Singing At The Threshold

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

There had once been humans in the Valley.

Not anymore.

Cara sat at her loom, listening to the hustle and bustle outside as the raiders came back. It nettled her that they were called raiders. It wasn’t called raiding when you went to gather fruit from your own orchards, or salvage what could be found in the ruins of your own home. Or at least it shouldn’t be, but the raiders themselves seemed to find it funny, so that was what it was called.

It hadn’t been a good raid. Cara could tell by the subdued voices, the occasional cries of pain as someone was carried past with an injury. Burns were the most common, obviously, but breaks and sprains happened often enough. Bites and slashes were a rare occurrence–typically, if a dragon got close enough to bite or claw, that raider wasn’t coming home. The burns were bad enough.

Cara focused on her work, pulling a yarn back and forth through the warp threads. She let the rhythm fill her attention, and drown out the dismal sounds from outside. Weaving was a far cry from what she’d done before the dragon incursion, but the mountains were frigid most of the year. Thick clothing and warm blankets were a necessity, teaching children how to play woodwinds was not.

Textiles were one of the few things they could manage without the raiders. It was easy to keep goats and sheep in the mountains above the valley. The beasts thrived on the tough grass and steep, rocky terrain. With the herds, the settlements had meat and milk to eat, and wool for clothing. Everything else had to come from the valley. The mountain soil could grow very little, and they needed more than pine nuts and goat milk to live on.

“Did you hear about Andrik?”

Cara glanced over her shoulder and saw Mel ducking under the heavy drape of her tent. It was too cold to keep the door open, but she needed light to work, and they couldn’t afford to waste fuel when the cold wouldn’t kill you yet. Mel settled down on the mat as Cara turned back to her work.

“Is she dead?” Cara asked quietly.

“No, she’s back.”

Cara raised an eyebrow, but did not look over at Mel. She could imagine the woman’s face, eager, expectant.

“Glad she made it.”

The words sounded flat, but they were true. Andrik wasn’t a raider, and had no business making the journey home for anything. People who weren’t trained and armed were as good as mincemeat walking down into the Valley. Andrik had been determined though, and dissatisfied with the information the raiders came back with. Some scholars had adapted to their new lives more easily than others.

It wasn’t a raider’s job to examine things or run detailed observations on the environment. They needed to be in and out quickly, gathering as much as they could and getting out alive. Andrik wanted more. She wanted to study the dragons, and the Valley as it was now. She wanted to know what had happened. She wanted everyone to be able to go home.

She had been gone for months, and declared dead for nearly as long.

Mel hadn’t moved, and Cara could feel the growing tension in the air. She had something else to say, but she was waiting for Cara to prompt her.

“What?” Cara asked.

“She found something,” Mel blurted.

“Hmm.”

“Oh, honestly, Cara!” Mel crossed her arms, but Cara didn’t offer anything more. “Andrik says it wasn’t just some freak happening that the dragons showed up. It was a thing that brought them.”

“A thing?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind of thing?” Cara asked irritably. There had been too many hopeful rumors over the years for her to put too much stock in this one.

“I don’t know,” Mel shrugged. “Something small, powerful. A relic or something. She said it opened a kind of door that was letting them all through.”

Cara didn’t respond, but her attention piqued. Relics that opened doors were surprisingly common. Just at their school in the valley they’d had a dozen that opened to different places around the continent–all lost now. Before the incursion there had been rumors that such relics could open doors to much farther or unusual places. It did not seem so far-fetched that one might open to a realm of dragons. If the door was big enough, even those gargantuan monsters could have come through it.

And if no one was there to turn it off, the door would remain, and more dragons would come through.

“She said it was in the school,” Mel went on, oblivious to the shift in Cara. “Like in the school. Like, the doorway had cut through a wall and it was sticking out of the roof.”

“We didn’t have anything in the school that opened doors to other realms.”

“Andrik said it was there,” Mel insisted. “It had sliced open the music room.”

Cara paused her weaving, staring down at the strings. Her eyes went wide, her lips parted, and the world slowed around her. The bustling outside fell quiet, and the air felt deathly still. She recalled a serpentine relic, rounded and hollow. The one they’d all assumed was some kind of ocarina. The one that sounded too flat and croaky to play beautiful music. That plain, fragile thing that no one had even considered when they’d fled the Valley.

“Fuck.”

The word was barely a word. Nothing more than a single, damnably hopeful exclamation.

“What?” Mel asked, scooting closer. When Cara still did not reply she leaned over and peered directly into her face. “Cara, what is it?”

“I know what it is.”