The Dragons of Valley High

There weren't always dragons in the Valley, and let me tell you: it was so boring.

Of course some people complain, but some people are always complaining. For instance, when I was just a little kid, there were all kinds of heated arguments because our school officially changed it's name to Palmer Valley High. For the hundred previous years the school had operated under the name of a Confederate General. Gag. You'd think that people would understand why that had to change, but you'd be wrong.

So sure, some people throw fits about the dragons even though it's obvious that the dragons have only made things more interesting.

Imagine watching the Valley High football team back when all of the cheerleaders and all of the players were human. Unbearable, right? We hadn't made it to the championships in living memory. Our track squad was terrible. If you wanted to see Valley High win at anything, you had the chess club and the debate team, and that was it. And even there, Narlaxitrus the Destroyer can win debates. He is just so articulate, and he knows how to arrange his points in a logical order, and most of the debate team will admit that they've learned a lot from watching him work. So it's not like we lost anything when the dragons showed up.

Okay, maybe that's not entirely true.

When the local used car dealership denied Arthus: Spirit of Eternal Flame financing on a 2007 Mazda Miata, the dragon did burn the entire lot of cars to the ground. I was actually there for that one. No one died, thank goodness, but Arthus: Spirit of Eternal Flame didn't leave a single car without any scorches at minimum. You know those tube-things that wave their arms around to let people know there's a used car lot? I watched that guy flail as the entire lot behind him burned.

So we did lose one used car dealership when the dragons showed up, but that's not a huge price to pay. Does anyone want to go back to the days before you could grab some Dragon-Style BBQ from a half-dozen food-trucks in town?

Well, apparently, yes.

I was actually at a food-truck on the day when it really hit home that we were in for trouble. Ryianion the Conflagration and I had ducked out of class because it was a beautiful, sunny Friday afternoon, and neither of us could sit through another hour of algebra this week. "Have you tried the spicy lamb and rice?" Ryianion the Conflagration asked me.

"Nope."

"Ohmygosh you absolutely have to. It is so good."

"Okay," I said. "But the mild this time."

"Right, right, mild."

While Ryianion the Conflagration ordered, I wandered around to the other side of the food-truck. It was a beautifully clear day, and the parking lot was buzzing with people. Plenty of humans and dragons milled around, chatting and eating from the cardboard boxes that the truck served its food in. There were plenty of other witnesses, is what I'm saying, although maybe that won't help my case much. It happened so suddenly. None of us were prepared, and when we gave our stories to the police that afternoon, we couldn't help but serve up a mangled pile of contradictions and impossibilities.

So, I'll tell it as I remember it, and you'll have to look up the papers if you want someone else's version.

First came the blast from the abandoned gas station. It's windows had been boarded up for over a year, the gas pumps just relics of a different era. Sometimes people sat under the canopy for shade, but beyond that it was just a husk of what it had once been.

It exploded, ejecting all of the boards with eruptions of green flame. The force of the explosion knocked half a dozen people over, and even from fifty feet away I felt it like a fist of air hitting my chest. I fell to a knee, gravel digging into my skin, and looked up in time to see the building's slowly turn from green to red. The structure was blackened, each of the old windows spitting thick tongues of flame up the side of the building.

I tried to say, Holy shit! but the explosion knocked the wind out of my chest.

The canopy screeched so loudly that it engulfed the screams of the people struggling to get away. Then it collapsed, landing on the old gas pumps and kicking up a cloud of dust and debris.

I took a staggering step closer to the explosion, aware that not everyone had made it out fast enough to escape the collapse, when scaly hands grabbed me.

"Let me go," I moaned.

"Easy," Ryianion the Conflagration said. "Easy."

"We need to help!"

"There's nothing we can do."

He held me back.

Cutting through the sound of the fire as it consumed the building, someone screamed. I struggled to go forward, to help, but even as I did I could feel the heat from the fire. Fifty feet away, and it dried the sweat on my forehead.

I remember the explosion and the fire coming first, and that was why no one noticed the choking dragon nearby. Other people say I've got it backwards. Maybe it all just happened as once, but each of us could only notice one thing at a time.

No one denies that the dragon did choke, though. She raised a fist to her mouth, trying to cough to clear the blockage. She fell to her knees, pulling her wings in tight on her back, trying to hack up something. The colour drained from her scales, and she sucked deep in a desperate attempt to get air into her lungs.

One of the survivors who was nearest to her remembers her wheezing, "Help me..."

Then the flame took over, fire consuming her entire head in seconds, a jet of blue flames burning so hot that the people nearest to her died in seconds.

It was chaos, at that point. Fire trucks warbled their sirens in the distance, and people struggled to get back to the safety of their cars, and no one noticed that the food-truck began to melt until it was too late. That wasn't from the heat of the fire, though. Hidden canisters of acid had been released with a time-delay device, spraying the inside with a concoction that no one could survive.

Ryianion the Conflagration hauled me away from the scene of the chaos, but I watched it all with a look of utter confusion and horror. It was so much all at once that I couldn't believe this was anything except a natural disaster. There was no way that anyone could have intended for this to happen. It was as sudden, surprising, and terrifying as the day the dragons first appeared in the Valley, but there would be no comforting answers coming within a few hours. This was something different.

I choked against the smoke that seemed to be rising from everywhere all at once when someone screamed, "Look out!"

Ryianion the Conflagration pulled my head down as something slammed into the rapidly-emptying parking lot. All I could see was a broken wing sticking out of a tangle of scales. When the dust settled and the fires died down enough, Ryianion the Conflagration let me approach the fallen body.

The fallen dragon would have been beautiful in life. His scales were white with blue undertones, and the wing that hadn't been broken was long and graceful. Now he was dead, and his body was just a heap of organic material in an awkward distortion.

His eyes were open, but he saw nothing.

So that's where we stood. The choking dragon had turned into a pile of ash. The gas station itself was nothing but wreckage, burning so hot that you couldn't get within ten feet of it without losing your eyebrows. One of the food trucks was dissolving. And at the center of all of this, a dragon corpse had been dropped from the sky. It was too coordinated to be anything but a deliberate attack, but if I had any doubts about that they would have been resolved by the details of the dragon's body.

A message had been carved into his chest, revealing the blue tissue that hid underneath those white scales:

DEATH TO ALL LIZARDS

Ryianion the Conflagration's hand was on my shoulder, the only thing offering me stability amid all of this chaos. I looked up into his green eyes, unable to read the expression on his scaly face.

"Who would do this?"

I didn't know. But I did know that together, we would find out.