Sins of the Father

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.” Hedwig, Violet’s great-grandfather, shifted in his seat, obviously uncomfortable under the scrutiny of the youngest of his son’s line. He had never known how to speak to her properly after her mother had died under his watch. “Our people did not live here either, back then; we were outcasts, always traveling from land to land, city to city, for we could not live anywhere for long. We were cursed, you see, to never find a land of our own.” “How can we live here, then?” Violet cut in, her serpent coiled around her arm. “Curses can’t be broken so easily; I’ve never even heard a story that would suggest something so ludicrous. Our neighbors have one on their household, and they’re fairly lucky that it’s so mild. Even so, their kid can barely breathe sometimes because he broke a promise they made on his behalf! Once! It’s almost insulting that…” She trailed off slowly. The old man was watching her, patiently waiting for her to stop speaking so he could resume his story. From the darkness behind him, another pair of eyes stared, amused, at the exchange, and the long, tapered tail that formed the body attached to them wound tighter around Hedwig’s chair. Glints of multicolored light shimmered as they caught the feathers around the dragon’s head, as it leaned down to hear the discussion more clearly. Shrinking back into her seat, Violet’s dragon looked back and followed her cue, slithering back up her arm and hiding inside her hair, with only its head left poking out. “Objection withdrawn. Sorry. That was out of turn.” “It’s alright,” the old man said, “it’s an unbelievable claim, I know. But you and I both know that none of your cousins who left the Valley of Serpents and settled beyond it have lasted very long. It was only last week, I believe, that Darion and his wife moved out, no? Martha?” “Yes, sir.” The maid in the corner answered as if the conversation had been scripted beforehand. “And how are they settling in?” “According to their last letter, Darion has been having anxiety attacks since they reached their new house, and their baby has fallen ill.”

The clicking of a pen was the only thing that broke the silence that followed; Hedwig’s eyes still didn’t waver as Violet twisted her head to the side and her shoulders shook slightly. It took some time before she spoke again. “Do they know?” “No, they don’t.” Came the reply. “None but the main branch of the family can be told of this, by the terms of the curse itself. Doing so would only bring plague and misfortune on our house.” “But Great-Grandfather -” Violet started, only to be cut short by Hedwig’s voice echoing through the room, accompanied by his fist slamming into his chair’s arm. “They would die, Violet! To do so would kill them, and you, and anyone else that might have heard. We can’t risk it; many of the main family have tried in the past, and died again and again until we are all that remain.” His voice raw from shouting, the old man stopped a moment, covering his eyes with one hand. A tear fell down his face from beneath it, sparking in the light. “That was what happened twenty years ago when your parents passed. That is why the main family runs thin, despite the prosperity around us.” He laid his shoulders on the back of the chair, clearly exhausted by the outburst. “That’s why there’s nothing to be done about it. But this is something you need to know. We can’t leave this place, or the home we’ve made here.” “Sir?” A voice interrupted. Hedwig turned again to the corner of the room, puzzled. The maid, holding his gaze, said, “Your story, sir. I don’t mean to interrupt, but you’re getting off-topic.” He readjusted himself. “You’re right. My apologies, Violet.” Violet shifted nervously, though she felt numb from shock. Something akin to sorrow or dread was steadily building in the hollow of her chest, making it hard to move or even breathe. She was keenly aware of the larger dragon’s eyes; how could she not be, when they bore down on her like a knife? ”It’s alright.” She said, trying to avert her eyes somewhat from the dragon, or even Hedwig, moving the conversation along as best she could. “I think I understand some of it now, at least. My parents… well, I suppose I can see what happened. Or why, at least.” She suddenly turned her head back to the old man, wiping a tear from the side of her face. “Did you know they were thinking of leaving? My father was so excited about it, but mother… perhaps I know why she was against it now.”

The room grew silent once again; Violet sat almost expectantly while Hedwig slowly slumped into his chair, waiting for his answer. After a moment, he spoke again. “I knew he was considering it, but not seriously. Not until she asked my permission to tell him, and I forbade it. I thought she knew better. Maybe she doubted me, maybe she doubted the power of the curse itself, but she did something that couldn’t be taken back. I wish it could have been.” The old man looked distraught like an old wound had been torn open again. Violet responded, at first with force, “It isn’t your fault, Great-Grandfather,” then much more quietly, “even if I wish it was sometimes.” Her dragon twisted briefly around her upper arm in an attempt to comfort her, while the larger one’s smile up above only grew, curling in amusement for some unknowable reason. “But anyhow!” Her tone brightening, Violet attempted to bring the conversation away from the dark place it had gravitated towards. “You had a story you were telling. It might be best to try and work through that before getting bogged down in our own family drama.” The tears rolling down her face hadn’t dried yet, but she still pushed herself into sitting up in an attentive position, mimicking how she had looked when she first sat down after her great-grandfather had called her to the library with no warning. This coaxed a smile out of the old man if only a somber one; he too drew himself up in his old wooden armchair, and resumed his stern continuance, only bearing a shadow of the sadness from before. “Of course, dear. Let’s continue, at least for the moment.”

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley of Serpents. Back then, our people did not live here either; we were outcasts, cursed to never have a land of our own. We traveled the world, stopping from town to town and buying and selling what we could. Some accepted us, and there we would bring our own little slice of prosperity, while others shunned us and threatened to cast us out forcefully. Too many of the latter would strike, and we would be starving and beaten, trudging down the highway in hope that our next stop would let us in for food and water; enough of the former, and we would have food aplenty and many goods to pass to any new destinations. But we always had to remember the bad times, lest they come back once more to haunt us.” “How far back was this?” Violet asked. While the old man spoke, her dragon had slipped down to coil up and snooze on her lap, but, in contrast, she looked deeply interested in the story. “I know we settled in the Valley relatively recently, but I’ve never been able to figure out exactly when. You usually avoid the subject, but well, given the conversation…” She trailed off. Her hand unconsciously drifted back to push the hair back from her eyes, securing it neatly back into the intricate braid that encircled her head. Hedwig tilted his head in return, blinking slowly. “Did we never tell you that? I thought your mother must have…” He shifted again in his seat. His expression had softened the creases around his eyes as if he was remembering better times. “Not that it matters. My grandfather was the first of our house to settle here, roughly a hundred and forty years ago. While I think his legacy stands on, it must be said that he was not a very nice man. None of us who remember him like to recall the time when he was alive.” The menacing eyes of the dragon above them both seemed to recoil for a moment; they quickly twitched about the room before its towering body seemed to seize, then slowly relax as the old man’s aged hand ran slowly across the scales closest to him. “I think my efforts to change the nature of what he built in this place have caused history to see him far more kindly than he deserves. Unequivocally, he was a monster, far more so than our lifelong friends here.” He stood up, grasping at the cane that lay by his side, while the head of the massive beast swept down alongside him. As it reached him, he smiled wearily and placed his hand on it instead, leaning into its body to support himself as he walked towards the fireplace. Upon reaching it, the head of the family extended his arms close to the fire, warming his old bones. “You see, the dragons didn’t use to be our friends, nor even our partners. It wouldn’t be untrue to say that they were our enemies, when our family met them long, long ago.”

“According to my grandfather, we first came upon the dragons in one of those drought seasons. A local baron had just forced our family out of his castle, and in order to reach the next town, we had to trudge through a nearby swamp in the dead of night to avoid any bandits that might be camped out along the highways. It was dirty work and soiled many of the goods we carried, but it was still a better option than being raided in the night, and having our people killed, held hostage, or worse. You stick by your family, after all; putting them in danger was like cutting your arm off, it just wasn’t done. My grandfather led them through all this, holding the torch and always putting himself into harm’s way first.” “Excuse me,” said Violet, “but you keep saying ‘we.’ Were you there for this? I know you’re old, but I don’t think you’re over a hundred years old.” Hedwig turned back to her and blinked, a look of confusion crossing his face. Realizing her mistake, Violet turned scarlet, and a stumbling mess of excuses nearly escaped her mouth before the old man laughed aloud, the sound of which echoed across the brick walls. “Quite right, my dear. I apologize, I forget myself sometimes. All of this feels so long ago.” He leaned slightly into his dragon once more, though he seemed much more youthful than before, with almost a spring in his step. “I am certainly very old, that much is clear, but I have only just barely broken my hundredth year on this earth. Though I’ve never had the opportunity to leave the Valley, these stories were told to me so often and so vividly that they feel almost like a second set of memories, like every tale I’ve heard was lived through by me in a past life. It’s a funny thing.” He steps forward, sweeping his arm over the dragon as he walks alongside its massive body. “Each telling is just a little different, just like every time you recall a piece of information. I feel like I’ve neglected you in that.” His foot catches on a knot in the floorboards as he finishes his sentence, and he crashes down into the side of his dragon, where he is immediately caught by its coils and helped back to his feet, accompanied by a series of painful-sounding pops and cracks. Finally returned to his chair, he falls back into it, massaging the backs of his knees. “It seems like every time I try to think about the old times, something pulls me back out again. Talking about this is hard on me. But you’re nearly grown now, and I’m the only one who can speak of these things anymore. No one else remembers.”

The fire crackled in the corner as the dragon swept its body across the floor, entangling around Hedwig’s chair once again. Across from them, Violet had a grim expression on her face, wringing her hands from the stress of the conversation. This was too many personal revelations packed into such a short time, so much so that it left her feeling dumbfounded and overwhelmed by the tide of emotion that kept swinging back and forth. Her great-grandfather had never been great at staying on topic, but she really wanted him to after all this; this was a story she had to learn about, she knew that much, but there was a part of her that just wanted out, to go back to her room and stare blankly at the wall for an hour or two until her head stopped reeling. She sat up as the old man cleared his throat and resumed once more. “Here is where the dragons enter our story. Back in those days, being travelers, our family encountered many strange and mysterious creatures, of which dragons were only one. Not many people know about them; though myths and legends do exist, for the most part, people keep to themselves. They might know about a singular type of beast, for example, that keeps around their little village, but that’s the extent of it. On the other hand, though, we saw everything.” Hedwig steepled his hands excitedly. “We have records of many of these, written down somewhere in the family library; birds with the face of humans, enormous cattle with stinking breath and maddened gazes. We have seen lizards that sing, and forests that speak in tongues unknowable by man. And it was two of these creatures that we came upon in that swamp; the dragons and the eternal tortoises.”

“What?” Violet sounded confused. “Turtles? I’ve never heard about those.” “No, tortoises.” Said her great-grandfather. “There’s a difference. Turtles generally live out at sea and have fins. Tortoises are the ones we get inland; they generally have tough feet. They’re related, but not the same.” The two stared at each other for a moment, before Violet grinned. “Alright. Carry on.” The old man smirked in return. “The tortoises and the dragons were an intertwined set of animals; presumably, the two had never been separated from each other before. Those tortoises we found were ancient, likely much older than the kingdom we live in, or even the royal line. Perhaps they even beheld the beginnings of humanity itself.” His smile faded, the lines on his face twisting into a grimace. “It was a terrible thing that happened that day. The speculation on the tortoises only happened when we truly stopped to examine their bodies; however, that night, my grandfather slaughtered the tortoises, cracking open their shells to feed our starving family. They live now only in our records, only in this story. The dragons were their defenders, their lifelong friends, and they too were murdered in that swamp. Only one was saved, by my father, who was only a young boy. He carried it with him in his jacket, sheltering it from my grandfather’s wrath. All our dragons today are descended from that one, the very last of the turtle dragons.”

“It was only a while after that when it became apparent that the dragon who had been saved was an extremely valuable creature. My grandmother found out about it almost immediately and helped my father to hide it as it grew. It imprinted on him, you see, after its tortoise had been slain, and soon they had bonded; it began to learn about him, mime his movements. It felt pain with him, it felt wonder, and it felt sorrow. The other children would make fun of him for saving it, but it would snap at their hands when they tangled with him, keeping him from harm. It would comfort him on those days when the world was hard on him, keeping his spirits up. And eventually, it split, creating a new dragon.” Violet was slumped back in her chair at this point, with one hand covering her face, but at this, she raised her head again. Her other hand was cupped over her dragon’s head, in a futile attempt to cover the holes in its head that sufficed for ears; luckily, it was not particularly good at interpreting conversation yet, so it simply continued to sleep in blissful ignorance. “What do you mean, it split?” “... Did you never wonder where dragons came from, dear? I suppose we don’t explain it that often, but still, they have to reproduce somehow.” “Well, I thought, you know, when a mommy dragon and a daddy dragon love each other very much…” Violet was flushed red again, clearly embarrassed. The old man chortled. “No, my dear. That’s a reasonable thing to assume, but that’s not how dragons work.” Violet turned away to look at the maid in the corner, her face burning. The maid was quietly chuckling behind her hand, but as Violet turned, she quickly stood at attention once more, no trace of any emotion showing despite the intense conversation. “Once they reach a certain age, they start growing additional heads, which eventually divide from their body and become a separate dragon, who then imprints and bonds with someone else. This doesn’t happen after they reach a certain age and size, thank goodness,” at this, he looked up at his own dragon towering above them, “but this means that a single dragon can produce a large number of others in a relatively short period of time, as long as they have hosts to attach to.”

“Is that what happens in the nursery? Why would you hide that from everyone?” Violet was genuinely puzzled by this. Hiding the piece about the curse, she could understand, since it was life-or-death stakes for anyone it was involved with. But knowing how the dragons worked seemed like enough of a basic fact of life for the family that she couldn’t justify keeping it from them. “Well, that’s just a matter of information control.” Her great-grandfather’s reply seemed sheepish, not quite tinged with regret, as it maybe should be, but definitely dyed with embarrassment. “You have to understand, letting news of how the dragons reproduce spread could have extremely dangerous consequences for the family as a whole. Kept secret, it allows us to keep together as a single family unit, at least for the most part. A single tree, with one trunk, that spreads its leaves as it will. But if the entire family knows, then factionalism will start to divide us; we will branch ourselves away until there is not one House of Serpents, but two, or three, or more. We can’t afford that, especially if it causes an entire segment of the family to fall victim to the curse. That’s why what happens in the nursery is kept secret. Only children who are too young to remember what happens there are allowed, as well as a set of servants that we can truly trust, like Martha over there.” The maid in the corner curtsied in stony silence, a strange expression flickering across her face momentarily before it returned to its usual stoic state. Violet’s posture softened at this, but as she turned back to the old man, her eye flicked up again to the larger dragon, noting it too had an unreadable difference in its bearing. “I suppose that’s fair. It does account for why all our children are sent there until they’re two years old, at least.” She said matter-of-factly, wringing her hands. “Could we get back to the story? This has been a long conversation, and I don’t know how much more of it I can deal with. There’s maybe some things that I’m going to need to process here, after all this.” Her great-grandfather smiled. “Of course. I’m sure you could use your rest after hearing something like this. I can’t say how likely I am to make it through everything either; telling these stories always dredges up some very bad memories.” His leg shifted, pulling away from his dragon. “I’ll skip ahead a little bit; while the time in between meeting the dragons and our family arriving in the Valley is something that you should know about, it’s not directly important to the premise of the tale. And I’m not sure how much more of this my old bones can take.”

“Years later, our family still traveled the lands. Though by now, many of them possessed dragons, my grandfather was still unaware of their presence, but at this point, he knew that the rest of the family was hiding something from him. He was also the only one who knew about the curse at the time; he was a tremendously paranoid man and had hoarded the information so that no one could use it against him. A simple trade route is what brought us to the Valley, however.” Hedwig coughed. “Excuse me if this part is a little muddled. I’m trying to move through it a little more quickly, but I will still give context where necessary.” Violet nodded, trying to make it clear that she understood without interrupting. “There are two cities on either side of the Valley - Adestrial and Kestrail - and in those days, the Valley acted as a path through the mountain range that divided the two. Knowing this, we took a chance and went through it in the midst of the rainy season.” Violet’s eyes widened. “And, as I can see from your face that you just put together, this quickly became a problem. Luckily for us, we made it to the hill where this very house stands before the rains truly came into full force, and so we were not swept up in the flood that consumed the Valley, filling it as if it had become the ocean. However, we were trapped there, unable to leave until the waters abated.”

“Being merchants by blood and trade, we were of course prepared for long stretches on the road. We had enough rations to survive that time easily, but that wasn’t the problem. No, the real issue here was the curse. It began to activate, and everyone reacted differently; some became paranoid and greedy, some became overwhelmed by their senses, to the point where they couldn’t function, and others became deathly ill. It began to tear the family apart, making my grandfather increasingly desperate. In the middle of all this, he discovered the dragons, the big secret that had been hidden underneath his very nose; in anger, he took my father’s dragon, and cast it far into the grove, where the orchard stands now. Unfortunately, it did not survive without my father there to guide it. However, deep in the brush, it split, and the new dragon found a new host. It’s unclear how this happened, exactly, but instead of taking a human or one of the tortoises as its partner, somehow it became bonded to the very land itself.” He turned slightly, caressing the giant behind him once more. “This is that very same dragon; the Serpent itself, that both the Valley and our noble House are named for.” Violet stared up now with an expression filled not with fear or intimidation, as it was before, but of raw and undiluted wonder. “After it did, something even stranger happened. The effects of the curse slowly faded away as if it had never been laid upon our family in the first place. This land belonged to it now, much more than anyone else, and so this place was not ours, even as we were forced to stay upon it. My grandfather noticed this as soon as it happened, and became convinced that it was here where we were meant to settle. He told his direct family about the curse, and how it didn’t affect them here, and together they convinced the rest to leave our nomadic ways behind. We built levees and vineyards to ensure that the Valley would never flood again, and our House was erected around the Serpent to protect it and our livelihoods. Now, we are one of the largest trading centers in the East, and our home is open to all weary travelers; it will stand for at least as long as I live, and now that you know its secrets, I hope that you will take up my mantle as head of the family once I am gone and continue its legacy.”

The tension in the room jumped, electrifying the air and increasing the pressure on Violet twofold. She knew she was the heir to the family; ever since her parents had died, that duty had fallen directly on her as the next in line, but it still had never sunk in as it should. The servants treated her with strange looks, and her cousins gave her a wide berth, rumors abound as to what she, an orphan scarcely fifteen years old at the time who would one day be in charge of them all, was doing, and a thousand eyes waited for any small misstep she made. It had been five years since then, but every day that passed failed to make it feel any more real. Her great-grandfather, the only member of her family left, was the only person she could look up to, and he had never even done so much as acknowledged to her that these duties would pass to her one day. Not until now. She stood up, jolting her dragon from its slumber; it hissed and looked around, assessing the situation before slithering back to her and glaring directly at Hedwig with a mixture of fear and anger. “Violet?” The old man sounded confused. “I’m done with this. I need some time to myself.” Violet said. She stormed out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her.

Later, she would regret this; this would be the last time she saw that room, and her great-grandfather before he died. Before the fire raged through the House of Serpents, and the head of the family was cut away, left to rot in the dirt. Before she was cast out of the only home she had ever known. Before the dragons betrayed their masters once and for all.