Relic

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

Seldom a day would pass without hearing this adage grumbled from the mouths of the elderly citizens in town, usually in the vague direction of whatever vacant- eyed youth they felt was taking too much modern convenience for granted in the moment.

In this oft remarked upon glory of yesteryear, our little kernel of a town had been a thriving mining center of some renown. That is not to say that our products were the best or brought the most trade. No, our acclaim came from how we harvested. You see, there weren’t always dragons in the valley. They had once been used to mine the ore and precious metals that gave our town its name.

I would like to say that Orecoal was not named because our founders loved a bad pun, but that would be a lie. My parents, not immune to the puns that ran so deep in our mountain blood saddled their eldest with Lily my father left the crags of his mountain home to settle in the valley with my mother. And those same brilliant but susceptible minds , had bestowed their second born with another floral name in a fit of inspiration: Delphinium. Delphi. From Orecoal.

By the time my brother came along, they had apparently exhausted this fount of creativity and had merely slapped a wayward letter on… and so my brother escaped with the barely nauseating name Oren and endless gloating rights. Rights in general are monumental to Oren. No member of the family is canny enough to escape once he decides to champion a cause, and dragons are among his favorite.

“Did you know sometimes they wouldn’t even let the them out of the cage”, he says, scratching our own family dragon under her chin, “ dragons smaller even than Priscylla! Cramped, unable to flee if air turned foul!”

“That is the entire point of bringing the dragon”. Lily, ever pragmatic, doesn’t even look up from her teat in the face of this evening’’s lecture. “And if there is one thing Priscylla is not, it’s small. “ The last word is aimed down at my hand which hovers with a morsel of toast at Priscylla Level.

She’s not wrong, although my toast doesn’t change altitude, gliding round the back of my chair in my left hand and out of her sight. Priscylla is large for a dragon. The other day she had managed to flap her rotund body high enough to perch on the fence and growl at random passerby, scaring the living daylights out of Widow Hutchins and Wyvie. Most modern dragons tended to reach about Wyvie’s size, about that of a large chicken, although so called “teacup” dragons were increasingly popular, especially with the ladies of high society. Toted around on their owners shoulders like scaly parakeets, flashing their bright colors. We were told that Priscylla was a teacup breed. Much to my mothers shock and Oren’s delight, she had proven this false as a hatchling and now settled at the side of a decent turkey.

If there was a trickle of the great mining dragons of Orecoal in our modern companions there was barely a drop of the great beasts of legend. Their snub little faces alien compared to the great angular snouts and long lithe bodies of their distant ancestors.

The great fire drakes had made their hoards high in the craggy mountains, once upon a time, and amassed in them the precious metals their descendants would later mine. Be they legendary or domestic, the simple fact remains: all dragons love precious metal. Even Priscy, who considers every drake instinct beneath her, will nose up a useful bit of scrap metal on occasion. Once, she had even found an old bracelet, which had been discarded by a toddling Lily as unpalatable and brought to me as an early birthday present instead. I wore it still, although it was rather snug on my wrists so many years later. Oren was a baby at the time and this charming family anecdote had been kept from him as he would likely construct a soap box on the spot. The lures of exposition on dragon labor eclipsing even the chance to tease his sibling for hoarding junk.

It’s not that Oren is truly incapable of refraining from lecturing. The majority of the Plume family feels the same about dragon labor, despite coming from mining on both sides. Unlike the bulk of the so called “Talons”- descendants of the original dragon tamers- who pride themselves on our heritage. They would see Orecoal restored to its former glory. Several of the wealthier families still keep working dragons, specially bred to be larger than even Priscylla, if only just. When Lily was in school, she was even briefly Betroved- cultivated by several of the girls in her class to join the Treasure Trove, a cadre of women looking to preserve the old ways. No such offers were extended to Oren or myself. Oren was too outspoken in his politician and I was…not Trove material.

Lily would have been their crown jewel: the daughter not only of a Talon, but the direct descendent of one of the founders who collapsed the mines.

You would think that would make other Talon families wary of ours, but sadly, that’s not the case. I suppose it makes a warped kind of sense; there is a certain symmetry in the bringing the prodigal child back into the fold after so long.

Lily, to her credit, brought those ambitions crashing down in true Plume fashion, though she was more gracious about it than they deserved. She has always shown less of the tendencies toward the hell seeking that plagues our line. The Plume family has always been catalytic, churning of innovators and anarchists in near equal measure. My sister is firmly the former and dreams of being elected onto our city council. Her even temperament combined with the the deep firsthand knowledge of how quickly even intellect can give way to oppression makes her the perfect candidate. Her passion well tempered because she, like all of our blood, she understands the allure of doing a terrible thing: it gets progress faster.

Self-control is not a gift I was blessed with. Thankfully for my family and the city as a whole, I was also not blessed with the lofty ambition later bestowed upon my sister and brother. My passions area little more base- exploring the inner workings of the natural world. Most especially, the skies above our dear ruined mountain.

After the Collapse, the people of Orecoal largely avoid the mountain. It is an ever present, literal monument to their ruination. This lack of habitation in turn makes it the perfect spot to observe the night sky, free from light pollution. On such nights like tonight, when the moon is new, I make my way up the mountain alone, to revel in this unimpeded view.

On my fourteenth birthday, Aunt Pansy, who shares my love of science, gifted me with a telescope of my very own. She and my father were my first instructors, taking me and my siblings in treks up the mountain to gather various plants and specimens and camp under the stars. By age seventeen, my parents finally allowed me to make the journey up the mountain by myself, provided I take Priscy with me.

It is due to my companion snoring at my side that I don’t hear it at first. When it comes into view, it looks like one of the large clouds that I know have left their perch on the mountain side and left a clear patch of sky for my telescope beneath.

A large shape rolls across the sky like the hull of a ship, stars winking in and out in snatches between the glide of its great limbs. My brain is sending me several signals all at once but “still and small” win winning so I watched, frozen, as the pearl underside twisted, exposing flanks dark as well water before the whole mass quivers and trickled to the ground like sand through an hourglass, heaping into an immense and mass…mere feet from my terrified face. It draws itself to its full height little eddies swirling around its wings as their dark writing shapes nick at the still night. The long serpent neck unwinds, two luminous eyes slitting open to meet mine as the wings unfurled fully with a heavy wet sound and the stars wink out.