The Ruin of Dragons

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. The thought was almost harder to believe than dragons having ever existed at all. Look long enough, and find the fractured pieces of something that used to be. Cities organized through color coded rooftops with windows large enough to fit a person, mounted with eternally unused perches. Skulls bigger than a giant’s, buried deep underground, and fossilized eggs that belonged to no bird.

With the gods the dragons came, banished to a world devoid of all but monsters lurking under the seas, and because of humanity they left.

Left.

That was too kind a word.

Slaughtered. Hunted for the damage they wrought, their impenetrable scales, and the power they held. Mia often wondered if her ancestors thought about the repercussions of their actions, about what would happen to their realm when the creatures charged by the gods to be the keepers of life and death were suddenly and irreversibly gone.

Did they think it could ever be this?

Mia pulled back the cover of her makeshift tent, and stepped out into the grey of the Valley. As blackened grass crumbled to ash beneath her feet she tried not to look to mountains encompassing her, and the oily black tendrils that was slowly consuming them.

Tried, and failed.

The girl had been born in this grey, raised with dead greenery and a dying world, and was expected to believe her parents when they told her it was once a world of color. That there was once a mesmerizing blue sky, lush oranges and reds of trees in the fall, and deep violets and vivid pinks of flowers that littered the Valley.

Mia looked down to her arm, at the grey skin exposed there, and the charcoal strands of her hair that fell down around her like the smoke that was eating the world.

She should not have believed them, her family. She was no hopeless fool grasping at impossible realities. This was all she had known, but she dreamed of that color, her mind taking her to a world where cities were bustling with life and love, and the blazing red of a dragon’s flame had made this world a hearth at which to rest. She knew, deep down, that this was not all there was. The petrified pallid meadows and the mutated two-headed deer, wholly in greyscale, were all wrong.

And she was going to fix it.

She looked down at the map in her hands, tinged slightly beige. It drew her attentention for but a moment before the air was knocked from her lungs as something rammed into her side, sending her flailing to the ground, a trail of oily tendrils left in her wake.

“I’ll be taking that.”

Mia seethed, wicked scimitar already in hand, as she pulled herself up and peered at the thing that knocked her aside. A man, dressed in the same robes and headwraps as she, to protect him from the ashen particles filling the air.

Her map now in his grasp, he tipped the ridiculously large wide-brimmed hat atop his head at her, “much obliged.”

She didn’t allow him another word before she charged, sliding to slice at his ankles. He danced back with a chuckle, pulling out a rapier in the same swift movement.

“You need to be careful out here, girl,” he said, waiting for her to get back to her feet, “the Valley’s a dangerous place to travel alone.”

Mia glared, bracing her foot in the dirt.

“Give. That. Back,” she churned out with gritted teeth.

He shrugged, gently folded the map and slipping it into his pocket, “I don’t think I will.”

With her free hand she whipped out a throwing knife hidden in her robes and flicked it towards him, the knife’s point barreling towards his chest. But the strange man was too fast, too swift, and he easily sidestepped the blade.

She was on him in seconds, not letting him a moment to recover before she hacked at his limbs, his body, at anything she may be able to hit. Her compact muscles soared at the harsh movement – she hadn’t a proper fight in a fortnight.

It didn’t matter.

As she sliced with her blade, she swept out a foot, drawing his attention one way only to hit him with another movement. He stumbled only just, but it was all she needed. With a harsh kick to the chest, he hit the ground with an audible thud. She stomped on his wrist before he could lift the rapier in his hand, and pushed the tip of her scimitar into his neck just enough to draw a single droplet of blood.

“We could split the profits,” he sounded calm as ever, as though this were tabletop negotiations, and he did not have a blade to his throat. “A dragon egg’s worth a pretty penny.”

“It’s worth nothing to a dead man.”

“How right you are.”

“The map,” Mia nodded to the pocket. “Now.”

The stranger lifted his hand, and Mia pressed the blade further against his skin for emphasis as he slowly reached to his pocket. He flicked his wrist, and–

Nothing.

Darkness.

Mia stumbled, shocked, confused, as everything around her fell into shadows before it washed away and she was thrown into a world of color. She blinked as trees spurred out from the ground before her eyes, and with them birds flew out from their leaves, bursting into a welcoming blue sky. She hid her eyes from the brightness of the yellow sun, the grass beneath her spreading out into greenery, flowers and bushes and weeds popping out of the ground for as far as the eye could see. The mountains were whole, glazed in snow where the smokey tendrils used to be.

This was impossible.

The air smelled sweet, a perfume she’d never encountered. Was that what flowers smelt like? She crouched down at the rose just before her, and as she went to cup it in her hands, she felt nothing.

Not the softness she imagined the petals to hold, or the sharp stinging of the stem’s thorns. Her fingers, still greyed out themselves, passed right through the flower as though it did not exist.

An illusion.

Mia cursed, and swiped at the ground where the stranger was once, fruitlessly stabbing the area even as she knew he was gone.

Magic? She’d read about it, people born in the time of dragons with the capacity to light a fire with the snap of their fingers, or lift trees from the ground with nothing but their mind. Many guessed that it was the magic of the dragons seeping into the children of their riders, and with their extinction so too did magic leave the hands of humanity. The stranger shouldn’t have magic – no one should.

Who was he?

It didn’t matter, not right now.

She needed to get out of here.

As if on cue, the beautiful lushness of the Valley collapsed around her, reversing back to the reality she knew far too well. Hopelessly, she glanced to the mountains once more, and found only ruin.

The stranger was nowhere in sight, but footprints made of oily tendrils where the petrified grass had been crushed spotted the ground. He’d gone north.

She would follow.

The world was built for the sky, and now it was crashing to the ground. Only the last living dragon egg could lift them back up; that was, if she could get to the stranger before he got to it.