The Time Before Dragons

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley.”

This was the last thing my sister Brenna had said to me before she disappeared. Before everything I knew about the world started to unravel.

The sound of the fire crackled in my ears as we stood alone within the mud walls of our home. The rest of the village was quiet, not yet sleeping but indoors for the night.

Her dark eyes were shining with urgency, her raven hair in a wild tangle.

I loved my sister with my whole heart. I had always been the one she confided in. So how could I ever tell her that even I did not believe her memories were real?

My father, the elders, the whole village would say that the dragons in the valley had plagued us for generations. It was impossible that Brenna could remember a time before they came. Or so I thought back then.

Brenna, who was four years older than me, was “unwell”. Everyone knew that. That she openly called the elders of our village liars, and argued with their version of the past, was only proof of it.

The story of how the dragons came to be in the valley was one every child in our community would learn to recite from the moment they could speak. Once, long ago, evil witches secretly dwelled within our village. They stole children and devoured them, monsters in our very midst. When they were discovered, they were burnt alive because it was the only way to keep our village safe.

For a while, it worked. But a few years later women from our village started to disappear - at the very same time our ancestors first glimpsed the dragons down in the valley. They realised the dead witches had risen again in the form of these dragons, and these dragons have wreaked their wicked war on us ever since.

Before I knew such a thing was impossible for a girl, I wanted more than anything in the world to be a dragon slayer. I would imagine myself standing firm, atop the hill above our village, in my iron armour shell. As the scaly beast swooped on me, I would swing my sword to slit its throat, weathering its fiery breath.

It was his ambition to be a slayer that first drew me to Conn. For a time I used to watch him alone in training then try to copy him in secret, or so I thought.

The first time we met I was training on the hill with a large stick I used as a sword, when I suddenly noticed him behind me, watching. For a moment he stood, frowning, with his arms folded, his chestnut eyes fixed on me, and his brown locks blowing in the breeze.

The dragon slayers of our village do not take their business lightly, so I braced myself for a fierce rebuke. Instead he merely told me, “Your footwork’s the problem.” Then he spent time correcting it, and he gave me a wooden sword his father had given to him when he first started training.

Conn had decided to follow in his father’s path and become a slayer when he was a child, still aching from the death of his mother, taken by our foe in the valley.

It was his ill fitting helmet I wore, and his shield I carried, to venture into the valley once it became clear that Brenna would never again return to our village. I knew I would need to ask his forgiveness, should I survive to return them to him, but that was not a bridge to cross right now.

Besides, I also knew the reason it would most upset him was that my behaviour may hand his father yet another reason to deny us permission to marry. As if he needed any more of those. Conn shared my father’s fear that my sister Brenna had not just ruined her own marriage prospects, but mine as well.

Brenna had been gone for many nights now. Though it was more or less accepted that she had walked into the valley of dragons to die, my father still refused to perform her rites, staving off reality with drink. I wanted to leave offerings and bid my sister goodbye, so her soul did not wander in pain.

As I walked through the forest at the edge of the valley, the towering trees bent their heads of green foliage turning amber, and seemed to look down on me from above. I saw terrified faces in the knots of their greying brown bark, and even the branches seemed to be reaching out to block my path, lined with fallen red leaves so bright they looked like a trail of blood. The fallen leaves exposed wretched fingers, stretched out in desperation to warn me away.

I scolded myself for my overactive imagination, at work again. Conn often told me it did not always serve me well.

My sister and I both inherited our mother’s gift of imagination.

While my sister Brenna has been called my father’s very spit, I have my mother Briga’s flame hair. I am called Brigid in honour of her because she perished while giving birth to me.

Briga used to smile like she had a sun of her very own inside her heart. She had a gleeful laugh and when she was alive my father Flann laughed all the time, too.

I know this because Brenna told me everything about our mother that she could remember. I have worried sometimes that it was my greed to know every last detail, fossicking through the past, that made my poor sister crazy.

All her wrong memories stemmed from her memories about our mother.

Brenna said she could remember standing with our mother, as a small child, forced to watch - and hear - the witches burn. There was to be no crying from anyone, so Briga gave her a strange tasting root to chew on. It made her face numb, and it made things so the horror and grief of what she saw did feel not true, and did not well into her heart. Not until many, many years later when it gushed into a pain she feared drowning in, because she knew to her core it was true.

Brenna told me she could remember the women who were called “witches”. She and our mother spent many hours gathering herbs and making brews with them. Her favourite was called Amma. Amma seemed to be as old as the rocks, and had a cackle so raucous she almost sounded like a crow, but her spirit was warm and generous. Brenna had spent enough time sleeping on her lap to know she was incapable of harming a child, let alone stealing and eating one.

The one and only mercy of having borne witness to the burning was that Brenna saw for herself Amma was missing, having escaped from the angry mob baying for her blood.

It was the mention of Amma’s name that started all the shouting between my father and my sister. There was so much shouting it was hard to understand, but I knew it was about the seeds.

Brenna had told me before that she well remembered a time when Amma had given our mother a bag of seeds. Our father discovered it and, furious, he threw it away. Brenna held that this was only days before the village burned its witches.

“The witches burned before my own mother was born!!” my father had bellowed at her. “I can’t protect you if you keep behaving this way!”

“It was never once me you protected!” Brenna fired back at him, in defiance.

My father looked struck, and I held my breath in fear that he would strike Brenna. Instead he turned his back on us both. He walked out the door, not to return for days.

My sister and I stood alone in the aftermath.

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley. I remember the time before dragons.” Brenna insisted, as her eyes started to fill with tears.

I nodded, because I knew how much Brenna needed me to believe her. Even though I did not believe her. Not back then.

The snap of a twig, beneath my foot, jolted me out of the past. It occurred to me now how quiet it was. There had been magpies chattering as I entered the forest, and the whistling song of a blackbird sometime afterwards, but now there was not a sound.

Ahead of me, I saw a clearing, where the trees encircled a bare patch of ground like they were holy followers in a clan ritual. It seemed as good a place as any to leave a shrine for Brenna, and I was growing ever more anxious to leave the valley, and head home.

As I entered the clearing my heart beat quickened. I felt like I was being watched, but when I peered through the trees around me I could see nothing. That is, not until I noticed the strange way some red brown leaves seemed to flicker, and inch closer.

I held my breath, eyes peeled, as I felt an invisible presence closing in, from the woods.

All of the sudden I was knocked to the ground by a huge rush of wind, blasting upwards, out of the trees.

The first I saw of the beast was its shadow, blocking out the sky over me as it soared overhead. I looked up and saw the silhouette of two enormous wings, and the snake-like copper coloured underbelly, just before it was gone from my view.

Before I had managed to find it in the sky again, the dragon had swept back and landed feet in front of me.

The powerful, sinewy body towered over me, shimmering with dark serpentine scales. The vast wings, which belonged to neither bird nor bat, folded into its body, and the mighty talons rested on the ground.

I looked up, in both awe and terror, at the pointed head atop a long, arching neck, and saw keen black eyes staring back at me. The razor-sharp fangs were visible, but not bared, while the nostrils flickered.

I jumped to my feet and I held up my wooden sword in a gesture to convince myself, as much as the dragon, that I was not afraid. With a quick snort the dragon set the sword alight, burning away my courage with my weapon.

I started to run. The dragon swooped, in chase, and knocked me from my feet again.

I lay still on the ground, my face planted in the dirt, eyes closed, bracing myself for the end. The beast was so close to me I could feel the heat from its nostrils as it sniffed along my back. I flinched as it nudged the helmet away from the back of my head.

“Brigid?” it said, in voice that unmistakably belonged to my sister Brenna.

At first, I did not trust my ears. I knew dragons had boundless magic and trickery, and I knew the greatest weakness to them was a soul’s deepest desire. I knew my vain hope that my sister may still be alive would be the instrument the beast could torture me with, and that knowledge filled me with rage.

I sat up and faced the dragon, ready to breathe some fire of my own with what I imagined would be my dying words, but I was struck by the way the beast angled its head, and crinkled its brow. It was the exact same thing Brenna would do when she was curious about something.

Somehow the dragon had Brenna’s features - black scales the colour of her raven hair, covering all but its underbelly; pitch black eyes that could still sparkle; even a way of smiling with just a little more of one side of the face than the other. Or was I just imagining it? Was I seeing what I wanted to?

“Brenna? Is it really you?” I said, staring up at the creature in torment.

The dragon motioned a claw towards the helmet. It informed me, with a smirk I was all too familiar with, “His armour doesn’t fit you in the slightest.”

I laughed, knowing it was true, and that, miraculously, the being before me was indeed my sister.

Brenna laughed, as well. Her laugh was just the same, and I realised, only now, just how long it had been since I had last heard it. In truth, her mirth had all but disappeared long before she did.

I nodded, with a deep sigh, and studied my transformed sister in wonder.

I had so many things I wanted to ask, and tell her, but something at the other end of the clearing attracted her attention before I had the chance. In an instant her gaze grew sharp, and I could no longer see my sister in her dragon features.

I turned to where she was glaring, and saw Conn with his bow aimed squarely at her. The look in his eyes was every bit as wild as the creature before him. My stomach dropped, as I glanced back and forth between them, each of them primed for attack.

I cried out to stop them, putting myself in the path of Conn’s arrow to protect Brenna, but he had already let it fly. I felt searing pain as the shaft pierced me through, just above my hip, and felled me. Conn sang out my name in horror and remorse, as I lay on my back in breathless agony.

Brenna let out a bloodcurdling roar, and spat a long burst of flames at Conn. He leapt from its path with no time to spare, and set his target on her again. As he fired once more, so did she. His arrow grazed her side and her flames singed his sleeve, but neither was deterred.

I could feel my strength bleeding out of me as I howled out to each of them, in a vain plea to end the battle. I let out a high-pitched scream when I saw Conn unsheathe his blade and charge at Brenna.

Next moment, I was lifted off the ground and into the sky, clutched into Brenna’s belly as she flew away from the clearing.

As I fought the fade into sleep, I saw Conn shouting up to me from the ground below. He fell to his knees weeping, defeated and broken, when the distance between us was impassable.

I wanted to call out, and hearten him, but my spirit was waning fast.

Soon I sank into slumber. When I awoke, my world would never again be the same.