Stories of Dragons

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. For generations, parents had kept their children on a steady diet of horrifying stories featuring the flying beasts. They were the monsters at the edge of the night, the sharp-toothed consequences for young people who strayed from the wisdom of their elders. Naughty children get nipped, parents warned, and evil children get eaten.

The stories themselves were a hybrid of rumors from far-off lands, accounts gleaned from dusty history texts, and tales remembered from the parents’ own childhoods. Those who knew better – expatriates from the Concordat Mountains or retired soldiers who had fought in the Eastern Forests – kept their mouths shut about the actual dragons they had seen.

Though the stories of dragons varied wildly, none of them took place in the Valley. This was a haven of peace, guarded by towering peaks and thick walls of good old mountain stone. The Wardens kept the Valley safe, always and forever, amen.

When she was seven years old, a girl named Mika realized something important. If dragons never came to the Valley, and the Wardens protected the Valley from every threat, Father’s bedtime stories were therefore utter nonsense. So in a way, it was his fault that Mika developed an insatiable appetite for breaking the rules.

Mika would never call herself “evil”, although a slim case could be made for “naughty”. When she roamed the streets at night, tossing crumbs to the stray cats that wandered the outskirts of the village Wallander, she considered herself to be quite good. She was showing kindness to animals, and didn’t Mother tell her to be kind to everyone?

The cats returned the kindness in time, brushing against Mika’s legs and purring contentedly when she approached. In those moments, she felt loved. When her parents tried locking her window, taking away her dinner, bolting her door shut, and even tying her to the bedpost one frustrated evening, Mika yearned even more to be back with her strays.

The other children thought her strange. Mika agreed with them, but she thought their jeers and mocking words were an inappropriate response to strange. Be kind to everyone, right?

When Mika was sixteen years old, and her parents had given up on keeping her away from the strays, and the local boys had given up on making the strange girl smile, and the cats had accepted a two-legged companion on their nightly strolls — that was when the dragons entered the Valley.

***

First came the rumors. Father returned from the forge one autumn day with the news that Wardens had spotted winged forms crossing over the western peaks. He’d heard it from the Taylor, the head smith who’d learned it from Tom, the local tailor. Tom was an ex-soldier whose son was friends with Captain Smith, a Warden on the night watch. Smith had supposedly seen no less than three dragons over the span of two hours.

Mika brushed it off. She’d stopped believing Father’s tales long ago.

Then Eliana, the crone who sold her knittings in the market square, told everyone who would listen about the creature that had crawled right up to her door in the middle of the night and scraped at the frame with its talons. Her curiosity piqued, Mika inspected Eliana’s door on her nightly stroll with the strays. None of the cats would go near Eliana’s house, and the three parallel gouges in the wooden doorframe were too deep to belong to any animal Mika had ever seen. There were no wolves or wild bears within the walls.

Mika was almost home when she heard a noise from the darkness. It sounded like someone dragging a rough-cut stone across a sheaf of paper. She turned to look, ready to laugh in relief at one of those old tabby-cats that had never quite warmed up to her presence.

A scaly tail slithered through the grass and disappeared into the shadows.

Pumpkin, a lean orange kit who couldn’t be older than six months, scampered away from her side. Mika didn’t blame him. She sprinted back to her rear window and hurled herself through the open space into her bed. Her hands felt desperately for the edge of her feathered comforter, and she pulled it over her head, shutting out the mysterious darkness and the image of bloody, gleaming teeth nipping at her toes.

The next morning, Mika hid beneath her covers until she could smell the finished cornbread coming out of the wood oven. She dashed out of her bedroom to take her seat at the table. Father entered a moment later, hanging his jacket by the door as Mother set the bread next to a plate of cured ham slices.

“You won’t believe it,” Father said, taking a plate proffered by his wife, “but those stories about dragons in the Valley? They’re all made up.”

Mika clamped her mouth shut to keep the arguments from bursting out.

“Oh really?” Mother asked, sounding unsurprised.

“Just talked to Taylor,” Father explained. “It looks like the Warden who saw the dragons wasn’t even on duty that night. He likely made the whole thing up.”

“Hmm,” Mother said, sitting next to Father and taking a slice of ham for herself. Mika followed suit, chewing as quietly as she could.

“They transferred the guard to another village further down the wall.” Father bit off a chunk of cornbread and nearly swallowed it whole. “One little story starts a whole fuss. Now everyone’s saying they’ve seen dragons. Can you believe that, Mika?”

Her mouth full, Mika just shook her head. If she had never believed Father’s stories, he certainly wouldn’t believe hers. But she knew what she had seen.

By the end of the day, the whole of Wallander had changed its tune. Those who had reported accounts of dragons were gently mocked, and those who had discussed the stories now laughed about the whole foolish incident. Mika didn’t blame them. It was hard, being the odd one out.

***

As autumn faded into a gentle winter, the stories of dragons began to turn back on themselves. Whispers of a conspiracy crossed the village. The Wardens had fabricated the dragons on purpose. They used children’s tales to scare people into compliance and recruit members into their ranks. Indeed, the number of Wardens along the western wall of the Valley had nearly doubled in the last few months. What other explanation could there be?

Fed by acceptance, the whispers grew into grumbles that filled the village’s two smoky taverns and wafted through the streets. The Wardens had grown complacent in their duties. They were conjuring accounts of monsters to make the villages of the Valley rely on them. They were manipulating Governor Amadicius into giving them more funding, more supplies, and more soldiers. The Valley was a haven of peace, and the only enemy to be found here was the Wardens’ irrelevance.

“You just watch,” Father said during a dinner monologue on his new favorite topic of conversation. “Soon they’ll claim some great victory, and they’ll expect us to thank them.”

Father, surprisingly, was right. Just two weeks after solstice, the Wardens held an assembly on the avenue just inside the western gate. Mika stood with her parents as she stared at the wrought iron doors that stretched thirty feet above their heads. Beyond them, the snowy peaks of the Concordats gleamed with light reflected from the pale winter sun. Had the dragons emerged from the bowels of those great mountains?

The gathering was not mandatory, yet the people still came. Some arrived straight from the market, clutching ripe red tomatoes freshly harvested from the fields by the hot springs. Others bundled up tightly against the cold, ready to hear the Wardens’ latest concoction.

A weathered old Warden with a pair of scars crisscrossing his chin stepped forward to address the crowd. His stony eyes invited silence as they swept over the villagers.

“Some of you don’t trust us,” he growled. He waited for a response, received none, and continued. “Some of you think the Wardens of the Valley are making up stories. You think dragons haven’t come to your homeland. You’re wrong.”

Next to Mika, Father clenched his fist but said nothing. A few murmurs spread through the crowd, but the Warden’s hard expression quickly dispelled them.

“I am General Oberfell,” the Warden said. “I command the Wardens along a two-hundred-mile stretch of the western wall. Yesterday, we slew a dragon the size of ten men at the river crossing.”

A few gasps came from the crowd. Mika imagined a ferocious, scaly beast bigger than her house clambering over the walls and snatching up one of her strays. The thought nearly made her sick up on her boots.

“Sixteen Wardens died for you yesterday,” Oberfell said. “Remember this.”

He spun on his heel and marched back towards the wall. He took only a few steps before the shouts began.

“Stop lying to us!”

“There aren’t any dragons!”

“You don’t have any proof!”

Oberfell whirled around to face the crowd. Mika looked up, stunned to recognize her Father’s voice as the source of the final accusation. Mother turned her ashen face away, but Father stepped forward to meet Oberfell’s stare. The villagers parted as he walked to the front of the gathering.

“General,” Father called out, “you and your Wardens have watched these walls for generations. We’re thankful for that. But dragons? In the Valley? We haven’t seen tail or talon of these beasts. We need evidence.”

Oberfell’s stern face could have split the peaks themselves wide open. “You want to see the bodies?” he asked. “Should I drag the charred, blood-stricken corpses of your Wardens into the market square?”

Someone in the crowd shouted in affirmation. To Mika’s great relief, Father ignored them.

“No, General,” he said, more softly this time. “But if you have the body of the dragon, or fresh scales, or something, it would help us to believe your claim.”

Mika read the apprehension in Oberfell’s face as he answered.

“The body of the dragon,” he said, “is the property of the Scientific Corps. It’s classified. I’m sorry.” The general turned away once more, ignoring the yells and jeers that followed him back to the western wall.

“The Wardens are making it all up!”

“What’s the Scientific Corps?”

“It’s all lies!”

Father returned to Mother’s side and put his arm around her waist. Around them, some of the pluckier Wallanderites hurled their tomatoes at the general’s back. Two connected with the man’s armor. He didn’t break stride.

“I knew it,” Father muttered. He raised a hand and looked around, presumably for something to throw. Before he could find anything, Mika grabbed Father’s arm and wrapped him in a tight embrace. As she buried her head in his strong chest, she wished that she could tell him the truth of what she’d seen.

***

As the first snows fell that night, Mika lay snuggled up under her blanket, trying to remember if she had truly seen that tail snaking through the grass all those weeks ago. It seemed preposterous now. Every single resident of Wallander now agreed that the Wardens had conspired to frighten them with stories of dragons outside the walls. How would a dragon even get past the ever-increasing number of Wardens along the western edge of the Valley?

But Mika's memory didn’t lie. There had been something sinister lurking in the night. Something had frightened little Pumpkin away. And now stray cats were disappearing from the streets, one or two every week. No one noticed enough to care, or cared enough to notice, except for Mika herself.

So instead of roaming the village in the chilly midnight air, she curled up in her bed and dreamed up a plan to convince her parents of the truth.

No one stopped Mika as she walked along the western wall the next morning. She left a light trail of bootprints in the snow as she crunched her way past the guard tower filled with Wardens. Two of the bolder strays joined her, pausing occasionally to sniff at the fresh powder as they walked. When one of them wandered off towards the gap in the wall that admitted the river, Mika followed.

She had to crawl on her knees to inspect the grate that interrupted the shallow river. This was how the cats crossed into Wallander from the wilderness beyond. The grate itself was almost twenty feet wide, with metal spikes set in regular intervals to keep larger animals from doing the same.

So why were half a dozen bent and broken spikes lying in the water? The resulting gap was almost large enough to admit a full-grown man like Father. Instead of pondering the fairly obvious question of what could have done this, Mika scampered away. She rushed back to the house, changed into fresh clothes, apologized to Mother for falling into the river by accident, and huddled by the fireplace to think.

Just before midnight, Mika rose fully dressed from her bed. Mother and Father had given up on taming her strange proclivities, but she still tiptoed across the wooden floor and oiled the door’s hinges before slipping out into the night. She wore three layers of clothing, her thickest gloves and boots, and a furry cap that nearly covered her eyes.

The cats swarmed around her when she passed by the market square. Mika dropped a few crumbs of cornbread and vegetable scraps as she hurried by.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “but I have somewhere to be. Stay safe tonight.”

The torches cast uneasy shadows from the top of the western wall. Wardens chatted above as they made their rounds, watching keenly for any signs of trouble that would threaten their borders. Mika hugged the wall as she retraced her steps to the river.

The water hadn’t frozen over yet, but Mika’s blood seemed to crack and crumble within her veins as she forced herself to crawl up to the grate. She wormed through the gap, careful not to rip her clothes on the exposed spikes. Once through, she clambered up to the dry land on the other side of the wall.

She immediately removed her gloves so her hands wouldn’t freeze. What a horrible idea this was! The layers that kept Mika alive would probably kill her now that she was half-soaking. But if she made a fire, the Wardens would investigate and bring her right back. They’d fix the grate, and she’d lose her chance to prove that dragons had arrived in the Valley.

The river crossing was two miles ahead. Mother had brought her there half a dozen times before finally concluding that her little girl wouldn’t be a hunter. No one knew what Mika was supposed to become, least of all Mika herself.

She stuck to the tree cover near the riverbank as she trudged through the snowy brush. She made it only a quarter mile before the cold had sunk into her bones. Every step felt like breaking the ice that froze their locks during the night in deep winter. Her legs stiff, her feet numb, Mika carried on.

By half a mile, she knew she might never reach the crossing alive. By three-quarters, she knew she had to make a fire or else she would die. By one mile, she had begun gathering sticks in frost-bitten hands. But she kept walking.

Was the river still on her left? Mika jumped at the sound of cracking leaves somewhere in the distance. She looked around and realized to her horror that she must have lost the river at the first bend. She was somewhere in the wilderness beyond the wall, lost to civilization, freezing to death. All because she thought she saw a dragon.

Another crack. Mika dove behind a juvenile redwood, crouching by the thick trunk as she listened to the night. The brittle leaves of winter crunched nearby, the sound drawing closer. She was not alone.

In the stillness of the woods, heavy footfalls thumped just out of sight. Mika dared herself to look, because she was really quite cowardly, and a dare was a surefire way to convince herself not to look. She squeezed her eyes shut as the mysterious rhythm approached her tree, paused for several heartbeats, and moved on.

Mika tore her eyes open and glanced around the trunk in time to see a dragon’s tail disappear into the brush. The patchy moonlight from above the trees illuminated glossy black scales that joined together in twin ridges running the length of the tail. The creature twitched, wiggling its tail briefly as it passed under a clump of briar bushes.

Mika was so astounded, she forgot that she was dying. She dropped the meager handful of sticks she’d collected for a fire, and looked for any sign of where the dragon had gone. The trail ended at the briars, but Mika saw the yawning mouth of a cave set into the rocky foothills that preceded the Concordat Mountains ahead.

If she had reached the foothills, she was at least half a mile from the river. She would die before she found her way home. Then again, she would also die if a dragon dismembered and digested her body. Of the two choices, the latter felt much less certain and much more intriguing. Mika summoned every last speck of courage in her chest and approached the cave.

A faint light emanated from the cave entrance, suggesting a fire somewhere deep inside. As Mika stepped up to the mouth, a moving shadow broke the hint of yellows and reds dancing on the inside wall.

“This is how I’ll die,” Mika said, her throat dry and cracked from the freezing air. Well, at least she was choosing for herself.

Mika took two steps into the cave and promptly plummeted ten feet to the rocky floor. Her ankles screamed at the impact, but Mika bit her tongue, because this would be an exceptionally uninteresting way to die. She made herself stand on unsteady legs, bracing her hands against the cool stone walls below the ledge that had been her downfall.

The darkness waited for her. Mika walked through the last hint of moonlight from above and into the abyss. She felt her way along the rough-hewn walls of what must have been a man-made tunnel. Perhaps her ancestors had used these caves long ago, before the wall, before the peace of the Valley.

The dim firelight returned in a few minutes, bouncing off the walls ahead, revealing a sharp turn in the tunnel. Fire meant people, which meant civilization, which meant life. Or it meant dragons, which felt more like Mika’s luck tonight. She should have stayed home.

Too late now. She breathed deeply, accepting her fate, and tasted an unusual scent on the air. Was that fennel? Before Mika’s brain could find an explanation, her feet carried her around the bend and into the strangest dining room she had ever seen.

The tunnel opened into a cavernous space with a high ceiling and curved walls that must have been a hundred feet apart at the widest point. Most of the room was empty, but a roaring fire sat in a pit near the center of the room. Set against one wall was a trio of wooden shelves that held dozens of books in all colors and sizes. On the opposite side were tables strewn with metal tools, strangely shaped glasswares, and other implements Mika didn't recognize.

It took her a moment to register the centerpiece of the room. Beyond the fire, two figures sat on opposite ends of a dining table. They were eating salads from wooden bowls, nice ones that they couldn't have found in a town like Wallander. The man on the left was a Warden, judging by his familiar armor, though he also had a white coat slung on the back of his seat.

The figure on the right was a dragon sitting in a human chair. It held a fork in its right hand—claw?—talons?—and gripped the wooden bowl in front of it with the other. Its tail emerged from a hole in the chair back, waving gently from side to side. The creature speared a few romaine leaves and a golden cherry tomato, raised the fork to its snout, and bit. As it chewed, its head turned directly to where Mika was standing. The Warden’s gaze followed, and although he raised his eyebrows, neither of them seemed completely surprised.

The dragon sighed—it sighed—before turning its scaly face back to the Warden.

“I told you she was onto us,” the dragon said.

***

Thank you for reading my entry into the Fantasy Prologue challenge! Please let me know what you think in the comments below.