Dragon-Spared

Chapter 1

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. At least that’s what Mim says. I was just a babe when the first of the dragons supposedly appeared. I caught her once on a good night – her tips were generous enough that our bellies were full, and she’d even managed to get her hands on a small pinch of sinter. Half-blasted on the highly potent and aromatic herb popular among the unfortunate blue collies like us, she told me about The Great Awakening.

Mim likes to grumble from time to time that man had no business settling in Sand Valley back when it was colonized. Some places were meant to stay wild, the kind of places that were brutal and more likely to kill someone stupid enough to venture into them than provide shelter and nourishment. Sand Valley is like that. A dry expanse of sand sandwiched between the towering Geltha Mountain Range and the bigger range to the east, Hugor, the Valley gets very little in the way of precipitation. Mim says only the crustiest and most stubborn kind of fool would’ve stayed in a place with no water source and little in the way of plant or animal life and carved out some kind of existence there. She’s almost right. Half of Sand Valley’s founders were notorious thieves and traffickers. The other half were murderers. Finding themselves abruptly unwelcome in the fertile, wealthy cities located on the other sides of the Geltha and Hugor ranges with the refinement of city law enforcement, they retreated to Sand Valley, determined to conquer the barren land and make it their home. That said, considering all of us Sand Valley locals can trace our lineage back to these thieves, traffickers, and murderers, and that we’ve continued to carry on despite well… you know… dragons… I figure none of us has room to talk about Sand Valley’s forefathers. From my perspective, we’re just as crazy and desperate as they were.

Mim says Sand Valley always had a strange way about it. Even for a desert, there were odd and extremely inhospitable qualities to it – areas that the locals knew to steer clear of. Some parts of the Valley experienced random spikes in temperature hot enough to parboil the flesh right off a man. Then there were the occasional tremors that rocked not only the Valley, but the mountain ranges and the wealthier cities of Mavishton or Lothesborough, located on the other side of Geltha and Hugor. For a while, white collies from other cities loved to visit the mountain ranges, poke around Mavishton, Lothesborough, and Sand Valley, and throw around fancy terms to explain the phenomena like “underground hydrothermal waters” and “seismic activity.” One of them once wrote a fancy paper stating the tremors were the result of seismic waves causing minor quakes. To hear it from Mim and other locals, everybody who knew anything about Sand Valley knew that was a load of dragon shit.

That became widely known after The Great Awakening. What isn’t as widely known is the events of the day before the Great Awakening. That day, a man by the name of Guff Willis saw the first dragon burst from the trembling grains of Sand Valley. Guff was a bit of an odd one, so of course nobody took him seriously when he stumbled into town screeching about some “dragon” that had crawled out of the pits of Hell. But by the next night, Guff was one of the only two topics anyone in Sand Valley could talk about. The other topic of course, was the dragons.

Mim told me that the day of The Great Awakening was a real scorcher, even by Sand Valley standards. By full noon the sand was so hot it was liable to melt the soles of your shoes. Tremors had been rolling through the Valley, rebounding off Geltha and Hugor. Some townsfolk joked that the two mountain ranges were having an argument. Other folks joked that it was Guff’s dragon. Turned out the joke was on the folks poking at Guff, because shortly after noon, dozens of dragons exploded from the scalding sands and set upon the town. From what Mim said while high and complacent to my insatiable curiosity, her glassy eyes fixed on visions of the past, the Valley was stained blood-red for weeks after The Great Awakening. Hungry dragons fresh out of what white collies think was a long hibernation tore into just about anything, including the people of Sand Valley. Including my birth mom. She had me in her arms when a dragon raked its talons across her chest, instantly killing her. It devoured her as I fell from her grip. Her blood was the geyser that soaked me and disguised my scent, likely saving my life. Mim saw the whole thing happen from her hiding spot in the battered skeleton of what had been the town pub. Covered in alcohol and shards of timber and glass, she watched my mother be massacred in horror. She told me it was the oddest thing though – I fell to the ground, covered in blood and half-baking from the heat, but never made a sound. She never once heard me cry. Half-convinced I was dead, she finally crept out to check on me after the last dragon had flown away. Covered in my mother’s gore, I’d looked her straight in the eye. Mim swears she saw a gleam in my infant gaze that spoke of something special. Otherworldly. What I know is that Mim’s thought process is a strange combination of superstitious ideologies and unsentimental logic. In her eyes I was both dragon-spared and baptized in the blood of my mother. There were no stronger omens of greatness. I was a good investment. She believed I would help ward off the flying demons and garner her some form of otherworldly protection. Worst case scenario, I was a potential earner. She took me in that day and raised me as her own. As for Guff Willis, nobody in Sand Valley had seen him since The Great Awakening. Most people think a dragon got him.

Under the tiniest glow of the morning sun, I braided my hair deftly, sliding my feet into my boots and squinting at the mirror in the creeping dawn to make sure I looked tidy. My life might be a dragon-damned disaster, but as Mim would say, tidiness mattered to the white collies in management, so it sure as shit better matter to a blue collie like me. I felt the same jangle in my gut I always did as I got ready to leave my house. My dayshift at the grocery store in Mavishton was part of life as a blue collie. After The Great Awakening, the divide between white collies and blue collies became starkly defined. Dragons were diurnal. This meant that all major industries capable of doing so shifted their labor hours to nighttime. White collies like teachers, engineers, and stuffy businessmen stayed safely in their underground houses, while we blue collies were stuck in older model above-ground homes, working undesirable dayshifts as essential workers. Some white collies like doctors and nurses had to work dayshifts too, but hospitals valued their white collies, and paid the exorbitant fees for private access tunnels to fancy VIP subways constructed after The Great Awakening. Blue collies weren’t worth much. Being from Sand Valley made me worth even less. This meant I had to take my chances on foot to the closest economy-fare subway station.

I took a deep breath and strode out my reinforced front door, setting a nice pace for my run while keeping my ears pricked and eyes peeled for any signs of early-risen dragons. The closest subway station was five miles away. With the advent of our new, fiery friends, gas stations were vacant, burnt-out ruins that silently heralded pre-Awakening times. Most cars became fancy lawn ornaments almost overnight. Electric cars soared in price, and blue collies got used to traveling by foot. Five miles. When I first started running this route as a teen, it took me a nerve-wracking hour. I’d arrive to the subway station a sweaty, panting, snotty mess, my lungs burning so badly I could’ve sworn I was part-dragon myself and breathing fire. My stamina had improved since then, and I could make the run from my home to the station in thirty-seven minutes. Thirty-seven of the longest minutes of my life every morning.

Some days I spent my thirty-seven-minute run mentally cursing the system. Blue collies had always been the ants upon the backs of which this dragon-damned country was held. The Awakening had only worsened the status quo. The uber-wealthy that lived just outside the Valley had everything delivered to their fancy underground palaces. They replaced their private jets with private subway cars. White collies in the area either had compensation packages that included VIP underground travel to dayshifts, or coveted night shifts that protected them from the horrors of dragons being in the Valley. The rest of the world watched, racing against the clock to find a solution to our dragon problem. The problem was that the world wasn’t sure how to kill them and wasn’t keen to risk what was currently a local problem becoming more widespread. The most concerning solution I’d heard rumors of to date was finding a way to isolate the dragons to this area. I suspected that that “solution” included writing most of us have-nots off as collateral damage.

When I didn’t curse the system, I spent my thirty-seven-minute run trying to understand The Awakening and dragons in general, especially the fact that they were somehow real. Dragon lore had existed among ancient civilizations. Stupidly, modern civilization assumed it was little more than ancient fiction meant to simultaneously horrify and entertain the masses. My theory was that dragons had gone into hibernation long enough for the truth of their existence to die out. Those “seismic waves” and “heat spikes?” Dragons deep underground, shifting and possibly breathing small spurts of fire as they slept. How long could we expect these dragons to stay active for, before returning to hibernation? More concerning – was Sand Valley the only resting place for dragons, or was the world in for another Awakening?

My feet pounded the sand as I ran. I glanced at my phone. Twenty-three minutes down, more than halfway to the subway station. I had fourteen minutes left. Sweat trickled down my cheek as I took a few more strides, when suddenly my heart jolted in my chest. Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh. The sound I’d hoped to never hear. Mim had described it to me in detail. Said it was unmistakable. Loud. As usual, she was right – there was no mistaking the flapping sound of dragon wings, and I was running through the dragon-damned wasteland known as Sand Valley. Years ago, Sand Valley blue collies had dug out emergency underground shelters along the route to the subway station, but I had at least another three minutes until I reached the next one. Little more than wood beam-enforced pits in the ground, it was a typical Sand Valley response to a massive problem – minimal effort that served to allow citizens to continue existing in this hellhole we called home.

Swoosh. Swoosh. Swoosh. The sound grew louder as I picked up my pace, my breath sawing through my lungs raggedly, my heart pounding in my ears. I glanced back and tripped over my feet, nearly face-planting. A scaled beast about the size of a mountain lion if you didn’t count the wings was rapidly approaching. I turned around and ran faster.

“Damn it, Lyra, you will not die today!” I whisper-screamed as I sprinted toward the next emergency shelter.

I knew it was impossible. My brain had done the math and I knew there was no reaching that dragon-damned shelter before the beast was upon me. I felt the heat first, a sudden spike in temperature, before the razor-sharp claws circled my torso. I flailed, kicked, screamed to no avail as I felt my body leave the ground. I looked up. A reptilian-looking scaled belly and limbs filled my gaze. The claws around me tightened, cutting off my ability to breathe. I squirmed fruitlessly, knowing that blackness awaited me in only a few minutes. Just before oblivion took me, a final thought crossed my mind: So much for Mim’s superstition that I was somehow special and dragon-spared.