Five Winters

The toddler in tattered clothing, soaked and scared, is running through the thicket with only the adolescent thought of protection. He holds his small bunny away to get her as far as possible from the comparatively monstrous boars charging behind. Only the dexterity and weight difference keep the toddler ahead as they’re forced to propel their thick hides and gnarled tusks over fallen trunks.

The dragon picks the three boars off one by one, distracting the boy in his run, whose attention is dwindling to the obstacles ahead. He is cross-sectioned by a thin, outreaching branch that knocks him down, his air up and away as he hits the ground and sends the small bunny flying forwards. And in the boy’s desperate recoil for air in his lungs, lurching forwards, he watches as a blue, twisted dragon’s digit gracefully skewers the dirtied white coat of a cottontail.

The boy, panicked and breathless, falls back to the crunchy leaves, and his world turns black. He awakes hours later, surrounded by a sea of shiny blue, quivering, but mighty in its structure. The dragon has entirely encircled the boy, now deep in slumber as well, but its consciousness left with a parting gift of a half-burnt deer, laying grotesquely against a broken and singed tree.

He rushes to the sweet smell of cooked venison, a nigh obsolete delicacy for a toddler alone in the dark and dreaded. He quickly has his fill and, with it, plucks a few good bones to set aside. Spying a nearby stone, he grabs it, plops down, and places it between the calloused and bloody soles of his feet for grip as he begins sharpening his new daggers.

Satisfied, still looking up and over his right shoulder to see approval from his father, he wipes a burgeoning tear from his eye and gathers as many as his tiny left hand can hold. Gripping a larger bone, he walks up stealthily towards the sea wall, staying low and out of sight.

He breathes deep, stands as tall as his muscles will let him reach, and comes crashing down onto an azure scale. With not much strength yet behind the young boy’s arm, the most damage dealt was to his thumb on the end of the shank being so quickly ricocheted from the surface. Through tears of confusion and rage building up behind the big blue eyes, he lets loose a shrivelled scream and the rest of the bones, now placing both hands onto the shaft.

He comes down again with more strength and only further blunts the tip of the bone. He stands, unsuccessful, turning his scrunched and wet cheeks into a relaxed and comfortable position, mirroring the look of his mom’s lost in thought. He lets drop his blunted dagger and retrieves a sharpened one, placing it between his teeth as he climbs the tree next to his cooling meal in the chill, fall wind. Finally, he reaches the apex of a bowing branch, summoning untested courage and leaps downwards to plunge white into blue.

Only the tip instantly snaps from the force and itself plunging white into dark brown skin on the way down. The boy lands on his feet with a long seething look into the bright blue until the adrenaline wears off and the uncontrollable tears and weeping begins.

In his right ankle now sits two inches of bone, one in and one out. The wailing sounds leave no bird unfettered and seemingly no wyrm in slumber.

For in the incessant noise, the dragon, amused, awakes and puffs a chuckle from its nose. It creaks its slender neck from the divot created in the dirt and extends a forked, purple tongue toward the boy. He instinctively crawls backwards from the quickly warming maw but cannot escape its speed.

The dragon forces its fire back into its throat, keeping only the hot air that travels along the tongue, pooling into near-boiling saliva that it lets drip onto the punctured ankle. The boy reels in sharp pain, but it is a sensation so similar to what his mother used to cause upon scrapes and deep cuts; he lurches forwards and quickly pulls the white from brown. He lets the hot liquid work its way around, soothing and cleaning and almost burning, and both heads return to their previous resting positions for another night’s rest.

One that is interrupted for only the blue head, as its deft ears pointedly arise at the distant whooshing of wings. Without hesitation, it stands upon four mighty stalks and stretches out its iridescent wings, knocking an innumerable branch from tree and tree from earth. It positions onto its hind legs, accurately scooping up a claw full of frozen boars and a wide-eyed boy, hanging limply in hearty digits. The dragon soars upwards into the darkened sky and flies with speed belonging only to these beasts.

Through dark, unkempt hair blowing wildly and incredibly dry eyes, the boy still spies over his shoulder, growing smaller with each half-second, his old village. He balls his fist and pointlessly hammers it against the impossibly hard scales, drawing blood and inaudibly breaking his pinky knuckle, trying desperately to turn the dragon around and rescue his family.

They fly for hours, nigh half a day, through the sunrise and moments from sundown, until the horizon smiles a gargantuan smile with snow-tipped mountains for teeth. The dragon flies unaffected while the boy is buffeted by bitter winds and snow through sets of pointed fangs and rows of molars. Where one mountain, in particular, stands out amongst the rest, and that the dragon tips its head and descends towards.

It gracefully tilts backwards, coming in far too close to the face of the mountain and thrusts its wings towards it, cancelling its colossal momentum. Its claws relent their grip and let the half-dozen boars roll, along with the boy, into the mouth of the mountainside cave. The boy sits up, staring and unmoving, wondering why the dragon will not land. But his idle stance is forced to budge from the biting winds, and he hobbles as best he can into the far corner.

Once he is tucked away from the boars, the dragon flexes muscles in its neck, sucking in the cold wind. It blows an imposing gale into the opening, quickly and accurately freezing only five of the six boars, where it thrusts its head upwards towards the end of its breath to exhume the remainder of the frost. It remains there, flapping its wings uncharacteristically delicate in the darkening expanse of this cold biome. Where the boy watches as it takes the untouched boar in its claw, as it summons fiery breath from its chest and roasts the last, angled away from the opening, only letting the hot air enter the cave but no fire.

It finally latches onto the edge, clambering inside and skids the charred hunk of meat towards the boy in the corner before coiling like a snake and resting its head again.

The boy, however, suffering from a sense of unrest being in such a strange atmosphere, turns to survival instincts for comfort. He scans the cave’s interior and sees only ice, dragon, and skeletons. A few bouts of shiny yellow coins piled high, entirely unfamiliar to the boy.

Delicate pots and vases, similar to those his family would pray towards in attempts to speak to fallen friends and grandparents. In an attempt to find stones or rocks, he finds only ice and shards, which quickly serve as unbearably cold and fleeting instruments to begin tearing into the searing boar.

He first takes the melting shard and slices away meat and tissue from the boar’s skin, using the dripping water to soften the stiff leather and now manipulating the hideous but sterilized hide as a makeshift salve over his ankle wound. He returns to his damp corner, all the while remarking the dozens of skeletons dotting the interior but thinking nothing of it as he’s never quite seen anything of such size. Far more extensive and more intricate than he could ever understand.

The boy, tossing and turning, kept ever so slightly away from slumber by dire frost, finds himself staring intently and defeated into the navy blue expanse as his warm exhale darkens it with his own smoke. His eyes squint as his head cocks, naively calculating the pros and cons of what his mind is telling him he must do. Then, painfully, he stands to his nervous feet and gingerly walks towards the blue scales, undulating and steaming passively in the cold night. The boy inhales his first warm breath in several hours, being so close to the wyrm, and finds the courage to follow his mind.

He places his hands overtop a single protruding scale and throws his weight back to test its stability, remembering his father’s teachings about scaling cliffsides. However, in all the blistering cold and whiplash from the journey here, the force put upon his knuckles as he clenched was enough to remind him of his broken pinky from hammering these same scales. The boy tumbles backwards, slicing his left hand’s palm open and, not wishing to put too much weight onto his bad ankle, slips hard onto his knees instead. The ice below him cracked ever so slightly.

He places his palms against the icy ground and closes his eyes, biding his anger and inadvertently changing the source of pain. He wishes to cry and wail for his parents, but holds it in, truly realizing they will never hear him. The scarred and bleeding boy stands once more to his feet and removes his tattered sheepskin shirt. He holds it outwards in both hands as he circles the serpentine beast, searching for a minor climb.

Upon finding it near its tail, he wraps the sheepskin around his hands and scales the wall of blue, feeling warmer and warmer with each foot ascended. To his surprise and thankfulness, he finds that the rest of the dragon’s tail coils inwards like a descending ramp. As well as the inner, almost perfect circle, minus the odd outstretched arm and claw, has flooded with warm water, exposing the roots of this tooth they exist within.

The boy walks carefully down the end of its tail and, stepping into the warm, ankle-deep water, exhales a deep breath. He hangs his shirt off a piece of a tucked wing within reach and drops to his sore knees to drink this fresh water. Satisfied, he drifts effortlessly towards the beast’s chest and sits down against it, feeling such incredible comfort. A comfort not felt since the wintry cold nights cuddled deep into the arms of his loving mother. Those sweet memories and the healing warmth surrounding him quickly drifted him off to a long sleep.

That same morning comes quickly to pass, and the next few ten days are spent eerily similarly. An altogether familiar routine of daytime chores: collecting and organizing meals, as more boars and a few deer with the peculiarly sizeable brown bear is frozen in tow; Bumbling around the house, or in this case, the cave, kicking around dust bunnies or now oddly shaped skulls and enormous bones; then finally eating a warm meal and leaning against a loving, warm chest to wish him a goodnight.

However, the eleventh night is not as restful. He is shaken awake and mired in traumatic history as supermassive wings are heard outside, so severe the boy instinctively reaches for his bunny once more until the adrenaline pumps and shakes him from a stupor.

The blue dragon is slow on the defensive as he now takes intrinsically careful and slow movements to not crush the tiny boy encircled in its body.

This new dragon’s body is almost impossible to fully appreciate as only the snowflakes that land upon and flutter around are the only elements that give its enormity away. Every aspect of body and prowess is twice that of the blue dragon’s as it flies stationary in the cave’s entryway.

The boy can see the monstrous black beast between blue legs as the sea-scaled body and wings stand to full strength. The boy spies no fire nor smoke billowing in its belly or chest, but swears to perceive cheeks similar to that of his brother’s before spitting a mouthful of watermelon seeds.

He intuitively hides behind a blue leg easily thrice his width and watches from around the girth as the blue dragon attempts to fill his own maw with frigid air. Only it finds insufficient frost, as he’s been keeping the cave warmer than it usually is. The black beast spotting this weakness anomalistically pounces on it and spouts a heavy and horrendous torrent of black tar from its mouth, followed soon by a weaker blast of flame catching fire to the tail end of the flood.

The blue dragon thrusts with full might directly through the tar, charging its own belly with orange ferocity. But in its thrust, it sends the boy flying through the air backwards, hitting and sliding along the slick surface. He never breaks eye contact with his new friend, as it becomes less blue, soon almost entirely covered in partially burning tar. The two dragons connect in mid-air, the black, not expecting this maneuver that’s blocked from sight by its own attack. It’s sent reeling backwards, unbalanced from surprise and having the remainder of its breath knocked from it.

The sea serpent, desperate to take whatever attention there may be from the boy, flies upwards with incredible speed while spinning, consequently cooling and hardening the blobs of tar upon it. The black beast soon follows until both are well out of sight for the boy. Only thunderous roars and bellows of fire and frost are heard.

Outside, the two battle for what feels and sounds like mere seconds but looks like hours from the spectacle of it.

As in the serene night, all that is seen winding through the mountains are clashing breaths of fire of differing lengths, the bigger and brighter belonging to the better and blacker lungs. In contrast, the smaller and dimmer are shorter due to a quickly decreasing endurance from the extra weight and diminutive mobility from being tar-covered.

Blasts of frost follow the shallow breaths of fire that attempt to abate the black’s flame to get through and freeze the wings. This dance encircles the entirety of the mountainscape until only one more blazing breath is heard as it’s forced downwards in front of the cave’s opening to illuminate one final spectacle.

The boy watches, through welling tears, as a black and blue body falls, barely able to keep altitude. And a black beast with jagged teeth clamps down hard around the weakened neck and takes control of its inferior body. Then, with two massive gusts of wind from onyx wings that pick up a tiny tsunami from the surface of the cave’s interior, black shoves blue against the side of its own mountain. A violent, earth-shattering sound reverberates through the cave, bouncing off every surface of the ice.

The crash instantly deafens the young boy, who crumples into the corner and screams without hearing a single note of a deathless blue dragon’s wail, only seeing limp blue wings plummet towards earth, followed soon by a seemingly endless avalanche. A continuous curtain of pure white snow and ugly white noise all begin to vanish as he is seconds from passing out, except they continue.

The boy’s senses remain as they have trouble focusing on new sensations. He looks down and around at his legs and arms as cold, pale hands grasp his tiny calves and shoulders. He is plucked from his yellow puddle and hurried into a wooden trapdoor newly breached from splintered ice, a foot deep, sourced from a fracture about ten days ago.

Feeling utterly helpless and carried by capable hands, after what feels like a familiar result of a long afternoon out on the old farm, he lets fatigue and trauma overtake him and slips into sleep.

The boy awakes half a day later, not that anybody could tell, as this damp stone cave he finds himself within features no natural light to tell dusk from dawn. He looks around, dazed and squinting from the ringing in his ears, remarking and feeling an odd sense of familiarity lying beside the dozens of frozen boars. Minus a particular brown bear that could surely not fit, try as the boy’s new captors had.

The surprisingly large, primarily square room alights with a mysterious flame; it undulates sourceless and just as effectively. Looking directly at it, the boy turns away quickly and catches his dark brown chest and stomach embarrassingly exposed in front of what feels like visitors. Trying his best to recall where his shirt may have been, he focuses on the several blotches of veiny purple that dot his tiny torso until he forgets to remember.

The boy looks up, seeing vaguely humanoid faces, pale white and sharp characteristics with strange, tiny mouths and ears and large eyes. Their faces vastly unfamiliar to his own village, but he knows his mother would still tell him to say: Hello, tell them your name, son.

And so he does, to neither his nor their knowledge, how effectively. The boy commands his lungs, throat, and air as he’s been taught, and the pale creatures bend their tiny ears and tilt their heads in response to the strange sounds. The fourth creature from the grouping of five takes a tentative step toward the boy and summons an ethereal floating board that fills with dry dirt and a single wooden stick. They take it in hand, quickly nodding as if answering a question itself asked, and then kneel to the boy’s height. The pale being scribbles in the dirt and wipes it clean with a hand. The boy looks inquisitively towards the beings and grips firmly upon the strange stick, slowly displacing soil into the rough shape of letters like his mother was only just beginning to teach. Hello, nam is turq— blue rock. I am five winters.

He steps away from the board, forcing the stick in his hand to vanish and reappear back to the dirt. Four of the five beings turn to decipher, while the closest keep their eyes keenly on the boy. The board lays flat and begins to undulate, a physical manifestation of translation magic stumped by a toddler’s poor penmanship. In an opal hue and the pale being’s own language appears the words: Hello, blue rock. I am five winters.

Surprised by his false eloquence, the pale creatures quickly look at one another, clearly deliberate yet silently. Only slight quiverings would have been heard from the corner of their tiny mouths if not for the boy’s constant ringing. Finally, after their brief deliberation, the first pale creature alights his prominent eyes in soft purple and catches the boy’s attention. “Hello, Five Winters,” the boy hears in his pounding head in a melodic rendition of his mother’s tongue.

The boy nods excitedly, thinking he can hear through the ringing once more, and the five pale creatures nod in return before exiting the room. The last in their party of five stops in the doorway and removes the long pearlescent cloak from around them, taking it in their fair hands while two translucent arms unfurl from behind their back and over their shoulders.

They begin weaving impossibly gently until the cloak loses its purity and takes the form of a small brown shirt, with a few scratches for familiarity. They don the smallest of smiles and leave the room.

But not before waving a white hand over the door frame, magically emblazoning the name: Five Winters, into it.

The boy gets up from the rock formation they laid him on and quickly wears the perfectly folded shirt. He goes to leave the door frame but is buffeted aside by many more pale creatures, these ones far bulkier and less fair. All aside from a dozen or so, carrying different aspects of a tiny bedroom, all scratched, all brown. The dozen without things in their tougher hands leave the room, heaving the frozen boars onto their shoulders, supported slightly by translucent arms.

He waits now, patiently, trying desperately to hear footsteps approaching; when none are heard, he leaves the room and is astounded to see the floating flame behind him automatically snuff itself out. The curious boy walks and ponders down cold and bleached corridors, searching for the last of the five.

The one reminding him of his mother, who gave him his shirt back. An act of caring that needs no translation.

He walks in circles until soon finding his way back to the door frame newly emblazoned, where the flame relights upon entering. On the bedside table sits a warmly cooked slice of boar awaiting him. He eats and soon sleeps and is then awakened by that same party, although only numbering four. The fourth creature steps forward and summons that same board. The boy, rubbing his eyes vigorously, hops off his bed and begins to draw the shapes of two dragons of differing sizes and a little bunny. He writes the words blue above the smaller dragon and bunny above his late companion, drawing little crosses where their eyes should be.

The board flips and shudders, trying its best to replicate and refine childish scrawlings. The familiar word blue appears above a rugged opal silhouette of a slain dragon, a larger one of unknown colour and an altogether unassuming slain bunny. The four pale creatures clearly attempt to control their emotions as all their eyes quickly alight in shades of soft purple and exit the room expediently.

This cycle continued for days that turned into months. With each night, slices of boar turn into unappetizing mushrooms and ivy, with each morning awakening featuring old tomes in pale hands and scribblings in the dirt in response. Odd times throughout the months, the fifth creature would appear in the mornings to weave more clothing or to dress his growing hair into tightly woven braids; the boy would grow to like these mornings the most, but did also grow to enjoy hearing entire sentences in his head.

They all grew as well, although with impatience rather than adoration, as they desired for him to respond in kind. That etching of the blue dragon haunted them; for a long time, they consisted of the offerings of that dragon, but other times were slain by it when their desperation grew dire, and they so wished to know more.

Such desperation has reared its head once more and fueled the feelings this morning.

An unholy mixture has spurred this civilization to venture from their humble, wooden trap door. A mix of desperation for food, as the taste of dragon gained goods, tastes ever sweet, but equally as much a sense of vengeance. Revenge, for in those months, their higher minds in communication with the boy, have well enough pieced together that it was a black dragon that had allegedly slain their on-and-off-again partner and neighbour.

So in their rapid descent, all thirty strong, they brush off long-abandoned staircases built into the side of this particular tooth and keep several eyes trained dutifully on the skies, weary of black and tearful for blue. The boy, most of all, as he squints and rubs and adjusts to the bright skies once more. After all, he was five last he saw the sun, and unbeknownst to all, from within the mountain, he had hibernated through his sixth winter.

They reach the bottom at long last, where the third mind pulls a map from a satchel which their translucent arms unfurl and grip onto. Their eyes alight through notably whitened irises to abate the brightness, and those two dozen larger bodies march in the direction given. The five higher minds follow suit, with the boy held aloft atop the shoulders of the caregiver, the fifth and final mind, braced lovingly by magic arms.

They continue for a few more hours, where soon after, they stop and rest and camp. The third mind’s eyes quickly turn jet black as a ghastly apparition of themselves elevates from their body and flies between the mountains. The four other minds lay next, while the two dozen encircle the most important of them all, holding each a tiny fire in their hands.

They all continue this pattern for a week, darting through and eventually out from the mountains into a sparse forest dotted with marshlands. Where just through the trees, the boy, from atop tall shoulders, spies old wooden structures encased in still thick tar.

He excitedly taps the pale head of the caregiver, and points in the direction of his village, just slightly off-centre of their heading. Upon response from the third mind, they change their eyes from purple to bright blue, matching the boy’s eyes. The boy hears in his head: “Yes, child,” as they take their first steps through dilapidated fencing.

They sit inside an altogether still upright town centre, forming their usual circle. All accounted for, minus the caregiver, who returns in the morning with a few books. They hand them all over to the fourth higher mind, who holds them aloft in their strange appendages and rolls their purple eyes back in their head. They remain deep in translation, spreading this new language amongst their kin.

The boy, who has hopped through the two circles of twelve into the arms of the caregiver, is entirely confused by the look of fear growing on all these pale faces. The first higher mind turns his eyes deep red, whereas the second mind stands with orange eyes and walks forwards as the outer circle of twelve expands and marches outside, unfurling their arms which morph quickly into ethereal swords.

The inner circle of twelve waits for the fourth mind to collapse with matching red eyes as they send their apparition through the ceiling. The ring then summons their arms, taking the form of large shields.

The fifth mind, the caregiver, now locked out from the inner twelve, picks up the boy and runs outside. Only to be clipped from the tail end of a torrent of hot, thick black tar.

They spin halfway through, consequently catching almost all of the tar on themselves while protecting most of the boy, only a few blotches landing on the left side of his face and latching onto his clothing. The boy screams in pain, with tears sizzling into steam upon reaching the black on his cheek, while the caregiver’s eyes flash orange, summoning two of the outer twelve to their location.

The slowly burning and completely inhibited pale creature unfurls their ethereal arms, moving seamlessly through the built-up tar on their shoulders. They weave their hands to and fro, altering the boy’s clothing while on his back, from a brown, burning shirt to a beautiful blue coat.

The two larger bodies arrive and carry the child to a nearby dilapidated house, with many an opening to a busy sky. The boy lies in the middle of the floor while the two run back outside and attempt to free the fifth mind. He is unsure where best to look: at the house that is all too familiar to the one he lived in, to his caregiver burning and stuck in the middle of the road, to the sky where dances a battle of blue and black yet again.

This time, he also sees green.

The green dragon of equal size to the scarred blue swoops down to the forest floor and bites a tree in half, mixing fire and leaves in its mouth to produce a poison that it volleys in the black dragon’s direction, weakening it. Its wings flutter, and eyes glaze over, where it roars in response and is quickly quieted by a long-held frost breath directly down a bubbling throat. It freezes and closes until it is reopened rapidly by several twisted blue digits piercing and shattering the black wyrm’s neck. It convulses and begins to plummet toward the town hall.

The first higher mind’s red eyes flicker, receiving direction from the third, sending two of the inner twelve shields toward the caregiver. The first mind summons his own two shields, larger and empowering the nearby inner circle’s, creating an opal dome above all the minds.

The fourth mind drops the several books and looks longingly towards the caregiver with sombre purple eyes.

The caregiver’s eyes become a kaleidoscope:

Flickering orange, to tell the two swords to run.

To red, to tell the two shields to shelter the boy instead.

To purple, to receive the last of the language.

Finally, to bright blue.

The boy, watching a massive black corpse fall closer to his only family, hears in his head:

“Your name is Turquoise, and it is nice to finally know it. I found a book in your mother’s hands in the house you’re in right now. But to me, you remain my Five Winters and I your Blue Rock. I love you.”

The black dragon slams into the ground, demolishing the town hall and everything nearby. The boy shields his eyes from dust and debris as the two inner circle bodies hold fast against the buffeting winds.

The blue and green dragon coast just above the black, ripping its head off and together, throwing its corpse into the forest. It exposed a perfectly intact opal dome from under it and a crumpled mixture of wood and black tar in the middle of the street.

The boy stumbles out onto the road and locks eyes with the blue beast, suddenly wishing he had another bone to sharpen.