Finding the Valley

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

In fact, there never were. At least, not in Prith’s lifetime, nor his grandparents’ lifetime, nor their grandparents’ lifetime. Prith had no idea, but the last time there were dragons in the Valley, his ancestors of fifty generations ago nearly died— along with everyone else on the continent. But because Prith did not know this, it was not on his mind. Instead, as he stood and looked out over the Valley, he gasped softly and shivered for reasons completely unrelated to any sense of impending peril.

Prith’s skin was still cooling from the last two weeks of trekking. The change in temperature was a surprisingly sudden sensation. Emerging from the oppressive mugginess of the dense jungle into the grassy Valley was almost like dropping through the ice on a lake in its abruptness. With the humidity no longer sealed in by dense foliage, the temperature felt like it dropped from something like a steam-oven to a pleasant afternoon in early summer.

The other sudden and astonishing effect of leaving the jungle was that Prith and his companions now had their first view of the Valley, in all its glory, teeming with many thousands of dragons. Most people would go their whole lives without seeing a single dragon. A few well-traveled merchants might see one or two, high in the skies, and they would retell the story at every dinner party they went to for the rest of their lives. But now, Prith was seeing what felt like every dragon in the world all at once. The afternoon sun glinted off of wings and backs and tails, glinting and sparkling ranges of colors in a million distant pinpricks of dazzling glitter. Sometimes the colors clustered here and there – Prith could identify those as spots where the same breed had gathered. Then, in other places in the Valley, the colors speckled wildly, shifting and glittering like a kaleidoscope made of stained-glass windows, where dragons of different ages or from different regions were mingling or passing by one another.

Prith was enjoying the view when he heard a soft, awe-struck gasp behind him.

“Just like you imagined, Yini? Aren’t you glad you’re not in some boring, stuffy clerking office now?” Prith smiled but he couldn’t take his eyes off of the Valley as he asked.

“I didn’t think there would be so many! They’re so beautiful… the colors…” Her voice quietly trailed off in speechless wonder and reverence as she slowly let her pack slide off her small shoulders and down to the grass at her feet.

“Their scales are really remarkable – they catch and refract light in different specific ways, depending on the age and the breed. They each have their own coloration, but they also have variations in structure, thickness, flexibility, and so on. You’ll see, when we collect a few shed scales for samples.” Prith gestured vaguely down the slope toward the grassland below.

Yini blinked, startled by the comprehension of what Prith’s promise of collecting shed scales might entail. “How close are we going to get?”

“Close as we need to, and not an inch closer,” came Loytow’s voice from behind as the big man trudged out of the jungle. “Dragons aren’t so aggressive as stories say. We’re just ants to them. They won’t mind us so long as we aren’t…” Loytow’s words of reassurance were entirely lost as he laid eyes on the Valley and its dazzling menagerie of dragons. He had seen nearly fifty dragons in his life as an experienced guide in the wilderness, but he had never seen more than three at one time. Prith couldn’t help but smile at the effect that nature could invoke in even the most jaded, experienced wilderness guides. It made studying Great Magical Creatures worth the risks and inconveniences.

“Didn’t I promise you a story worth telling?”

Loytow chuckled. “You promised a thousand dragons. Might be the first time I’ve been paid more than I was promised. Not that this is payment, mind—a view won’t fill my belly or clothe my back. But… if it could… This…” Loytow, like Yini, found it hard to properly finish a sentence when confronted with the stunning splendor of nature on display in the Valley before them.

The trio soaked in the spectacle for a few long, silent minutes. Prith opened his pack and, after grabbing two notebooks he did not want to write in at that moment, he finally pulled out his medium softcover notebook, with the light brown cover. After asking Yini for a charcoal pencil, Prith made a quick, rough sketch of the Valley and scribbled a few notes.

“Do you need me to write anything?” Yini asked, wondering if her job was starting right at that moment.

“Not now. I’ll mostly need you for dictation and referencing work once we’re all set up down there.” Prith closed his notebook.

“Speaking of which, we should pick a spot to set up camp for the next few days. Somewhere tucked out of the way. We should probably keep close to the Lejdnau foothills,” Prith made a motion with the flat of his hand like a knife, pushing it East, indicating staying close to the slopes leading up to the jungle behind them. Loytow and Yini agreed, and within a few minutes the three had sighted out a promising alcove further down in the Valley, a few miles from the nearest dragons.

“Already gettin’ all sorts o’ visitors,” Loytow grumbled as he held his spyglass up to his eye and swept it up and down the length of the Valley, counting a half-dozen small encampments tucked along the edges of the Valley.

“I’m only surprised there aren’t more, really. An event like this is literally the stuff of myths and legends! Every poet and bard, every student and professor, every merchant dealing in exotic goods,” Prith’s voice dripped with distain, “They’ll all want to be here.”

“And lookey-loos and thrill-seekers. They’re the ones to watch for. They’ll do something stupid, no doubt. Get themselves ate or crisped. Just hope no one else goes with them for their stupidity.” Loytow frowned as he slapped a thick, calloused hand over his spyglass and collapsed it back down to store back in his pack.

***

As the three of them carefully hiked down the slopes that descended into the Valley, Yini pointed out the Roughridges that formed a sort of small pseudo-canyon around the Ashen River.

“Whatdya call ‘em?” Loytow moved closer to Yini and hunched his frame down to better hear her as they took careful steps down the grassy hill.

“Roughridges. See, on either side of the river?” Yini pointed to the pair of craggly rock formations that jutted up at a steep angle from the Valley floor for a thousand feet, then dropped off just as steeply back into the ground. Like a single, tiny mountain stretched along the length of the river, duplicated on either side. While most rivers carve their own canyons, the Ashen River seemed to have been placed in a canyon that was a little too big for it, like a child wearing an older sibling’s coat.

“One of the most unusual, unexplained things of any landscape on the continent.”

“Nothin’ unexplained about a canyon and a river. That’s just how nature works,” Loytow retorted.

“Ah!—but the river didn’t carve the Roughridges! If it did, they’d be smoother, for one thing. And the riverbanks, even after a heavy rain, are over a quarter mile away from the Roughridge walls. But the Roughridges still follow the bends in the river. That’s one of the mysteries of the Valley!” Yini grinned. Prith, keeping only a few steps in front of the other two, smiled. Yini’s passion for the mysteries of nature matched his own, and as they descended into a valley to study the largest gathering of dragons ever recorded, this display of enthusiasm reassured him that he’d made the right hiring decision.

“One of ‘em?” Loytow grunted, less excited by the prospect of nature presenting too many mysteries in once place. “How many mysteries the Valley got?”

Yini’s eyes unconsciously went up and at an angle as she pursed her lips in thought. “Well, there’s the Roughridges, the permanently temperate weather, the Ashen River’s resistance to magic, and now—” Her hands still gripping both of her pack straps, she poked one tiny finger towards the endless mass of dragons. “So, at least four, right?”

“Huh. No foolin’. I guess never get out here enough. It’s a nice place. Quiet, calm—when it’s not full o’ dragons, o’ course. But there’s not much demand to bring folk out here. It’s a tough trip, and I suppose there’s other nice spots closer to cities. Easier to get to, less travel time.”

“Like I said, that’s why I hired Yini to come with us. She’s one of the few people I’ve talked to with any knowledge about the Valley or interest in coming here,” Prith said over his shoulder back to Loytow.

“Which job was it?” Loytow grinned at Yini. They’d only known each other for a few weeks, but there hadn’t been an evening of campfire stories when Yini hadn’t revealed some experience from a different temporary job.

Yini smiled up at Loytow in recognition of the understanding. “I worked in the rare collections section at the library for a while. It was slow, to say the least, so I would look through the shelves most days. It was boring work, but it’s a fascinating place to spend free time. I think most of the books and maps about the Valley are at least a century old. No one’s been interested in this place in generations. I guess no one could figure out where the Roughridges came from, or how the place stays so temperate between two extreme climates, and the puzzle got abandoned.”

Loytow guffawed. “Ha! Well, when it’s not full o’ dragons, there’s not much here! Easy to forget about and ignore. Like a bum peasant mud-farmer: no one knows and no one cares. But then when that nobody farmer’s distant great-uncle dies and leaves him a fortune, he’s suddenly got a whole lot o’ friends.”

“Well, the Valley isn’t completely forgotten,” Yini offered. “You know that old expression ‘Finding the Valley’? Like when two sides don’t get along, but they come to some kind of agreement or compromise?”

“O’ course. A valley’s where two different bits o’ something meet up. Makes sense.”

“Not just any valley. The Valley. And not just any two ‘different bits.’ As ‘different bits’ as you can get!” Yini looked across the grassy expanse to the towering, foreboding, snow-white peaks to the West— as different as a place could be from the comparatively gentle hills covered in thick, sweltering jungle in which they spent the last few weeks. “That expression is about this place. Even if we’ve forgotten about the place, we refer to it all the time.”

“Maybe people would get along a little better if they knew more about this odd hiccup of geography. It could be inspiring for them,” Prith mused. “It’s probably best they don’t all come to learn about it right now, though.” He smiled as he kept looking out at the ever-closer, endless mass of dragons in front of him.

***

The next morning, all three made their way carefully down the Eastern Roughridge to collect samples near the river. Prith gathered pieces of shed scales and remnants of hatched dragon eggs and dictated his observations to Yini, who recorded his words carefully. After a few hours between the river and the high, Loytow called out for Prith and waved him over to him, a short way off from where Prith and Yini were making notes on the samples.

Prith came over and stood next to Loytow with his arms folded across his chest. He didn’t need a spyglass to see a person rappelling down a cliff face on the Western Roughridge.

“Exquisite.” Prith’s voice was one part disgust and two parts weariness.

“Yup,” Loytow confirmed without lowering his spyglass.

Prith gave an irritated sigh.

Yini was just walking up to join them, looking down at her notes. She looked up, confused. “What’s exquisite?”

“That,” Loytow handed the spyglass to Yini and pointed across the river to a small camp on the Western Roughridge, across the river from where they stood. As Yini trained the spyglass where Loytow pointed, Prith spoke up.

“Exquisite Enterprises. Merchants of high-end, luxury goods. They send people out to places like this to collect whatever they can sell to their customers. They will get plenty of dragon scales from this expedition, I’m sure. Who knows what else. Yini, we are going to have a visitor very soon. Could you please gather up all of the notes and store them safely in your pack? And then make sure your pack is tied tightly. And… It’s best not to say too much to our visitor. If she asks a lot of questions, just tell her you don’t know, or deflect somehow.”

Yini herself had a lot of questions about this imminent visitor and why Prith already had such thoroughly formed ideas about her, but she knew she would get her answers soon enough. It wasn’t long before she saw a lanky woman, not much taller than Yini but more wiry, almost spindly, but wrapped tightly in a thin layer of dense, lean muscle. She was probably in her late 20s, Yini guessed. She was moving quickly and confidently towards their camp. She certainly looked the part of a seasoned and well-equipped explorer, outfitted with bundles of rope, sample bags, and a few small packs fastened around her. As she approached, she gave a small, delicate wave of greeting to Prith and Loytow seemed oddly out of place. A wild place like the Valley demanded big, broad, grand gestures, it seemed to Yini. A small wave like hers seemed better suited to a fancy, extravagant gala. When the visitor spoke, Yini immediately realized from the woman’s accent that she must have been raised to practice such small, polite waves for such fancy, extravagant galas.

“Why, Prithakard Ilojen, I thought I might find you in the Valley this season! I am truly so delighted you have managed to join us. And Mr. Loytow, always a pleasure,” She gave a small smile as she bent her knees as an aristocratic lady might, though an aristocratic lady would never, for any reason, wear those clothes or be within a thousand miles of a place like this.

“Nice to see you too, Tali. Here to scoop up the loose dragon scales, I’m guessing?” Prith had not moved any closer to the visitor since she approached. Tali stopped a few a feet away from Prith and put her hands on her hips, her tone now slightly less airy and congenial.

“You make it sound positively criminal, Prith. Like I’m ripping the scales off of babies! Recovering what nature discards is merely being thrifty.”

“No one has any problem with you taking what nature discards, of course. We all just want to see safety prioritized, especially considering the extraordinary circumstances that—”

“And isn’t it extraordinary!? Why, the view from the Intatolk peaks looking down, it was—well, I’m sure you had a nice view from the side you arrived from, even if it was a much lower elevation, further away, and gave you much less of a comprehensive view of the entire Valley.” Yini noticed that while Tali’s tone was polite, delicate, almost apologetic, her eyes were decisively none of those things.

“It was a lovely view of probably the most incredible phenomenon any of us will ever witness,” Prith replied calmly, holding in a snide remark comparing Tali’s personality to the cold, sharp, treacherous peaks of the mountains to the West.

“Of course it was. Best not to think about how much better it would have been if you’d only had a better vantage point. Speaking of vantage points,” Tali slowly took another step closer to Prith, “From your academic vantage point, have you figured out what all this…” – she moved her hand in a circle meant to reduce the thousands of dragons to something smaller and simpler – “…is? Why so many dragons, why now, what they will do, how long they’ll do it?” She angled her head subtly but sharply and held it still, her eyes studying Prith before looking towards the dragons, then back to Prith.

“No. It seems that egg-laying is involved, but I’ve only been here for a day, so I don’t have a lot of firm conclusions.” Yini had not heard Prith limit himself to a single sentence about dragons in all the months she’d known him.

“Well, do keep a lady informed, will you? I’d positively love to hear that they’re replacing the old with the young. I can scarcely imagine how much we could make selling dragon bones!” Tali was already turning as she finished her sentence. She seemed almost skipping, there was so much spring in her step. A skein of rope across her back slapped against the sheath of a large knife as her excitement carried her back towards the river. Yini could see the tension in Prith’s jaw.

“I haven’t seen someone that politely rude since I clerked in a government office.” Yini’s attempt to ease the tension worked, and Prith and Loytow both laughed.

“Ugh. Can you imagine it? Tali in government?” Loytow spat as if to get the taste of the idea out of his mouth.

“I almost can,” Prith chuckled humorlessly. “Except that she’d never be able to stay inside for a whole day. She’d end up scaling the city hall tower just out of a reflex or habit or something.”

“So, you’ve obviously crossed paths before and you’re obviously not friends. How worried should I be about Ms. Tali and her ‘Exquisite Enterprises’?” Yini asked as she unpacked the bundle of field notes to resume work.

Prith exchanged a look with Loytow and exhaled a breath that carried a light groan out of his lungs that made him momentarily seem twenty years older.

“Talinya Resokorah and I run into each other in the field now and then. An abandoned dragon cave, an old phoenix nesting ground—places like that. I want to study the site and collect notes and samples. She wants to loot and pillage, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve filed a few complaints about her over the years for poaching and for interfering with spaces not open to private sector exploitation. None of it has stopped her, of course. It’s hard to stop that much money.” Prith brought his hands up in front of him in a shrug of demoralized exasperation. Yini nodded in understanding and empathy.

“Makes sense,” she said. “She’s here for money. You’re here for research.”

***

The second day at the bottom of the Eastern Roughridge was terrifying for the four people who were there. For everyone else, it would merely be the start of events that would change the continent.

Tali had been in the Valley for over a week, and the dragons closest to her camp had learned to ignore her. Practically from dawn to dusk, she was nearby, carrying off shed scales or egg fragments. Dragons were clearly intelligent creatures, but they did not seem overly fascinated by humans. Yini wondered if dragons wondered about humans taking their organic refuse. Tali did not consider that possibility. Her imagination was more directed towards making money or finding adventure, and the inner lives of dragons did not captivate her imagination. The fantasy of selling hundreds of dragon scales to merchants in a dozen cities did captivate her imagination.

Tali had noticed, however, that some of the newer shed scales were much more vibrant than the comparatively faded ones, and this sparked two questions in Tali’s imagination: First, what is the freshest possible scale that could be acquired? Second, how much would it be worth at auction? Tali allowed her imagination to fantasize about the second question. If, years later, Prith sat down and applied his academic methodologies and traced all of the causes of all of the events of that day, he would conclude that this fantasizing was the primary cause of his sprained ankle.

The insouciance of the dragons made Tali’s job much easier and safer. But as danger recedes further away from Tali, some force in the universe compels her to close that distance. And so, Tali’s obsession with seeking the freshest scale, combined with the indifference of a 60-foot long female Goldspeckle Greenvine became the powder keg.

Tali spotting a loose scale dangling on the enormous creature’s hip was the spark.

The dragon hadn’t minded Tali walking near her. Tali even walked under her at one point. The overlapping scales on her legs offered minimal purchase, but there were a lot of them and they were spaced regularly, so Tali reasoned it wouldn’t be any more difficult than a moderate free-climb, and the scale was only 20 or 30 feet up. The dragon surely wouldn’t notice, particularly if Tali waited until she was asleep to make the climb.

Tali approached quietly and slowly during the late afternoon, creeping up to the sleeping heap of green and gold scales. Tali tentatively reached out a hand and touched the dragon’s enormous foot. No reaction. Tali slowly pressed down, applying more pressure. She was sure the full weight of a human would be nothing to a creature this massive. The dragon showed no reaction even when Tali hoisted herself up to the dragon’s ankle. Tali began to climb, slowly at first, then more quickly as she became accustomed to the scales and their spacing. She closed in on the loose scale. Fifteen feet. Ten feet. Five.

Then the dragon noticed.

Tali’s contingency plan for the dragon becoming agitated was to hide in some nook or cranny of the Western Roughridge, but that plan assumed that the dragon would react on first contact, not once Tali was 30 feet up. She had no plan for this, but if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because she also had no plan for what to do if the dragon took flight while she was still on it.

As the wind started to rush around her with a great lurch, the first thought Tali had was that she needed better grip. However, the only thing available to her that was not a smooth dragon scale was a loose, dangling dragon scale. She reached up and grabbed it firmly with her left hand, keeping her right on the thin rim of grip offered by the other scales. The loose scale held fast, so Tali transferred more of her weight to it as the dragon rose into the air. When the scale suddenly tore loose, Tali had the good sense to let go and immediately grab back for grip. She was entirely unprepared for the spurt of thick, rancid fluid that followed the removal of the scale. She was too overwhelmed by the sensation of the viscous greenish yellow pouring down over her head and body to hear the screech of the dragon.

Prith, Loytow, and Yini were not so preoccupied by disgusting effluvia, and so they did hear the screech. They looked up in time to see a massive Goldspeckle Greenvine diving towards the ground uncomfortably close to them.

“Run!” Prith’s shout was entirely unnecessary since they were already instinctively fleeing. They sprinted for the meager cover of the Eastern Roughridge. Now that they were facing the steep, stony crags, they could not see the dragon pull out of the dive barely ten feet above the ground and make an impossibly sharp banking turn to bring herself parallel to the Roughridge. The force of the wind from the massive creature making such violent maneuvers knocked all three of them to the ground.

Tali, her blood coursing with adrenaline and her body coated in the most disgusting substance she had ever encountered, carefully timed her dismount as the dragon got close to the ground. However, she had not at all counted on the sudden, sharp turn, nor the stupefying force of the wind generated by sudden movements of a creature of this size. For barely a full second, Tali bobbed and swirled in the currents of air like a leaf. Whatever majesty or awe the sight might have held, it was unceremoniously cut off by Tali getting clipped by the tail of the dragon as it flew past. Tail tumbled the remaining 15 feet to the ground in a disoriented tumble. She did her best to keep rolling upon impact, spreading out the energy of the fall as she had done many times before.

The dragon flew tightly up against the Eastern Roughridge, dragging her right flank – where Tali had been only seconds before— against the rocky formation. Stones and rocks went splintering in all directions.

Prith heard the thump of Tali’s impact onto the tall grass.

“Get to cover!” He yelled to Yini and Loytow. Prith leapt back on his feet and ran over to Tali, shouting her name.

“Tali! Tali! Are you alright?”

Tali coughed. Prith involuntarily scrunched his nose at the scent.

“Oh, ugh, wha—get up, get up, we have to get cover! Get up!” Prith’s questions were drowned out by the frantic instinct to survive.

Her heart still pounding, and no major bones obviously broken, Tali shakily but quickly got to her feet with Prith’s help, and the two of them ran towards the safety of the Roughridge. Tali stumbled and weaved unsteadily, and Prith had to keep an arm around her to keep her on her feet and pointed in the right direction.

The two staggered the rest of the distance to the Roughridge and crammed themselves into the first nook they spotted. It was a tight fit for two people, but there weren’t any other alcoves big enough for a single person.

The dragon circled high into the sky, still screeching occasionally in the distance. Prith and Tali started to regain control over their breath and felt their bodies ease from the tension of the last thirty seconds. After a moment, when he thought he could speak again, Prith turned his head slightly. A few pebbles trickled down the side of the alcove as he moved his neck to face Tali. Then the sound of a few pebbles clattering on a stone continued, and took on a deeper resonance, until Prith and Tali felt a rumble in the ground and just as both of their eyes widened, the ground under them gave way and they plummeted into darkness.