Sāwol Etera

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

But half-bloods, the disgraceful byproducts of the beasts and their human mistresses, sometimes slipped through the net.

I met her in the worst blizzard the Valley has seen in the last one hundred years.

Ice needles have pinned her to the forest floor, whitewashed except for the emerald fluid that sketched a web around her convulsing figure.

Futhorc the Ice Dragon wasn’t done though. More razor-sharp arrows shot down from the seething sky, where spirals of clouds raced to blot out more light for us folks below. Oh, it was definitely Futhorc alright. I could see his mammoth body anchored to opposite ends of the Valley’s diamond netting. The carbon crystalline must have seared through his scales and burned down to the flesh. To retaliate, he was using his breath to freeze everything.

I have never seen anything like her. A dragon wing sprouted out of her left side, pitch black apart from recurring silver spirals that extended down to her very human skin.

There was no moment of reprieve. She shrieked from the top of her lungs louder and louder as she bled like a pig. I imagined the entire Valley would have heard it if it wasn’t for the avalanches the storm triggered.

I glanced at the path downhill. In the opposite direction lay her, leading into the heart of the woods.

Holding onto my Kirin Parasol, I set down my basket of talowood. As I left my haven where the foliage was denser, the same ice weapons turned to assault me as well. I twirled the umbrella between my hands until it transformed. Click. Click. The end tip shot out an overlapping disk of steely blades that whirred by their own setting. Every time two sets of their teeth grated together, the external object rebounded and buried into a nearby trunk.

“Mercy!” She screamed in the local tongue. “O mercy, holy custodian of heaven!”

I dropped the dyed snow I scooped up. Her blood was viscous like molasses.

Kneeling down by her body, I pulled out the pins over her right arm. The gaping holes closed up in a matter of seconds as the skin tissues regenerated themselves.

Click. A projectile locked seamlessly into one of the nodes on the parasol’ top that controlled the spinning mechanism. Click. Another stopped working. When the swords no longer kept up a consistent barricade, the ice needles gladly exploited the nooks and crannies of the parasol.

One which was the length of a saber pierced through my shoulder. The squirt of red splashed across the glowing green snow.

“Curse you!” I wrenched out another needle near her heart. The liquid in her arteries burst forth and sprayed over my nose and eyes, but it ceased so abruptly, before I could even register how warm it was. “This would’ve never happened if you did not show up!”

The moment I freed her right side, the skeleton of phalanges that dictated the form of her wing flexed. A giant shadow passed over my head.

I swung the parasol hard at the grotesque form. Fortunately, the blades only nicked the striated muscles when I stopped, realizing that she was offering me protection.

I gasped and looked at the suffering girl again, this time in a different light. Her long silver hair, caked by iridescently verdant clots, like gems slipping down from her tresses, were all tangled up over the face. The face that would mark her as human or dragon.

Her torso was also penetrated by icicles, inhibiting her healing abilities. I set down my parasol and reached for the one closest to her heart.

“Stop, human!” Her freed hand clasped around my wrist, easily overpowering me. “This was his will. He must choose to forgive me. If not, I shall remain here.” She was dead serious.

She brushed some of the tangles behind her ear and revealed the grand prize— a pair of glazed ambers embedded in her sockets. No animalistic glint. No reptilian scales framing the pupils.

“Are you certain?” My voice squeaked as her identity of a half-blood fully dawned on me.

“He must be the one who forgives. I, Sawol Etera, cannot disobey him…” she wheezed.

She definitely wasn’t referring to Futhorc. Futhorc only punished. He assailed the Valley every day because of his hunger. Dragons did not really appreciate the taste of men, but they liked our children. Unfortunately, Futhorc’s domain oversaw an evolved nomadic group who created a barrier to resist him, so he could fume all he wanted up there, but could not touch us.

If not for the wars dragons waged among themselves, they would’ve had eternal dominance, and it wouldn’t have mattered that they do not reproduce easily. Every lunar eclipse, the gigantic serpents donned the most irresistible male forms, lithe and sturdy like a dancer, at least so the rumors said. They roamed Earth for one full night, ensnaring as many mortal women as they could and impregnating them. And in the rare occurrences that two half-bloods joined, the world received one more menace.

As if reading my blasphemous thoughts, the ice storm intensified. I should go. In the first place, I was disobeying the Valley’s orders by gathering firewood at this time.

But her wing, stretched over my entire body, did not budge. Even as it spasmed.

“Leave me,” she cried. “I cannot hold it up any longer. Go! Before I crush ye to death!”

How did she sneak in? Humans had moved into valleys to better sight incoming dragons and respond. Some of the weaker hamlets in the south simply offered one child to the dragon every month. Again, rumors. My Valley, after accomplishing the magnificent feat of constructing that net, had severed ourselves from any communication with fellow humans. We pride ourselves in eradicating all dragon presence within our territory.

Has a woman betrayed us? Or worse, has the net been breached?

I ought to agree with her request. It was best that this one-time accident terminated, and what more suitable than a dragon’s fury to kill a dragon’s seed?

Groaning, I struggled up. Her wing moved simultaneously, straining to shield me every point along the way.

“Thanks, uh. I have this parasol, so you can rest now.”

You can die now, more like.

I retreated back under the trees and strapped the basket over my shoulder. This batch of talowood is going to keep me and Mother warm for a month against the dragon’s constant temper.

Futhorc took away from us not just our mobility but also summer.

I’ll come back once the storm dies down to bury this “Etera”, I told myself.

Reaching the downhill path, my entire vision suddenly darkened like a blind person, except I knew that I was seeing black. Oh no, not again!

Like I dreaded, my habitual hallucination took over. They used to be nightmares, but now they fancied daytimes as well. A hangman’s rope looped around my neck, yet to be tightened, while a tangible darkness obstructed my vision. In a matter of seconds, torch lights, swinging pitchforks and angry voices enter into my view. It was the townspeople, calling for my execution. Brawny arms untied me and carried me like a sack of flour to my demise. And, as it always unfolded, a life-sized dragon, towering even over a barn, with translucent scales like rainbow opalites, swooped down and snatched me away in its enormous talons. The wind cried their welcome.

Every time I had this hallucination, the dragon said something different to me. This time, it rumbled from the depth of its body. “Human intelligence does not understand human flaws.”

The clinks of ice striking metal took me back to the world of sanity. I hated that hallucination and its implication more so.

And I hated myself for feeling sorry for a monster. But what can I do? We are a people who believe in higher beings than the dragons. And their divine messages to us, even if it was a dream condoning dragons over humans.

I ran as fast as I could back to where I left her. She was almost past help.

“Why did you come back?” she spoke strenuously. “I cannot disobey-”

I knocked her out with the blunt end of my ax. “Shut up.”

My shoulders heaving, I pulled out every needle and lifted up her surprisingly light body. I shivered as her wing talons sagged, scoring deep into my skin. But I did not drop her in the snow. Thankfully, the overhanging branches were thick for the rest of the way, and my parasol still offered minimal protection over the two of us. As the blizzard raged on, I situated her in the abandoned lumberjack’s cottage close to my house.

***

A week. Futhorc nested over the Valley’s diamond netting for another week, obstructing sunlight and freezing the air into hard pellets as he saw fit. I regretted my impulsive behavior that could potentially wreak havoc into our century-long prosperity. But if she didn’t die from her wounds, she would now die from hunger.

Mom told me to be careful when I headed up the mountains. “Tread carefully on the slippery roads.”

She was wrong. After the storm, there were no roads. The pines that once soared into the clouds were sliced through the middle, depositing their amputated branches down the boulder-strewn slope. The sheer amount of them formed into a latticed barricade, where the gaps in between were only available to snowshoe hares and fortunate squirrels.

That gave me the excuse to wait another week. Until the men from the village center finally extended their aid to mountainside people.

Even with half of dragon blood, she should be dead by now.

On the outside of the cottage, factoring out the storm damages, there was no sign of activity. I stepped onto the porch and pushed open the creaky door. Instantly, I noticed that the worktable in which I placed her was empty. Fearing the worst, I armed myself with a whittling knife before investigating the bedroom further inside.

A soft tune wafted out.

I dashed to the end of the hallway, knife raised, but the scene waiting paralyzed me. She was braiding her waist-length hair, weaving in a fresh blossom after every knot.

“You…” I shivered. She responded to my voice with a dazzling smile, causing me to falter. “You. Turn around.”

In the place of her very dragonlike wing, there was a narrow pulmonary sac along her shoulder blade. Protruding like a swollen wound.

“Good.” It made her look a lot more normal. “You keep it like that for now,” I mumbled.

“This? What else is it supposed to be like?” The shape of her lips delivered the perfect pout.

“What else is it…? Don’t you remember what that thing on your back there used to look like?”

“You mean that this ghastly scar looked even worse before?” She yelped.

Unconsciously, I tottered a few steps back, barely maintaining my balance with the paneled walls. Did I strike her that hard? Without the wing and the ancient dialogue though, she did look different. Aside from the uncanny bearing, she could almost merge into a normal crowd, or the local school, or any human congregation.

Finnegan, what are you thinking? Leading a dragon-blood to your own fellow humans?

“Do you not recall me?” I asked tentatively.

“You are a perfect stranger,” she answered, smiling.

There is no doubt about it anymore, that my spur-of-the-moment attack gave her memory loss. “Do you know your name?”

“My name?” She blinked back the shiny droplets that adorned her eyes, too genuine to be a crafty performance. “No. That’s why I woke up in this cabin and decided to stay here. I was waiting for someone to come.”

Her soft whimpers creased my brows, raising a nasty worm of guilt. “You see, I was the one who found you in the forest and brought you here two weeks ago.”

“Then you must know where I should go!” Her eyes, having the identical shade of the fire wicks that kept my humble dwelling at bearable temperature the past storm, flared up.

“No.” Her prominent shoulders sagged. “But before we figure that out, you cannot leave this house. I don’t know where you’re from, but you are a foreigner here, and us people have a low tolerance of aliens. You have suffered trauma, but I believe you might be able to remember your place of origin with some time and healing.”

I cannot believe every single word I just said. What if she was from the line of Heorte, the Heart Master, who would incinerate people if they tell lies?

“You must have saved my life then. Thank you, Finn.”

“What did you say?”

“Finn. Isn’t that your name?” The sweet and docile mask held in place, framed by unbound tresses that were kissed by moonlight.

I was dead-on. Heorte reigned the kingdom west of Futhorc. This half-blood, having stumbled into the Valley by accident, was a mind reader.

Only my mom calls me Finn. To everyone else, I’m Finnegan, a finicky artist boy who isolated himself into the mountains.

“Oh!” She gasped. “I’m sorry, Finnegan. I should not have used a moniker.”

“R-r-remember to stay here at all times.” The stutters ratted out my nerves. “I-I have to go now.”

“It was nice meeting you, Finnegan.”

***

“Finn.” Mom’s voice strained with worry. “I understand that you must go to that haunted house for inspiration, and by the name of the Creator of mankind and dragons, I have given you more freedom than any other teenager in this place. You are of age, but you are spared from the diamond mines or maintenance works on those awfully high ladders.”

“Not the same speech, mom?”

“Look at me, Finn.” Mom’s strong arms rattled my comparatively lanky frame. “You already went once today. I can’t allow you to risk the mountain path at this hour.”

I sighed and pried her clinching fingers off. “I’ll be back before you know it, mom. I just left something there this morning.”

“Can’t you get it tomorrow, Finn darling?”

On the doorstep, I eyed the broken parasol I had yet found the time to send to the blacksmith for repair. “If I take Dad’s Kirin, would you let me go without waking the neighbors to stop me?”

“Oh.” Her shrewd eyes took in the icicles that still prohibited the parasol’s blades from spinning properly. “Fine. But if you are not back in an hour, I’m going to have to bother the policeman to take me up there. Then, the whole Valley will know that our family has gone crazy again.”

“Yes, mom.” I couldn’t shut the door fast enough so that she did not smell the smoked and salted meat beneath my undershirt.

Even though the storm had subsided, mist crawled like an avalanche through the dark green trees. The windows of the cabin were brightly aglow even from afar, an unwavering shaft of bronze that pierced into the monotonous winterland. I paused at the front door and knocked.

“You’re back, Finnegan.” Her smiles, I must look out for her smiles. They seemed to be getting the best of me.

“I brought you some food in case you were hungry.”

“Ah.” She laughed at her belly rumbling. “Perhaps I was.” She pinched up a slice of bacon in her hands and inserted it into her mouth, chewing thoughtfully. Her mandible kept moving, and pretty quickly, the sack had emptied.

I swallowed my disappointment. I was bringing her a week’s rations based on my estimates. So that I wouldn’t have to return too soon.

As she chewed, I became engrossed by the grease bits strewn over the corners of her lips and how her pinkish tongue deftly cleaned them. But, she was looking straight past me at the assorted arrangements of stars and how they almost winked over the dark indigo sky.

“So, what did you do while I was gone?” I felt bad now for caging her inside. A beast of her own kind, she must have preferred the outdoors to a clammy house.

“Oh!” Her attention refocused. “Look at the floor, the sink, the cabinets. Aren’t they pretty? I was scrupulous to get all the layers of dust off!” Indeed they were, but that only aggravated my guilt, for I thought it was impossible to rid this place of its choking air quality, but she did it. Somehow, that made everything seem as if I kidnapped her from the storm just to be my janitor.

“So um, I brought you some berries to go with the beef.” I tossed it onto the table.

“Berries, how delightful? I wondered what those violet pearls were when I looked out the windows.” She threw one into her mouth. Instantly, her face, colored in the same shade, scrunched into wrinkles.

“Here, some water?” I filled a cup from the sink, taking in with gratitude how there were no wisps of paint floating inside.

I added another item to my prayer list tonight— ask forgiveness for openly deceiving someone through harmful means, even if it was a half-blood, who was allergic to all fruits and vegetables, produces of the land and not of the sky that they belonged to. But now, her showcase of normality could not beguile me anymore. She was dragon-blood.

“Please don’t leave again, Finnegan,” she said between choking on the sour juice. “Each time, I dread that you will not return, and I… I wouldn’t know what to do then since I have no recollection of anything.”

“I-I have to,” I apologized. “I have family waiting for me.”

“Oh, but of course.” She heartened herself by raising her voice, appended by an easy comportment of the previous tension. “I was being silly. Go. Just… come and visit soon.”

“I will!” I promised a little rushedly. I darted outside and rushed all the way home, before Mom would send the nosiest adults poking into my hideout and finding me guilty for breaking the most sacred rule.

***

“Finn.” Mom pushed the plate of boiled turnips across the table, a bare morsel on the grotesque platter the size of a dragon’s eyeball. “You’re getting outrageous lately. Eat before you go and lock yourself in that cottage.”

Wordlessly, I took the rusted fork from her, lifted the plate, and plunged everything into my mouth. Still munching, I headed for the door.

“Finn?” She only sighed.

Ever since Dad vanished into thin air three years ago, I had not been the same. Folks around here said that he opened a gap in the net and slipped out to offer himself as Futhorc’s treat, but the dragon despised his tough meat and only froze him into a statue, breaking off one body part at a time. If my mother wouldn’t do it, then it was up to me to defend his honor. Dad was a quiet but loyal man. He would never do something like that.

Three light patter on the snow-cushioned ground. “I am sorry that people don’t trust you.” The dragon girl materialized out of the white eddies that glided down the bent treetops.

“Whoa!” I skipped back a few feet as my tumultuous insides clutched my throat. “You-you are not supposed to step outside!”

“But I’ve been awake for almost a week now, and no one is ever out in those woods except you.”

Occasional flakes slipped into her coiled bun, a little too silver to pass as a common ash blonde. Upright and bracketed by spear-straight pines, she was nothing like the twitching beast I first saw, bleeding to death. The trunk leaned towards her, the uneven ground flattened as she took a step, and the knee-high undergrowth parted to two sides. The entire forest welcomed her presence. Who was I to contradict them?

“Alright. You may do so only if you keep to a close vicinity of the house. I won’t take responsibility if you wander too far and get captured.”

“Your word is my command.”

I shivered. A sheen of sweat diffused across my forehead, a texture similar to blood, except stickier. Already, she was regaining some memory of her vocabulary.

“You need to drop your foreign way of speaking. Just say ‘Of course’ or ‘I understand’.”

“Of course.” She beamed.

Still wary of an illegal hunter or a lost child, for it just takes one to report me, I walked her back. Either it was my imagination, or every corner and every furniture inside gleamed in a more pristine light. I set down a handkerchief-wrapped bundle of bread. Mom would be too protective of my feelings to accuse me of stealing, but this can’t go on forever. I’ll gather more talowood later today and go into the city to barter for food.

She nibbled off some crumbs, chewing loudly, but did not take a second bite. Again, she read my financial concern.

I can’t say what I felt about being able to be read like a book.

“What do you usually do up here, Finnegan?”

My art was nowhere near good. They had the technical skills and the proportional shapes, but they lacked something, something that made them mine, a nonliteral signature. But even if they were masterpieces, they belonged only in these cabinets.

“You do sculptures? That is so, so exciting. Would you let me look at them, please?”

The moment I freed my first piece out from the block of wood, I knew that no eyes could ever have the opportunity to appreciate or critique them. But her? She might be the only audience I’ll ever get.

Gingerly, I took all of them out, holding their bases, and made a row on the worktable.

Standing on its hind legs, its double wings extended to full wingspan, or curled up into a ball… They were all the same dragon from my dream, hideous and divine. Perhaps it was the wood’s mahogany and beige gradients that failed to capture its magnificent scales. My favorite one was it perched atop a steep peak, its spiked tail snaking down the rock ledges. But it too, wasn’t right.

“So, what do you think?”

Her fingers traced the dragons from its eagle beak to the aforementioned tail, the entire gesture imbued with a sense of longing. She settled on the beast’s center-front horns that twisted into a knot and spiraled backwards.

“For some reason, your sculptures bring me remarkable peace,” she said. From the moment I brought those out, her eyes had not left them.

“I’m glad to hear it, for it brings me nothing but a defeatist vexation and many sleepless nights.” I could not keep the despondency out of my voice, for these artworks were more like a release valve, to project my absolute frustration with this long, plaguing vision. But if it did not look the part, my poor heart cannot have peace.

“Kuning,” she suddenly whispered to the sculpture.

“Kuning,” I repeated, not sure what I should feel about her recalling one of her comrades’ names. Or about the fact that this dream-stalker was literally called “the King”.

“It’s probably not my place to make suggestions, but I feel that you did not give him the reverence he deserved, that majestic grace. I see here too much fear and anxiety that contorted the shapes as well as the truth,” she said.

Naturally, I was afraid, afraid that maybe this was the dragon who tortured my father, discarded him, and zeroed on me for its next prey: The chisel I picked up clattered to the ground and rolled under the table.

“Here.” She went under to retrieve it.

I lowered onto the bench. Pulling forward this most recent one, I chipped into its egg-shaped eye and traced out a circular groove. In my hallucinations, I had seen those ablaze fireballs, anatomy-wise no different from humans, but enlarged exponentially in ratio so that every individual fleck streaked across your vision. When carving, I was deterred by my fear of making it too real, yet I wasn’t anymore.

I didn’t need any reference materials or models. Each dream, the rush of adrenaline from my temples to my toes remembered the awestruck sensation. I chiseled out another concentric circle inside as well as radiating lines like the bloody ones that pulsated around Kuning’s dark pupils.

It took me less than a few minutes. A few minutes that I forgot to breathe. By the time I no longer itched for the narrowly beveled tool, I knew it was finally wholesome.

“Now, it looks alive instead of an inanimate toy.” Again, she put my mixed feelings into words.

“Yes, you have a good eye.”

I pushed the sculpture back into the ordered row. It morphed into a mirror for me to relive those open-mouthed moments where I stood beneath the sovereign of children-killing and fire-breathing dragons but felt no concrete fear. Compared to the fakes on its left and right, it was magnificent.

“What are you waiting for?” She chuckled at my, no doubt, silly expression. “Aren’t you going to restore the other ones?”

Restore. I liked how she used the perfect description. I gave my complete attention to the second defective work. Some required more tweaks than others, for not only the eye, but also the muscles on its wings, and the tension between its undulating forms and the sharply-defined scales protecting its skin, were sloppy. I didn’t know my motive then, but it almost seemed as if I endeavored not to bring them into real life.

She found a seat for herself on the side of the worktable. Whenever I became stumped by my invisible mistakes, she offered input that was always on the mark. She was a bad influence, a dragon supporter, but she looked entirely human. And, it had been a long time since I had such a good laugh.

“Crikey! It is getting late!” I leaped to my feet as daylight’s last shimmer tremulously climbed onto my face. Judging by the sky outside, I had less than an hour until sunset.

At a loss of any logical explanation, I grabbed the parasol and the empty basket on the doorstep and flew out of the door without saying goodbye. On my hasty way home, I remembered why I brought them with me this morning.

It must have been her sorceries. I did not ready myself before I got swept up by her clever little pokes into my brain.

What did I do for the past ten hours? Warmed towards a non-human? Laughed my head off with an either intentionally or unintentionally manipulative harlot?

Me? Who would die of shame if my father did actually defect to the dragons?

Even by running, I made it back in darkness. Miraculously, Mom did not alert the whole Valley of her missing child. She would be immensely worried, but maybe I should head all the way to the sheriff downhill. Or maybe the village Elders directly? But, who would trust me when I file a report for an amnesiac half-blood?

***

I stayed away for two days until the dream revisited, except this time, I felt an odd serenity as my feet lifted off the ground, and gravity’s rule no longer applied, and I looked into those penetrating eyes. I knew who gave me that peace, so I went to see her the next day. And the day after.

After the remodelings, she coaxed me into creating new subjects. I carved Futhorc with the long whiskers fluttering by his proud snout, Heorte and the amethyst embedded in its forehead, and even one of her. Half-bloods become shape-shifters once they pass a certain age. I imagined her as a ghost from the Underworld, runed in the silver markings I recalled seeing on her wing.

She asked me that one’s name, but I did not answer. I was glad that she couldn’t remember her past.

And I was content with how things were. She was half a dragon, but no one knew that she existed except me. From that awful blizzard seven months ago, she kept her life, and I got her, someone I didn’t particularly mind listening to or talking to.

But, people who I rely on never stayed exclusively with me.

She was gone that day. I covered twice the amount of forest area that I permitted her to explore, but there weren’t even a shadow or a footprint, not a single clue as to where she went. The woods itself grew relatively quieter without her presence.

Please, please let it be that she regained her memory and left the Valley for good. I prayed repetitively under my breath.

The search went on without any progress whatsoever, so I went back home.

Mom, who was shocked at me being back this early, half-shoved, half-led me into my pathetic closet. “You are just in time, Finnegan! Quick, make yourself respectable! A most marvelous thing has happened!”

Perplexedly, I took in the red apron she wore instead of the musty brown regular, her braided hair, and fine leather sandals. “Mom, what’s going on?”

“Oh, you won’t believe it-”

“Is it Dad? Did he come back?” I cried.

“No, but it’s as good as that. They found a half-blood in the woods. The entire Valley is invited for the execution! Think about it, all those years of crafting diamond weapons finally paid off!”