Summoning Fire

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley, you know,” I whisper from where we're tucked away, hidden under a low-growing bush. I hold my breath as the shadow sweeps over us, the enormous creature blotting out the sun as it makes its pass above.

We were lucky to be on the edge of the forest when the siren started to wail – a few more feet and we would’ve been completely exposed out in the meadow.

We would’ve been lunch.

I keep my eyes fixed upwards, catching glimpses of its powerful form through the leaves, silently willing the beast to keep gliding and begging the wind not to carry our scent to those nostrils, flared and searching for a hot meal.

Jarvy shifts beside me, his movement rustling the branches of our secret spot.

“Stop it,” I say through gritted teeth, nudging him in the ribs – gently. I don’t want to jostle the bush even more.

He rolls his eyes, settling into a crouch. “Fifi, we’ll be fine, they’re not even that close anymore,” he drawls – though he’s speaking in more hushed tones than usual.

Fine, hey?

The scratches on my arms and back, caused by stray branches as we dived for cover, begin to sting, and I wish I’d thought to grab my leather jacket before we’d left for the morning’s hunt. I should know better than to leave it behind, even in the middle of summer. I should’ve been more prepared. But there hadn’t been a dragon sighting in weeks and the sun had seemed so determined to melt my skin as I’d walked out the door. Carrying a jacket just seemed like an annoyance.

I shake my head, praying silently that the monster soaring on the thermals above doesn’t catch the copper tang of my blood in the air as it twists, writhes and somersaults its way towards the mountain ranges at the other end of the valley. Three more follow close behind, slicing through the sky. The sunlight glints on their scales, a black, green and purple shimmer stretched tight across rippling muscles, like an oil spill dancing across the sky. Two shimmering swathes of blue-tinged black keep each one airborne – but I know from the histories these silk-like appendages are anything but fragile. More like woven threads of steel mesh than the gauzy decorations they appear to be – and nothing can tear through the deceivingly thin membrane of a dragon’s wings.

“Priny told me,” I continue as the flock eases out of range, spinning and somersaulting against the backdrop of cotton candy clouds. “The dragons showed up again twenty years ago, out of nowhere. After 53 years without any sign of them, everyone thought they were gone for good but one day, they crawled out of the mountains and took back the skies…”

I trail off. Jarvy knows the histories, I don’t need to tell him. But it’s still a topic we’ve never been able to leave alone. The apex predators had reappeared the same month I was born, emerging one spring morning from the cavernous rifts and blackened hollows nature had carved into the depths of the distant hills. Jarvy had been three at the time, and we’d both grown up knowing nothing but screeching sirens, scrambling for cover and the bone-trembling fear of life on the ground.

You never knew who might be plucked from the village and carried off to the dragons’ network of caves. All you could know for sure was that you’d never see them again.

As kids, Jarvy would tease me endlessly, insisting it was my birth that called the dragons back to these mountains. ‘Dragon girl’, he’d called me. Real original, right? I’d hated him for the first few years of my life but somewhere along the way, we’d gone from being enemies to cautious allies… to friends. No-one else could ever climb a tree like Jarvy – well, no-one except me – and, at six years old, that was a skill I couldn’t help but respect. We’d race to the forest after school, heading for the tallest Redwoods, their thick trunks and outstretched branches begging us to play, moving higher and higher. We’d both try to out-climb each other, heading for the pinnacle where the treetops kissed the clouds, and would spend our afternoons lounging among the branches, reaching to the heavens to see whose fingers could scrape the sky.

Of course, the top of a tree isn’t the smartest place to be when there’s a bunch of dragons flying overhead on a mission to find a meal. When Jarvy’s parents and my aunt Priny had discovered what we’d been doing they put an end to it, fast.

“How could you be so stupid?” Priny had said, hauling me back to our cottage, my little legs pumping to keep up with her great strides. At five-foot tall, the woman was astonishingly fast.

“And you!” Jarvy’s mum had scolded from where she stalked behind her son, directing him out of the trees by his shoulders. “You’re older than Fifira, you should know better! You’re supposed to be setting a good example!”

Good example my ass.

Jarv had taught me all his tricks when we'd become friends – including how to sneak out of the house without getting caught. So while we stopped climbing trees in the afternoon, we instead began a nightly ritual of creeping out of our windows while the town slept and racing each other to the highest branches, trying to pull down the moon.

We weren't scared of anything back then.

I sigh, pushing the memories aside as I wriggle out from beneath our paltry hiding spot, the floating reptilian flock now barely dots on the skyline.

“We got lucky, Jarv,” I say, brushing the dirt from my top. “Like, really lucky.” I reach over my shoulder, assessing the damage to the back of my shirt. Ugh. Priny’s going to kill me for ruining another one.

Jarvy shoots me a lazy, devil-may-care half smile, flicking bits of earth and grass off his own sleeves and tossing his sandy hair from his eyes. They’re light brown, flecked with gold, but in the sunshine, they look almost like pools of molten amber.

I might swoon like the rest of the girls in town, if I didn’t know him so well.

“Relax, Fifi. We were fine, they didn’t scent us, they didn’t see us…”

I bend down to adjust my bootlaces, clenching my jaw where he can’t see. “Yeah, this time. But if you hadn’t been late this morning, if we’d been halfway across the meadow we–”

Jarvy chuckles and I stand back up to face him. He’s grinning like an idiot, a flower in his outstretched hand, roots dangling forlornly in the breeze.

“I’m sorry,” he says, shoving the pathetic bloom at me.

I roll my eyes again, snatching the meagre offering as heat rises to my cheeks.

“Come on, let’s go. We need to catch something for dinner and it’s going to be even harder now everything’s been scared away.”

I spin on my heel and stalk away, Jarvy’s footsteps echoing mine as we make our way deeper into the forest. As a hunting team, we’re unmatched. There’s a preternatural understanding between us as we make our way along the usual tracking lines, picking out a quiet path along the sun-dappled packed earth. My anger faded as focus took over and I begin to run on instinct. Track-find-kill.

I feel more than see or hear Jarvy has he veers left behind me, knowing he’s heard what I have – a snuffling in the leaves ahead, the gentle clop-clop of dainty hooves on the ground. We take our usual positions – I go high, into the trees, while Jarvy stays low, positioning himself close to the ground. We can see it now, the deer nibbling at a sapling bursting from the forest floor. We draw our bows as one, connected in that way we have – something I admit I take for granted.

A cool breeze shifts the leaves around me and the birds pick up their chattering, calling to each other in song now the coast is clear. The forest is only ever silent when the dragons fly over.

Jarvy has the clean shot and I let him take it, feeling the usual pang in my chest as the beautiful creature falls. We need to hunt if we want our families to eat but that doesn’t mean I enjoy taking a life. Still, Jarvy’s good. It’s a quick kill, no suffering, no mess, and I drop soundlessly from the tree and wander towards him when something flashes to my right, a beam of sunlight being cast directly into my eyes. My bow is drawn in an instant as I whirl to look at what’s caught me off guard. Stupid, stupid – I’m not on my game today. But whatever it is, it’s not moving. I creep closer, the gleaming silver winking up at me from behind a cluster of bushes.

I push aside the greenery with my foot, not yet daring to un-notch my arrow. But it's just... well, I actually don't know. A rock? It's not like any other rock I’ve ever seen, granted, but it's the size and shape of a small boulder. A boulder of gleaming, seamless silver.

I stare at my open-mouthed reflection, perfectly mirrored back to me in the rock’s pristine surface.

“Jarv!”

I nudge the metallic stone with my foot. It stays firmly put.

“Jarv, check this out!”

He saunters over as I give it a heftier kick. It doesn’t budge.

“What’ve you found, Dragon Girl?”

The old nickname had stuck, although I took it as a term of endearment these days.

“I actually don’t know. It’s like… a big shiny ball?”

Mental head slap.

“Big shiny balls, hey?” he says, right on cue. “I’ll show you some…”

Jarvy’s voice trails off as he spies my discovery.

“We have to go, Fifira. Right now,” he says, grabbing my arm, dragging me away from the silver sphere – and in the opposite direction of our kill, still lying on the forest floor waiting to be prepped and taken back to the village for dinner.

It hits me: he's just called me Fifira. He never uses my full name.

“What is your problem?!” I shout, digging my heels in as he yanks me along, crashing through the brush and making no attempt to be quiet.

"That thing’s gotta be worth a fortune, we’ve got to see if we can lift it.” Even as I say the words I know there'll be no lifting that thing. It felt rooted to the ground when I’d tried to shift it with my foot. “Besides, we can’t go back without food.”

Jarvy spins to face me, gripping my shoulders in his strong hands and giving me a shake. Or maybe… wait, is he shaking? The colour has drained from his face, now sheet-white beneath the freckles the scatter across his cheeks.

“We. Have. To. Leave,” he says with a soft growl, his golden eyes grim and brows furrowed. “Now.”

I've never seen light-hearted Jarvy this serious before. I search his face, but it’s giving away no answers.

“What is it, Jarv?” My voice is soft and my stomach clenches as a primal panic starts to rise. I sway on my feet as the blood rushes to my legs, my body priming itself to run at the hint of danger.

“That,” says my oldest friend, terror shining in his eyes, “is a dragon egg.”