The Boy Who Would Not Break

I

Dragons do not change. They mature, they grow, they evolve, but never change. Change is a human concept, and the last humans fled the Valley over a century ago.

Dragons do, however, shed. First they molt the dewy skin of a wyrmling, then the brittle plates of an adolescent ormr. By their hundredth year, all that remains is a seasoned layer of scales and a heart of fire; a true drake, fully grown and eternally static.

This is not change, but revelation. The dragon within has always been there. It just needs to be revealed.

II

Myrra tromps through the snowy brush as a familiar ache descends upon her bones. The redwoods are her only companions, co-sentinels of this forested patch at the Valley’s edge. Dead leaves crackle beneath her claws, and hissing winter winds fill an otherwise silent night.

She knows she heard something. Around sunset, a muffled thump! had raised her ears and quickened her pulse. Between sheer cliffs of stone and a thick layer of frost underfoot, sound travels in strange ways down here. But Myrra knew this forest when the towering trees were tiny saplings. She knows when something does not belong.

Suspicious, she sniffs the air. No other dragons are near, not even the ormrs who come to gawk at the elderly hermit patrolling the rim. She detects the mingled scents of woodland creatures, moose and beavers and owls, but no pain or fear or blood. Nothing seems amiss.

So Myrra sniffs again. Her keen nose snatches it from the passing wind: a wisp of terror, a hint of flesh, and the smoky, tanned essence of boiled leather.

Humans.

She breaks into a gallop, tucking her wings in to slip through the trees. Sensing her approach, the forest denizens stir as she passes. They settle down again in moments, knowing she will not hunt them while they sleep.

Myrra reaches the Valley wall and sniffs again. She follows the scent west along the length of the wall as it gradually curves northward. She searches for signs—broken branches, footprints, spent torches, anything that would indicate the return of the humans.

A century after the barbarians disappeared into the mountains, Myrra alone remains near the rim, vigilant in her solitude. The arrows hissing through the sky, the boulders crashing into airborne drakes — every moment remains firm in her memory. Dragons should never forget.

Other members of her thunder think her foolish. The council of drakes believes the humans fled for good. So Myrra keeps her patrol and the thunder keeps its distance.

Her sharp eyes find their target, a dark lump lying in the snow near the northerly stream. Pushing off the wall, Myrra hurtles downward and lands with a crash in the icy water. Whatever humans deigned to enter the Valley, they will not escape with their lives.

The lump does not move. This human is even larger than the brutes she fought in the old wars, though still a fraction of her size. Have the humans grown? They do change awfully quickly.

Myrra approaches with caution, stepping lightly on the bank, the fire in her heart boiling at the ready. Only when she draws closer does she see that it is not one human, but two.

The man and woman had been tied together before they died, falling from the cliff’s edge two hundred feet above Myrra’s head. They were likely thrown off, a savage punishment for a primitive people.

The two human bodies face each other, pressed together in death. The man wears a thick beard, the woman long braids tied off below the shoulder. Myrra prods them with her nose, but the bodies stay frozen in rigor mortis, bones crushed and muscles pulverized by the fall. Satisfied, she huffs a plume of steam into the chilly air.

A tiny wail answers.

Myrra rises on her haunches, spinning to find the source of the very human noise. It sounds like a cry for help. Perhaps other humans descended into the Valley after all.

There it is again. The noise comes from the dead humans. Nostrils flaring, flames roiling at the back of her throat, Myrra prods at the bodies again, rolling them over.

A tiny human rolls onto the snow.

Rearing back in surprise, Myrra growls at the horrid creature. The thing is pink and soft, its flimsy skin exposed to the elements. A scrap of leather armor protects its midsection. It can’t be more than twenty years old, or ten, or possibly two. Myrra can’t remember exactly how quickly humans age.

The thing smiles up at her and gurgles. Disgusting.

Myrra prods it with a claw, knocking it over into the snow. The baby wobbles up on unsteady legs and reaches out its hands. She pushes it again. It stands up, now grinning widely.

She hisses at it. It hisses back, then collapses back into the snow, grabbing its own soft toes and mewling like a contented kitten.

Myrra looks up at the cliff’s edge, barely visible through the misty haze. That distance would kill the hardiest of humans. She will ensure this one meets the same fate.

III

The baby likes heights. Myrra carries it in one claw as she soars above the redwoods, beneath the cloud cover that hides the Valley from prying human eyes. If she ascends, she risks being spotted by the humans. If she goes lower, the baby might not die from the fall.

A primal part of her, an instinct long suppressed, urges her to care for the thing. Wrap it in leaves, set it on fire, keep it warm. That worked for her own brood before the humans claimed their lives.

The memory of her fallen children strengthens her resolve. She climbs to the top of the cloud layer, wings tempting the open air beyond. Let the humans see her and tremble.

She glances at its squishy, flat face one more time. It stares back with wide brown eyes, the same color as her mother’s scales.

Myrra drops the baby. It screams as it falls. Then, a thump. She protects the Valley still.

IV

When she lands to dispose of the baby’s body, it is not dead. It is, however, pooping.

The baby giggles, then crawls through the snow, oblivious to the freezing wind, completely unaware that it should have died twice tonight. Carefully avoiding the droppings, Myrra swoops down, picks up the baby, and carries it to her lair. She drags it through the stream on the way to clean it off.

Her cavern sits half a mile from the wall with a gentle sloping entrance that leads to a comfortable nook just large enough for her to sleep and store food when needed. Most of the other drakes will be hibernating soon. Not Myrra; someone needs to guard the rim.

She sets the baby down in a corner and ponders her situation. The thing’s flesh is soft and pillowy, the bones fragile, yet it lives. Looking around the dim space, it reaches for something Myrra cannot see. Probably its mother.

She sighs, then lights the baby on fire.

The flames cast flailing shadows on the cavern walls as the baby waves its arms. A pang of guilt tightens Myrra’s chest at the sight, and she snuffs out a cloud of steam to extinguish the fire. When the fog clears, the baby regards her with a curious expression, jaw hanging open to reveal a toothless maw. Although the leather scraps around its midsection char at the edges, its ugly pink skin remains unblemished.

Myrra decides to keep it, for now.

V

Feeding the human should not be difficult. Myrra catches a wild boar, whispering an apology as she swoops down into the fallow where the creatures sleep. Poor manners and poor sport, hunting like this, but her own food stores are depleted. She tries to pick a few huckleberries from a sprawl of bushes clumped around the base of a redwood. Her talons aren’t dextrous enough for the job, so she uproots a entire bush to bring to her lair.

The baby ignores the berries entirely. It licks the raw hunk of pork, then crawls away on its hands and feet.

What do humans like? They enjoy swinging swords, drinking intoxicating beverages, and…oh yes. She remembers the roaring campfires, the pale imitations of dragon’s breath they used for cooking meat. She sears the pork loin, digs out a smaller piece with one talon, and proffers it to her new charge.

The baby eats the whole thing, then poops again, right in the middle of her lair. Barbarian.

VI

Dropping the baby from great heights is the best way to make it stop crying.

It wakes up in the middle of the night, bawling greasy little tears that leave streaks in the dirt caking its face. Myrra tries rocking it as the humans do, swinging it in wild circles by the ankle, trusting in the swooshing air and rhythmic motions to calm it down.

When this fails, she lights it on fire again. This works until the baby remembers it is human and thus required to be as annoying as possible. It starts crying again. After half an hour cycling between flames and tears, Myrra gives up on this tactic.

She feeds it more pork. It cannot stomach more than a few ounces before defecating on her pristine cavern floor, or worse, spewing chunks from its soft mouth. Even a newly hatched wyrmling tolerates several pounds of meat. No doubt this child is defective.

As dawn teases the rim of the Valley, she carries the baby up through the redwoods to the dissipating layers of mist. Its relentless wails only fuel Myrra’s exasperation as she hurls the baby downward. It clips a redwood branch as it falls, snapping twigs and branches as it crashes into a boulder near the stream. It ricochets off the boulder and plops into the snow.

When Myrra lands, the baby has finally stopped crying. She names it Bounce.

VII

Myrra is fairly certain that Bounce is a boy. He has the proper appendages, if memory serves, and his constant neediness and cheery disposition toward repulsive behavior leave no room for doubt. He reminds her of Nymmo, her firstborn son who would swallow whole raccoons before regurgitating them terrified and drenched in saliva.

Nymmo fell to a human ballista two centuries ago. The bolt pierced his neck.

As winter yields to spring, the young ormrs fly by Myrra’s territory every few days. They have been guarding the nest and stockpiling food while the drakes and wyrmlings sleep. Myrra keeps Bounce inside the caverns now, except for the occasional midnight jaunt to the sky.

The boy picks up the dragon tongue with surprising speed.

“Drop me!” he yells.

Myrra lets him fall through the mist. He laughs.

VIII

One morning in late winter, before the other drakes rise from hibernation, a trio of ormrs visit Myrra’s cavern. When she hears their approach, she stuffs Bounce into a pile of leaves by the entryway and sets it on fire. That should keep him distracted and therefore hidden for a few minutes.

The lead ormr is Chottu, a proud specimen with glossy black scales and a thick snout. Myrra remembers his hatching. How many winters passed since then?

“Any sign of humans, elder?” he asks. His tail thumps softly against the ground, a sign of amusement.

“None,” Myrra says, fighting to keep her own tail from shaking with anxiety.

Chottu paws the ground. “Strange. We found dried human droppings by the stream. Sniffed them out in the thaw. The scent leads here.”

Myrra’s heart boils. Those must have come from the night she found Bounce. She had been careless.

“How do you know the scent of human droppings?” she asks, masking her fear with a snobbish tone. “You know nothing of their kind. Go back to your nest, young ones. I will guard the rim alone.”

The ormrs leave, Chottu’s tail dancing in the grass. Myrra watches them disappear into the tree line. Bounce tumbles out from the charred leaves a moment later, holding his toes and giggling to himself. Resolving to be more vigilant, she ushers him inside the cavern.

IX

Ten years pass.

Bounce grows lean and strong. Though he feels exhaustion and cold, his body remains invulnerable.

Myrra teaches him the ways of dragons.

X

“Am I a dragon?” Bounce asks.

Myrra has been waiting for this question. She swoops down from the night sky and perches atop a boulder, setting the boy next to her. A sleeveless moose hide tunic protects Bounce from the winter chill.

“No,” she says, “you are human.”

Bounce wrinkles his nose. “You don’t like humans.”

“I like you.”

“So did you change?”

Bounce knows that dragons don’t change. Though she feels no different than she had on that fateful night, Myrra’s attachment to the boy has…shifted? Evolved? Change is an inappropriate word for her experience. Too human.

“I learned.” She scratches the base of her neck. “We all do that. Human and dragon.”

“So humans are like dragons?”

Myrra curls her serpentine body against the boulder. Closing his eyes, Bounce leans his head on the smoother scales of her stomach.

“Humans are like…ice.” Myrra searches for words to plumb the depths of her instincts. “Their chill spreads across the land, but they form only a thin layer of frost on the eternal earth. Though they shatter and melt with ease, they transform into flowing water or rising steam to freeze again when winter comes. They are persistent and adaptable, yet temporal as the seasons.”

“Don’t most dragons hibernate in the winter?”

“The drake who rises in spring is the same one who slumbers in winter. We…continue.”

“But wyrmlings and ormrs change. You told me.” Bounce rubs his bare arms with shivering hands. As she bathes him in steam, Myrra pities the child for the scales he will never have.

“Humans grow cold,” she whispers, laying her head next to Bounce. “But a fresh fire warms them in moments. Emotions settle on them as the morning dew, ever-present and gone by the afternoon. If you cut them, they bleed and then heal.”

Bounce frowns.

“Not you, of course,” she adds. “Perhaps you are not human after all.”

Bounce looks away, still rubbing his arms despite the warmth of Myrra’s breath. The redwoods hum with crickets and owls, and the stream burbles underneath the first frost.

“That’s too bad,” he says. “I wanted to be something.”

XI

They come for her two days after the spring equinox.

Eleven dragons swarm the skies above Myrra’s cavern. According to ancient tradition, they would form a full battalion except that seven of them are ormrs. A proud drake with gleaming black scales leads his fellows in a wide arc that ends at the clearing between the cavern and the stream.

Myrra greets them with wings flared, the tip of her tail carving circles in the packed dirt. “You have reached your prime, Chottu. I congratulate you.”

As the other dragons spread around the clearing, Chottu faces her. “You know why we are here, elder.”

Myrra swats at the air with her tail, a gesture of rebuttal. She does not trust herself to speak a lie.

The dragons move in, not towards the cavern as she expected, but towards her. One of the ormrs approaches, trembling, carrying a set of ancient silver shackles. A lumbering gray drake Myrra doesn’t recognize helps him place the shackles on the joints where her wings meet her shoulders. Saddened but unsurprised, Myrra lets them restrain her.

“Search the forest,” Chottu commands. He beats his leathery wings and takes to the bright morning sky. As the other drakes usher Myrra away from the clearing on foot, the ormrs fan across the undergrowth, sniffing and searching.

XII

Half a century has passed since Myrra last saw the council of elders. They haven’t changed.

Sycchus leads the council from his rocky perch in a shaded elm grove. The ancient drakes who stand with him have lived far beyond Myrra’s eight hundred years. Age has not weakened their limbs or dimmed their eyes, so why does she feel so old in their presence?

“Sister,” Sycchus says, his voice ragged but firm, “your actions douse the fires in my heart. Why have you betrayed your thunder?”

Though the shackles scrape her scales, Myrra puffs out her chest as best she can. “I am no traitor.”

“Lies!” Chottu steps forward, smoke spewing in angry clouds from his nostrils. “You know your guilt!”

Sycchus raises his claw, gesturing the drake back into the crowd surrounding them. “He speaks rashly, but in truth. You have been accused of harboring a human child.”

“Where is your evidence?” Myrra asks. Though her guilt is assured, she wants to know how long they’ve watched her.

“Two human corpses were discovered near the northern stream ten years ago.” Sycchus recites the charges with the solemnity of a wizened old owl. “The ormrs found human droppings in your territory soon after. Last night, a drake saw you flying through the mists with an adolescent human on your back.”

“As if you were a common pack animal.” Chottu spits a burst of sparks onto the wild grass. “Disgraceful.”

“You broke our traditions, our peace, and our trust.” Sycchus rubs one eye with a bony, cracked talon. “Myrra, you have guarded our borders alone for a century. What changed?”

The simple question thrusts into her heart like a barbed spear. Not for its audacity — accusing a dragon of behavior approaching humanity — but for its precision.

“I changed,” Myrra says. The drakes and ormrs around the perimeter murmur among themselves, a buzz of conversation that stings her ears. “My heart softened. My love grew. A human child relit the ashes of my bitter, burnt soul.”

Like flames dancing along her scales, the confession spreads warmth through her body. She changed. A pleasant feeling settles in her stomach.

“Where is the human?” Sycchus asks.

Myrra paws the ground with her foreleg. “What will you do to him?”

“What he deserves,” Chottu says, biting off each word like a strip of raw meat from a fresh kill. “My ormrs will find him soon.”

The crowd stirs at the southern edge of the grove. As the dragons move to the side, creating a narrow path, seven ormrs escort a human boy wearing moose hide garments into the clearing.

XIII

Sycchus pronounces judgment without delay.

Exiled from the Valley, Myrra will fly north to the savage wildlands and live among lesser creatures until starvation or shame ends her life.

Bounce is a human. He will be executed at sundown.

XIV

Bounce stands in the center of the grove, drakes and ormrs forming a ring in the surrounding trees. Dusky light casts long reptilian shadows on the forest floor.

Chutto volunteers to carry out the sentence. Still shackled, Myrra sits next to Sycchus and the elders. She worries not about the execution, but what will happen when it fails.

Over the years, Bounce’s expressions have held wonder, joy, angst, desire, and every other strain of human emotion. Today his face shows something new. Confidence.

Nothing Myrra says will make a difference. She cannot change a dragon’s mind. To change is to be human, to be weak. She can only watch.

Chutto prowls around the boy, snorting sparks. Bounce ignores him, looking instead to Myrra, his chin held high in defiance of his doom.

Rearing up on his haunches, Chutto unleashes a jet of yellow flame. The roaring fire consumes the boy, clothes and all, smothering him in a tempest of heat and smoke. Flames pour from Chute’s maw for a full minute. When they finally cease, the drake slumps to the ground, exhausted but victorious.

The flames die out, the smoke clears. Surrounded by charred undergrowth, Bounce stands in the dirt. His clothes have fallen off in tattered, smoky rags, and the fire singed away his hair and eyebrows. Still, he stands.

The dragons in the circle gasp, some backing away as if struck, others hissing smoke. Sycchus looks to Myrra, his jaw dropping in disbelief. Despite the chaos around them, Myrra bares her teeth in an amused smile.

Chutto climbs to his feet and releases an agonized howl. He leaps forward and clamps his jaw around Bounce’s midsection, shaking the boy with vigorous fury. His teeth fail to make purchase in the boy’s pink-white skin. Enraged, Chutto tosses Bounce aside, sending him tumbling across the green grass to the edge of the grove. The dragons on the border back away as the boy’s body rolls to a stop.

Brushing dirt from his body, Bounce rises to his feet.

Chutto’s energy is all but spent from his firestorm, but he stalks towards Bounce once more. Even as she loathes him, Myrra respects the drake’s tenacity. Chutto has always been driven, persistent, and dragons do not change.

Some dragons, at least.

Bounce stands firm against Chutto’s charge. The dragon grabs him with a gleaming black claw and beats his wings hard enough to fill the grove with gusts of wind. Holding Bounce tightly in his talons, he ascends to become a speck in the sky framed by the rising moon. As the last rays of sunlight disappear over the lip of the Valley, Chutto drops the boy.

Bounce smacks into the ground with an ear-splitting crack. Chutto follows, his wings barely holding him upright until he collapses to the grass upon landing. Worn from the exertion, he lifts his weary head to see Bounce stand once more.

Chutto growls. “Impossible.” He lowers his head into the dirt, too weak to respond as Bounce approaches him. The dragons observe in silence, enraptured by the boy who would not break.

Bounce resting two fingers on Chutto’s snout. “I forgive you,” he whispers. Then he turns to Sycchus and the elders, bowing low as Myrra had taught him. “Release my mother.” His words are neither plea nor command.

“We have pronounced judgment,” Sycchus says. His eyes dart between Bounce’s proud stance and the defeated drake behind him. “The council’s word is final.”

Bounce nods. “Humans are like winter ice. Dragons, like mountain stone.”

Sycchus hums in agreement. The rest of the council watches in silence.

“Then what am I?” Bounce asks.

The elders have no answer, but Myrra steps forward, a familiar ache settling upon her bones. As she strokes Bounce’s hair with one talon, the ache lessens.

“Change.”

XV

Humans do not stand still. Like the tides, the winds, the seasons themselves, they reach for new horizons, never ceasing or pausing for breath.

Humans do, however, remember. They carry their traditions in their hearts, and their prejudices run deeper than blood. By the fifth generation, memories ripen into myth and warnings into legend.

The village awakens with the dawn, driven from slumber by a frantic bell ringing in the square. Rising from their beds, they stumble bleary-eyed into a scene from myth and memory.

Dawnlight shines on the scales of a dragon, a legendary creature replete with unfurled wings and fanged teeth. She regards the village with hopeful eyes. On her back rides a murky-eyed human boy in moose hide.

The human slides off the dragon’s back and approaches the nearest villager, a stout woman clutching a broom to her chest. Smiling, he extends a hand to her. She takes it.

This is not change, but revelation. The boy and the dragon have always been there. They just needed to be revealed.