A Plague of Dragons

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. I remember when they first appeared in Woodale. They were much smaller back then.

I was a schoolboy at the time, attending lessons at the old abbey, where the monks taught us our grammar and sums. I always took the forest road to and from the abbey. I preferred the scent of wood and leaves and the sigh of wind in the trees to the smells and sounds of the village - horse manure and rotting garbage accompanied by the incessant rattle of cart wheels. I usually walked alone. My schoolmates found the trees a bore, or perhaps they were afraid to set foot on the shadowy paths through the woods. I never really minded leaving the village route to them since I preferred my own company anyway.

One afternoon on my way home, I noticed a strange movement next to a rock alongside the path. When I pushed aside the fallen leaves, I could see the creature - not even the size of a kitten and covered with shining black and red scales. He looked back at me with enormous eyes, deep and black as polished obsidian but shining with intelligence. He was not in the least bit shy or timid. In fact, I had the distinct impression that he knew me and had been waiting for me to come by. I gathered him into my arms and as he curled against me comfortably, I hurried along on my way home.

When I burst through the door of our cottage and showed him to Mother, she gave a little shriek and drew back in horror. Though tiny, it was a hellish monster, she insisted. I was to get it as far away form the house as possible and never touch such an abomination again. I pretended to obey, but hid my new pet in the storeroom under the house. Mother never went down the stairs, she always sent me to deliver and retrieve our supplies, so I was sure my little stowaway would go undiscovered. I fed him scraps from my plate after dinner and he chirruped happily as he munched them up.

The first week went smoothly, but then the odor set off the first alarm. Dragon feces smell strongly of sulfur and are highly corrosive, as I quickly discovered. Cleaning up after my little friend was a challenge until I came up with the solution of scraping his droppings onto a flat stone. I am ashamed to admit that dumped it all in the rivulet behind our house and did not immediately notice the impact on downstream vegetation. Despite my efforts, the stench lingered in the storeroom, although at first I was able to satisfy Mother by telling her that I had dropped an armful of chicken eggs on the floor and was unable to clean up the mess adequately.

The next sign of trouble was the speed at which my pet increased in size. By the end of the second week he was larger than a fully grown wolfhound. His appetite increased to match his size, and I could no longer satisfy him with table scraps. I had to break into our food stores, but still his hunger was unsatiated. Meanwhile, the storeroom was becoming a cramped living space for him. I was at my wits end.

Then one day I returned from school to find him sprawled lifeless on the stairs. I bent over him, sick to my stomach with grief and guilt. He had starved down there in the dark, all alone. By now he had grown to such a large size that I could barely move him, so I just left him there and went off to think. A day later, when I came back to dispose of the carcass, I was shocked to find that only his scaly hide was left, along with the skull, which had rolled down the stairs. His flesh had simply devoured itself in my absence! I kept the skin and the skull - in fact I still have them to this day. Other than that, he left no trace behind.

Mine was not the only dragon in the forest. Like household vermin, if you see one you know there are many others around. Soon the woods rang wth their bellows and the forest road was closed to travelers. They may have all started as kitten-sized creatures like the one I found, but like him they grew rapidly in size and apparently multiplied in number just as quickly. Even brave wolf hunters started to avoid the woods, so the village elders held a meeting and decided to offer a generous reward for every dragon slaughtered.

The reward was a large sum, and for a short time Woodale was crowded with bounty-hunters eager for gold and glory. All claimed to be expert Slayers, although I suspect that most of them had never seen a dragon before. There is a general folk belief that dragons breathe fire, but I know from experience that this is not at all true. Their bile, like their feces, is highly corrosive. Nothing metal can stand against it when they, shall we say, regurgitate, and it reduces wood to an unrecognizable and unusable char, which accounts for the destruction they wreaked upon the trees of the forest. Thus, of the dozens of slayers who marched boldly into the woods brandishing axes and crossbows and massive swords, only three or four returned, and they were drooling, mindless shadows of the men they had been.

As the supply of Slayers dwindled, the number of dragons continued to increase. Soon they were encroaching on the borders of the village, first snatching up chickens and goats at night from backyards on the edge of town and then prowling the main streets of Woodale in open daylight. The elders met again and were able to convince reluctant farmers from the neighboring fields to donate some of their livestock in hopes of appeasing the ravenous creatures. As with the dragon I had tried to keep as a pet, the more the beasts ate, the more they grew and the more nourishment they craved. Villagers and their children began disappearing and then one morning the entire night watch could not be found. The next day Mother and I gathered up what we could carry and joined the crowd of refugees fleeing the town.

As for myself, I was happy enough to leave Woodale. I had formed no real attachments there, aside from that with the dragon who had perished under my care. After a few years I entered the university at Etinberg and started the next stage of my education. Mother and I heard occasional reports of the state of our old neighborhood - ominous details about the destruction of the forest and the devastation of the buildings. The dragons soon moved on to infest other communities where they committed similar atrocities. With the king's recent announcement, the security of the entire kingdom is acknowledged to be threatened by the creatures, who are now officially known as the "draconian pestilence."

I am no hunter and no Slayer, although I have been responsible for the death of at least one dragon, inadvertent though it may have been. Nevertheless, I feel that I have certain knowledge and skills which make me uniquely qualified to help address the "pestilence." Up to now, I have not mentioned my father. It was always a painful topic for Mother and we never mentioned him in our domestic conversations. The unadorned fact is that he left one night and never returned. Mother reported his absence to the authorities, but they found no trace of him and assumed that he had deliberately abandoned us. As a child this had little effect on me - he was often away on his travels, so it seemed as if he was on a long journey. But Mother was heartbroken at first and then bitter.

The point of all this is that upon Mother's passing a few months ago, I found one of my father’s journals among her possessions. I am not sure if she kept it on purpose or if it had been accidentally mixed in with our other property when we moved. It was inscribed in Latin, so she herself could never have deciphered it, but with my newly minted diploma, Latin is not at all an impediment. I have read the book and studied it most carefully.

It was quite clear from that manuscript that my father was deeply engaged in the practice of the forbidden art of Alchemy. I realize now that the storeroom under our family house had served as his laboratory. I remember noticing the strange glass vessels and implements which adorned the uppermost shelves of the room, but as a child I never bothered to investigate or even to examine them.

I have no personal objection to his interest in Alchemy, aside from the fact that he put his wife and child at some risk. If he had been discovered by the authorities we would all have been expelled from Woodale. I suppose with his disappearance and our flight in the face of the “pestilence,” this is somewhat of a moot point. At any rate, one thing that is clear from his journal is that there were other manuscripts which record the details of his labors and possibly the results. Since Mother did not have them they must still be concealed somewhere in our old cottage. There are some very interesting questions about the circumstances of his disappearance which those documents might help to resolve.

There is only one way to retrieve those notebooks. I am the least likely candidate for buckling swashes or doing any derring, but I am determined to return to Woodale, which is now part of the vast wasteland created by the “pestilence.” My colleagues at the university laughed in my face when I first mentioned my plan, but a little shallow taunting did nothing to dissuade me. I suspect that behind my back they have started a betting pool and are calculating the odds on the likelihood of my survival and perhaps on the number of limbs or organs I shall leave behind if I do make it back. Leave them to it. There are things I know about dragons and about Woodale which they do not.

Due to my natural interest in the species which had affected my life so powerfully, I made a point of enrolling in all of the classes available of the university which dealt with Thaumatotheriology. I discovered to my disappointment that very little is really known about dragons. My brief encounter with the hatchling from the forest provided me with more solid information than any of the noted experts in the field have accumulated about these so-called “wonder-beasts.” Armed with those insights, I am reasonably confident about my personal safety on this journey.

At any rate, if there is anything I can learn or confirm about their origins, life cycles and potential weaknesses, it is my duty to at least make the effort, in spite of the danger. If the proliferation of these creatures cannot be stopped or even slowed, the very existence of the human race on the face of the earth may be at risk.