Devil’s Bone Root, Dragon’s Blood, and Dogwood

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Once upon a time, the Valley was a peaceful, bucolic place, filled with apricot orchards, and soy farms, and flocks of the best egg-laying Orpingtons and Australorps and Red Stars for five counties. Was is the operative word here. Because it wasn’t peaceful there any longer.

Some folks say it was because the farmer’s market got too big, too popular with the millennials who journeyed out of the City every weekend in search of freshly-baked bread and organic produce and handmade soap. And it was true there were a lot of them. That’s why the market got so busy in the first place, and the vendors expanded their lines.

Some say it was immigrants bringing their strange ways into the Valley, when they came to work the fields and farms, and found the place so hospitable and welcoming that they settled there permanently. They were a great addition to the community, fixing up their homes and raising their kids and joining the PTA. Salt of the earth kind of people. But who knew what strange things they brought with them?

Some say it was something in the water, in the river that ran down from the plateau. Maybe it was polluted by all the industry north of the Valley. Chemicals that mutated natural wildlife, or maybe they were doing animal experimentation, and something got loose. It had happened before.

But in truth, no one knew the real reason dragons came to the Valley.

No one except Maribelle Moonshadow, the woman who kept the Serpent’s Kiss Metaphysical Supply booth at the weekend market in the town square.

Maybe the name had something to do with it. Serpent’s Kiss. Could there have been an element of wish fulfillment in what happened? Or was it more complicated than that?

Maribelle Moonshadow, aka Mary-Beth Miller, was a complicated woman. She held seven degrees from five different colleges. She had been married three times, never for longer than nine months (being around other people for too long was difficult, at best). Maribelle preferred animals to people, attracting every stray cat for miles around. They just seemed to know that she would never turn away a hungry animal of any sort. She was definitely a soft touch. And once they found her small farm, they saw no reason to leave. Plenty of food, a soft bed, and no dogs around. What’s not to love?

Perhaps most important to this story, is how Maribelle made her living. She had the greenest thumb in the very green Valley, and she used it to her advantage. As a practitioner of the White Occult Arts, Maribelle grew many of the ingredients for the potions and simples she sold at the farmer’s market. Her garden was enormous, filling her small farm’s former soybean fields, and extending into the fields she rented from neighboring farmers. She seemed to have a magic touch with plants, growing the most healthy, verdant specimens anyone had ever seen, producing all the leaves and roots and flowers she needed to support both her market booth and her Internet business.

Maribelle’s gardens were laid out alphabetically, for ease of harvesting. Every plant was segregated in its own little plot, separated from the next by a footpath so that Maribelle could work staking and watering and plucking out weeds without disturbing the ground. And every plot had a hand-lettered sign with suitably ornate writing on it, so that if anyone visited her gardens, they would get the right impression. The right impression being, of course, that this was a mystical, magical place filled with green wonders.

Aconite, Adder’s Tongue, Agrimony, and Asofoetida. Balmony, Barberry, Belladonna, and Bat’s Head Root. Calendula, Cardamom, Cascara Sagrada, and Cat’s Claw. Damiana, Dandelion Root, Devil’s Shoestring, Dulse, and Deer’s Tongue. And on it went, in ever-widening spirals of alphabetical plants outwards from her potting shed, where Maribelle started seeds each spring in little peat pots, fertilized by her secret mixture of organic additives, so that the tiny plants which sprouted in the humid shed sprang up tall and strong.

Perhaps that was a part of the problem. Maribelle’s special organic fertilizer was in large part chicken manure from a nearby farm. And everyone knows that chickens are actually just tiny dinosaurs, descended from the reptilian giants of ancient times. In addition to the manure, she blended in compost from the gardens, weeds and stalks and other greenery gleaned during harvest time, thrown in a big pile and left to rot down. Lots of good nutrients, especially when mixed with coffee grounds and eggshells and other kitchen refuse. That fertilizer was potent stuff.

But in truth, the real problem was the puppy Maribelle adopted.

Early one morning in late spring, when Maribelle went outside to her flagstone patio, where she lined up about twenty aqua blue and rose pink plastic plates—bought for 50₵ apiece at the discount store in town, and much more efficient than using hundreds and hundreds of paper plates every year—she discovered a new mama cat slinking out of the marigolds and leading a litter of five six-week-old black-and-white kittens to the food plates. And following behind Mama Cat and her kittens, a black-and-white puppy, nearly twice the size of Mama Cat’s natural offspring.

“Well, I never!” Maribelle stepped back to sit on a large rock and watch as the puppy shoved in among his adopted family to slurp up the wet food. She laughed as he got his nose pushed out of the way by the hungry kittens, but scrambled on to the next plate, and the next, until he’d eaten his fill.

After breakfast, most of the cats went about their business, heading off into the gardens to sleep in the sun or into the potting shed to hunt for mice. Mama Cat and her kittens disappeared into the undergrowth, but Maribelle figured they’d be back in time for dinner. The puppy, however, tummy swollen to twice its normal girth with an abundant meal of cat food, lay down on the flagstones at Maribelle’s feet.

Now, feral cats take some time to bond with their caretakers, and Maribelle knew never to force the issue. She figured that any cat who wanted would come to her for snuggles and scratches when it was ready. But this puppy wasn’t wary like the cats were. He rolled over on his back, four paws in the air, and his head resting on Maribelle’s foot as if it were the most comfortable pillow in the world. And he fell right off to sleep.

Maribelle sat there in the morning sun with the puppy sleeping on her foot and thought awhile. Dogs were kind of needy, whereas cats were independent and took care of themselves. A dog would require training and care. But she had always taken in any stray cat that came to her. It just seemed right to accept this gift the goddess had sent her way.

“What am I going to name you, little poodge?” she said softly in the still morning air. Her eye fell on a nearby flowering tree and although it seemed kind of lazy as far as naming things went, it also seemed kind of right. “Dogwood. That will do for now.”

Dogwood the puppy happily left behind his adopted feline family—although they all stayed, the kittens quickly growing into full-sized cats—and moved into Maribelle’s life. And that is the second potential cause of the disaster that followed. Dogwood grew quickly but didn’t always fit into his rapidly-expanding body. Cat food suited him, it seemed. His legs shot up to twice their former length in just a matter of weeks. His floppy ears grew longer and tangled in his gangly legs when he took off running. And his scimitar-sharp teeth chewed on anything he could fit into his mouth and many things that didn’t fit.

On the day in question—the day of the actual cause of the disaster, the third factor in the dragon invasion of the Valley—Maribelle and Dogwood were in the potting shed. As usual, Maribelle was multitasking. She was planting tiny seeds in little peat pots, a new plant she’d never grown before. There was a container sitting on the floor beside her potting table, filled with compost and chicken manure to fertilize the seeds. And there was Dogwood, gnawing on one leg of the potting table, a rickety old wooden thing that Maribelle had repurposed from the town dump.

Dogwood had been working on that table leg for many days and he’d finally accomplished his goal.

Complete annihilation.

With a resounding crash! the table collapsed, Maribelle’s freshly planted seeds, peat pots, and fertilizer all coming together into a small mountain of mud on the brick floor of the potting shed, with Dogwood’s equally muddy face peering out of the debris.

Dogwood’s grinning face.

What a good dog he was! He’d killed that old table dead!

Maribelle, with her usual patience and good humor, simply swept up the debris, threw it onto the compost pile, and started over. She propped the table back up with a couple of cinderblocks. She got out another stack of peat pots. Another bag of potting mix. Another scoop of fertilizer. And she went on with her day.

What Maribelle didn’t realize was that the seeds she’d been planting before Dogwood upset the table were all mixed up now in the compost pile. Devil’s Bone Root and Dragon’s Blood seeds. Chicken manure. And the final ingredient for disaster: the wilted cabbage leaves from the previous evening’s dinner of stir-fried veggies. Red cabbage. Extra potent. And cabbage, besides its properties of fertility and good luck, possessed an affinity for lunar magic.

Throughout the day that compost pile absorbed the heat of the sun, warming the contents. A brief afternoon thunderstorm soaked it so that the discarded seeds started swelling. And when the sun set, and the full moon rose, the misbegotten magic came to life.

And gave birth to dragons in Maribelle’s mystical garden.

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished.

Author's note: This story is dedicated to my mom, a dedicated gardener. Although I've never seen it happen, I believe that one day she just might grow dragons in her garden, among the watermelons and zucchini. I can hope!

I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to my next entry: