Aftermath

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always fires eating away at the mountainsides, the cracking of trees that burned to husks echoing in the frigid night air. Like joints popping, as if the earth were curling her fingers to claw at the rash of flames that glowed brutal and hot along the ridgelines.

There hadn’t always been ash falling from the sky, polluting the snowfall and turning once pristine snowfields to land poisoned by silt and murk. It choked the air and blotted the sun, filtering daylight through a grey haze and causing the nights to fade into a dank and moonless dark.

The forest was burning. Her forest was burning, and soon it would be just another wasteland. Scorched, blistered and barren; ravaged by the fire-spitting vermin that had besieged the world during Earthfall.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. There weren’t always dragons. Period. Once, they had only existed in myth and media; in bedtime stories, video games and books rife with adventure, joy and terror. But one was now here, in her home, in Denver’s Valley. With it, it had brought devastation, like they always did. They were a plague, destroying and consuming the land then leaving it to rot as they moved on.

Denver had been a child during Earthfall, wrapped up in young reverie and blind to the adult problems that had filled society with turmoil. She could recall a faint memory here and there of the home she once had, the parents she once loved. Those recollections had an incorporeal undercurrent to them, the rich detail of new memories turned sour and dim by time. She couldn’t see the faces of her parents anymore. They had become vague outlines in her mind, though some of their characteristics still remained. Her father’s large and calloused hands, the way he smelled of oil and grease when he came home and how her mother would chide him to leave his dirty boots in the garage. He never did, and then he’d smirk at Denver, sharing a private joke as her mother sighed and made a sarcastic comment about husbands being untrainable.

Her mother was more difficult to remember. Denver associated emotions with her memory, feelings of familiarity, of comfort and assurance. Her mother had been so smart, and they had an ongoing game where Denver would think up what she believed were impossible questions, and yet her mother always had answers.

She couldn’t see her mother’s face anymore when she tried to remember…but she could see the long dark hair that hung down past her shoulders, and she recalled how her mother would tie it up into a bun on the weekends. To keep it out of her face, her mother had said, while she went about vacuuming the floors and helping Denver put away the toys that had migrated across the house during the week.

Remembering was like looking through foggy glass at scenes that were backlit by smoke and darkness. The details were becoming harder and harder to hold onto and they felt like moments snapshotted from the life of a stranger. Moments from a life before Earthfall and the dragons.

Everything had changed when it happened. Fire and panic had reshaped the world into something else…something more violent and primal. And Denver had changed with it, accepting the violence as a way of survival. The years after had been harsh and filled with running, stealing and hiding.

And the one responsible was here, now. It was not welcome.

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Denver pulled the bandanna back up over her nose, warming her face against the cold night wind. The soot that hung in the air made her cough and spit a black and grimy discharge onto the ground. The pitch of the night was all-encompassing. The moon had lost its influence here, its reflective light unable to cut through the filthy atmosphere as she trudged through the grey packed snow.

She was cutting her way along the edge of a woodland, careful to keep her path within the tree line and not stray from the minimal shelter provided against the blowing snow and wind. The drifts were not as deep beneath the trees, the snow rising to just above her mid-calf as she hiked. She could feel the dull cold of the packed snow against her legs, shielded by a pair of ill-fitting snow pants, hiking boots that were past their prime and gaiters that did not have many outings left in their lifespan.

Her gear was old, worn and in need of repairs beyond what she could fix with her last roll of duct tape and clever ingenuity. Her scavenging trips into Boulder the previous summer had not been as fruitful as she had hoped, and now in the depths of winter she was getting by on invention and stubbornness. She knew the chances of coming upon useful finds while scavenging were becoming slimmer with every passing year, and chancing travel into larger cities was almost no longer worth the risk due to the dangers. Freebooter troops had laid claim to much of the city and taken what resources were available, and while they tended to leave travelers alone – not wanting to risk injury or illness from any of the old-world contagions that had rose up post-Earthfall – it was the lone drifters and vagabonds who posed a threat. People who had either lost their morality as the world burned, or who had none to begin with. Pirates, cannibals, and even worse…

Her life was hard on her own, but many of the things she had seen over the years made trusting anyone else even harder.

The dragons were to blame. Memories of life before them were vague and fading, but she remembered happiness. She remembered family and friends and a lack of the throat-choking fear that had become so present after their arrival.

Denver knew her situation was bleak. She was in the midst of one of the coldest, most bitter winters of the past many years, hiding out in a remote cabin whose windows she had boarded up against the wind and prying eyes. The gear she relied on for survival was in desperate need of repair, and the torch she currently carried was one of only two that remained in her stocks.

She had a persistent, wet cough brought on by the silt in the air and she was too skinny, even for her young age. The worst of it was the dragon who had taken up residence in her valley had driven the deer and game animals from the forest. From what Denver had seen of them, dragons hunted by burning woodland and scavenging the carcasses left behind.

The mountain forests she now trekked had once been lush, teeming with life. During the past months, though, they had been scorched and blasted from the earth. No food remained and her valley was no longer a place for life to inhabit.

She would die if something did not change. Soon. She knew this. The days of childish fantasy and young optimism were long behind her. And so she trudged forward through the night, past the vague shadows of trees that stood silent just outside the grasp of light thrown by her torch. She had an idea of where this dragon was nesting.

An old gold mining colony was just ahead, its tunnels snaking through the earth of the mountain. A few mine entrances yawned wide enough for a dragon to slither into, seeking shelter from the bluster and chill outside. Over the past few weeks, late into the night, Denver had heard guttural sounds roaring down the mountainside and echoing off the rocks. She would be the first to admit to having no knowledge of how dragons communicated, but those calls had sounded languished enough to pique her interest.

If Denver was starving, then this dragon likely was, as well. It had chased the game from the land with wrath and fire, and perhaps now was lamenting its overzealous siege on the valley.

Denver had seen dragons in the years since Earthfall. They were not so much the gigantic monsters shown in movies, and instead had looked sleek and agile. She had always been at a distance, but they had not seemed to be much larger than the memories she had of the elephants she had seen with her parents when they visited the zoo for her twelfth birthday.

If this dragon was starving and weak then perhaps…

Perhaps she could kill it. Perhaps this would provide the food she needed to survive until the snowmelt in the spring.

Slung on her shoulder, resting against the back of her charcoal-colored parka was a rifle. She had carried it with her for years, only ever firing it sparingly. She had found a care manual in a sporting good shop during one of her scavenging trips into Boulder, and while the manual had been for a different model of rifle, she’d been able to glean enough information to understand how to maintain the firearm.

The bullets were precious to her, as there had only been a single box of ammunition left with the rifle when she found it. That had been during the early years after Earthfall.

And now, as she carefully and cautiously approached the wide mine entrance that beckoned ahead of her, she was sickly aware of the two remaining bullets in the pocket of her coat. They were all that remained. Two shots. Two chances…if they even fired, at all.

Denver breathed deep. She could not afford to think like that. She could not afford fear right now. She had no other options. She was out of food and out of time. She couldn’t walk down off the mountain in the middle of winter, it was too treacherous.

And so she would walk down into the earth, instead, and face this beast.

She held her torch up as she stepped into the mouth of the mine. It was framed with wooden beams along the sides the ceiling, and they extended as far back into the silent cavern as her torchlight would allow her to see. A loose wire snaked along the ceiling and back into the mine’s depths, the sockets of long-broken bulbs latched to the rocky ceiling every few feet along the path of the wire.

Denver leaned her torch against the stone wall of the mine and shrugged the rifle off her back. She pulled one of the bullets from her pocket and loaded it into the chamber of the gun, then snapped it closed. The echo reverberated off the walls and down the mine shaft, causing her to tense and listen anxiously.

Silence was all that lay ahead of her as the wind howled behind outside the mine. Denver picked up her torch and held it aloft in her left hand while holding the rifle in her right, cradled between her side and armpit. She shivered as she started forward, not from the cold but from the adrenaline and the dull terror that tore through her veins with every step further into the darkness beneath the earth.

She did her best to keep her steps light and soundless, but in the silent void of the mine that was near impossible. She was coming up upon a slight bend in the tunnel when she heard a low rumble that stopped her dead. The sound was low and guttural and she could feel the tense vibration of the noise in the ground beneath her boots.

It stopped. Denver exhaled, not realizing her breath had caught in her throat.

Then the rumble came again, tinged with the hint of a growl that rose up into a full snarl. The sound filled the tunnel, cascading off the walls and the ceiling in a chorus of vicious echoes.

Denver started to lean back on her heels, about to turn and run from the mine. All feelings of foolish bravery had fled in the wake of that horrendous sound and she was left with the pure instinct to flee and survive.

And then her brain caught fire. She dropped her torch and rifle and grasped at her head, tears forming in the corners of her eyes as she screwed them shut. Denver staggered forward, gasping with pain as stars exploded behind her eyelids and her head screamed.

“You’ve come this far,” a voice forced itself into her head.

It did not echo within the tunnel like the snarl had, but instead burrowed into her brain. It was ethereal and commanding, and every word burned hot and excruciating in her brain.

“It would be a shame for you to leave so soon…”

The voice receded from her mind and Denver opened her eyes, blinking against the tears that clouded her vision. She wiped them from her eyes, a dull and blunt pain still throbbing behind them with every heartbeat. She peered forward into the shadows that danced at the edge of the light cast by her dropped torch.

She had stepped forward and stumbled through the slight turn in the mine shaft and her torchlight was obscured by the bend that it lay partly behind. Her eyes followed the uneven and ridged rock wall that led away ahead of her, taking in the points and lines of the stone. And then they stopped, staring and then blinking as if she were trying to clear her eyes of the shadows that danced within the tunnel.

She saw an eye staring back at her. The pupil was narrow, like that of at cat, but the eye itself was the size of a softball and was set into the head of something that was far larger than the elephants she had seen that day so many years ago. The eye fixed Denver within it’s primal stare as the reptilian head of the beast rose a few inches off the ground, teeth bared in a wet and quiet snarl as the dragon faced her.

“Why,” the voice boomed into her mind again and Denver flinched back, her head filling with that same pain and force.

But, just as quickly as the voice broke into her mind, it receded. The dragon’s head swayed and then fell back to the ground, its large eyes fluttering as if in pain.

Denver breathed in, trying to will the dull throbbing in her head to vanish. In that moment she took full stock of the beast. It lay curled tightly within the tunnel, it’s scaly skin nearly the same color as the stone around it. Its front claws clenched and dug into the earth, creating deep rivets in the ground, as it tried and failed to lift its head again. She could hear its breathing catch in its chest. It sounded pained and exhausted.

She wondered for a moment at the animal. It had spoken to her…somehow putting words into Denver’s mind. She knew little of dragons beyond the destruction they caused. They were violent beasts that tore across the land and left misery in their wake. Mindless and vile…and yet this one spoke…

“Why are you here?” the dragon asked, the voice pushing back into her head, though not as forcefully this time.

Denver still winced uncomfortably, but the voice was not as searing and painful in her mind as it had been earlier.

“I…” Denver started, then paused.

Was she really talking to this thing? This monster that was responsible for the decimation of her home? This was not what she’d expected when she entered the mine...

“Speak!” the voice roared into her mind and Denver stumbled back, shutting her eyes against the brutality that exploded once more in her head.

“I do not have time…” it said, softening upon the last words.

“What are you?” Denver hissed the words between clinched teeth.

She was on her knees, doubled over and feeling as if she may vomit. Every time the dragon spoke, her brain felt as if it were being torn open. The sensation was unnatural and exposing, intimate in all the wrong ways.

The dragon snorted. It was an oddly derisive sound, and Denver suddenly had the nauseating sense that the dragon was rooting around in her mind, teasing and searching at her memories.

“You could not pronounce it in your primitive language,” the dragon scoffed. “I am a Matriarch. I am the last…”

Its voice trailed off, leaving a void in Denver’s mind as the pain subsided.

“You’re dying.” Denver whispered.

She could sense it. Every time the dragon forced the connection between it and Denver, she could feel a small sensation of finality and hopelessness at the other end of that connection. She wondered if the dragon could even stand. Despite its enormous size, it was clearly in a very weakened state.

“Yes,” the dragon said, its tone cool and tinged with a note of sadness. “I am the last…” the dragon repeated, the voice fading from Denver’s mind.

The great eyes of the beast slid shut as a final deep breath escaped from its chest and its body relaxed limply. The dragon’s voice reached out to touch Denver’s mind one more time. It was soft and distant, almost pleading in tone.

“Help her…she will be the last…”

In its dying moment, the dragon’s front claw shifted, revealing the object that had been hidden between it and the dragon’s neck.

A single large opalescent egg.