A World Asleep

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. In fact, most of my tribe believes that there never were, and that the dragons from the old stories were just make-believe dreamt up by drunken bards who had too much time on their hands. I know different though. I've seen one - I think. I was out fetching fire-food one day with my kindred spirit when I glimpsed a gigantic, smouldering eye fixed on me through the gnarled trunks of those ancient trees near the entrance to the cave. Startled, I called out for my kin, but by the time I turned back, it had vanished.

Once I'd finished explaining what I'd seen, he said nothing, but I saw an all too familiar twinkle in his eye. "Don't look at me like that, I know what you're thinking," I said, annoyed, but he simply shrugged affably and leant against a tree, surveying me with humour dancing in his eyes. We stood there without speaking for a while, each waiting for the other to break the silence. The setting sun behind him illuminated his muscular profile, erasing his flaws, and I felt a sudden twinge of jealousy over his caramel coloured skin and perfect physique. "We'd better get going," I told him shortly, and his gaze was suddenly penetrating, however after a few moments he simply nodded and started off down the path back towards home. I followed, feeling silly that I'd even mentioned it to him.

Since then, I've often wondered at what it was that I saw - even doubted that I saw anything at all (maybe it was just my imagination) - but these days I feel quite sure that it was indeed a dragon, because every now and then a stray chicken will go missing. Of course, it could always be one of the neighbouring tribes with whom we share the Valley, however I've listened to them deny taking the meagre livestock we are able to rear, and honestly I believe them. I don't know why exactly, except that there's a plaintive note of sincerity in their denials, and they seem particularly incensed when the accusations get more direct, as if they're angry that we would dare to accuse them.

The stories, those that we can understand anyway, tell us that the dragons used to own the skies and lived up on the peaks of mountains, higher than the highest clouds. The elders, who came from the time before time, told us of an invisible web which bound all life together, a way of coexistence and of harmony. The entire planet, they taught us, was once alive and in active collaboration with each and every creature on its surface. The people say there was a great cataclysm, the end of the world, though whether we did this to ourselves or to damn our enemies, we will never know: it has been lost to the ever-shifting sands of time.

What is known for sure is that when we scarred the skies and rent the earth asunder, the delicate web of life was irreparably broken. Dragons and birds fell from the skies, the giant cold worms and the artificial birds ceased to breathe their smoke and flames, and mankind's cities, wonders of light and glass and steel, went cold and dark and silent, as they have remained ever since. Man was returned, in little more than an instant, to the primordial darkness from which he emerged. Even the song of the phoenix was replaced by an eerie, empty silence. And these fabled birds, just like the dragons, have completely vanished from the world, never to be seen again - if they were ever even here at all.

Or at least, that's what the elders used to say - but they said loads of things, many of them pretty bizarre. I once heard talk about an elder, one of the oldest, who used to rant and rave about how we were a scourge upon the planet, how we had brought this age of darkness and desolate cold upon ourselves, and how he thought we deserved this outcome as a punishment for our 'sins'. Of course, I never really understood what that meant - what even were sins anyway? It was a word without a thing attached to it, like so many of the words contained in the papers that help to keep us warm at night.

My kindred spirit, the seer and healer of our tribe, says that sin is something bad, like a sickness, but one that each and every one of us is born with. Sometimes I tease him for his wild ideas, unsure of where he's getting them and hoping to bring him back down to earth with the rest of us. He spends too much time in his own head, I think. He sometimes tells me about how he thinks that the old elder wasn't wrong, says that he still had the sight which has been lost to us for so long now. I don't know whether to believe him or not, but I know he would never lie. Maybe he's just a bit loopy.

He believes that humans hurt the mother earth so badly that she had to enter a deep sleep, a sleep that was to last aeons. But, he says, she is not dead: rather, she sleeps so that she may heal herself, and sometime, someday, she will reawaken, and life - real life - will return to this world of ours. Dantæ thinks that the magic was already dying by the time of the big bang, that it was being forgotten before the flame was entirely extinguished, and he suspects it had something to do with the great winding worms made of that cold, impenetrable and lifeless material - metal, he calls it. The people in our tribe are always telling him that he's going to be the next elder, but honestly I don't think he wants to be. He certainly has the mind for it though, and the learning to match. Then there's his fondness for yakruna, a sacred herb which can either be made into a brew or smoked for a more intense, but more fleeting, effect.

Sometimes, in the twilight just after dawn as I wake up from a particularly vivid dream, I live out a little fantasy, though I don't know where it comes from or where it goes, of Dantæ and myself at the head of our tribe, leading them up and out of the Valley, through a mountain pass which is filled with broken stone. The dream always fades just as we are walking towards one of these cities I've only ever heard about, before I can get a good look at where we are heading, because I get so excited to see the future that I forget where I am in the present, and all at once the dream is over and I am lying on the ground next to the embers of a dying light, as the morning light just barely brushes over the mountaintops to graze the tips of the tallest trees. I've often asked Dantæ about this dream, hoping that he will help me to understand its meaning, but he always just smiles in a knowing sort of way and keeps his silence. It's frustrating, but I learnt long ago not to try to force him to do anything - people who do that tend to end up regretting it, and I have no interest in feeling that emotion, corrosive and poisonous to the soul as it is. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that he knows what it means, that maybe he's had this dream too, that maybe, just maybe, it's not just a dream...

My private reflections are suddenly interrupted by the delighted chattering of my younger sister, with whom I am travelling to the cemetery of forgotten words in order to retrieve some fire-food. "Look, Sol!", she says - she has just found a butterfly, once very rare but becoming more and more common these days; it is perched just below the sign which marks the entrance to the cemetery, a sign which bears the markings of a lost word in the old tongue, made of the characters "lib ry". We don't know this word because it's not one of the ones which was in the few stories the last of the elders translated, so that those who were yet to come might have some idea from whence they were descended. What we do know is that this man-made cave used to serve as a repository of knowledge, a place for all who wanted to understand the world or themselves a little better to come and spend time, to absorb the wisdom contained in so many volumes. Now, all this science has been lost to us, and we live in perpetual darkness.

With every passing night, the chances of recovering these lost words becomes slimmer and slimmer, as we gradually deplete the store of papers which reside within the 'libry' in order to keep ourselves warm enough to survive the biting chill that pervades the entire Valley once the sun has set. Without the words to burn, I am convinced that my parents would not even have been born, let alone myself, and a couple of times during the early winter morning we have actually come across the still-frozen remains of other tribespeople who were unable to keep themselves warm during the night. That's why we burn the words even though we know that we are destroying our history, shattering link after link in the chain that connects us to our past, and to all the people who ever were, about whom we can now never know.

x

Once we've collected as much as we can carry, we head back outside and start off towards home, but I can't help myself and I find my feet carrying me away from my sister, who is happily skipping back the way we came, and retracing, for the thousandth time, my steps towards the building which lies just beyond the libry, the building which is next to the giant worm. As I approach the building, I feel the familiar heaviness in the air, an atmosphere of futility which pervades all the buildings where the ancients used to live, but which hangs especially heavy around the worms, those long-dead smoke breathing monstrosities mounted on the cold, straight tracks which carve a cruel path across the otherwise beautiful countryside. There is a faint buzzing in the air which I can never quite localize, and sometimes I lose track of time here as I stand staring, in a state bordering on utter incredulity, at the worms and wondering what life was like back then, such that people didn't notice there was something... wrong... with those creatures.

I'm not sure why I think that, but on some level I simply know that it's the truth - there is something wrong with them. They seem somehow more dead than dead - as if they are symbolically anti-life in some way. It's an idea that comes out of nowhere sometimes when I am stood transfixed by these arcane creatures, frozen still as if caught in the gaze of some timeless predator that preys upon mankind and sucks the life out of him. But of course, that doesn't really make sense - didn't the elders say that we created these monsters, forged them out of rocks we extracted from the ground and moulded them to our desires? I seem to remember that being mentioned in one of their stories, but these days the number of people who remember what the elders said is slowly dwindling, and my parents are among the few who still make an active effort to preserve the old teachings. My dad always tells me that words have power, and to forget them is to forget the power we once wielded. I've never really understood what he meant by that.

What was this power that we once had access to, and did it even do us any good? Surely if the people of old were so powerful, they should have been able to prevent the end of the world which has placed us in our current predicament, barely eking out a survival in a world that seems indifferent to us, if not actively hostile at times. Sometimes I imagine that the worm is drinking in my attention while I am standing here bewitched, and it feels as if there is something coming back to me from the worm, a little nudge here and a pull there to guide my daydream, as if the worm wants me to understand its history, where it came from and what it was built for. I'm struck today by a funny thought that perhaps the dragons and the worms went to war - that humans built them to wage a war against the dragons. After all, both of them breathed smoke and fire, and both are said to have flown over the landscape with a swiftness and savagery that made them legendary, indefatigable predators. Maybe these worms were the answer humans constructed to the challenge that the dragons posed to our survival, and that's why we wound up wounding the earth and condemning ourselves to this endless darkness.

Something brings me back to the present, although for the life of me I can't put my finger on what has caught my attention. Perhaps the odd buzzing feeling which accompanies the heaviness in the air around this area has conspicuously become a little louder? I glance around nervously, but everything is just as it always is, perfectly still and utterly deserted. For some reason I don't quite understand, I take a couple of steps back, and I am struck by the oddest feeling of being watched, although there is no-one in sight. Maybe someone is hiding among the remains of the giant worm, or spying on me from the treeline? If my parents knew I was here...

As I scan my surroundings, I abruptly realize that there is a large shadow which envelopes not only myself and the giant worm, but also the nearby thicket of trees. I look out across the forest and notice that the shadow is spreading, although it is far too large for me to determine the shape, so I instinctively glance up to see what looks like a gemstone-carved bird sparkling in the rays of sunshine. I am wonderstruck for a few moments before the reality of the situation slams into me: I am staring at the underbelly of a dragon. As I gaze open-mouthed towards the sky, a million thoughts rush through my mind only to vanish over the horizon before even a drop of the rushing river can issue forth from my mouth. I could tell in that moment that everything we thought we knew was about to change, and as I felt the realisation sweep over my body like a wave, setting my hair standing on end, the only thing I knew for sure was that the life-force of the world, that invisible web the elders spoke of, was coming alive once more.

A piercing scream suddenly cut through my reverie, cleaving past from present forever and turning the blood in my veins to ice. It was the voice of my sister, but hadn't she already headed back towards home? She must have doubled back to look for me. As I looked around frantically for the source of the sound, it echoed off the steep slope of the mountains, confusing and disorienting me. Abruptly I noticed something that set my heart pounding: the shadow on the ground was subtly growing larger, and the shape of a diving bird of prey slowly assumed a clear relief against the life-affirming light of the sun. I was just starting to run towards the nearby copse for safety when I was wrenched to the side, falling to the ground and hitting my head hard before I could even tell what was happening.