In the Valley of the Lost

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. They had come slowly, steadily, year by year until their cavernous nests were sprawled out all across the furrowed mountains around us. We could hear their wild screeching as they called to each other through the hazy alpine air. Could see the glare of their fiery breaths illuminating the night sky in increasing numbers, each blazing point a reminder of how surrounded we’d become.

The Valley stretched out as far as the eye could see, caged in between the towering cliffs of two separate mountain ranges. The Pillawogs to the east, running low and dense along the edges of the Serawin River, sprouting up on top of each other until it was impossible to tell when one bluff ended and another one began. They bubbled up in the distance like the frothy surface of boiling water, rounded and soft, but to the knowing outdoorsman, completely inhospitable.

And to the west, the Fearshewa Mountains, sharp and austere, rising so high into the heavens that very few people had ever seen their menacing peaks. Most of the dragons had settled there, preferring the safety of those shear, dropping cliffs to the gentler slopes of the Pillawogs that erupted so congested-ly just across the river.

Our city and towns lined the banks of the now-mighty Serawin River, speckling the receding ridges of that angry waterway with low buildings and high fences. The land was flat and damp, packed down earth that had been razed to make way for more factories and manufacturing plants, in such stark contrast to the textured bluffs that loomed above us. Everywhere I looked there were drab buildings butting against one another, angular and stocky, scrambling away from the hungry water’s edge. The seasonal flooding of the Serawin had become so perilous and unpredictable that many people simply abandoned their homes and moved their lives to the shadowy bounds of the Valley, pressing closer and closer into the base of the mountains. Tempting fate with their proximity to the wildness that lurked there.

I had left my house the year before, after water had seeped in through the baseboards and like a ghost, floated my furniture up off the floor with the hidden power of its surge. Everything had been ruined, had been maimed by the rot and mold that settled in after the flood. Even my pictures that hung so guardedly on the walls had been left warped and discolored, puckered and pulled in the way that only water can leave its damaged footprint. I took just one suitcase with me when I moved into the crudely-built apartments that had started cropping up on the outskirts of the city. My kitchen window looked out toward the Fearshewas, a rocky ledge so close to me that no matter how I twisted and bent, I could never quite see the top of it. Sometimes at dusk I would watch the dragons returning home from the hunt, squirming deer and elk hanging from their monstrous talons, their wings thundering across the darkening sky. The Valley Council told us it was only a matter of time before they started going after our cattle and horses and dogs. And that someday they might even come after us.

We lived in fear of the dragons, paving our roads in fire-resistant tarmac and umbrella-ing ourselves under impervious roofs of cement and stucco. Some people were so scared of their vehicles combusting, of being easy petrol-filled targets, that they reverted to using push bikes and wagons again. That seemed silly to me.

But what did I know?

The slow and trickling arrival of the dragons had changed everything in the Valley. It had created a frenzy of panic and alarm that divided us even more than the constant flooding of the Serawin did. It pitted beliefs of tolerance and acceptance against calls for action and combat. Each year, the Council commissioned more and more soldiers to patrol the streets, the site of armed troops marching through the Valley meant to make us feel safe and protected. There was even talk of building a giant wall along the border of the Fearshewas to further barricade ourselves against the threat of those foreign and ferocious creatures.

Despite my fear, I was in awe of the dragons, captivated by their flaming intensity and latent power. They were majestic in a sleek and burnished way, the sun casting them in colorful tones as it glinted and shimmered off of their gilded scales. When they howled and shrieked at night, the sound filled the sky with tremors of terror, a vibration that wriggled in and wrapped itself around me until I was left quivering with reverence. I was always told that those were calls of aggression. But it only ever sounded like sorrow to me.

I could always sense when a dragon was flying overhead, could feel the heat and heaviness of the air as they passed through it. I wanted to see one up close, wanted to inspect its horn-crested head and fire-seething nostrils in exacting detail. Maybe someday I would come to face to face with one and wish that I’d never dreamed of being able to reach out and touch its scaly, mystical form.

I’d heard some people say that the dragons were actually harmless, that they’d only come to the Valley to escape the crumbling and eroding alps to the north that had been their homeland for thousands of years. That the once-shaded peaks and buttes in that far-away territory had become so warm over time that nothing could survive in the dry, unsheltered heat there. Water had started to pour down from the mountains as the snow-covered tips thawed out, leaving a swirl of brooks and creeks that converged into the swollen and raging basin of the Serawin River. As our river bulged and throbbed, overflowing into our streets and yards, the dragons’ land had dried out. It had cracked and splintered, collapsed in on itself and created potent landslides that devastated the fragile earth laid out in its path. The few remaining ice-caps would inevitably melt away beneath the blazing breath of a dragon and they would all eventually be driven from their homes, unable to hunt, to nest, to even exist in such fruitless terrain.

That’s just what some people said, though.

The Council news said otherwise.

Every day I watched my television screen light up with alarming broadcasts, tales of the unending violence and savagery the dragons had brought to the Valley. Animal carcasses left strewn across the outlying farmlands. Trails of bloody paw prints that simply vanished into thin air. Injured pets and livestock scorched by those beastly breaths.

And, at last, a missing child.

The thing we had all feared most.

Her sweet face was plastered everywhere in the Valley. On the clinging posters that wrapped along the sides of buses and benches. On the flyers that were printed and passed out at vigils and Council rallies. On every news channel that played day and night with all kinds of anchors and contributors and experts speculating about how a dragon had crept into one of our yards and stolen the silent innocence of a child.

It seemed strange to me that we would need all of those have-you-seen-me and help-bring-me-home signs for a girl who had been snatched up into the sky by the vicious talons of a dragon.

She hadn’t been seen.

And she wouldn’t be coming home.

But what did I know?

The rest of the Valley was in an uproar, arming itself for battle against an unknowing enemy, roused by a shared hatred for the intruders we had mistakenly let come to live around us. The Council delighted in the outpouring of support that it had been trying to drum up for years, puffing their chests on the renewed authority and power this loss had brought them. Within days they had started fortifying the military with more men and more artillery. The foundation of their long-discussed wall was being poured along the edges of the city and before long it was rising up out of the sodden ground, being erected at record speeds as the workers toiled away under the watchful eyes of dragon poachers.

So who was out looking for the little lost girl?

There were whispers that spread through the city like scattered leaves in the wind, whirling through town, reckless and untraceable. Rumors that it hadn’t been a dragon who took the child, that we had to think about who would benefit most from such a calamitous disappearance. Who was being fattened with influence and control, building up their sovereignty and rewriting our laws in the name of defense and protection?

It was simple to look toward the jagged cliffs of the Fearshewas and find an obvious target for our bitterness in the alien, winged creatures that had nested and settled there. Easy to point to them and see the root of all our problems, those voracious, feral animals that couldn’t be more different than our own orderly, banal existence. But the reality is that our problems had begun long before the dragons started showing up in the Valley. It had started with the clearing of the river’s banks. The budding factories that pumped chemicals and fumes and smog into the air. The rabid flooding of the Serawin. The way our humanity fractured beneath the weight of our dissimilarities.

I didn’t know what to believe, but it was impossible to ignore the frantic energy that was brewing in the Valley, the urgency with which everything was coming to a head. It was palpable in the air, a thick haze of disquietude that descended down from the spectral mountains and settled in all around us. People scurried about picking sides, aligning themselves with whatever truth it was easiest to accept, preparing for the incalculable war that we could all feel coming.

There was just one question.

Who was the enemy?