Could It Be the Beginning of the End?

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. But we always felt like something mysterious was hiding between the heavy clouds, quietly awaiting the right moment to blast.

People in my village believed in ancient stories, stories told by their ancestors traveling across the lands hunting for creatures that would burn humans’ existence on this planet.

There was a story that kept their eyes half-open at night.

A story of dragons unleashed from prison in hell deep under the cursed land.

A place made from a blue fire melted with the souls of the dead; it was ruled by hate and worked by the universal laws of black magic.

It was told that the God of all evils, Ravana controlled that hell with tight hands.

Those dragons were his slaves; he stole them from the seventh skies when God degraded him deep under the seventh ground.

They drank from the lava of darkness and became Ravana’s soldiers to avenge the God of life.

They were tamed by the servants of God themselves and fed the flesh of the punished dead.

Dragons, to our people, are a symbol of death; they spread fire and turn humans into ashes and smoky souls.

They get released into the skies every 1000 years to fry angels patrolling the skies.

Ravana wanted to send his army to the seventh skies and take over the throne of God of life.

He wanted to control life and turn it into a ceremony of death.

The God of life to us was everything; he provided us with food and shelter; he gave his blessing and turned our home from ashes to a soil land.

A young girl used to wander over our village; she used to walk alone, gripping a long sharp stick in her left hand.

A mysterious symbol from the far foreign land was carved on her right shoulder that no one could understand.

She used to whisper to herself in a foreign language with the same voice and hum repeatedly.

Everyone thought she was crazy, a beggar’s daughter from a place across the mountains.

At night, she heads into the open land and stares at the skies; she scans the moon and mountains with sharp and wide eyes.

She seems to wait for something moving cautiously between the clouds.

The fog filled the sky and shadowed the massive mountains on a windy night.

That girl appears again, but there is something different about her this time.

She didn’t feel like she was wandering anymore; it felt like she finally found what she was hunting for.

The sign on her back was glowing, and suddenly we heard a deep voice from the skies.

My heart started pounding, my hands started shaking, and my breath tightened.

Is this the moment? The moment our lives end.

A loud wind with a blowing force moved across the land; it felt like the wings of the dragons and the angels smashing the air, fighting for the battle of the end.

Shadows of arrows over the mountains and tails of dragons block the blurry moon in the misty sky.

We stood around the tree of hope, holding hands.

A tree watered from a heavenly river in the highest mountains of the skies.

We sang the song of life our ancestors taught us that weakens the voice of the underground whispers controlling the souls of the dragons.

Suddenly, everything became quiet.

Could the skies have heard our prayer? Could it be that the God of life spread his light over the skies and diminished the power of the underground whispers?

My chest started loosening, and I could smell the freshness of the green grass.

In a blink of an eye, the sky went bloody red as if the sun had collapsed, and then everything went black.