Somewhere Between Earth and Sky

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Centuries ago all of dragonkind had left the earth we knew for an alternate dimension. There they built a flourishing society and lived in peace. Until they turned their eyes back to the earth of humans, of technology and progress and exponential growth. To the earth where wars of greed and religion destroyed as much as we'd built, where climate change and ocean-rise ruined the land, where disease and poverty and starvation prevented humankind from thriving.

Why did the dragons look back? Why not just go on with their lives in a beautiful, abundant earth filled with wonder? They told us that the damage we had caused was seeping over the border, across the liminal spaces between the dimensions. If they didn’t return and set it right, fix the poison that humans concocted, then both worlds would be destroyed. All worlds would be destroyed, for there are many dimensions beyond these two.

***

The dragons returned on April 8th, 2035. They returned to the hills and cities and farmlands and forests, all across the world.

And they returned to the Valley. My Valley. The one that I looked down upon every day of my life, where my family had lived and learned and worked for generations.

The Valley where now only dragons roamed.

***

Dragonkind had an enormous advantage over humankind. Besides the advantages of size and strength and long, scimitar-sharp teeth, I mean. Those helped in a fight, back in the days when knights rode forth on valiant, brightly-caparisoned steeds to save the kingdom and rescue the princess and all of those fairytale elements. But in the modern world, against germ warfare and nuclear weapons and automated drones, the physical advantages pretty much evened out. But dragons still held the advantage.

For they also had magic, embedded in the very cells of their being.

Humans have played at being magicians forever, but we never really knew what magic was. What it is. Science and magic, when combined, presented a force that could not be defeated. A fact that humans soon learned, or died trying to disprove. At first, we thought that dragons were the primitive ones. Great, hulking beasts with tiny brains. We didn’t know what we were up against. Of course, they tried to negotiate, tried to get us to “see the light.” But we humans have always been pigheaded and full of ourselves, thinking we were better than any other species. Thinking that no one could reign supreme over us.

We were soon proven wrong.

Much has already been written about the Great Dragon Wars of 2041 and 2057. Pull a history book off of any shelf and you can read about the tactics which defeated human weapons. About the destruction of arms caches and nuclear submarines and weapons manufactories. Very primitive weapons we had, as it turned out, when faced with the manipulation of ~matter/space/time~, with a strong measure of magic thrown in. Humankind didn’t stand a chance.

When the surrender of humankind on earth was finally negotiated, the dragons acted quickly. No fault there. The earth was failing fast. The dragons—even with their knowledge of ~matter/space/time~ science and magic combined—had to get to work to reverse climate change and repurpose the detritus of hundreds of centuries of humanity's dirty footprints sullying the earth. Apparently, their wizard scientists had been working on the human problem for quite a long time.

Their solution was probably not the punishment we deserved, considering what we had done to the planet of our birth. But dragonkind was…well, kind, in many ways.

They created a world for us, for humans, in the sky. It was formed of clouds, with solid bottoms beneath the white billows of vapor. You could walk on a cloud and not fall through (they didn't want any humans accidentally returning to the planet below). Towers rose from individual clouds, connected by ethereal-seeming walkways and suspension bridges. Every human had a bright, clean space of their own, a room in a tower, either connected to their families’ rooms or alone. There were schools for the children, and workplaces, a job for everyone suited to their character and neural capacity and temperament. We grew our own food and wove our own fabrics and sewed our own clothes. We were growers and workers and artists and musicians and writers. All of our needs were met.

Except for two.

Firstly, religion was outlawed. The scientifically-minded dragons showed us that the only gods were the ones we created out of our own superstitions and fears. We were allowed gratitude and appreciation and contemplation and meditation. But no worship of a being greater than we, ourselves, were. There was no need for worship. We know that now.

But it was the second need that the dragons refused to fulfill, for their own safety. And—hadn’t we proven ourselves unworthy, after all?—we were never to set our two feet on the green hills and valleys of the earth again. Our new home was tethered to the old earth, but we couldn’t return, except by special dispensation. And that was the most painful thing about this new life, by far.

At least it was for me. I would never know the ground my mother lived upon.

And died upon.

***

Author’s Note: This is the prologue to a novel of longing and loss and desire for what we humans had but threw away. The story follows a teen character (Girl? Boy? Other?) who wants desperately to step foot on the ground where their ancestors walked, and their fight to reach that ground from their new home in the clouds.

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Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, and pledges are always cherished, like a dragon treasures a cavern filled with gold. And books.

I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to another of my entries: