The Dragons Will Save Us

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. Before the dragons came, seeds that waft from the Dandy buds disintegrated into dead black flecks upon the mere touch of the cracked arid dirt. But then, miraculously, the dragons came. They flew in on lush wet winds and blew magical renewal into the Valley. They transformed death into blooming life so vivid, human eyes are too small to soak all the wonders in; human minds too limited to comprehend the vastness of the Valley richness. Before the dragons, lonely hot breezes brushed sand grains over seemingly endless emptiness. After the dragons, from out mossy cliffs cloaked in heavy rainbow flower vines, burst waterfalls. The water splurges heavily down on gleaming golden rocks and fairies skitter about in happy dances among the rainbows that rise in the created waterfall mists. The dragons roar their triumph as they prance and dart in the fiery florescent clouds which look down on the wonderous green paradise.

So goes the stories of my father, Holstice. He claims the stories came from his father, who were passed down from his father. As often happens with fables, it comes that there are people who wish so badly for the stories to be real, that they believe the stories are real. My father tells me that he sells hope and happiness, by his stories. What harm is there in that, he asks me with a broad smile and a wink. Tell no one, he tells me, then says, perhaps the stories are real, yet perhaps they are not. There came a time, a time in which we now live, where desperation makes it so that the people need the stories to be real. Hope once like fluffy lard around a fat pig now the marrow of a dried bone. A luxury now a necessity. And if this hope is betrayed? If this faith is not rewarded? Then all is doomed.

Plagues are not uncommon among these lands. Nor are wars, but a plague as bad as this, my father and the elders of the village say, has not been seen since the very dawn of men. Indeed, this plague could end the existence of men, at least as far as men known gathered in the ten kingdoms. (I assume of course that they mean men and women and children.) The plague spreads and carries with it famine, pain, wars. It turns children into ghosts, men into monsters, mothers into wailing banshees, fertile dirt into poison. It passes from village to village like sparks leaping from tree to tree until all is ash.

The commoners and nobles alike paid father well to hear him tell his stories of hope. Not just of Dragon Valley but of the eternity of the soul and the possible attainment of forever happiness and contentment, free of the heavy labors, fever spasms, death and dreariness of this realm. Like his father and my grandfather, people looked to him for various healings and happy messages. My father taught some of the tricks of the “holy man” trade to me, although I cannot be a holy man, being born with a vagina rather than a penis. He told me hope is essential in the message, but fear is the quicker prod. The prod to save souls, sure, he’d tell me, yet also to have the people give our family money. Money helps us live well. Few are really allowed to live well, even in times of plenty.

Yet the plague will consume all: rich, poor, believer, sceptic, fat, skinny, beautiful, ugly; the righteous and the wicked. Unless it is stopped.

My name is Allstary. My father says my name means “one who is favored by the stars.” I do not feel particularly favored over any other, except for having the good fortune of being born to a beloved charlatan; a man paid well to tell his tales, or as he’ll sometimes teasingly say: his “lies of lore.” Paid enough that he can wrap expensive gowns around his porty belly while he smokes sugar sticks while seated on a puffy throne in a stately manor. He has gifted me pet horses. My mother died while in birth delivering me and my father refused to remarry. I dressed as a boy when younger to go to school to learn to read and write. I turned eighteen the last full moon. I am technically still engaged to the son of another noble. A good man. I scolded myself many nights for not being able to be enough in love with him. It is expected that eighteen-year-old girls who are of desirable visages marry. My fiancé left a year ago in search of treasure and has not returned. I suspect he like so many others, died. I pray to the gods that he has died rather then turned into a Grey.

Stories from the destroyed surrounding villages reached our village. Gruesome tales of the plague and starvation causing cannibals. Children ripping strips of bloody flesh from a fellow playmate, who rips his own tender puss drenched flesh off his own skin to gorge his own hungry mouth. Mothers imploring their children to eat them after they soon die. Murderers rampant. Eating the diseased flesh of a plague sufferer turns men’s skins grey and their eyes bulging red and their teeth and fingernails sharp and they lose their former human senses to become horrid creatures of blind bloodlust, rage and unquenchable hunger for human flesh. They are most often called Greys. Every hour as two more corpse carrying wagons are filled, a dozen more Greys emerge, like maggots scurrying from open wounds. Some villagers have claimed to see them while foraging mushrooms in the Woods of shared boundaries. The plague turns humans into other forms of ghastly beasts of various deformed designs, so the stories go, but all with one common trait; the newly formed creatures scream in constant agony. They are not natural and so it as if nature wants to punish them with pain until they are blotted out of existence. The wails, howls and cries and moans of humans, attributed to the suffering of the disease and hunger, turn animalia. We have heard sounds never heard, echoing from the woods and neighboring villages and from the mountains. I have heard them. I have nightmares of them. In desperation, so the new horror stories go, some villages have turned to the evil sorcery of witches in hope of salvation, even letting these dark sorcerers and necromancers perform their perverted evil rituals in holy chambers and sacred sites. This, my father has claimed, has only given greater force and speed to the spread of the destruction which sweeps over the land.

I’ll pause here and apologize for the bleakness of my writing. I’d rather write fanciful sunny stories which uplift readers bringing them smiles and gladness. Yet I yearn to chronicle correctly. These times are dire, dank and perilous. Existence itself teeters over the edge into the dark mysterious abyss. Perhaps all the villages in all the kingdoms of this continent will perish. All that will remain of our memory and what has happened to us will be the words written by journalists, perhaps to be found by exploring islanders some thousand years hence. Perhaps by some unknown magic these future humans, if humanity is to survive at all, will be able to translate these words into their language. I feel the weight of this responsibility on me, yet if I let it burden me too heavily it will be as a rock pressing so hard on my hand, I cannot lift a quill or form a scribble at all. So, I will try not to lament myself with too much paralyzing doubt and pressure and instead let the words flow, in these short intervals of rest we have while on our quest. We venture to purify myself to be worthy to enter Dragon Valley, burrowed within Gladstone Mountains. Once inside, so father instructed me, I will beg the dragons for their help on behalf of humankind. My father says I must believe or else the various spells will not work, and I will offend the dragons. So, I try to believe. I will try and yet I have doubts still. One cannot force a rock to turn into water by simply wishing it to become water hard enough. Similarly, despite my efforts to swat them away like annoying grasshoppers, I have doubts that I am who it is my father claims that I am; I doubt I will be what it is I need to be. I have doubts in the existence of Dragon Valley at all, or that if Dragons do exist that they will care for us with any stronger impulse then us humans care for a mosquito. Or these damn annoying grasshoppers.

No human is allowed to enter Dragon Valley. I am supposed to be transformed into an angelic being of light worthy to enter the Valley. How this is to be, father will not let yet reveal. I must pass certain tests. I have strong suspicions that I will be asked to sacrifice myself to a greater cause. I have not yet dwelled deeply on this. Such abstractions only entertain nebulous thoughts which feel more like dreams then reality, even knowing the reality of death will soon likely bite me. Legend claims that if any soiled human foot dares to spoil Dragon Valley with its print, the mighty dragons will become so outraged that they will make the kingdoms pay a price for this offense by laying waste to villages, cities and farms and even the jeweled Royal Cities. The dragons are powerful enough that not even the gods could stop their destruction. Some claim that at least one kingdom, Hex, fearing this outcome, has positioned a guard unit called the Golden Royal Institute of Protectors of Dragons, or GRIPD, who patrol the Gladstone Mountains, which, the lore claims, are the mountains in which Dragon Valley is nestled. GRIPD will kill anyone on the mountains who do not have the proper papers legitimizing their claim to be there. We do not have proper papers. I am getting ahead of myself.

I see Malpin glaring at me. He does not think I should bring paper and pen and waste time writing while on our journey. The materials are too heavy and thus will slow me down and writing is too much of a distraction. He does not like having a woman on this adventure. We are bad luck, goes his dull basic and common superstition. His eyes are a muted green that blaze emerald in sunlight. His gold sword which he has named Lighting glints when the sun catches it. Perhaps it is my imagination, but I think he hates the complication I bring him, as he finds me attractive. He glances my way and his eyes glide over me and linger for a spell before he quickly turns away in apparent agitated shame. He then snorts and grumbles with tight lips, huffing from some internal self-annoyance from his false belief that his attraction to me is a weakness in him that will impair his own goals in his own quest. He claims that his sole objective is to help me purify myself and then enter Dragon Valley where I will plead with the dragons for help. However, I suspect he has other motives, although I do not mark him as sinister. Perhaps I am wrong. He is knowledgeable of the world, fit, skilled and handsome, and intriguing in a way, being an outsider, that draws me towards him. It may be true that the drearier and bleaker the times, the more impulsive the temptation it is to escape into various fantasies, including in indulgences of carnal passions, as is innate in our nature. It would feel good to have him unclench his sword Lighting in exchange for a warm tight embrace of me, and while lifted in his muscular arms abandon all doubts and fears and over-wrought worries and any thinking at all, as I allow him into me; allow him to use my body as a pillow into which to pound his pent up frustrations and aggressions into, and in so doing feel more powerful as his power is transferred into me. A simple touch of his face and gentle kiss after melting his frozen stoic scowl into a warm shy smile before then would be ideal. Yet despite the last two sentences I have just written I am not tempted by him or have any aims to waste time in flirtation and banter and smiles with the man. He is cold. I smile at him, but I smile at everyone. If death should soon accost us, and we still have pulse, life, energy, light and imagination reserved enough in us, perhaps it may happen we will entwine our mutual desires, to fulfil one last curiosity and carnal want; to create a burst of light from what living can bring us before it is snuffed out in eternal darkness. Yet that time has not come yet, and I doubt it will. Of course, I hope it will not come. I would rather live a long life then be like a bug, whose short life ends after the explosion of its life goal of sex is met. Such thoughts are silly I know and not fit for these serious times. I feel some shame from gently teasing such selfish thoughts of hazy pink cloud dreaminess while the darkest and heaviest of thunder clouds rains down on us the ghastliest of pain and death. Yet still even among a fire if a whiff of sweet fragrance from a flower wafts my way, I will inhale.

Let me backtrack. My humble yet vibrant village, Cherpie, far in the outskirts from the Royal City, Kerkon, held a meeting in our grand wooden hall, with all the elders and wise men, their sons and warriors among us, in order to discuss what to do of this plague and famine, headed our way. The debate was raucous, rowdy and raw. Men yelled things they would dare not in normal times, from fear of being labeled blasphemous, to the gods and the kingdom. A greater fear overtook them and emboldened them. My very presence led to contentious heated speech and near brawls. Women are not allowed to attend these village council sessions in normal times. My small rotund father insisted I show, and that the reason would be made clear later. Annoyingly he also insisted that I wear my prettiest blue silken dress, to match my eyes, and tie my auburn hair in white flower vines. Begrudgingly I obeyed him. He directed me to sit by his side. An important elder, him being the second highest ranked holy man, he held a seat along with five other men deemed most important, on a platform which overlooked the hall. I took a sixth seat.

Some insisted that to save ourselves from the plague we must first understand the origins of it and be bold in truth in pointing where the blame lies, as dangerous as the truth may be. It stemmed from the most recent revolution which overtook Kerkon, a young well-traveled leader claimed. These types of bloody coups happen regularly, and for the most part our village of Cherpie is distant enough that the rumblings that emanate from whatever revolt which shocks Kerkon does not shake the ground of Cherpie too violently. It remains mostly the same for us; all the kings and queens and leaders are all equal in their greed, vanity and evil, despite the hatreds, murders and wars that the rotating ruling families wage against each other. Yet this revolution was different. The new ruler King Kapan, sought to overtake freedoms once enjoyed by the farmers for he believed his new ruling philosophy could produce crops better then them. He sought out pointless wars against neighboring kingdoms all for his glory, and those kingdoms fought back with new weapons of pestilence which grew beyond their ability to maintain, went another rumor. He waged genocide against groups of his own people, blaming them for his policy failures, went another rumor. The gods who Kapan’s royal victims worshiped cursed us with this plague and famine, because those gods are more powerful than the gods that Kapan’s family worships, claimed some. “That makes no logical sense,” argued a young elder, continuing: “if the family of Kapan that usurped the previous royal ruling family worshiped lesser gods, how is it they were able to usurp the order and kill the ruling family, which worshiped the more powerful gods? Why would these more powerful gods punish and destroy us with this plague and famine now, rather than just kill King Kapan and his clan?” The logic was all convoluted and hard to follow, even if it were spoken in a calm voice and not shouted with seething contempt and overflowing emotion. Some boldly declared that there were no gods, and it was our false belief in them that caused this famine; the solution must not be found in trying to appease imaginary petty powerful beings in the sky but in science. I confess that that line of argument held the most persuasion over me. Fists were raised and shook and nearly swung, faces turned red, veins bulged in necks and temples, sweat dripped, spittle splat, nostrils flared. My father and I kept silent, observing the madness. “Sir Holstice, you are usually one of many words and supposed wisdoms,” cried an elder to my father. “You have nothing to say of the blasphemy against the gods and kingdom spoken here in this sacred hall?”

My father waited for the obnoxious clamoring volume to subdue, which it did as more eyes turned towards him anticipating his hoped-for wisdom. “First of all, we must stop fighting amongst ourselves,” he bellowed. “We must not let small thoughts and selfish vanities overtake us.” This was mostly met with murmurings of agreements. “If we will kill a brother in false belief that it will save our own life and that of our family, we will all we die. Conversely, if we will lay down our life for our brother, each has a better chance of survival. Some may die yet more may live; otherwise, all, including our women and children, will succumb.” His words brought head nodding and chin scratching and accompanying noises. My father raised him arms and his voice. “Our salvation lies in Dragon Valley.”

This simple direct pronouncement caused another uproar of howls and shouted arguments. “Dragon Valley does not exist” “The GRIPD will destroy any who goes on the mountains!” “No human can enter Dragon Valley; if one does then the Dragons will destroy us faster than the plague will,” “Holstice, I always knew you were a fool,” “It’s a good idea let’s hear the man out,” went various overlapping shouts. My father raised his arms, palms out, in order to calm the crowd. He turned towards me. “Allstary, stand up,” he demanded. I rubbed my palms over by legs as I stood to straighten any wrinkles in the blue satin fabric. I cleared my throat and then smiled with tight lips, nodding at him then turning to nod at the crowd of men. I smelled stale sweat and beer. “It is true that my daughter is the most beautiful women in the land, is it not?’ crowed my father. I felt my cheeks flush. I downcast my gaze. I felt the leering eyes burrowing into me in crude superficial objectifying judgment and I wished to disappear. The voices grumbled what appeared to be mostly lukewarm agreements. “The dragons favor beauty,” my dad claimed. “There are ways to purify my daughter; to change her into an angel of light, no longer human but something more. To make her worthy to enter Dragon Valley.”

“What ways are that?” asked a sceptic.

“That is not of your concern,” my father snapped back.

I would like to know I thought.

“If Dragon Valley is real,” asked one, “you would risk their wrath, if your daughter offends them?”

“How will you escape from GRIPD?” asked another. “It is forbidden for us to go into Gladstone Mountains; they belong to the Kingdom of Hex”

“We have our own warriors better then theirs; yes, in this very village of Cherpie,” boasted one.

This brought out some boastful shouts as well as doubtful moans accompanying eye rolls.

“You daughter is very pretty, it is true Holstice, yet many of our daughter’s radiate beauty and wholesomeness.”

Not as wholesome as you may think, I thought. I had laid with my fiancé before he disappeared, as well as more than a few of your beautiful daughters radiating wholesomeness, in acts you’d ascribe to witchery and evil. Yet I hold no regrets.

“Why should your daughter be chosen for this honor and not one of ours,” the man continued.

My father took out a white handkerchief from his pocked and dabbed it against the sweat which gathered just below his baldness. He looked down. While he did so another man spoke up: “my daughter is a true virgin of gentle grace; she will delight the dragons. I declare on her behalf she will be willing to sacrifice her life to the dragon gods to appease them so that they may save us. I’d only ask that her name and that of her family be forever after honored.”

My father strained a smile. He whispered: “that is not how this works.”

“Will you tell me how it works father?” I whispered back.

He forced a smile.

A finger of accusation flung at me and with it the accompanying shout: “she is no virgin!”

I cannot wait to leave this village of small minded frightened superstitious little men and women and the swill of gossip which it turns out in tight vomitous volumes, I thought: a variation of a thought I’ve had umpteenth times, since I first learned there existed worlds beyond these boundaries.

“My daughter is named, ‘favored of the stars,’” my father declared. “She has been chosen for this moment.”

A man shouted an objection. My usual even tempered and patient father cut him off and raised his voice. “Who is the holy man here who would know such things; You or I?”

That chilled the man’s ire. “You,” he relented.

“I have been preparing my daughter for this very moment her entire life,” my father proclaimed. How and in what ways, a mystery to me. I thought it may be one of fathers lies or exaggerations. Or perhaps a new belfie that could be twisted into a truth by hindsight and novel interpretations. Perhaps feeding me raisins as a child, for example, now gives my breath a smell which delights dragons, or some such thing. My father continued: “My wife did not die in vain while giving birth to dear Allstary. I knew form her birth she would grow to be someone important. Otherwise, the gods would not have sacrificed such a beauty that was Eliza.” These words sounded a bit delusional to me. My father became so accustomed to telling comforting lies to others that perhaps he became comfortable telling them to himself. I do wish I could live up to his expectation and not disappoint him. Or my mother, wherever she may be, if she be anywhere at all, if souls live on after death.

“What say the holy highest priest,” asked one, referring to the high holy man, Belzum, the first rank. Belzum had not spoken a coherent word as long as I’ve been alive. My father has cleaned Belzum’s bowls for as long as I can remember. I believe he is over a hundred years old. He appears to me to be more totem and prop then a man.

Belzem, to the astonishment of all, looked at me with what appeared to be a knowing glance and gave a slight head bow. I heard gasps. “Good, good,” my father mumbled to himself.

“What say she?” one shouted.

“A girl may not speak in these sacred halls,” yelled a reply. “We risk the wrath of the gods already even allowing her to stand before us.”

“The gods have abandoned us already,” came a shriek.

I rolled back my shoulders and lifted my chin. “My father, the wise Holy Man Holstice, speaks true,” I declared. “He has prepared me my whole life for this day. For this very moment. I am willing to sacrifice all, even my life, for the sake of saving our Kingdom, just as I know all of you and all your daughters and sons would, if they were asked, as I have been asked.”

“You will die?” asked one.

“I hope not,” I said. “But I am willing. I go clear headed, knowing the risks and dangers. I have heard the debate. Perhaps the chances of success are slim, yet still they must be taken.”

“Have other villages thought to send expeditions to the Dragons to implore them for help?” asked an old elder.

“I believe so,” my father replied.

“We will send our best warriors,” declared a young man. “To help in the quest.”

“A small group,” my father said.

“Yes,” agreed another. “We need our warriors here to protect our village from the Greys, roaming cannibals and other twisted beasts and evil sorcerers born from this abominable plague.”

“If only we had a wizard,” lamented a meek voice.

“Magic is evil; we long ago decided to ban it,” countered another. “For good reason.”

Debate erupted over whether it was foolish or wise to have banned magic; whether the fates of other villages that had official wizards among them fared better or worse for it, in dealing with this current and most deadly plague. No one seemed to be winning or losing the arguments. It all just sounded like the yelling noises and last frantic screams of a drowning people, to me.

There is one odd eccentric who dwelled among us: a rotund dwarf with a blurred hazy eye and creaky voice who dressed in fox furs and a straw hat. He mostly kept to himself and only seemed to exist for a target for children to throw rotting eggs at. His name is Horbit. He had not been invited to this great hall debate. No one, including myself, had noticed him before he spoke up with his reedy voice, which somehow could be heard among all the shouted vocal eruptions. “I am a wizard,” he declared. The voices stopped and all stewed in silence which was then broken by hearty group laughter at this man’s expense.

Horbit ignored the laughter. “I know an elf,” he declared. This statement brought forth more boisterous cackling. “Its name is Harveneth,” Horbit said. “Harveneth the outcast. They were shunned by their elf kin for having fallen in love with a human.” He cast he blurry eye at me. “They had a child.” He cast his eyes back to the ground. I admit it creeped me out how he looked at me. I spun toward father; in hope he could offer some reassurance against the rising feeling of unease within me. My father kept his lips tight, and he nodded while he looked upon Horbit. Horbit then yawned. Out his stretched face hole crawled a baby fist sized black spider with a bulbous abdomen and skinny spindle legs. Then another spider. Galmour, our best trained and most noble highest-ranking warrior (a name you need not remember I believe; I doubt he will be featured again in these pages, seeing as Malpin so badly beat and humiliated him; but perhaps I am wrong, and he will show himself again) spun quickly towards the ghastly sight of Horbit vomiting spiders which then crawled all over his fox furs and straw hat. Galmour’s nostrils flared, and his eyes blazed as he unsheathed his sword and pointed it in accusation against Horbit, saying: “a witch’s spell has infested this sacred site, brought in by this strange dwarf. Did I not say we should have killed him long ago; that his supposed harmlessness was all a sham?”

I must cut this writing spell now. Malpin has been glaring at me a good while as I sat on this mossy rock in this field of decaying wheat. The Gladstone mountains jetting at the horizon gleam a bold purple under the red sky. Grasshoppers have invested this harvest; they are so plentiful it as if the very dirt leaps and vibrates all around me. They make a terrible high pitched screeching chorus with their leg rubbings. It is foreboding. Father has sent a message bird back to the village instructing that he has found food. Not the wet sloppy rotted wheat stocks, but the insects. They provide good nourishment, he claims. He says it is a good omen; I on the other hand feel a sense of foreboding from it. Or perhaps it is the blood from my foot blisters that has me more ill at ease. Malpin shouted at me, wondering if I heard the howls of the Greys. They approach, he said. He sounds agitated. His gold sword Lighting is withdrawn, and he slices the air with it, making whoosh noises, causing sliced grasshopper parts to spattle out from his swings. “Stop your writing now!” he commands. I write this sentence you read here despite his order. He loses his patience. “Now!” he demands again, with more vigor. I suppose I should obey. I will close this and next writing session tell of my introduction to him and the elf Harveneth (they are two I believe but walk as one) and Horbit and our guide from the rival kingdom Hex, Malstorm. Unless I am to die in an instant of course, then these are my last words. I hope I shall live.