Dragons in the Valley, Oh My!

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Well, that is, until I messed up and kind of wished them into existence. Yup. I messed up bad on this one.

A year ago, Hill View Valley was your typical American suburbia. We went to school and to work, teenagers like me played baseball in the street, and parents did whatever it is that parents do. In the wintertime, it always snowed, and we’d have to shovel out the vehicles and they never bothered canceling school. Never. One time, it dumped fifteen inches of snow overnight and you’d have thought that school would have been canceled. You’d be dead wrong because Hill View Valley High School and the Hill View Valley Public School System didn’t cancel for anything short of three feet of snow.

My dad was the Chief of Police, so you can imagine that my version of wild Friday nights was as tame as a group of nuns playing bingo. My brother liked to sneak out, and he liked to raise a little hell on the weekends. So naturally, he spent most of his time grounded because dad always caught him. It was like dad was psychic and always knew when he was trying to sneak out.

Mom was, for all intents and purposes, a stay-at-home mom, although she ran a small bookkeeping business from our house. Which always amazed me that she always managed to have a hot dinner on the table for when we all came home. Of course, I later found out she was having dinner delivered by some catering service. She just took the food out of the packaging and put it on the plates for us. But I suppose it’s the effort that mattered. I always wondered if dad knew. If he did, he never mentioned any of it.

Yup, sounds like a pretty incredible way of life, huh? And me, being a “typical” teenager, naturally I hated it. I’d have given anything to change how we lived. I was young and dumb because I had no idea what the consequences of my actions were going to be.

Last year, about a week before my sixteenth birthday, my aunt gave me this weird snow globe looking thing. Warned me about manifesting with it. I didn’t really pay her any mind at the time, because my aunt was always going on about super natural this, magic that. She was considered the town spooky person and was a practicing witch. Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize “practicing Witch” was her actual job description. I know now that she had warned me about manifesting my desires when I was near it because it might try to make your dreams come true. Too bad I barely listened, because if I had, Hill View Valley might not be in the situation that it’s in. Have I mentioned my proclivity to have the attention span of a dead goldfish? Anyway, I spent the next week before my birthday laying on my bed, in my room, directly underneath that snow globe, wishing about how different my life could be.

The next week, on my sixteenth birthday, I got my wish and in a big way. It was up to the exact moment the blue smoke erupted from the snow globe I fully believed everything my aunt said was complete hog wash. Before my friends came over, I snuck away. I took the snow globe down to the small creek behind our house and was just tossing it around. I have no idea what made me decide to take the snow globe, but I did. Everything was normal, until I missed, and it dropped like a lead balloon right into the creek. Remember that blue smoke I mentioned? Oh yeah. It erupted out of that globe like one of those smoke grenades you can get for the Fourth of July. Yanno, those things are kind of cool. I’ve seen tic-tok videos with people painting with them or staining their clothes. But not like getting mustard on your shirt staining their clothes. More like in an artistic way. Oh, right, the blue smoke from the globe. Since the dragons, I haven’t been able to take my ADHD meds like I’m supposed to.

At first, I figured it was some sort of gimmick ball. You know the ones, you get ‘em wet and they foam up or in this case, erupt in smoke. The smoke had a terrible smell, too. Like someone had hard cooked a bunch of eggs, then let them spoil. Then again, thinking back on it, I don’t think a gimmick ball would explain the extreme drop in temperature to the point frost was forming on the creek. And in the middle of July, that absolutely should have been a warning alarm. After a couple minutes of smoke, long enough that the creek was nearly frozen solid, a small spark of light came out of the snow globe.

I remember thinking something like, “Great, I’m going to die in a minor explosion in the woods. I’ll be covered in some kind of blue gunk, and the flames will probably horribly disfigure my face.” Okay–I’ll admit it, I can be a tad bit, well, morbid.

That spark grew into what I can only describe as a fairy. Think about Tinkerbell from “Peter Pan” and you get the idea. The little thing identified himself as “Nix”, and that he had a deal to offer me. Bit of advice for you: always read the terms and conditions before you make any deals with the fae. I, like a stupid teenager, did not. Nix explained to me he was the literal manifestation of my desires, and that he was there to fulfill whatever I wanted. He told me that anything I could possibly imagine, I could make it a reality. And that if I agreed, he’d give me a mushroom to eat, and whatever I dreamed about that night would eventually become reality. In return, I must complete whatever quest comes about from my dreams. I later found out that I was going to be the equivalent of what is fairy reality TV, more or less.

So anyway, he warned me that if I ate the mushroom, then I would be bound by the contract that was started, until I fulfilled it. Which truthfully, really should have been an immediate red flag. I should have had some alarm going off in my head screaming, “don’t do this, you big dummy!” But again, stupid teenager, so I did not. Surprisingly, I didn’t run home and pop it in my mouth straight away. And I’d like to tell you it’s because I was contemplating the consequences of my actions. It was not. Actually, I got home, got distracted as all hell, ended up doing homework, dishes, and tried to read a book. I had gone to bed, then shot up out of my bed and realized I had forgotten the mushroom.

It had a delightfully tingly taste, sort of like fizzy lemonade.

When nothing happened, I shrugged, and figured it more made up. My mind rationalized that obviously my aunt was playing some massive trick on me, and that none of this was real. I had no idea exactly how she did it, but the rationale that it was a prank soothed my mind, and I fell fast asleep.

And for the next week, nothing was weird or abnormal. I went to school; I came home; did chores; hung out with my friends, for Pete’s sake, I got pizza on Friday night. I believe I completely forgot about the mushroom, the fae, everything my aunt said, and everything related to the entire incident. I mean, c’mon, I’m a teenager with ADHD and a minuscule attention span. It wasn’t going to get any more attention than I had already spent on it.

Until everything got turned upside down.

I actually quite vividly remember sitting in Mrs. Hayes’ English class, getting yet another lecture on using weak, fifty-cent words in our essays. We had to complete a four-page essay on a subject of our choice–I had picked something about the environment. Nothing was ever good enough for Mrs. Hayes. If we used too many “weak” words, she’d take points off. That’s how I know words like “proclivity”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard another teenager even use that word, let alone correct.

I was the first to see the two mages, and the knight came walking towards the high school–from my desk, I could see the front of my school and the approach. The mages wore these brilliant yellow-red-orange robes that seemed to be bursts of sunlight coming towards the building. The knight wore black armor that reflected the sunlight, the red feather on his helmet flapping in the slight breeze. Each of the mages carried a staff, while the knight carried a halberd. The trio stopped on top of the hill outside of school, seeming to stare at where I was sitting.

As soon as the dismissal bell rang, I ran outside. People were already flooding out of the school, and I had no idea why they weren’t freaking out. I could have sworn I heard someone commenting about the trio, but it was too soft, and I was moving too fast to comprehend it. One mage identified the trio as members of the Order of the Burning Daylight, and I knew the water ran deep. It all came flooding back to me, about the fae, the mushroom, all of it. Then I remembered what I had dreamed about that night, after eating the mushroom. Dragons. Specifically, that dragons had been real but had died out, but now they were back. The mages informed me I was The Chosen One™, and that it was my responsibility to put down the Dragon Queen, from which all other dragons had spawned.

Yeah, so do you remember the part about that quest I mentioned? Well, there she be!

And…. I have tried. A lot. Oh, sorry, I’m skipping ahead again.

My best friends, Jeremy, Michael, and I took up arms to help me fulfill my quest. Let’s be honest, if I was getting dragged into it, so were they. Since Jeremy was skilled in archery to start with, he took up the arms of an archer, while Michael took up the robes of a mage. We figured out really quickly that lightning is dangerous, and he has to be careful where he points that stuff. And I, well, I took up the knight’s mantel, being gifted armor and a sword that seemed to be made from some sort of blue metal.

We figured out the lightning bit the hard way after he zapped the bajeesus out of me. We actually learned a couple of important lessons that day. For starters, we can kill each other. Lightning is very chaotic and hard to control. If I were to die, such as I did with lightning, things sort of started over. It’s kind of hard to explain exactly what happens, because I’m not entirely sure I understand it myself. It appears that when I die, it sort of loops back to the day after everything started. That was after we had gotten our armor and equipment and had begun to discover exactly what we could do. Most things happened exactly the way they had the previous time, although there were sometimes minor detail changes. For instance, the first twenty-one times we looped, the car that almost hits me when I try to cross the street was red. The twenty-second time, it changed to yellow. Of course, it still almost hits me, so I learned not to step out into that street.

We met our first dragon just three days after the initial event. That’s pretty much what we call it, the event. We don’t really know what else to call it, so that’s what we stuck with. And let me tell you, that dragon roasted us and absolutely kicked our butts without mercy. Woke up the next day, the loop had restarted–that was the second time the loop restarted on us. We eventually adapted the mentality that we were in a video game, playing as the main characters, that’s when things clicked for us, and we didn’t get roasted as often. And, like gamers often do, we got cocky. We figured ‘oh, we’ve killed a couple of dragons, let’s take a run at the Queen!’. Big mistake. She swatted us like you and I swat flies.

I’m still not entirely sure how all of this affects the other people in my town. I have no idea if they’re aware of the loop, only that they perceive the events that happen. So, for instance, they are aware of the attacking dragons. They’re aware of our roles in trying to stop the aforementioned dragons. But it’s impossible for me to know how they perceive the “reset” of the loop. I mean, do they know it’s happening? Or do they just think it’s another ordinary day (except with dragons)?

Over the last year, I’m pretty sure we’ve tried dozens upon dozens of original plans and tactics to try to kill the Queen. I’m calling it a “year” because of how many “days” have passed since the event. I’ve been marking them with entries into various journals. Of course, going back to the ambiguity of the loop, I’m not sure if when all of this is said and done, if a year will have actually passed, or if we’ll just reset like nothing happened. Anyway. Dozens of plans. We tried casting a massive sleeping spell, which almost worked, until we stepped on her tail and woke her up. Which she then used to swat us off the cliff, and we plummeted to our deaths. There was also the attempt at dropping giant rocks on her head, which only disoriented and subsequently tick her off. Oh, and there was the catapult we tried, which failed spectacularly. I think you get the picture. And if you don’t, we died a copious amount.

Eventually, we gave up on running directly at the Dragon Queen. We realized that there must be unknown mechanics for us to develop our skills, so we started doing odd jobs. For example, they sent us to arrest a swamp witch and then later a vampire. Before too long, we met other members of the Order of the Burning Daylight (which I’m going to refer to as the OBD from here out). They helped to put us on the right path, more or less. After we did some side quests with them, they gave us the knowledge of the Dawn Stones. Apparently, there’s seven of these Dawn Stones spread out all over the valley. The OBD has been after these for centuries. When combined in a circle around the Dragon Queen, according to legend, they bind her magic and weaken her. We realized we had no choice but to find all seven of the Dawn Stones.

So far, we’ve been able to secure two of them. And that was no straightforward task, either. The first one was being guarded by the biggest spider I’ve ever seen in my entire life. The venom from which killed me nearly instantly. It was a good thing that even if I died, we didn’t lose what progress we had gained. The second one was at the bottom of a lake that I didn’t know existed. Which you’d think would be easy enough to secure, Michael cast some magic so we could breathe underwater. Yeah, have I mentioned I’m really not very good at video games? This was extremely clear in trying to retrieve the second one. A mer-creature-thing killed me and ate my liver not once, not twice, but six times.

I’m sure you’re wondering why we haven’t tried finding the fae whose magic put us all into this mess. Well, we have. We actually found him in the same place as before, odd as that is. I tried explaining to him that this wasn’t what I wanted; it was more than what I had bargained for, etc. We tried bribing him, which failed spectacularly. Heck, Jeremy even tried grabbing him by the wings and shaking him vigorously several times. The only thing that earned us was an electrical shock. Nix was solid in his affirmations that it was, in fact, what I had bargained for. We had made the deal, and we struck the magic. He explained that it’s like forging a sword: once you form the block of hot metal to the sword, there’s no undoing it.

With that being said, I think that pretty much catches you up to where we are. We still have the massive undertaking of taking down the Dragon Queen. And while I believe we can do so, I have no idea how we’re going to do it. So far, it’s been one insanity after another, and I’m quite confident that pattern is going to continue. All I know is that we have a lot of work to do, all so that we might get our lives back. Of course, that’s assuming that it’s even possible to get our lives back. I really don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibilities that Nix tricked me and we got trapped in the middle of this insanity loop.

I guess we’ll find out one way or another. All I know is we’ve got to try.