The Firmament of Fire

There weren't always dragons in the valley. For indeed, the Valley is a timeless place of All Things, and forever is a thing beyond a promise to give.

There was a time, faded and spectral in the minds of folk today, when the skies were a place of imagination, idyllic and wishful; from its vast blue openness came nurturing rain and divine wonder. Balance, bereft of disorder, weighed the fortunes of all. Over lush trees and plentiful fields below, the gods dwelt in celestial palaces above the heads of the valley folk, and on clear nights would appear above to celebrate the union of nature and divinity. There was a time where one’s lungs could well deeply without sputtering the ash that mired all.

There wasn’t always terror in the skies. All life needed not cower in hills and holes, gripped with fear, addled with confusion, pallid with regret and woe; for to wonder, not to worry, is the milk of life.

Before the heavens ignited with a shrill hiss, hands below joined in pious labors, molding for their deities above a viridescent garden bountiful and wide, each step and strain of hand and foot an act of service to a Firmament of Green and Blue between the heavens and the valley of all. People, gathered in union, looked upward at the great blue arch above in pleasant wonder as it stretched over and across open fields of green grass and golden grains; resplendent in the glory vested from partaking in this covenant between heaven and earth, natural and divine.

Alas, this pact has been broken, its promises severed. The very fabric of the divine contract burnt asunder, refuting its clarion preamble and striking its clauses to dust. The folk of the valley watched in terror as the starry homes of their gods above them were consumed in the thunderous roars that flamed from licks of fiery forked tongues, an example to all below.

Dragons, fell terrors of the skies, have come to the Valley of All.

From deep slumber and long exile, the winged serpents bellowed fiery vengeance on the gods that banished them and the folk that hid under their divine robes. For dragons are the scaly, ever hungry incarnation of fire and ambition made flesh, and had no place in the firmament that kept the heavens above the earth, and were cast from the pact, banished from existence in a realm that sought harmony. In retribution and insatiable serpentine hunger, vengeful spite spewed forth from the mouths of scaled demons, to immolate the heavens.

Fell ruin descends from the skies to hunt.

The roaring hiss tore the very air as it combusted and enkindled the very fabric of the ether. Like straw the very cosmos erupted, engulfing the great halls of the heavens in flame. The burning of the celestial palaces of the gods above doused ash upon those below, leaving their world coated in gray and cloaked in perpetual crimson night. Now that ash fills the air and bleeds into the water, folk are hunted where grain was tended, and pious labor yields the people no prosperity or relief from famine, woe, and dragonfire, as they dwell heads bent below a smoldering sky.

Sown of earth, watered by sky, reaped in fire. The verdant truth of a journey of faith, passed like a baton by many hands and carried by many feet under an azure sky, all buried in ash and dust. In its wake, oblivion. Icons and images of the gods, hewn in stone and cast in steel by forgotten means, are plucked from rubble for baubles and playthings, their faces unremembered. The loss of everything is lost on all who still draw brittle breath.

Be it faith, fact, fallacy or fiction, the world around is made of what’s made of it. A truth, be it spoken, heard, remembered or forgotten, is the destiny of all things done, in the end. What truths can be woven at present, from a past burnt away?

The Valley today is a mired and treacherous place. The skies glow like embers as the ash falls from their depths as smoke ever rises to their heights. Some say the ashfall falling overhead are the charred remains of the gods, and their home in the clouds and stars. It falls in great clumps and grows dunes of ashen desert, where famine stalks the earth as dragons stalk the skies above.

From one supreme danger in the sky do a thousand that tread the earth spring, from famine to black smog to serpents of all sizes, and of course the timeless curse of a conquered people: their former neighbor. From left and right swoop the famished and frightened down upon scraps in the ash, slaying the grandson of their own grandfather’s brother-in-arms. In this way the folk of the Valley could find no peace for their angst, any more than they could find food for their too many mouths.

Few believe in a duty to any pact.

Fading under growing debts of dust and ash, evanescent become the memories of resplendent before-times in the muddled and seared minds of those that strife under scaled wings. Remembrances, like ghosts, cling to rasped whispers carried by pained breaths. The story of people, of kingdoms and courts and governance and cooperation, dissipates more each generation. The dust that falls forever from the heavens above clouds the minds as it clogs the senses, stunting the once-proud sons and daughters in body and spirit. What’s left of the dead gods contemptible flock in the valley are desperate, disparate, ravenous, and lost, wandering the wastes half blind and half-witted.

Of what Is remembered, of heroes, of clarity, and of the color green? Of mages, magic, of purity, blue, and truth? Not but what little slips through perpetual billows of ash and smoke, hoping for breath. For the rogues and the rats that ever remain, the air is starched with ash, the water flows tainted with dust, and the words spoken char the ear with deceit.

It is amongst these wisps of smoke and under this glowing ember sky and above these rising dunes of dust that humanity lingers, bereft of the kings and courts of old and longing for days anew. The holds of their ancestors lay in ruin mired by smoke and superstition, laid waste by flame and abandoned by fearful times. Indeed, there were few known to venture in the dusty forgotten halls of the forefathers, and one was known as the Collector, or sometimes the The Owl. As he searches for irrelevant trinkets, he wanders these dunes under the burning heavens for the sake of one sole truth: memories can be destroyed, but the patient tide of remembrance cannot be so easily burnt away.

The knowledge of dawn was dimly suggested on the horizon when the Collector rose to greet her gaze, peering through the receding gusts of sodden ashfall that had hammered and hissed through the night.The wind gaped and yawned. On the clearest of days the innervated yellow light of the sun contested with the crimson glow of the burning heavens and the vast gray of the ashen sky, though most days the eyes could hardly pierce the hazy gray clouds further than some few dozen paces, leaving days hardly brighter than nights under the ever-burning Sky Above. Today, more than most, had seen fit to appeal for more favor from the source of All Things.

It was this quality, this sun-ness, that the Collector had hoped for as he gazed expectantly at the orange globe defying the heavens. Where the sun traveled in the sky, seemingly indifferent to the immolation that imitated her below, the smoldering embers and licks of flame that spread across the sky seemed to fade and retreat in her path. In the life of this Collector, which had seen days beyond most, the radiant glory obscured above the smoldering and sacked palaces of the divine, and her path above It All had become something of a private religion to him. This elusive sun-ness was steadily everything to the aloof collector and wayfarer of fortune, though there was no communion to it all. Where she lit, things— real, tangible things— were found, thus he followed methodically.

As he gazed at the amber radiance whose arrows pierced the dusty vale, the Collector stood stock still save for a slight rising in his chest, taking in her glory as might a flower in a meadow, rising slowly from his own gray stalk of robes and baubles. This salute he gave whenever viable in the wastes in which he scavenged, prospecting for artifacts of a bygone era in the dusty dunes, and her plight always occupied his mind, either in the immediate search for light or in broader inquiries for guidance. The collector saved his faith for the one entity in All Things that kept their end of the bargain between earth and the heavens, and had endless skepticism and appraisal for all else under embered sky.

The sun-goddess continued her daily ritual of rising. The redness of the smoldering skies retreated in her wake, the violence of of crimson contrasting sharply with her warm, nurturing glow.

In time for a mild gust of pale-gray ash, the Collector fastened himself, drawing a leathery dark mask of bird-like countenance over his face, until his shrewd eyes were hidden behind two amber-glass globes with a long, hooked nose protruding between them. Only during these moments of quiet exaltation was this mask removed.

The Collector started out down the hillside he had perched safely through the awful night, rays of dawn striking through at tools and metals strapped and dangling from wispy gray robes as the Collector descended into the ashy mists cast below. Noting the irregular piling of dust that betrayed the cache of items hidden beneath, the collector began scanning with his eyes, feet, and staff.

Among the sparse remainder huddled in the brush and ruins, little was known of this hood behind a dark plague mask, not even his true image. Only his bird-like countenance peered from beneath his flowing gray hood, always alone, seeking some artifact or another from the past out of the dust. These trinkets were stowed, stashed, and strapped upon the cowled old bird’s robes and boots as they hobbled and hopped on their master’s eccentric mission.

Items that drew the observer’s eye all heralded from the old world, or the world under the clear blue vault, as it was sometimes known. According to his discoveries, which he conducted all through the business of salvaging and trading pieces of study, forefolk of lore had begun to see a world where the ends met one another in capital fashion for expansion and exploration.

Compasses, calipers, flintlocks and other intrepid pieces of steel saved from oblivion told the Collector much of the forefolk’s growing sense of wonder. While peasants still toiled under kings and their many mounted knights, the winds of change were blowing in the near hills, long ago; rumblings of steam, fiery cracks of black powder, and the steely staccato of industry competed with the sounds of the king’s billowing banners with incrementally mounting pressure. In bustling cities shaded under stone keeps, people, like playwrights, wove stories of the divine and of nature, of the heavens above and the world beyond with ever more intricate juxtaposition, foreshadowing, and finesse.

But one day all of these petty plot lines ceased, with no more exposition or explanation— only fire. Before, the Valley of All Things was rumored to harbor creatures of innumerable quantity and magical quality; in the Valley Under Ash, life began to extinguish as seemingly only the most dragon-like beings would remain; lizards and snakes, vultures and other such ilk swelled in rank, marching dutifully under wreaths of smoke. One could hardly find a horse or a castle or a spell tome or a recipe to corroborate that a kingdom once had a knight, or that writing could hold magic, or that quantities mixed and assembled properly yielded secrets and wonders.

At last, his steel-capped staff made a clear chiming ring in introduction to some ferrous antiquity in the dust. The Collector withdrew his staff with some strain, as if some unforeseen force pulled on its end. He pulled back and doubled over the place his staff stuck again, before again pointing his staff, this time with a comically naive panache.

With a loud “zap!” several pieces of ash-sodden rubbish flew to the tip of the Collector’s steel-tipped staff, hitting it with a metallic clash.

The Collector gingerly harvested each ash-coated scruple from his staff, then placed his salvage in a leather bag hanging from his chest. One piece of the three earned the Collector’s immediate interest, and was held to the rising sun after being coarsely wiped down by the sleeve of a gray robe.

“This particular piece, I think, will fetch a day’s worth,” thought the collector, whose needs were modest among survivors of the dragon scourge, a truth which spoke to little luxury. The item in question was actually a melted mass of metals from sundry sources, a salvage bit the Collector and other scavengers in the area knew as dragon-slag. It was coveted, often hidden deeply in hardened pools under layers of dust. If the dunes nearby bore more proverbial fruit, the Collector could perhaps mark this location and note it to the local Reeve, who organized work parties among the semi-nomadic denizens, and from there the dragon-slag could be mined out, and hewn into tools to scrape the wastes or weapons to fight over its scraps. Always prized above all was elder-steel, of the many things of lost-make that humankind could either scavenge or kill for.

The Collector stood up straight and considered the distance to the Gather Grounds, where folk scuttled from hole and hut to trade and commiserate, and otherwise engage in all they remembered of citizen-life, ignorant of the hollowness of their parlance. The sun was climbing swiftly, and would be resting in her grace soon after his return, were his departure from these dunes immediate.

Stowing the dragon-slag and dusting his robes, the Collector stole off, content to be in stride with his weather guardian. As morning gave way, a fine coating of pale ash glazed the surface of the valley around him, like cvc cv snow of the driest origin. Within a day of the valley’s temperamental weathers, the powder the Collector traipsed through presently would be blown and scattered for miles, replaced by soot of another chalky hue. Dunes, some the size of mountains, drifted between the valley’s flanks, massed from piles of ashfall and at the beck and call of treacherous winds. Their gradual incursion into the realms humankind still held forced many such as the Collector to dive into their dusty depths, or be driven to new lands by invading dust storms.

As the Collector hopped along, small dunes gave way to dust-capped ruins, and charred forests of dead pine and brush came to sight. Charred roofs and tower remnants poked out of mounds of soot-covered rubble. With care, the Collector navigated through what he recognized as an old battleground recently picked up by the local scavvers, from which he had well before taken his pickings as a collector that tread further than most, and worked alone.

“What truth might separate folk from beast, best?” The Collector jested to himself, knowing full well his own answer. Though his days had seen folk reduced in behavior and appearance to animals many times, aside from dragons no animals partook in a scene like this.

Here lie a field of charred forefolk, soot covered and ash-brittle, lying in repose under drifts of dust. Well-known sources of dragon-slag, elder metal, and leather from charred soles, there were multiple sites and sights such as these in the Valley under Dust, bodies burnt to sundry crisps, often little more than dust, brittle to the touch. Through the amber globes through which the Collector saw the world and through the experienced eyes through which he sifted the world’s trinkets, he discerned two different groups of dead in the dust, with the larger being some two-times antecedent and three-times the size of the latter and later party. The later party also differed in armament and placement, strewn atop their predecessors without order.

“In short,” the Collector mused to himself, “It seems the first group could have sired the fathers and mothers of the group slain atop, such was the miserly nature of humankind’s struggle with the dreaded dragon scourge. The first group, likely royal footman under the Last King, marched to death encased in armor and wielding polearms, crossbows, and flintlocks, under the hope of spearing and piercing the serpents like beasts of the forest, and under the plight of saving a kingdom— both fantastical delusions, borne in the immediate wake of the arrival. The armor of the first group did naught but melt faster than could be mustered in any forge the forefolk could conceive, as they died in seconds standing in their defensive ring of spears and shields. Their remnants were not so much cast as laid in place, rows of ash resembling sons of old, entombed in the motley melted metal that once shone with such bold and valorous light.

The Collector, also known as the Observer, had pieced together the story. Immediately following the arrival, the handful of kingdoms that made up humankind, known today as forefolk, fought on each their own terms, separately throwing legion upon legion at the scourges of fire that threatened them. Armies, resplendent in shimmering mail and marching in regimented arrays, were butchered like herds of lamb at a slaughterhouse. Follies levied in chainmail, these men marched to near-immediate death.

The second group was smaller and more learned of dragons. Their places of rest suggested a longer struggle; they spent what shot they had, avoided formations and lines of rank, and what was left of their corpses were largely free of melted steel that spilled over rows of knights like lard. These men and women— for, at this point, armies were neither heavily armored nor exclusively made of men—- knew that no steel would weather dragon flame, and learned to forgo its extensive use on the body, along with the use of sheildwalls and strategies of old. They, too, were hopeless, but nowhere near as helpless as their would-be grandfathers, nor were they as illusioned. Unlike the footman and knights of the Last King and Kings of old, hardly a spare arrowhead, bolt-tip, or musket-ball could be found among their person, having been trained and taught to loose every shot, dart, or rock available to them.

The collector pondered humankind’s long, desperate, and bitter struggle, and his unfortunate place in it, having always admired the Scattered Resistance, as he alone called it, being the only study of history he knew. Different from those before, who lived and died believing hogwash of a king or some knights one day quashing the beasts that hounded them, and unlike those after, among whose disunified number the Collector glumly counted himself, the folk of the Scattered Resistance were practical as they were desperate, and could collaborate on levels unknown to the dissonant, half-feral masses of today. They even had some luck in slaying a few dragons, such was their stoic determination to reclaim the world they felt they could still see on the twilight horizon, teetering into darkness. The scrap found from them was more frugal of make but more frequently intact; These men and women knew to avoid the flame-spitting maw as well as the huddled groups that fanged jaws found a leisurely target, though for it they died after many near-misses and having been singed and seared many times. Though they would all rest in the same ash, there was the march and cadence of life that made the journey, and the Collector resented his lot.

He wondered how Kings of Old could see violence the hereditary domain of only young men, of what people must have looked and seemed. Folk of today were feral to a muddling degree, and such categories as man, woman, young or old washed into irrelevance amid starvation and strife. Everything that still drew breath in the valley also need kill to live and be beheld in it; there were no such saintly distinctions of innocence saved for women, children, or elders.

As the collector made his way to the Gather Grounds ahead, he wondered how many stories humankind made up about itself, of kings, queens, ladies, and courts; of how many lies did this great, unyielding and unrequited “we” require, like saints and gentle-men, simply to fabricate some notion of “Us?”

The Gather Grounds came into view over many pensive steps, until they stumbled into crowds and huddled masses. Here at the gather grounds, folk participated in what remained and what was remembered of citizen life, largely ignorant of its hollowed parlance and shell of society. These gatherings, sometimes called mullings, would scatter at the sight or sound of any dragon. As such, there was a slightly forced quality of so many persons huddling above ground, as if none could relax truly, a truth never fully known by people who knew no real peace. Pale shadows and silhouettes of governance and community, these happenings entertained the notion that life as it always was continued, a notion that incurred spasms of the Owl’s eye, hidden underneath his leathery hook-nosed mask.

Despite his dour sense of sober realism, the Owl had found perhaps a sole friend in the playwright and “lead” troubadour of the scattered “town,” their casual friendship springing eternally from a mutual inclination to note a situation for its irony. His job in the grounds, or as the two would jest, his profession, was actually a harker; it was his responsibility to state the news of the day after noting the date and hour and several other such daily posterities. However, folk cared little for the names and numbers clumsily thrown at time in a place beyond its relevance. Few listened to hear it proclaimed that this day under the ash was the fourth day of the third month in the year of oblivion. Thus, the playwright went a step further, and then a few performative steps left and right.

His troubadour group was the entertainment and backdrop of the mullings that would assemble nomadically across the ruined town and nearby brush, avoiding open fields and the ominous and haunted lord’s halls and keeps. Through renditions of stories surmised about days past and comical reenactments of current happenings, the makeshift theater was one of the attractions that gave nearby trades and dealings a backdrop, and provided a sort of local news the folk would gather around.

The Collector made his way, content to tackle the trade stands for his daily earnings in due time. Approaching the Playwright with outstretched hand, the other pointing claw-like to the emptiness of the first hand.

“I believe you are setting up shop to sling your tedious wares illegally, good sir.” The Owl quipped.

“Oh-ho! A constable, collecting tithes for king and country! My best actor has been poking at piles all day!” Jeered the Playwright, voice dripping with mockery. The sundry and sordid relations of bygone days were a favorite banter of the two, and was some of the highest culture to be found in the Valley.

“For someone who can deride folk for fooling their very selves, you sure do a job of helping them do it,” quipped the Owl, shaking a mockingly disapproving finger at the Playwright, who was busy attempting to collect admission fees from people who wandered too close. Most currency was less-than-reputable by virtue of hailing from bygone kingdoms or by virtue of being mostly trash anyway, and consequently only frivolous things were bought instead of bartered. This dichotomy of wealth being the subject of one of his most self-adored works, the Playwright proudly considered himself a study of how people parted with their wealth.

“Oh, it's no-thing to me, to give the people what they want. My work I stole from them anyhow, just like the admission fee. We live in a picture-spinner, and to give a spin for a spin received is nature, or at least mine,” said the playwright, short-changing another would be patron as he played at admissions.

It was late into what the folk of the valley had come to accept as a clear day, where the crimson embers overhead were almost pushed out and expelled by the climbing sun, which had continued on her faithful dance heedless of the immolation miming her below. It was hot and arid, but under the shade of dead trees and charred barns and hovels the mulling seemed almost civilized in pleasant merriment. People made encampments on ruined porch steps as if they lived in the rubble behind them. Children laughed and frollicked covered in soot and ash. As metals were traded for potatoes, roots, jerky made from rodents and other food supplies, the troubadours took their places as they began their theater.

A ragged cloth, dirtied and patched, hung on a line over the makeshift stage, as the players formed a semi-circle to the side of it. Between this curtain and the crowd, a fire crackled and dined on what unburnt wood could be gathered. From behind the drawn curtain there was a feigned commotion that slapped and shook the curtain with each exaggerated sway, as the players all speculated what lay behind the curtain in pantomime. As the rounds of guesses mimed at one another intensified, the players began incorporating the shadows of their own charade on the tattered backdrop behind, miming and jumping with their own silhouettes.

The Owl had been alternately tending his attention from the play to a small corked bottle he had found on his travels. With troubadours bouncing across the fire, the bottle hosted a show of its own, resisting every attempt to crack its rustic seal and divulge its amber-brown contents in a dramatic show of resistance. As the play began cajoling mildly enthusiastic involvement from a small crowd, the Owl leaned over to the playwright, asking: “what do you call this latest grift on our refined sense of theater, you alley cat? What a way to double your troupe!”

The playwright smiled wryly. “This piece came to me, just so,” he said, gesturing at a player ahead, who had just turned their head to see their own form curled into the clumsy visage of what seemed to be a dog, and barked at the realization. “We meet, we play, we buy, we sell… it is all mimicry… and such.”

His voice trailed off as he watched his rough-spun work bleed into the crowd. A child had stopped to share their own shadow-puppets, the crowd was now applauding this innocent bravery, and joining in kind.

“A bird!” said one.

“A Cat!” called another.

“A dog with two legs!” yelled a third.

“Unicorn! Griffon! Lion! Centaur! Duck!” said another still, and after, as guesses of animals too long absent to answer if real or imagined, started to flow across the audience. The dragons and dust drove away most un-scaled life, leaving more mice than memories. Only guesses remain, and those aimlessly leveling these guesses at the world that's left.

Laughter and revelry briefly overtake the sounds of trade and traffic. The shadows cast upon the tapestry backdrop flickered between the light of the late sun and the modest campfire. Suddenly the light of both blinked. A momentary eclipse, under some colossal body, darkened the world below. Like a thief in the night, the jovial pallor in the faces around was gone when light and sense returned.

In a sickly silence the crowd sank, like ants realizing the shoe above them for what it is. No sooner did a bellowing hiss fill the skies, the air akin to timber splitting such was its force. Of all the indiginities, sorrows, and deaths the folk of the Valley endured, nothing, naught, and nill approached the realization above— they were being hunted.

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. But until there are no more, all pacts of peace are off.