The Hidden

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. Despite the fact that our valley had been thoroughly explored by every child adventurer in the village, they had gone undiscovered. Not until a group of mongrel boys managed to get themselves trapped in a cave, that is. That’s when we found the first one, a statue entombed in a long-forgotten cavern of stone and damp. No one knew how long the creature had been standing there under our very noses, frozen in a time long since passed. Waiting to be found.

The oldest men and women in the village only had the faintest memories of a bedtime story, one told to them by their parents and grandparents around the fire late at night, of a monster with a half-remembered name. A name that was never spoken above a whisper, lest the monster hear, and come for the one who had called to him. This monster was called a dragon.

But I rush too quickly, reader. I do the tale an injustice by sprinting to the end of it. No, this tale will be told as it unfolded to the people of this valley, in anxious meetings between neighbors in the street and in the excited shouts of the town crier. In worried glances in the market and in after dinner conversations around the dining room table. When the wonder and the fear of it all were so present in the room that you could almost taste it.

I first heard that the boys were missing as I was making my way in from the fields. Our island was in the harvest season – the days were long and the yield plentiful. My muscles ached and my hands cramped from hours of wielding the sickle, but the pain was delicious in its own way. It signaled a winter of full bellies to come, rather than a season of starvation and cold as in the past. As the last rays of the sun dipped below the ring of mountains that surrounded our island, I spied a figure running towards me in a seeming panic. I shielded my eyes from the blinding sun and saw David, a young man of our village.

“Arthur,” he panted, bent over at the waist to catch his breath. “A group of boys went out this morning and haven’t returned yet.”

“Well that’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “They’ve been gone longer than that plenty of times before. They’ve probably forgotten the time as usual.”

“Normally I would agree with you, but Mina saw something and she sent me to find you.”

“You should know by now that her words mean nothing to me. You all would leap from that cliff right down to the waves below if she told you that she saw it in a vision.”

“I know, I know. But you know the valley better than any man here. If you can’t find them then no one can. Joseph is with them, Arthur. Abby said they were headed to the caves this morning.”

Now I must tell you, reader, that I had no qualms in blatantly and publicly disregarding the wild musings of Mina, our supposed seer. I put more stock in the garbled nonsense spoken by my sister’s one year old boy. At least his words were genuine, if mottled.

But I couldn’t argue with the worry in David’s voice. Joseph was his younger brother and closest ally. Abby was the youngest child of the lot, a blonde, curly haired girl who kept tabs on her brother closer than her mother ever could. Although I was not convinced of the emergency, I couldn’t say no to the raw anxiety in David’s eyes.

I sighed deeply and accepted that the day’s work was not yet done. My dinner and place by the fire would have to be delayed.

“Alright David, we’ll find them. And when I do someone is getting a good thrashing. Whether it be Joseph, you, or Mina.”

Our island had no name, or if it did it had been lost to time long ago. For us, the inhabitants, it was just the Island, no more and no less. The island was made up of a central valley encircled by mountains with high peaks where none of us had dared venture before. Our valley was fertile and green, and provided us with good soil for our crops and grass for our cattle. It nourished us and gave us a home, and for that we gave thanks every day.

But the mountains, there was something about those mountains that made most of us stay away, though we could not name a reason why if asked to. Their height was forbidding, and the peaks sometimes disappeared into the low-lying clouds blown in from the sea. Some dread presence told those who wandered too closely there to get out, and never return. The warning was never heeded by the village boys however, including myself when I was a child. We took it as a challenge to explore the caves and pretend to look for some unknown treasure inside. It was only upon reaching manhood that the silent threat of the mountains spoke to us, and our adventuring days ended when our lives in the fields began. I suspected that Joseph and the others would be found in some such cave, forgetful of the time and oblivious to the worry that they caused their families.

David and I left the fields and headed for horses and supplies from my barn. I spared a glance at my front door as we passed, imagining the evening I had planned for myself, in front of the fire with a strong pint of ale. I shrugged off the vision and continued for the barn, where I found my horses Alma and Finn waiting for me and for their daily treat of sweet red apples. I happily obliged them, and enjoyed the soft feel of their mouths eating the apples from my calloused palms. I had no children, and no wife either. Alma and Finn were my sole companions, and I spoiled them with all the love that I would have showered upon the family I never had.

I threw a saddle over Alma and gestured to David to do the same for Finn. We packed water skins and some bread for the boys if they needed it, and a lantern for each of us. Although the day had been bright and the sky an uninterrupted expanse of blue, the weather was now shifting quickly. What sun was left was now covered by thick, low clouds that promised a flood in the near future.

“We have to hurry. This storm won’t be long in overtaking us, and some of those caverns have flooded in the past if the rain is heavy enough,” I told David as we lead the horses out of the barn and away from the village. He said nothing, but the worry in his eyes silently agreed.

We crossed through fields and the apple orchard that all of us in the village shared as a community. The crisp smell of autumn apples stayed with me after we left the orchard behind, the fragrance intensified with the impending storm. I made a note to myself to return the next day to fill a sack for Alma and Finn after we sorted out the punishment for Joseph and his friends. They had been warned many times to be home before nightfall, or their daytime excursions would be forbidden. I planned on seeing to it that the message would stick this time, as they were pulling me away from my dinner and drink after a day of labor.

We followed a trail of broken grass and browning apple cores out of the valley and towards the mountains. The boys could be in any number of places in the valley, but with Abby’s information and the knowledge of the closest cave system, I knew where to start our search. The clouds hung even closer to the ground and the view of the mountains disappeared under the heavy weight of them.

“The sky is black, Arthur. I don’t remember a storm blowing in this fast or dark before, do you?”

“No, but I’m sure this isn’t the first. Let’s find them and get back before we drown.”

Once we reached the spot that I believed was the most likely location of Joseph and his friends, David quickly got down from Finn and started driving two stakes in the ground to tie up the horses. Without a way to secure them, the thunder and lightning that was sure to come would send them running home without us. I lit the two lanterns and handed one to David when he finished, and we made our way to the cave’s opening. The sky had darkened to nasty shades of grey and black, and the air hung thick with humidity and rain. The mouth of the cave seemed a black hole with where no light could ever exist.

Our lanterns gave us only a circle of light to see by as we made our slowly forwards into the darkness. As a child myself I had explored these systems many times, and the caves were typically a harmless place to play as long as one returned before nightfall. But with the ambient light from outside gone, we might as well have been walking into a black hole. We moved farther into the cave and under the mountain, calling for Joseph and the others as we went.

“Joseph!” David cried. He kept his voice steady but I could feel his underlying tension. Although I didn’t take much stock in Mina’s warning, he was young and impressionable, and her words had sparked fear in his heart.

Finally, I heard a faint sound of a high-pitched voice.

“David! This way,” I called as I turned my body in the direction of the voice. We were far into the back of the cave and the voices were growing louder. Our passage narrowed into a tunnel as we followed the noise. Our lantern light revealed the cave walls closing in tighter around us as our descent steepened downward. The tunnel walls dripped with moisture from some unknown source.

“Do you remember this tunnel being here Arthur?” David asked in a whisper.

“I don’t recall it.”

“But if you didn’t even know of it, how did they manage to find it?”

“I don’t know,” was all I replied warily.

David was right, I remembered this cave clearly and I had never found this tunnel before. It made no sense, but logic suggested that I must have missed it on my wanderings as a child, though that didn’t seem likely. There was no other explanation for it.

The faint voices turned into audible shouts as we descended. We were stopped by a partial wall of fallen rock and debris, and on the other side we clearly heard the voices of the missing boys.

“Joseph!” David screamed.

“David! I’m so sorry, I know I should have been home but we’ve been trapped for hours!” the voice of Joseph called on the other side of the wall.

“It’s okay, Arthur and I are going to get you out! Just stay back from the rocks so you’re not crushed.”

“We will. There’s something in here you have to see! I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“That can wait,” I said stoically. I had not forgotten the storm and the horses outside, and I knew that we didn’t have time for a reunion at the moment.

David and I started grabbing the smaller rocks and moving them away from the pile of rubble as the shout of excited voices grew louder. The last few were heavy boulders that took the strength of the both of us to move. At last, we had a passage cleared enough for them to slide through without the threat of more rocks falling. But before I could begin giving directions for the first child to come out, David slipped through the gap we made and disappeared into the dark. I groaned and followed after him.

Before I had even made it fully into the interior cavern, the boys swarmed me with shouts of excitement and relief. I held my lantern up and witnessed the struggle that the children had been through on their faces. They were covered with dirt and sweat from head to foot, and some of their clothes were ripped from trying to escape their prison. I tried to quiet them by reassuring them that they were safe and that we would all be leaving immediately, but they wouldn’t be calmed.

“Arthur, you need to see this,” David called in a strange voice.

My eyes adjusted to the dark quickly and the lanterns revealed an inner chamber with ceilings so high that they couldn’t be seen. But that wasn’t what had startled David and what the children had been carrying on about.

In the middle of the chamber there stood a massive statue. My eyes and mind could not fully grasp the size of the creature that was depicted in stone before me, as I had never seen anything larger than our village’s meeting house. By my estimate, the statue was at least three times the size of that building, if not larger.

“How? . . I’ve never seen . . .” David sputtered out the questions that were flying though both of our minds. How could something so large exist under the mountain? How did it get here? And the most puzzling question of all – how had we never found it before?

By my feet lay the end of a long tail that trailed lazily across the chamber floor. It was connected to a four-legged monstrosity, covered in armor like scales that were individually carved into the stone. The beast was standing on its hind legs, with the front two raised into the air as if it were battling some unseen force. Two wings attached to the animal’s back and spanned from one end of the chamber to the other. I strained to see the creature’s head in the darkness, but I could just make out what looked like spikes or horns on either side of its face. Its jaw was open wide and its mouth was lined with teeth that could shred any of us to pieces in an instant, if it were alive. I sympathized with the boys who had been trapped here with that hellish animal as their sole companion.

David finally managed to get one of his questions unstuck from his throat. “What is it?” he asked.

I, who as a boy had listened at my grandmother’s knee to all of her tall tales and fantasies, knew exactly what it was. There was only one thing that this monster could be. I searched in my memory for the name before I whispered it into the heavy, dreadful blackness of the cave.

“A dragon.”