The Loss of Luster

There weren't always dragons in the valley... Unfortunately nowadays, there'll never not be.

"No, that's not right! That reads about as well as Hariot's poetry she brought to class when we were five." Hén thought with annoyance, snapping his leather-bound notebook closed and wrapping the dangling cord around it to keep the pages tight. As he placed the notebook into his pack, he looked behind himself, nodding to the fallen coniferous tree that provided him with shelter while he slept the previous night. Hén's quest had taken him on quite a long journey, but he was finally within a day's walk to Gimmen's pass. Hén was finally going to see a real dragon in all of its majesty. Or at least, what's left of a dragon...

The fate of the dragons is one that still haunts the world almost one hundred years later. Kanoralis, known to many as the antithesis of magic, was a magical storm that swept across the land and devoured all traces of magic from its face. Unfortunately that could include any human who had been gifted magic from the dragons along with any inherently magical plants that once grew. Kanoralis would form near any powerful source of magic, or at least that was the theory. The strongest sources of magic being dragons, storms quickly wiped out the large majority of dragons, petrifying them instantly. Some dragons were even caught in flight, crashing to the ground like a falling star. Dragons would attempt to hide in caves or buildings, but to no avail. The fog would seep in through any small crack and once it touched a source of magic, that source was drained in moments. Once it was apparent that there was no preventing the effects of that horrible storm, the dragons sacrificed their own lives in a final effort to protect what little magic was left. There were rarely strong enough magical sources aside from dragons themselves that would call down Kanoralis' wrath. So the dragons did the only thing they thought might prevent further meaningless death. They gathered in what is now aptly called The Valley of Sacrifice, wherein Kanoralis reared its ugly head one final time and devoured the last remaining dragons.

That's the story Hén was told once he was old enough to not be completely beside himself at the realizations that there were no longer any dragons. Hén had grown up on his grandmother's adventure stories such as Gimmen, the dragon protector of life, or Theodora Firebrand, the descendant of flames. Dragons had always been a favorite of Hén's, so his parents decided to let him believe in them as long as it didn't hurt anyone. Unfortunately, no matter the intention they had in allowing him more time with his childhood fancy, it didn't work out exactly the way they might have hoped. When they dropped that revelation on ten year old Hén, he called them liars and locked himself in the cellar for a week. He only came out when his stomach hurt so much he couldn't handle it any longer. Eating nothing but raw potatoes and drinking irrigation water will do that to a kid.

The mid-day sun's rays began assaulting Hén's fair skin. Had he really been walking that long already? It felt as though he only began this leg of his journey a couple of hours ago. "Not like the sun is somehow trying to trick me, guess it's time for lunch!" He thought, squatting down while swinging his pack onto the gravel strewn road in front of him. His meal once again consisted of smoked grey bear meat and homemade barley cakes that his mother slipped to him as a parting gift on the morning he left home. He noticed his rations were beginning to run low, four sizable chunks of meat and six more cakes were all that remained of his rations. He'd have to begin hunting in the next few days to avoid malnutrition with how much walking he was doing. He had been traveling for somewhere between ten to twelve days already. He wasn't quite sure exactly how many days unfortunately, on the fourth day of his quest he slipped on an innocent seeming rock and tumbled down a hillside. "You never hear the part of the story where Theodora Firebrand stubs her toe on a table and can't walk on it for a few days... I reckon I can leave that part out of the quest journal..." Somehow, Hén's own thoughts unearthed up some latent anxiety from the back of his mind, after he had so carefully buried it back there, too! But this was not the time to become timid, he was now closer to seeing a dragon than he had ever been before. Hén took the time to jot down a few key sights from the last few hours into his notebook before slinging his pack behind him and setting off again.

As the sun began to touch the horizon to the west, Hén was astonished at the view he managed to stumble upon. Not only had he reached Gimmen's pass, but at the most pristine moment he could have possibly imagined. The entrance to Gimmen's pass towered thousands of paces overhead, wherein the face of the Great Dragon Protector of Life was chiseled with great detail. Gimmen's scales seemed to come to a razor sharp edge, just as he was described to have had in life. Along with his legendary golden fangs that accented either side of his enormous maw. At the angle the sun currently held, giant magical rubies that had been placed into the carving's eye sockets began to cast a crimson light over what seemed to be the entirety of the pass. The pass looked ominous with the aforementioned lighting, but it also was something straight out of an adventure story. Hén's excitement began to soar, and while the logical part of his brain was screaming at him to be careful and evaluate his surroundings... He couldn't help but dash forward and bask in that deep crimson light in the pass before it vanished with the sun.

Shortly after his initial sprint into the pass, Hén was winded. It turned out that if you walk for hours on end in the sun and follow it up with a sprint up a rocky hillside, you get tired rather quickly. He took a few minutes to recover and irresponsibly took a bite from his dinner barley cake for some additional energy to keep going. Darkness was quickly enveloping the pass, so Hén had very little time left for travel. Along the path, Hén began to notice small geometric stones sporadically scattered around the foliage and on the path. At first they seemed to be nothing more than a darker colored rock than he had seen up to this point, he would casually kick them as he walked just to have something to occupy his mind. That was until he saw one up close, sitting on a branch at eye level with him. These were no mere rocks, but dragonlings! Dragonlings were the much smaller cousins to the dragons, they resembled dragons, but their scales were strange geometric patterns, almost like puzzles or a child's building blocks laid across their small bodies. The first magical creature that Hén had ever seen; this was a momentous occasion! Hén refrained from kicking any additional Dragonling corpses as he walked. These creatures should be honored in their sacrifice, not used as a substitute for an ordinary rock.

The night was fully upon him when Hén finally found a rock outcropping to take shelter under for the night. It was chilly in the pass, and as night continued, winds began buffeting Hén from all sides. "I guess one night without sleep won't hurt, maybe I can scout my path ahead a bit before dawn." He thought optimistically, attempting to make the best of what seemed to be his worst night so far. He wrapped his cloak tightly around him, putting the hood up to negate a bit of the wind and debris it was stirring up.

Not far from his own makeshift camp, just through some particularly thick trees, Hén found a poorly built, although somehow still burning, campfire. The fire barely shed any light with how dark things had become in the pass. All that fire really managed to do was create a spot in his vision and made it harder to see in the dark. So he allowed some time for his vision to readjust and began quietly making his way around the perimeter of the camp. If there's a campfire, someone or something must have created it... Hén had no intention of confronting whatever or whoever had created the fire, he simply wanted to see them before they saw him. There were very few people in today's day that made the journey to the valley of sacrifice, to most it's just a reminder of things that were and will never be again. So Hén was justifiably suspicious of whoever else may be on the path. Making his way to the opposite side of the camp, he found who he was looking for. A group of men, all with scarves wrapped around their necks, were doing something to the rock formation near their campfire. In the darkness, it was difficult to see what exactly it was, but they looked to be breaking away chunks of stone and stuffing them into satchels seated at their waists. After observing them for a few minutes, Hén made a horrible realization. These men were mutilating the petrified body of a particularly small dragon...