the sky and the shadows of the forest. The crowd had largely begun to disperse but some young people were still perched on the wall, one youth gesturing wildly and flapping his arms in an imitation of wings.

Clearly scaling the wall was no longer a reasonable option, and he was running out of time. He intended to use the funeral as a distraction while he delivered his message. Speeches would begin soon and the pyre lit at full dark so the sparks of Bakari’s life could shine as brightly as the community’s memories of her. Following that would be the celebration, involving a great deal of drinking, socializing and milling about in unpredictable places. He needed to be out of Enniedoch before then. At most, he had an hour.

Cade sighed and tightened the bracer’s straps. He was Calidorian to his core and the plan to correct the path of his future was based on reason and logic.

So logically, he had a backup.

He just didn’t like it.