The Dragons in the Valley

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. They were a myth, like so many things that loom in the imaginations of the innocent. Stories conflicted.

Told over the breakfast tables of the mountain village school houses there was a playfulness to the way they were enlarged upon. There were never enough colors in the paint bin to do those justice.

Beside fishing holes up narrow gorge hollers the gnarled roots of towering pines clung to the steep walls, and dripped spring water like they were clawing life right out of the rock. The mountain folk scratched runes into the bark to lock the dragons inside.

In the brackish flats of the great Bay slough they knew that far below their feet a serpent slumbered. Ancestral bones sunk down between the reeds and snakes of all sizes scrawled the happenings of the world along the mud for their Master. There were those here who knew how to read the signs.

Beyond windswept dunes on the Bay's long beaches, the flow lords waited patiently between reverberating sets of waves. They shaped the craft they floated on like dragons’ teeth, and rode the pulses of the beast rising from the deep, praising its power. If anything they thought the stories from the flats were too small.

Told around the careful cook fires in the golden grass fields they became more dangerous with each passing year of drought. A single spark from even the smallest wyrm would be enough to start the fire, and dragons were supposed to have larger and larger wings to fan the flames.

Between rows of artichokes in the broad plowed Valley they joked darkly of what would follow the last harvest before it came. It was hard enough feeding the teeming world without worrying about the flames the grasslanders envisioned. Dragons were probably shaped more like giant pigs than lizards, ready to eat the harvest bare.

In the municipal trade halls fine heads were scratched and grey brows furrowed over new concerns. The hips and curves of the Great Pass Road had been noted to sway. Rumblings had left more and more caravans stranded beneath rolling slides of dirt, tree and stone. In some of the more esoteric design theories it was considered not so much to be quaking, as waking.

Along the ragged sea cliffs they watched small salamanders scratch their way up narrow crevices and began to notice similar features reflected in the huge rock croppings jutting out. They clambered along the sea walls, painting bodies to match. They were convinced that the dragons would soon wake and escape, to feast on the fat seals who taunted and tempted them.

And underneath the low scrub of the roadside, in dusty tents, wild seers claimed they knew the dragons personally. In clouded orgies they would chant of eternal beings who spoke directly to them, and told them secrets they could only share with a few. These travelled the length of the valley, picking up new descriptions and spreading the news.

Told by children and by crones, the tales were different in each place and from some mouths they changed telling to telling. It was hard to know who had it right, or if anyone would ever find out. It always seemed like it was just about to happen, but season after season, year after year, and decade upon decade it remained a collective dream. There were some who had died waiting, and others who went out searching. Many just laughed in public and hoped the fears of their darkest nights never showed on their faces.

Elora could still remember the last morning they were a fantasy in her mind.