The Dragon-less Valley

There weren’t always Dragons in the Valley, just as there weren’t always stars in the sky, but it still seemed an unimaginable dream for the world to exist without either.

It should have been expected then, when it felt like the end of the world had begun when the dragons started to fall.

People had been struggling to kill them for thousands of years, eager to be rid of the creatures that horded gold and raided their villages. The only beings they had not yet conquered. They were never quite strong enough to rip the life away from beings whose teeth were larger than even the longest of the human’s flimsy bones.

But, over time, people grew stronger, and smarter. They made themselves far more advanced than nature would have granted them with simple evolution.

They built weapons and shot the dragons straight out of the sky.

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley!” They’d remind anyone who protested.

They forgot that there weren’t always humans in the Valley either.

There weren't always springs and wealth and life there.

As the Dragons fell, their fiery breath was snatched up by the sky, and their ever-boiling blood seeped deep into the core of the earth.

And so began The Devastation. The Apocalypse. The Demise of All That Was.

It didn’t rain at the end of the world.

Instead, the sky screamed sporadically with rebellious thunder, aiming lightning at whatever was naive enough to carry on living in a world that didn’t want it anymore.

The Valley’s hero, long before she was a hero at all, numb from years of wandering the sprawling plant graveyards which were littered with crackling stalk skeletons and the cavernous empty frames of dragons long dead, knew that it did not rain in the Valley anymore.

She knew that dark clouds which loomed above meant nothing more than a moment of respite from the relentless sun.

She knew that the times of people chuckling under rattling tin roofs, proclaiming ‘it’s raining cats and dogs!’ or that ‘The heavens have opened!’ had long since withered away into nothing.

(She rather liked that last phrase, and wished she’d had a chance to say it herself. It wouldn’t have made much sense to say it even if it could rain, because the heavens remained firmly locked, in more ways than one. No-one was clinging to the prospect of eternal benevolent beings welcoming them into the afterlife when it was so clear that all of the gods had abandoned them.)

She knew that it didn’t rain at the end of the world.

And yet there was something dripping onto her head, slow and deliberate.

She lifted a tanned and calloused hand, pretending she didn’t notice how it shook with trepidation.

There was something wrong.

Gingerly, she let her fingers graze the top of her matted black hair, bringing them down to observe the sickeningly dark red staining the tips.

Her heart froze in place.

Slowly, painfully, she craned her neck upwards, barely noticing how her breath caught in her throat, choking her.

Another spot landed on her forehead, dribbling down towards her eyes, tinging her world with red.

It was warm.

She told herself it was from baking in the sun.

(That didn’t make it any better.)

It was tangled in the dead, empty branches of a scorched tree; the edges were scraped and open, bleached a bright yellow-white in the sun.

She couldn't look away from the startlingly familiar horror as it continued to seep its life down onto her, bewitched by the way it swayed gently with the hot wind, an unobtrusive atrocity, all-too akin to a colourful kite tangled amongst leaves in a time long-gone.

But it wasn’t a kite.

It was a body.

And this time it wasn’t the hollow frame of a dragon.

It was nothing like a dragon.

In that moment, though, she realised that it was exactly like a dragon. The same tangled spine, the same quiet horror, the same bleached white as she was all-too used to.

Every skeleton cluttering the Valley around her suddenly became the scaffolding that once constructed a life.

Her eyes focused.

There was something clasped in the body's motionless hands, smooth and large.

An egg.

A dragon's egg.

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley,” our hero whispered as she climbed the tree, offering a silent, meaningless prayer to whatever might listen. She knew that she would never meet this person; she could never hear their voice, never listen to the trill of their laugh, never watch the way they walked or ran, never see the glint of life in their eyes, and yet they had offered her so much hope. “But maybe there can be from now on.”