Ashbringer

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

Kobal remembered the day it all changed. Her disheveled father, bleeding as he stumbled into the family’s cabin, raving about the otherworldly beasts that descended upon their precious sheep flock. Carnage, he howled. She remembered how the hearth’s firelight danced across his pale eyes from the way they darted wildly around the room. The other strong men of the clan took one look at his torn and burnt furs and knew something had happened, but dragons? Real dragons in the Deep Valley after a thousand years; surely not.

Carnage! Carnage and hellsmoke!

Clanlord Sapper, green of eye and red of beard, bade the village herbalists take in her father to treat his wounds, before organizing a party of volunteers to investigate. Kobal remembered stealing a glance at the hunters of the village from her window as they departed: raindrops caught in grizzled beards and evening sunlight glinting off burnished spearheads. Before they pulled him away, Father begged them to hold back, to wait until word could be spread to the other clans of the Deep Valley. But for the shepherds of Clan Thoris, anything that was a threat to their flocks, was a threat to their way of life. They had to protect their own.

Twenty of Kobal’s clansmen left the village that day to confront creatures that should have only been a thing of folklore. Twenty of the best and most honorable, led by Clanlord Sapper himself. They looked glorious with their weapons and resolve as they marched down the village path, and into the forest.

No one ever saw them again.

The one thing the villagers did see, in the dead of night, were small pinpricks of red light dotted across the valley far below the heights Clan Thoris called home. Kobal knew in her heart that they were really the vengeful infernos of roaring dragonfire.

*********************************************************************

“It’s been ten years since that day,” Kobal forced through gritted teeth as she hauled herself down to another handhold on the cliff-face. “Maybe dragons age as fast as other animals.”

“Doubtful,” mused a chipper voice from somewhere over her right shoulder. The lack of optimism in the voice’s answer irked her, but she dare not turn and reprimand its source while making her descent still so high from the valley floor below her. Spotting another cleft for her fingers, she wedged her body closer to the rock wall and sprung downwards. A stouter climber may have undershot the cleft altogether, but Kobal found her grip and was just lithe and springy enough to make considerable progress. Besides, death by falling from a cliff she had been climbing since she was a little girl would be a wholly inappropriate end to an adventure Kobal hoped was just beginning.

“Nicely done,” the voice again quipped. “Maybe you are some unimagined species of dragon. A…cliff lizard, or…a rock shrike. Yes, hmmmm.”

“Flick,” Kobal grunted. “Act useful and make sure the path below is clear.”

A small flicker of light and hum of discordant buzzing came from Kobal’s left. She kept her feet wedged firmly in the rockface and tested her weight. Satisfied she would hold, she turned her head and faced her snarky companion.

Flick was not quite a bird and not quite a spirit, but he was always both. His form resembled that of a small sparrow, except instead of feathers, bone, or really any physical elements, his body was made up of intertwining ribbons of incandescent light. The light itself, constantly shifting colors that changed based on his mood, seemed to drip and melt away from his form if you looked too closely. It was hard for Kobal to stare at his mesmerizing light patterns for too long, although she never stopped being quietly fascinated by the tiny flickering glyphs that periodically winked in and out of existence around his small body; hence the name “Flick.”

To some, like Kobal’s mother, Flick was a genius loci, a helpful spirit whose immortal essence was tied to the very soul of the Deep Valley. To Kobal however, the arcane familiar was just Flick: an occasionally pretentious yet loyal companion that had been with her since the village soothsayers deemed her worthy of his custody.

“Act useful you say!” The spirit bird flapped his wings indignantly, leaving ghostly trails of blue light and vanishing glyphs in his wake. “I seem to recall a young woman who would have no idea where to go without a little, ahem, Flick-enly advice, hmm?”

“Indeed. If not for you I would be as directionally sound as a wet turd. Now can you JUST?”

Flick puffed his chest and did a flying loop around Kobal’s head, as he oft did when playacting that he was annoyed, and winked out of sight. Kobal allowed a rare smile to tug at the corners of her mouth when she heard the faintest sound of him complaining to himself somewhere below her, scouting the path. Secure in the cleft, she took a moment to uncork her waterskin and swig before staring back out at the horizon.

Winter had come early to the Deep Valley, a thin membrane of snow from the previous day blanketing the green canopies below her in a layer of white. Fortunately, Kobal’s hide-gloves protected her from the worst of the chill emanating from the rockface, which thankfully had little snow covering. Even the light of the sun struggled to break through the grayish overcast weather and warm the four corners of the Deep Valley. Kobal’s eyes periodically darted towards various spots on the horizon, but in this the weather worked to her advantage.

Dragons famously hated the cold.

“Just like we practiced, mistress,” Flick said, soaring back up behind her and settling on an outcropping near her head. “Another ten minutes and you’ll be down.”

Kobal let her smile come out in earnest now, readying her body to continue climbing.

“That’s the spirit, Flick,” she grinned.

“Technically, I am the spirit-Flick. But I take your point.”

Kobal grunted. “Well, if we’re going to do this, you will be the one taking point. It won’t be a very heroic tale if I fall into a hole and die before I even reach the nest.”

“Well, would-be-hero,” Flick said, his feathers adopting a bemused blue tint. “I shall endeavor to keep you alive until your untimely but predictable demise by dragonfire. Are you sure I can’t talk you out of it?”

Kobal shook her head and began to finish her descent towards the valley floor.

“No, Flick. It’s about time somebody took something from them.”

**********************************************************************

The sun was the color of glinting embers by the time Kobal made it into the Deep Valley proper, and she used the quiet moments trekking through the wood, accompanied by the erratic crutches of boots on snow, to reflect.

At nineteen, she was the youngest member of Clan Thoris to descend the rock cliffs bordering their village. Unbeknownst to the clan elders, she had actually made the climb many times over the past few years, but didn’t want to draw unnecessary attention to herself from the other youths. Especially not since her stewardship of a genius loci, an act typically awarded to a seasoned clan soothsayer – she didn’t need another reason for the other youths to isolate from Madman Morrigan’s freak daughter.

She knew she wasn’t much to look at at first glance: a skinny teenager wrapped in furs and leathers sporting a mane of unruly black hair she failed to really tame with a worn cord. But strapped to her back was shortspear carved of ironwood with a steel tip, a pouch full of medicinal herbs and tools, and an extensive coil of braided rope. Living in the shadow of the Deep Valley since the desolation of the dragons had made her hard and resourceful, and every remaining member of Clan Thoris in the years since had watched her grow into a capable hunter.

When death was only a few flappings of massive wings away, she had to be.

Greenwort is best against direct burns and grows near the banks of the Aeron. The rivermud can also act as a salve, but won’t do anything to mask my stench. I need something more aromatic like sunleaf for that, but I can’t let it touch my bare skin for more than a few minutes or the area will flare up in a rash…

Mother had always taught Kobal that in moments of stress it was calming to recite facts. It didn’t even matter if they were relevant facts, so long as you attempted to find comfort in the things you already knew. That knowledge, she said, would drive away any insecurity or doubt clawing at the back of her head. It hadn’t done anything to help repair Father’s fractured mind, but Kobal gave it a go anyway.

When I arrive, I wrap the extra linens around my face so my breath isn’t as visible or loud. When in the cave, the less I can breathe the better, but if I hold it in for too long I risk being faint for what I’ll have to do next. Attune balance in the face of —

“Down, now!” Flick’s voice sharply whispered from out of nowhere.

Instinct kicked in and Kobal dropped behind a bramble of thorny bushes. The momentum swung the shortspear around from her back into her waiting hands and she gripped the carved haft fiercely, not daring to make another sound. For a moment, all she could perceive around her was the eerie red light of the setting sun filtering through the pines of the forest like a distant campfire.

WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!

Kobal pressed herself as close as she could to the cold soil as the flapping of giant wings neared closer and closer. She still couldn’t see the creature through the treetops and fading light, but it must have taken off somewhere near for the noise to be so loud.

“Which direction?” She hissed softly.

“East,” Flick replied. Fortunately, the genius loci, as a spirit of the Valley, could make himself unseen at will. It was useful, especially when helping Kobal stalk a prey as formidable as a dragon.

WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!

Her eyes trained on the area above the trees in the direction Flick identified, and it wasn’t too much longer before she saw. Death Incarnate, The Reaper Who Burns, Ashbringer: her people had long since discovered fitting names and epithets for the winged interlopers that had usurped dominance of their beloved Deep Valley away from them, those ten years ago. But humans could still scarcely describe the majesty and terror that was, a dragon in flight.

Carnage! Carnage and hellsmoke!

The dragon’s scales reflected the dying light of the day like wrought armor, reflecting painfully into Kobal’s eyes. Its wingspan alone must have been more than ten men across, and flapped powerfully above shoulders as thick as a boulder. Behind the dragon’s gigantic frame, Kobal could make out the whip-cracking appendage that was the spiked tail. Between its front carapace were black cables that could only be muscles and tendons supporting its lizard-like visage and hanging jaw, which itself was filled to the brim with sword-like teeth around an inescapable maw.

But the eyes; they pierced through the dusk with the crimson glow of a thousand suns.

Kobal felt fear. She felt a fear she had first known on the day the dragons came to the Deep Valley, butchered her father’s flock, and set his own mind on its path to decay. It was a fear nurtured by the sight of pinpricks of red fire in the distance, the last glimpse of old Clanlord Sapper and his scout party. It was a fear that every living thing in the Deep Valley had learned after the dragons chose the Valley as the sight of their new nest, carving territory for themselves and roasting any adversary in their path. Ten years of livestock carried off, houses torched, and charred villagers made the Deep Valley one of sorrow, and not the bounty it once had been.

WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP!

She lay still as the dragon soared above her. The wind blasting from its wings rocked the canopies above Kobal and reminded her of Old Nan’s chair creaking by the hearth. Clutching her shortspear in a vice grip, she waited. The shimmering monster moved beyond her field of vision, and after a tense moment, the earth beneath her rattled.

A throaty roar like mountains crashing pierced the air and almost made Kobal drop her polearm and clap her hands over her ears, but she resisted the urge.

She waited.

“It hasn’t spotted us,” she croaked.

“No,” Flick replied, materializing next to her a flash of indigo glyphs.

“Go see where it is.”

“Mistress, I don’t think–”

“Do it,” Kobal hissed.

Without another word, Flick shot away from her like an arrow of pure energy and towards the direction of the dragon’s roar. Kobal reached into her pouch and rooted efficiently, pulling out a fistful of sunleaf petals.

Sunleaf must be painstakingly found and gathered; it only blooms in the sunward palisades in the first weeks of autumn. For whatever reason, it smells nearly exactly like the musk dragons secrete when they rub off on stone to clean their scales. If sunleaf is not properly dried out before use, it may have the adverse effect and create a hostile smell that the dragon can not help but attack.

Kobal had dried this sunleaf personally; it would work. It would have to. She held it tightly in her hand, ready to begin rubbing it over her extremities if necessary. For once, Flick didn’t take his sweet time and hurried back to Kobal with his usually erratic shimmers of light.

“Half a league away, maybe slightly more.” Flick squawked out.

“Big one?”

“I daresay,” he replied, glyphs twinkling across his beak in a yellow hue. “I must recommend shelving this expedition, for the moment.”

“What? We’ve come too far!” Kobal cried, alarmed.

He spun around in her vision with orange light, leaving a temporary wheel of color imprinted in her eyes. He was terrified.

“It landed on the shores of the lake panting something awful. Steam was rising like mist from the beast’s carapace and the head was half sunken in the frigid water. It was barely moving, but definitely very much alive. If this is part of their hibernation ritual, I don’t know it, and that means whatever happens next will be unpredictable and outside of the scope of your plan!”

On the word “plan,” the spirit bird jerked its arcane beak into the air in front of Kobal’s face to punctuate.

Kobal stared off in the direction Flick had returned from, scarcely breathing. Months spent preparing for the winter, training her body and learning the fastest route down the cliffside, months spent bruised and battered from nightly lessons in spearcraft, mornings logged memorizing safe paths through the Deep Valley, could not go to waste. She had already given so much.

Carnage! Carnage and hellsmoke!

“How long was the creature in the air before you sensed it?” Kobal quizzed Flick.

He preened pensively, a neutral silver now. “I warned you the moment it was off the ground. Hard to miss.”

Kobal’s eyes pivoted east to where the winged familiar first mentioned the dragon. “That means its warren has to be nearby. How many adult dragons could share a nesting space with one of that size?”

“Not many,” Flick eventually answered, phantom glyphs trickling across his wings. “One or two more at the most.”

Some of the fear that was coiled tightly somewhere inside Kobal’s stomach abided, replaced steadily with a small trickle of resolve.

“Barely moving, you said,” Kobal asked, gathering her shortspear and sunleaf with her as she did.

“For now, mistress, but as I also said, I must rec—”

“Flick, listen to me,” she interjected. “A creature of that size is going to take some time and energy to get back up into the air. If its nest really is nearby, that gives us a little bit of time to get in and get out. But, that means we have to go now.”

Flick hesitated midair, the glyphs under his wings returning to a timid yellow.

“Go ahead of me and find the entrance to that nest. We can do this, Flick. But if we hesitate anymore, we’ll be eating into any chance we have of pulling this off.”

The genius loci still said nothing, but a myriad of colors flickered across his frame, betraying the conflict inside him.

“Please, Flick,” Kobal pleaded finally. “I can’t go back empty handed.”

In a heartbeat, Flick’s ethereal form fizzed into crackling energy and shot eastward, towards where the dragon’s nest had to be. Kobal deftly moved on the balls of her feet, covering double the ground she had before while maintaining as much silence as humanly possible. Her breath quickened, but her grip on her shortspear was steady.

She was going to steal a dragon egg.

**********************************************************************

The cave was right where Flick thought it would be, only fifteen minutes away from where the dragon had startled them both in the trees. By now only a whisper of sunlight seemed to creep over the horizon and through the treeline, forcing Kobal’s eyes to adjust to growing darkness. Whenever she would trek slightly off-track, Flick would appear as a flash of color in her sightline to correct her approach. The whole way to the entrance she held her shortspear at guard in front of her, never allowing the point to sink below combat level. The tension thrummed in her ear almost as loud as the dragon’s wingbeats.

The cave entrance itself was spooky: a fire-blasted hole with jagged edges seemingly bored right into a formation of massive rocks jutting out of the natural soil. The whole cave network would have been laid down by the cast off of some cliff-shattering rockslide far before Kobal’s time, the local earth filling cracks over time that later served as soil bed for larger flora. Kobal took a moment to appreciate the alien beauty of the cave, but it also wasn’t lost on her that the entire area surrounding the cave-mouth was completely devoid of snow.

It was here.

Flick kept a watchful eye in the air above her head, as Kobal deftly unraveled the length of thin rope across her back. She could tell his mood was in a semi-constant state of flux from the different colored light she saw splayed across the ground like ethereal shadows as she worked. She used a hardy knot Mother taught her to yoke one end of the rope to a dense boulder, and the other she looped firmly around her waist. Testing to make sure it held, she waved her comrade down.

“Anything?” Kobal inquired.

“No, mistress,” Flick replied fearfully. “If the beast stirred I would feel it. And if any others resided inside this foul dwelling, I would have sensed their presence as well. It’s empty.”

Kobal nodded. Removing a bundle of linens from her pouch, she wrapped them tightly around her face to shield her breath and crackled her supply of sunleaf before thoroughly rubbing the substance onto her furs and face-wrap. She looped the remainder of her woven rope around her left shoulder and hoisted her shortspear in a two handed grip.

“Maker be with us.”

Flick floated ahead of her, serving both as her guide in the dragon’s nest and a source of light. Kobal entered the cave with deliberate footsteps, making note of her rope length as it snaked back behind her and out the mouth of the cave. Flick was making an effort to hold a resolute colorform ahead of her, so a deep cerulean afterglow bathed Kobal’s face in its luster. It made her feel like a hero of the old stories, a being not wholly of this world. In a way she was right; the deeper into the cave she voyaged the deeper she was entering the domain of monsters.

In the first years after they came, the dragons, nearly all of them brandishing that same blinding set of metallic scales, were scarcely in one place for too long in the Deep Valley. They hunted and fought one another over territory, filling the whole region with the twisted songs of their mating cries during the summer months. They tended not to bother too much with the villages scattered across the ridges, like the one of Clan Thoris, tending to the lush bounty of the Deep Valley itself. But in cutting off the clans from free passage and usage of the Valley for livestock, hunting, and trade by the River Aeron, the dragons suffocated the livelihood of Kobal’s people. They were killing them slowly, and doing the same to the forest.

After Kobal’s scale down the cliffside and trek through the woods, she saw many an area with a whole avenue of trees scorched or ripped from the soil. The telltale sign of warring dragons. She had also traversed several bare patches of dead ground amidst still living trees. Privately, Kobal believed these were some of the sites where the invading dragons annihilated that first raiding party years ago, the one old Clanlord Sapper mustered after Father’s attack.

Carnage! Carnage and hellsmoke!

From Flick’s illumination, Kobal could make out deep gashes in the cave’s walls, and places where hanging cave-spikes still resided alongside broken stems. Areas where pale cave rock randomly met blotches of blackened soot; Kobal wondered if anyone of all the Valley dwellers had ever been so close to the warrens of their winged enemy. Strange little crackles sounded occasionally beneath Kobal’s feet, and she had the sneaking suspicion without looking down that they were bones.

She had never much cared for the scent of sunleaf, but the stench of dragon emanating from the bowels of the cave was pungent and made Kobal’s eyes want to water. It was overpowering except for the wrap around her face and the fact that she had spent hours outside prior, the cold numbing her sense of smell. As she saw the pulsing blue light from Flick ahead, she envied his lack of a corporeal nose.

But dragonfire could harm a genius loci, or so the old tales said. Flick was risking something to be here with Kobal on her wild quest to steal a dragon egg for Clan Thoris.

They delved deeper into the cave, the rope line getting considerably shorter across Kobal’s shoulder, yet she did not contemplate turning back, as Flick no doubt was surely at least pondering. There were times she thought even the mention of her idea out loud in earnest would prompt the sort of debate from him that she wouldn’t want: the kind to talk her out of it. She credited him with sticking by her and providing his aid through the whole journey, but first and foremost it was her idea.

They’ve taken so much from us. We’ll take something from them. We’ll take an egg and raise the offspring as ours. We make it one of us.

Flick was critical of her headstrong approach, but in her role to her people as Wayfinder (the youngest ever of Clan Thoris to be bonded with a genius loci) he was bound to help her act in the interests of the whole clan. Even if she hadn’t shared her plan with them, they still needed this: any victory against the monsters that had sent them cowering in their homes for a decade.

Kobal was sure she could get an egg. But she wished she was as sure about the second part.

“Here,” Flick fizzed, his color briefly turning a grandiose violet.

Kobal raised her weapon again, steadying herself before following Flick into a little alcove of the cave to her right. The spirit bird wheeled in the air above a crater-like indent in the rock floor, bidding Kobal come closer. She peered into the crater and had to stop herself from gasping.

Littering the indent were large shapes of a material that resembled broken pieces of white bark, but Kobal knew enough about animals to recognize them for what they were.

Eggshells.

Kobal’s eyes quickly darted up and around the cave. “Are they—?”

“Old,” Flick replied quietly. “I would have sensed another dragon. Feel them for yourself.”

Kobal got down on her knees and inspected the detritus. Indeed, the remains of the dragon eggshell still had a hard and fibrous quality to it, but with enough torque it crumbled in her hand. She opened her pouch and pocketed the sample. As she did, she noticed her length of rope connecting her back to the outside was almost spent. Flick noticed too.

“Seems an old nest. No sense in sticking around here for nothing,” he said.

Kobal frowned. It was possible he was right. Under Flick’s glow she saw a couple other indents in the cave floor with similar scenes to the one in front of her. Perhaps the dragon they hid from earlier was actually born in this cave, and remained near its home-nest, not actually capable of laying new eggs. But then, what could explain how erratically it broke its hibernation pattern, as dragons often do for the winter months, just to collapse by the lake?

Something is here.

“No…there has to be something here.” Kobal removed the rope from her waist and used a large rock to pin it to the cave floor. “We see it out.”

Flick glided forward. They spent a few minutes marauding the refuse of the dragon cave, every moment passing reminding Kobal that there was a dragon nearby that lived here, and probably would not be fooled too long by a sunleaf coating. Only now, she was without a readily safe way to guide her passage out of the cave, especially if anything happened to Flick in the presence of a dragon. He had never disputed the rumor that dragonfire is harmful to spirits. Kobal didn’t want him to find out.

Not like Father found out.

The moments dragged for a rapid eternity, and Kobal was close to breaking the haft of her spear against a rock in frustration when she saw something curious at the nearest cave wall.

“Flick,” she whispered. “What’s this?”

The spirit bird shot above her, glyphs twinkling in the gloom of the cave. She approached the cave wall just as Flick spread his wingspan wide to illuminate the whole length in cool blue light.

“Statues?” Kobal wondered in awe. “Relics…from the Old Kingdoms?”

“Mistress…I’m…not sure?”

Eight large humanoid shapes came into focus in front of her. They seemed to be constructed from a different, more porous stone from that of the cave wall and leaning upright against the paler rock. The statues were of a varying height, but nearly all taller than Kobal herself. As Kobal got closer, she noticed the visages and detail of the statues were incredibly simple, else worn down over time. They were almost like giant, formless dolls. She used her speartip to carefully prod for any signs of danger, before using her hand to brush across the torso of one with her fingertips.

Warm to the touch.

She quickly withdrew her hand back.

“Mistress…” Flick intoned, his colors going crazy in a cacophony of confusing lightbeams.

“Flick, focus on a mood,” Kobal gasped. “You’re hurting my eyes.”

It was then that Kobal noticed the farmost “statue” seemed to be missing a gaping chunk on its side. As Flick began to flutter incoherently, Kobal squinted her eyes and poked forward with the shortspear, revealing a hollow interior to the statue. Pieces of stone like shell fragments were scattered on the ground nearby, seemingly outward from the statue’s interior. Kobal chanced a touch with her hand; this statue was warm, but far colder to the touch than the other ones.

What?

“Mistress…” Flick pleaded again, his ethereal feathers a panicked red.

“Flick, what’s going on?” Kobal rasped, fear again gripping her insides.

“There’s…someone else here. How did—we should go!”

Kobal’s shortspear trembled in her hands as she turned towards the direction Flick was wheeling above in the cave next to her. There was just enough light to see a crumpled looking figure, stirring absently in the shadows of the rock. Kobal’s heart rate went shooting up and it took everything for her not to shriek with terror as the figure wobbled, shaking a cloud of rock dust as it moved to stand.

Something stirred in the distance.

“Mistress Kobal,” shrieked Flick. “We must go now!”

Flick’s color spectrum exploded with panic, and the spirit bird nearly collided with the humanoid thing trying to get back to Kobal. She nearly dropped the spear and turned to run.

“Kobal?” the thing croaked.

She froze in place, unable to look away as the humanoid thing that said her name moved into the light towards her. Its skin was cracked and ashy, and overgrown hair covered its entire form down to the feet. It was as tall as a man, but emaciated and misshapen looking. As it got closer, Kobal could make out reddish hair, and sunken green eyes. She recognized them.

“...Clanlord Sapper?” She managed, stunned.

The thing that once could have been Clanlord Sapper looked at her with a desperate face.

“Please, Kobal. Must… stop us before too late.” Sapper’s mummified hand reached out.

“Before what’s too late?” she replied, horrified.

“Kobal!” Flick yelled, his glyphs crackling with wild energy.

“Before… we become like them.”

Punctuating his every word, as if on cue, was the ever nearing thunder of a dragon’s wingbeats.