Golden Locust

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. But then again, there wasn't always a Valley.

The mountains, now almost hills, overgrown and settled late into the ground, once loomed large and broke the restless ocean waves where shallow waters now accept the slow relentless push of Aeven river. The river that, once only an ice-cold trickle of a mountain spring, formed the Valley.

Across mossy rocks and jagged stone teeth abandoned by the mountain the river flowed and sprouted along its route tree groves and villages. As people settled all along its banks, they brought their goats and sheep and planted wheat. They grew and cared for orchards and then vineyards. They called the river just that – “The River”. The River that formed the Valley.

And year by year the villages on the banks of the River grew and new ones were settled. People built mills and wineries and then bathhouses. They built temples and mines. They outgrew the Valley and went across the mountains and the ocean. They met others, they fought wars and lost. The Valley became a simple province. A small triangle on the first maps of the Great Empire. The River, the River that formed the province, was just a tiny streak of ink among hundreds of others, many much thicker and longer. The River now had no name and each village in the province made up their own.

But as time went on some names were forgotten and others merged into one. It was pronounced differently still in each village, but the maps of the province, the first after decades spent as part of the Empire, had marked the river with a single word: “Aeven”. And so, it was in the waters of the river Aeven that the first dragon egg had hatched.

The egg had settled there a thousand years before, a lost grey stone among the sea of stones that lined the path of the river. It had been covered by sand and then exposed by a changing current. It was scraped by passing fish and glazed by fisherman’s hooks. On a cold morning and at the coldest time of the year this first egg cracked and spilled into the stream a dozen golden dragons. The icy river rushed their tiny bodies, withering and almost boneless, down the valley. Some were caught by fish, mistaken for larvae and some lost themselves to the currents. Only four crawled out of the water, grasping with a hundred needle-sharp claws at the sand of the riverbank. One had broken a wing on the sharp rocks of the riverbed, another lost an eye and the third had spent too long in the icy stream. Her scales were almost black from the cold and her body shivered as if still pushing against a current. Only one of the newborn dragons had made the journey without scars – but even she was exhausted. And so, they each rested on the sand and dried out their wings, their large, sleepy eyes trying to catch a glimpse of each other and watching cautiously the snow-covered forest above the bank. Their bodies, almost starved in the egg, needed time to prepare for their first long flight up the sloping sides of the valley.

They streched their tangled, jointy, nimble limbs and rolled with meditation in the cold sand slowly allowing blood to fill their veins. Their hearts fluttered impersemptibly, their many clawed but almost human fingers, small and twisted, scratched at the sand. Their tails, long and still weak, moved aimlessly. They would lift their heads, as if to stand up slowly, and then let them fall back onto the sand, eyes closed, tired mouths gaping, slit-thin notrils pulling winter air into their reinvigorated lungs.

A soft chirp escaped the spiky snout of one of them and soon they were chirping loudly, learning each other’s voices, and counting up their number. Four was not enough to inhabit the valley, but where there was one egg, there was always a second and a third. And the dragons, from the moment they were born and pulled away from the comfort of their egg, had in their minds this knowledge – they were the first of a thousand dragons, a hundred thousand if their infestation were to succeed in the valley. The valley and beyond.