Flying Endurance

There weren’t always Dragons in the Valley. And I didn’t always fear for my unborn child’s life.

The Valley used to be an isolated area, with lush, blooming vegetation during the Sol Moiet – when the sun rose high and graced the Valley with growth – surrounding the deep caves within the mountains that provided protection during the Gelid Moiet – when the sky showered the ground with waves of white rain. Two large mountains, the istral and the extral, cut through the middle by the wide river Xeytis, were home to my people and the Village the gods birthed for us millenia ago.

Sempit Berries, wide and narrow and light blue in color, were our main source of food, eaten as is or cooked or smashed into a jam that filled the cracks in our stomachs. These berries grew plentiful in the trees along the mountains, even surviving the coldest nights of Gelid.

Within the river Xeytis, the giant water salamanders could feed the Village for a whole moon cycle, and their meat was dried and saved for Gelid when we were blessed enough to catch one. Their iridescent scales and their dense bones were given back to the gods with a prayer of thanks.

The paths of grasses and roots that traveling horned horses often passed over were cleansed by their footsteps, and were promptly gathered once the tall, peaceful creatures left the Valley. And when river water was collected after they drank from Xeytis, the water tasted pure and refreshing.

In my centuries of life, there had never been a shortage of sustenance and shelter gifted from the nature around us.

It was glorious.

And now it is not.

Our sempit berries are collected in mass and my people only see a portion of them, just enough to stay alive. For the first time in my life, I have seen bare trees, struggling to replenish their fruit.

Water salamanders are still trapped and killed, but their bones are discarded carelessly, while their scales are greedily taken for purposes unknown.

The horned horses no longer pass through the Valley. I pray to the gods that they could somehow sense that the Valley was no longer safe and collectively decided to take an alternate route. I pray that they are not trapped and killed and discarded carelessly at the edges of the mountains.

But if I’m being honest, I’m not sure how much praying helps anymore. Our gods do not seem to answer us anymore. I wonder where they have gone to, if they have disappeared, and yet I still cry out to them at night, desperate enough to hope that they are still within an arm’s length, that they can still hear me and have the power to help when they decide or are permitted to return.

There’s no way they are with us now, so something must have happened. This much I do know. They never would have let the Strangers come to us.

And yet they came, with kind eyes and quick tongues, long, unfamiliar words escaping wide smiles and metal tools held in firm grips that never seemed to know relaxation.

They came to us after our priest, Aki, came into his gods-given role, after the death of his mother, our late priestess, Nyala. I was her healer, taking over the position after my own mother passed on. I took care of Nyala for the last few centuries until it was her time to be raised up to her rightful place among the gods.

It was many moon cycles after I had learned of the life growing inside of me, my stomach starting to protrude with my growing child, that the signs it was Nyala’s time to join the gods began to mark her for all of her people to see. She grew weary, her skin forming wrinkles along her face and her legs failing to hold her up. Her eyes became dim, even in the sun that occasionally peaked through the white rain. Her tongue dried out and her lips cracked.

She refused water, and eventually stopped allowing me to spoon sempit jam into her barely opening mouth. She told me it was her time, and though I had already known, although my mother warned me this might happen in my lifetime, I cried over her weakened body. Nyala wiped away the wetness from my cheeks, her movements rough but kind, something that would have felt improper in any other situation. But I let her, for it was only fair since shedding tears in her presence was something I never would have done before either.

Resigned to the fact that there was nothing left that I could do, that the gods had called for her and it would be wrong to interfere, I made her as comfortable as I could. I covered her with blankets, woven with grass and feathers, and held her head in my lap. I would stroke her hair back from her forehead and croon to her softly, stopping when she would lose her breath momentarily or break into coughs, before continuing as though she had never interrupted.

Her sacred coughs racked through her painfully in those last few days, and I knew they reverberated throughout the stone room and reached into the caves around hers. Though I had been secluded to remain by her side, I knew that worry and grief must be filling the hearts of our people, of our Village.

With each harsh convulsion of her body, more and more blood spilled over and stained my hands and the ground she was laid upon until deep in one harsh, Gelid night, she sacrificed her last breath to the heavens.

We Villagers mourned for the next three days, refraining from eating and sleeping until a sign that our late priestess took her spot among the gods was shown to us: a break in the white rain, and a ray of sun upon Nyala’s altar outside of her cave, made of stones from Xeytis’ riverbed.

As tradition called, the priestess’ oldest child became next to be honored by the gods, having been presented to them from birth. Responsible for caring for the priestess' children as well, I was familiar with Aki. But not enough, it seemed.

Growing up, he was a quiet boy, with eyes that seemed to bore into you with a burning curiosity that bordered on uncomfortable. He often looked to the skies, and past the mountains of the Valley, as if expecting something more to be there.

If he had been gifted with different blood, I could have easily seen him turn toward the path of a Traveler. Not many of us decided to take that route, exploring beyond the Valley, and those who did typically never returned. I wonder now what would have happened if he was not born into the role of future priest, if he was permitted that freedom. Maybe then he would have allowed us to keep ours.

For the Strangers were invited in by him. They had seemed almost familiar with him when they first arrived, almost as if Aki had met them before, and told him all about our people and our land. It seemed obvious then that he had followed his desires and made the decision to become a part time Traveler unbeknownst to anyone else, returning to ensure he could take on his expected position when the time came. The children of the priestess never had caretakers to keep track of them; they never needed one, for they were watched by the gods.

Though I was only allowed to be close to the chosen family to heal them, and I was expected to prioritize the health and life of the priestess, I now regret not forming a deeper connection with her children, particularly Aki. He would be the next priest, after all, and my next priority. Maybe if someone had been paying attention, he would not have strayed so far from the Valley and so far from the will of the gods.

During Aki’s honoring as the Valley’s new priest, following Nyala’s final ascension into the gods’ presence, there was no inkling of knowledge that my people would face such a sudden change to our way of life. The Villagers celebrated the return of life with the breaking of the fast, presenting the food they had gathered during the end of the Sol Moiet to our new priest in a beautiful display. Crowded in the priest’s cave, the cave in which our priestess breathed her final breath, songs and laughter drowned out the sound of the white rain that continued to fall all through the night.

It wasn’t until after the Gelid Moiet once again melted into the Sol Moiet, the white rain chased away by the bright sun taking its rightful place above us, that the Strangers arrived. The Villagers, seeking protection together and under the watchful eye of the priestess, and then priest, in solely the caves of the istral mountain during Gelid, had already begun crossing the Xeytis again to spread out among the extral caves as well. The water salamanders returned, as did the horned horses. The Villagers could embrace the blooming gifts of the Valley once more.

But then came the Strangers.

And soon after, the Dragons.

There is never a time now that we exit our caves and we don’t see one one flying above our heads, on silver wings. Red lights, like eyes, watch over us as they scale the air, a deep humming coming from their silver bodies. The sound of them haunts my dreams now, and I always wake up now expecting to hear the foreign sound with a Dragon hovering right above me. They don’t enter the caves, though, so I am safe there. I don’t know why the Dragons are watching us, but it feels dangerous to be in their sight for too long. This seems to be an unspoken consensus among the Villagers, and as far as I know, we don’t leave the caves if we don’t need to anymore.

We don’t know why the Strangers are here, or why they have created these Dragons to watch over us, and they refuse to tell us. Maybe they want to keep us here in the Valley, make sure there are no more Travelers, but I don’t understand why. They are amicable with Aki – who barely makes appearances anymore, and never without at least one of them by his side – so why would they despise the kind of person he was, the kind of person that brought them here in the first place?

Maybe they just want to strip the Valley of everything it has to offer. It seems likely, the way they greedily take our food supplies and dig up our nature. They break down pieces of the mountains, they remove water from the Xeytis. It seems they plan to leave nothing untouched. Not even our people.

Essentially trapped in the mountains, the only solitude from the Dragons and their blazing red eyes, I have only been able to interact with those in neighboring caves. I don’t know what is happening to those whose primary residence is on the extral mountain, or the outer caves in the istral. I only know that the Strangers like visiting me and my fellow healers.

I try to stay away from them, finding temporary refuge with my friends, or hiding in the back of my cave pretending to sleep, but they always seem to find me. They have a special interest in me, that much I know. The only Villager carrying a child right now, they nearly salivate over my pregnant belly, and they touch me without my permission with their cold hands.

I cry when they leave, afraid of what will happen when my baby is finally brought into this world. Will the Strangers take them, like they have taken everything else? What will they do with them? Would I ever see them again?

I often consider leaving the Valley to protect my child, but something holds me back. Maybe it’s because I know that the larger my belly grows, the harder it is for me to move and the harder it would be for me to run. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Valley is the only place I have ever known, and it would feel wrong to leave my fellow Villagers at the mercy of Aki and the Strangers.

It wasn’t until the day that a Dragon killed its first Villager that I made up my mind. Mera, one of my friends and a healer as well, had attempted to cross the Xeytis to reach someone in an extral cave. She had spoken to me about it the night before, and the person she was trying to see had developed a cough. As there were no healers who resided on the extral mountain, one of us had to try to cross the river, even though we were told not to by the Strangers. She volunteered. And she lost her life.

It happened so quickly that no one seemed to see what had happened. There was a terrifying screech in the air, and by the time everyone scrambled out of their caves to see what had happened, the burnt body of Mera was already floating in the Xeytis, while the Dragon above her began to fly away with its incessant humming.

That was the moment that I realized why the Dragons were there and watching us. The Strangers wanted us right where they had us. They didn’t want us to leave where we were, not even to the other side of the Valley, and certainly not past the mountains.

It was ironic, considering they were brought to the Valley by Aki, who was driven to go past the mountains.

I was sure that if I tried to leave the Valley, I would be killed, too. Or, I would have been if they hadn’t been so open about their interest in my baby. They wanted them, so they needed me alive.

So I finally decided to leave. Somehow, someway, I would protect my child, as they would protect me.

And then once I was free, maybe I could figure out how to save the others.

I knew it would be almost impossible to escape with the Dragons constantly searching for us. I knew it would take time for me to come up with a plan. And I knew I had a time limit; I needed to escape before my child was born and before the Strangers could take them away from me.

With these facts in mind, I decided to start formulating a plan by spending time outside of my cave again. I would let the sun grace me with its warmth once more, and I would study the Dragons for any and every piece of information I could get from them.

The first time I stepped outside for longer than just to gather food, I felt eyes on me. They were not the Dragons' eyes, though I felt those, too. I tried to ignore the gaze, and continued to ignore it every time I left my cave, but it was getting harder and harder to each time.

And then I found out who those eyes belonged to, and my plan changed.