The hunt for the Graadfa Un

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. That was our fault, as there wasn’t much of anything in the Valley before us. As near as we can tell, we were the first things ever to grace its rotten glades and putrid waters.

I could tell you how the Valley looked before we arrived, but there wouldn't be much a point. It's a waste of your time, and merely nostalgic for me. I will say that it was different then; less pungent, less...infected.

It’s strange that we lived so close to it, and never knew it was there. For years, generations of good people lived and died within three days hike of Brimstone Valley and never laid eyes on it. Or maybe we had, and simply didn't remember it. At the time, it was altogether forgettable.

A few things happened that would change that. The first of these things was simple and unpleasant: dragons.

Now as far as I know, dragons can be a good thing. I’ve yet to see it myself, but I think it’s fair to give them the benefit of the doubt. After all, being born as a flying fortress that breathes fire and never needs a nail trim has got to have its upsides. Whatever those upsides happened to be, however, these creatures neglected to share when they came burning our homes to the ground.

The second thing that happened—and this one is a bit different, mind you—is our wind died. We don’t know why. Whatever happened to the wind was definitely not our fault. We’re getting to the part of this tale that actually is our fault, but this isn’t it.

Now, you might not think that the wind ceasing to blow would be a problem, but things got rather strange. Our crops stopped growing, our water started growing things, and life all around our peaceful mountain simply ceased to exist. Literally everything began to die.

I try to keep a positive sort of view about things, so I will be honest: The dragons brought the wind back when they started to randomly attack each other. After a fashion, that is. They were so large, so incredibly massive, that each stroke of their wings created a gust unlike anything you’ve ever experienced in your life. Roofs were torn off of buildings, horse carts blown away, ponds emptied out onto the fields around them, all thanks to the great beasts’ wings. For a time, we thought we could learn to live with them. We thought that we could trade a little dragon fire for the wind that sustained our humble lives.

We had never been so wrong.

It didn’t take us long to deduce that the dragons would eventually kill us all. They weren’t aggressive by nature, but they were so tremendous that they couldn’t quite help squashing us little beings crawling all over “their” mountain. Wandering our hillsides in the morning sun became a deadly adventure that may or may not have ended with you smeared into the grass, and that was when they weren’t fighting. Their midair squabbles were lethal: Rogue scales fell out of the sky like rabid meteors, torn loose in their petty territorial struggles; broken talons stopped up rivers like only the most laboriously built dams, flooding entire towns in algae-saturated water; and, of course, more fire, raking the surface of our fair hillside in scorching swaths of death and destruction. We learned the hard way that we simply couldn’t coexist. To these beasts, we were little more than insects to trampled, and that was if they even noticed us that much.

So, when we finally decided to kill one, we all thought it was a rather good idea.

Also wrong.

As it turned out, dragons had a temper, and were no strangers to the concept of holding volcanic grudges. The one that was camped directly over our last remaining village was the first to die. It was no easy task; a lot of planning had to go into killing something half the size of the mountain we lived on. Eventually, we succeeded. It was just unlucky for us that these quarreling beasts, who appeared to hate each other so passionately, rallied with such unfortunate haste. In just two days, we no longer had one colossal horror stomping our crops and sheep into the ground and dueling with its brethren in the skies above: We had over two dozen.

We stayed and fought for a while. You wouldn’t think that we would have been able to measure up against them, really, but we surprised even ourselves. In the weeks that led up to us fleeing our homes and abandoning everything that we couldn’t carry on our backs, we slew upwards of six of the winged serpents. We knew it wasn’t something we could sustain, however. We knew we couldn’t win, and so, two months after the first dragon was spotted on our precious mountain, we left in search of somewhere safer for our species. This led us, as you may have guessed by now, to Brimstone Valley.

It wasn’t called that then, you know. It was called something else. Something much prettier. Something much less...dragon. But of course, that name has long since been burned away and lost to time. Its current name is both more fitting, and forever seared into the minds of those that lived there, and their descendants for generations to come.

This is where we get to the part that’s definitely all our fault.

When we came to Brimstone Valley, we were broken, hungry, and without a home. We thought we were the luckiest people on earth to have discovered such an oasis of perfection, and we were! It took us mere weeks to have seeds sown and livestock roaming the hills. We built our first small town, cheering at our own great fortune. Years passed, and our lives started to come back together, the dragons a dreadful memory that we worked hard to forget.

But the memories of the dragons were not meant to rest. They were not meant to fade away into nothingness and cease to be. These beasts would not be forgotten, and they saw to it.

The first dragon in Brimstone Valley was rather small, only the size of a house or so. It was easy to kill. Had we been more observant, we might have realized why; its scales were softer, its snout shorter, its claws not fully formed. Unable to even breathe fire, it was a malformed mutant, a mere ghost of the mighty beasts we had slain before. We didn’t notice these things, our only care that we had killed yet another dragon. We cared very little for its strange features, or how it looked eerily similar to something we had seen before. After all, it didn’t matter.

We had won.

The next dragon was larger. We succeeded in dispatching this one as well, only a little more work required on our part. Its scales were a bit harder than the first, but not alarmingly so. It again had rounder features, simpler, less angular, less dragon…

More human.

Had we not been so foolish, we would have seen what was happening earlier. We might have been able to fix it, change it, remedy it, but we were too fast to kill, and too reluctant to see. We were fools, blissfully unaware of the horrors transpiring around us.

Then we saw it. We watched it happen. We watched for days as Thorne, the captain of the village guard, turned into a dragon. It was a slow, miserable event. Our minds reeled as the sun rose and set, each new day seeing him closer to becoming the monster that lurked inside of him. His body became covered in scales, his eyes changed color, his back hunched as though he had contracted a horrid disease. We all argued amongst ourselves, trying to decide what to do about it. We fought and quarreled, unsure of how to handle this man that was becoming the beast we all feared more than anything else in the world.

Finally, we decided that we would kill him. We had to, before he transformed, before he became something too large for us to handle. It was for the good of the village, after all. Anyone else would have made the same decision.

We gathered outside his home that same day, prepared to slaughter one of our own in cold blood. But Thorne was one of the few of us that wasn’t a fool. He had to have known what we intended to do. He was more than prepared. The battle was swift and violent, half a dozen of our best men left in tatters outside the back door of his hut. He vanished into the wilderness, and we let him. We dared not pursue him with our forces so devastated. We hoped that our problems would disappear with him.

They didn’t. More people began to change, writhing in horror at both what they were becoming, and what their friends tried to do to them when they found out they were afflicted.

Graadfa Un: The Scaled, we called them. They were fast, strong, and dangerous. Some of them got away, escaping into the shadows of the surrounding forests. We hunted them when we could, but dared not risk leaving our families alone for more than a few days at a time, lest one of their kind still be in the village. Those of us that did venture out into the wilds rarely came back. The wilderness of the Valley grew ill; trees rotted, lakes dried up, rivers ran slowly and filled with growth. The creature that populated the forests had turned on each other, and us. Bones piled high as dragons were slain, their carcasses like great shipwrecks strewn across the once lush hillsides of Brimstone Valley.

We still don’t know how it happened. A few of our elders surmised that the beasts had cursed us during our first encounter. Perhaps it was the Valley itself that created the abominations that were once our families. No one knows. In truth, it didn’t matter. We knew what we had to do.

Once our people stopped turning into dragons, and the only ones left were the serpents that now roamed the valley, we left.

Or we tried. We once again uprooted our lives and attempted to flee, but this time we were followed. A great crimson dragon stalked us at every corner, joined by a scatter of twinkling eyes in the gloom.

Thorne had come back, and he wasn’t alone. There is nowhere we can run now, nowhere that we can hide. We can’t leave; Brimstone Valley’s haunted hollows call to us, begging us not to abandon it. A war is on the horizon. We have no choice now.

We must hunt the Graadfa Un.