Fire and Stone

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. It had belonged to humans, before. Farmers and lumberjacks, simple peasants and pagans who had lived in the deep forest. Until the dragons came from the north and took it for themselves. For three hundred years it had been their domain, a rotting tomb of bone and decay, the woods silent and deep, devoid of people.

The valley belonged to the dragons now. People did not go there anymore. But she would.

The letter had come to her two days before, faded ink on crumpled parchment, delivered to the house of her mistress. She had never received a letter before, in her three years of employment as a servant to a noble house. She could not read nor write anyhow, so there was no point in sending or being sent something. Until two days ago. She had the lady’s maid read it to her. Three short sentences with the power to make her leave her post and make for the valley of dragons.

Come home quick. Ma dying. Come home.

The valley was the only way. If she was fast and lucky, it would take her four days at most to cut through and be out the other side of the mountain range, then half a day to reach home.

It would take three weeks to skirt the valley along the main road. She had walked it on her way to the city, sleeping in the trees at night, and continuing in the day, twenty-two straight days until finally, the great palace of the city arose on the horizon. It was twenty-two she could not afford.

Once every few months, she sent her wages home with a travelling merchant, but she had seen him only a few weeks ago and he would not return for another several moons, at the soonest. Though the road was well-trod by horse and cart, even if she could convince someone to take her in the back of their wagon, few people went off the main path to the village, and it would still take too long.

Ma was dying. She would cut through the valley, dragons be damned.

It had taken her half a day to reach the outskirts of the city, and then another half to find the old path that cut through the mountain to the valley. It was overgrown and faded, but still there, evidence of centuries worth of people passing back and forth. That had been two days ago.

For two days, she had barely breathed, aware of even the slightest whisper of sound. She had no belongings save the dress and cape she wore and the shoes on her feet, and the deep cool of the valley chilled her to the bone. At night, she slept in the hollows of trees, the chattering of her teeth deafening in her ears. She wished more than anything for a fire, but she knew she could not, knowing the smell and sight would attract the dragons.

She kept close to the trees, avoiding any gap in the canopy, and stopping every so often to listen out to the skies. There was nothing. Perhaps she was lucky and the dragons had taken up on the other side of the valley and she would be allowed to pass unnoticed.

She ate what she could find, mushrooms and roots and drank from what streams she passed and sucked the dew that formed on leaves into her mouth in the misty mornings. She was weak from hunger and thirst and fatigue but still, she walked, the sun and stars her guide to home, to Ma.

The valley was cool and deep. And silent. No animals scurried through the underbrush, no birds sang from the sky or trees. Fear of dragons was not only a human trait. It was unsettling, the quiet; every snap of twig under her boots sounded like the crack of a whip, announcing her trespassing steps.

The valley was a tomb, a crypt left to rot and fade. It felt like passing through a cemetery where all the gravestones had been so worn down their names could no longer be read. At one point, she passed the bones of an old hut, only the foundation of a fireplace left standing, blackened from dragon fire. It was strange, to step over what once would have been someone’s home.

She wondered what had happened to those who had lived there before. Had they died in the initial invasion, in the fear and blind panic when the dragons first came with swift and righteous destruction? Or had they managed to survive to walk out of the valley, knowing that once they stepped over the threshold of the mountain ranges, they would never be able to return?

She felt a deep, thrumming sadness, like the reverberating pluck of a lute string vibrating through her body. Fear and sadness in equal measure, and the further she went, deeper into the valley she travelled, the more potent it became.

On her third day, she knew she had reached the heart of the valley. She had dreamt of her mother during the nights, and in the strange twilight day in the deep of the forest, she began to see her while awake.

She could see her, back stooped low, scythe in her worn, rough hands. She shifted between the trunks of trees, flitted somewhere in the corner of her eye, here and gone in the half-second it took for her to turn her head. The valley was playing tricks with her.

Perhaps it was her spirit and her Ma was already dead. The dreaded thought had haunted her ever since she had received the letter. That despite all, she would reach home and find her gone, too late to say goodbye.

She refused to dwell on it. She only had to put one foot after the other and live to see one more sunrise in the valley. Ma would not die, not yet. She would not be robbed of seeing her again in this life.

She still had too much to say. Too much to give thanks for. To prostrate and to beg forgiveness, beg absolution. The guilt over their last meeting sat like a stone in her chest, heavy and all-consuming. She should have been a better daughter, a better sister. Her Ma should not have had to grieve the loss of her as well.

Thirteen children she had borne, eleven dead before they saw their fifth summer, six of them stillborns. Eleven graves in the field at the back of their hut, each marked with a stone.

Only she and her sister had survived. Pa died of a fever, six years past. He had joined their collection of stones behind the hut. Ma had not cried; she had merely buried him with her weathered hands and placed his stone, and carried on to the wheat fields for the harvest.

She saw her between the trees, facing away, the line of her back bent and crooked.

This time, she did not disappear, only kept her back turned and walked, scythe in hand, further into the trees, deeper into the jaws of the valley.

She followed, eyes fixed so as to not lose her, her feet moving of their own accord, luring her forward. She began to forget why she was there at all, entranced by the figure before her, a tether latched onto her navel, reeling her in.

Beneath her boot, something crunched in the soil.

Snapping out of her trance, she reared back and scurried to the nearest brush, crawling beneath it as quietly as possible. The crack had echoed around the trees, loud as a clap of thunder. She waited and listened, frozen; but there was no great screech, no leathery beat of wings in the sky; the dragons had not heard.

Slowly, she stood from amongst the plants and still listening, walking carefully back to where she had stood before.

She had not noticed it before, in her hungry and tired daze. It had been mostly engulfed into the forest floor, woven into the ground with vines and leaves, but she could still recognise the milky whiteness of bone.

She knelt and brushed back some of the foliage, revealing a rib cage. She had stepped straight onto the skull, her boot passing through its eyes and crushing the bone to several pieces. She could not guess at how long it had laid there, forgotten and unburied. If she had not stepped on it, she would never have noticed it, so embraced by the forest floor it was. No clothes remained, no clue to who it had once been.

She wondered if this is what would become of her. Swallowed whole by the valley, a fool who dared to think they could pass through without paying with their life. No one would ever know that she was there. Her Ma would die thinking she had not tried to return to her, her sister would spend her life thinking she had been left behind, and in the valley she would remain until someone’s boot passed through her skull.

She pushed aside some more vines and leaves and saw that the legs were tucked under, as though they had been kneeling. Looking up, she noticed what she had not before.

The statue, like the one who had once knelt before it, had been consumed by time and the forest, the stone a host to moss and vines. She did not know what it had once depicted - she could not read any of the etched words, and what seemed to be a robed figure perched atop it did not resemble any of those she had seen in the city that were supposed to be the likeness of the gods. It unsettled her, giving her the feeling that for some reason, she should not be looking upon it.

She averted her eyes, no longer wishing to see it, and caught the flash of something red. She lifted up onto her knees and leaned over the bones, picking up a large shard of skull, moving it to the side and peering in.

The stone lay at the base of the skeleton's jaws, resting against the top of the spine. It seemed as though, for some reason, they had died with it in their mouth. She reached in and pulled it out. It was pleasantly smooth and cool, like the lick of fresh water on a hot summer’s day. It was as black as obsidian, but when she held it up to the light, it revealed a deep red hidden inside that flickered and moved like fire.

It was beautiful. She had never touched such beauty; she had seen the jewels that glittered on the necks and ears of the noble family she served, but she had never been allowed to handle them. They had been cut into angles though, not like the stone she held, like a pebble washed up on the shore, tossed for centuries by the ocean. It felt as though it had begun to warm in her palm, as though she was holding up her hand to a ray of sunlight.

She tucked it into the bodice of her dress, its strange warmth pressing like a kiss to the bare skin of her breast. It was the first warmth she had felt since she had entered the valley.

She stood, taking one last look at the bones and statue. She swore she would remember it and live to tell the tale, to carry the memory of them, so that they would not be alone. Someone would know that they had been here, whoever they had been.

Her Ma was gone. She was no longer in the distance, or in the corner of her eye. The sun was setting, far to the west. Without looking back, she left the small clearing and continued. One more night. One more night and then she would be out. She would not end up like the body before the altar. She would not let the valley take her.

She walked until the light was gone and crawled into the hollow of a tree, wrapping her cloak tightly around her. One more night. Just one more night. She repeated the words in her head, over and over, until eventually, despite her fear and discomfort, she succumbed to her exhaustion and fell into a restless and uneasy sleep.

She dreamt of fire and smoke, of blood-red skies and the valley being engulfed in an inferno. She dreamt of screams and cries and the world burning. She dreamt that she stood in the middle of it all, untouched and unharmed.

She awoke with the stone in her mouth, burning hot on her tongue, and to the thunder crack of a dragon’s wings in the air.