The Dragon's Pet

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

That’s what mother used to say, anyway. As has now been explained to me, “always” is relative, and while it might be true in humanities terms that there weren’t “always” dragons in the Valley, the dragons themselves operated on more geological terms.

They’d been here before, Svartia explained to me, once she realized I was a person. The planet had gotten rather cool for their liking, so they’d all burrowed deep into Mother’s crust to snooze through it. That had been millions of years ago. To be honest, my brain really has a hard time wrapping itself around what that means. Svartia kindly tells me that I’ll never really have the perspective to understand it, gently stroking my head with the pad of one of her paws. The delicacy she’s capable of given her size is surprising.

It's obvious she struggles thinking of me as a person. Pet is probably more the true assessment of our relationship. Which… well, I’m sneaking ahead of myself here, let me finish laying the history before we get into the pet thing.

Initially, the dragons had seemed some sort of impossible geological event. The Valley used to be called Missoula when it was human habitat. It sprouted rather sizable rock formations during an earthquake three centuries ago. The formations shoved themselves up through the earth along the river running through town, causing a hefty amount of property damage and some sizable fires. For a little over a century, it made the town something of a tourist attraction, and anyone who’d ever even dabbled in geology had to make the pilgrimage. Eventually as the people who’d been displaced and died from the initially catastrophe faded from memory, the formations became more of a source of hometown pride and identity.

Then they’d cracked open. They knew that the eggs (as we call them now) were changing on the inside, but nobody was allowed to crack into them, only nondestructive measures were allowed when studying the eggs. We didn’t think that something (someone, I guess) was gestating, pupating. There were 24 of them, and over the course of a few days they all erupted, and gigantic creatures piled out.

We called them dragons mostly because of the size and fantastical nature of them. They look more like an avalanche formed into a sculpture. They had four legs and a tail, and something of a snout with gemstone eyes. The ground thundered when they walked, but generally they would to sink into the earth and swim through its crust when they wanted to go long distances. Svartia tells me that this is because the dragons are literally part of the earth. The actual relationship is odd. At time she thinks of the planet as herself, other times as a parent. The castle building is more personal grooming or beautification to hear her tell it.

They certainly caused a fair amount of havoc and damage, but in their defense at the time they didn’t know us as sentient. The rampaging across the United States was destructive; and they certainly brushed aside all attempts at violence against them with casual ease. The ability to traverse through the earth had them trapsing all over the planet. They identified the military vehicles as kind of an obnoxious pest. Svartia said she could basically smell the difference between the aggressive stuff and say a semi-truck. The systematic destruction of the military bases globally was more like someone putting a trap out for wasps than any real attempt to disarm us.

Once dragons demolished the global military infrastructure, the logistics of rebuilding it was incredibly difficult, agreeing on it practically impossible. While global leadership argued about what to do, humanity watched the dragons go about their business, it was noted that once the bases were gone, they made no overt attempts to destroy populations. Not to say it didn’t happen incidentally, here and there, but the “attacks” slowed down.

The Missoula Valley (Dragon Valley, or just the Valley as we call it now) was depopulated of humans and rebuild with what we call the Palaces. Svartia is rather amused by the ostentations term. They quarried various materially from all over the globe for practical and esthetic materials to build up their dwellings. They built them in sort of a circular formation, individual homes around a communal plaza where they shaped the earth into fanciful formations and tended plants. Carefully curated groves of trees were lovingly tended by Svartia herself. I, an overly ambitious adventurer was sneaking around in her garden when Svartia came by to prune. Terror infused my heart, but I knew that dragons generally really didn’t care about humans, unless they though we were going to be damaging to their plants.

I’d frozen amongst the pines while Svartia delicately shaped the trees like giant bonsai, and she noticed me as she finished up. She later told me she was just watching me the way anyone might watch wildlife, but as I tried to play it cool and not make any sudden movements, I displayed the thing that led to this “Oh my god, humans are people!” revelation.

It was Mr. Mustache, my pet cat, that got through to her. I was trying to act natural, so I let Mr. mustache out for lunch, and started playing fetch with him. You can, in fact, train a cat if you put in the effort. But as Svartia watched me play fetch, it dawned her that the animal she was watching had a pet. It had trained and was giving commands to another creature. This was when the tentative, gentle voice reached out to my (relatively) tiny mind and said “Hello? Are you… thinking?” which was the best Svartia could come up with when suddenly trying to ask someone who is practically squirrel relative to her if it was a thinking being with free will and agency.

So I thought back, “Uhhh… yes?” I was stunned, like an actual God had shown up and taken a personal interest in my existence. I gathered Mr. Mustache back into his little backpack with the bubble back so he could see out. This probably only worked as part of the dragon’s communication was mind to mind, though normally for them it more provided mood and context to their verbal discussions. Their actual spoken language sounded more like a rockslide of pebbles, and I feel unlikely to ever understand it let alone speak it. But intent and emotion were readable from her thoughts and after a few weeks of tentative mental pokes she was able to approximate a human intelligible dialog in my brain. I should add she also put me in a terrarium in her house after capturing me. I was too stunned by the connection of our minds to run away when her paw oozed through the earth and came up underneath me, capturing me like you might scoop a leaf out from a pool.

She took me to her palace, and created an octagonal enclosure with her forelimbs, sculpting marble like clay. 15 foot walls surrounded Mr. Mustache and I in our new space.

She figured out what was edible for me and Mr. Mustache and did her best to provide comforts. Initially she’d just dumped raw resources of wood and stone into the pen she’d made for me and expected me to just build a dwelling. I was eventually able to explain to her that the real trick to humans doing what we do is tools, and that aptitude wasn’t something we were born with like ants knowing how to tunnel, but generally the results of training and socialization. She found this odd because building was as natural as breathing to her, and the notion that a person wasn’t naturally handy or crafty was very odd.

“How did you not notice us?” I of course asked. “How is it the cat that caught your attention and not the nukes?”

“Nukes?” Svartia thought at me.

“Nukes! Missiles… uhhh… exploding projectiles, hot like the sun?” I imagined real hard what they were; though when I thought about it I’d never actually seen one. Mostly media representations, but it conveyed the jist.

“You were throwing those at us?” Svartia sounded flabbergasted. “I uhm… guess we weren’t putting that together. They were very startling to be sure, but we didn’t think you all could possibly… I mean.” There was the mental suggestion of a sigh. “Look, for the most part we dragons, as you call us, are mostly focused on our art, sculpture. My personal interest in um… animal husbandry is a bit of an anomaly. I’m afraid the rest of us really don’t pay much mind. You are so very small. My last pet was a…” She was doing a weird thing where she scavenged my mind for a term; projecting a three horned dinosaur in my brain and then projecting the word after she got it from me “Triceratops? That. Everyone thought it was super weird that I kept it in my dwelling. In a way this meeting was probably only going to happen with you and I.”

So I found myself in a dragon’s den, sitting in a stone enclosure with the top open, sides too smooth to climb out. I felt like the hermit crab I’d kept as a kid. Mr. Mustache seemed fine with the situation, but my plaintive inquiries as to when Svartia would let me go were being deflected. It’d been a few months at this point, and I was beginning to be less than calm about it. Svartia paid little mind to my shouting. Eventually she explained that she wasn’t sure how to go about telling the other dragons that the small bipeds that they’d been occasionally purging from the environment were thinking creatures. I was concerned that a creature that lived through epoch’s might take more than my lifetime to decide what to do with me.

And so, I looked at the things she’d given me to craft a ramshackle dwelling and began to plot my escape from a dragon’s lair.