The Valley of Beginnings

There weren't always dragons in the valley. And there shouldn't be now, Hakkar thought glumly as he crouched and picked up the end of the rope he had tied to a stake the night before. The time for them to have moved on from Brond Vale had come and gone at least six months ago. This had been agreed upon hundreds of years in the past, when the Accords were first made between men and dragons. Yet, reports had reached the king claiming that attacks on livestock had increased. The rope in his hands seemed to support those reports...yet...something was off. Last night there had been a succulent goat tied to the end of this rope, now there was just a cleanly severed end coated with a thick goo for half a cubit. Holding the rope in both gloved hands, he raised it to his nose and sniffed tentatively. He recoiled, nostrils stinging and burning. The acrid odor of the slime was nauseating. It most definitely did not come from a dragon. He sighed, and dropped the rope back onto the torn turf and dirt from which he had plucked it. He hated mysteries. Putting his hands on his knees, he stood. Both his leather armor and his knees creaked from the strain. He was getting too old for this.

Hakkar stood in the early morning sun for a moment, then began walking slowly around the clearing. He noted no signs of struggle, only a curious set of scimitar shaped marks that paralleled each other. They came from the woods opposite where he and his grandson had pitched their meager camp. He had chosen this spot well, or so he had thought. They were high above the farms below, which spread out in a marvelous tapestry of green and golden hues fading off into the distance. He had found this flat, grass clad clearing hard up against the soaring cliffs that towered over it. The glade was in a forest of stunted trees littered with large rocks that had tumbled from the slopes above. It was the perfect place for a conversation with a dragon.

Except, it's not a damn dragon, he mused to himself. Now what? Despite the mystery, he was relieved a dragon wasn't involved. Every dragon knew well that any domesticated animal tethered to a stake was not to be eaten until after negotiations had concluded. Any dragon that breached protocol by just swooping in and eating the parley offering without engaging in discussion was to be considered rogue and hunted down and killed. And he was much too old for that. He needed to think about this, but first they needed another goat.

He turned and looked down the long, rocky slope back toward town, and held his hands up to his mouth. "Seth! Seth!" He bellowed. "Get back up here, quick as you can!" He sat down on a rock to wait. Presently, a tall, fit young man with a mop of unruly brown hair and broad shoulders came jogging up the incline.

"Yes, Grandfather? Got it all figured out?" Seth came to a stop in front of Hakkar and eyed him, waiting. He hoped Grandda was ready to tell him what was going on. Even Seth, not yet fully trained as a dragontalker, could see that nothing here made any sense. When his grandfather had sent him down the mountain to scout for sign-admonishing him to stay in earshot-then he had known for sure something odd had happened. Dragons only left sign right at the kill itself. Sometimes, not even then.

"Eyes down, boy. Tell me what you see," Hakkar said.

Seth obeyed, moving slowly around the clearing, logging everything he saw. He took his time. He wanted to get this right. When his grandfather tested him and found his answers wanting, the lectures could go on for hours. He already suspected that Hakkar might be unhappy with him. With them both. They had been caught out napping this time. Neither of them had heard or seen a thing last night.

His examination complete, Seth approached his grandfather. He racked his brain, trying to put together a scenario that somehow involved a dragon. He stood for so long in silence that Hakkar finally raised an eyebrow at him.

"But it doesn't make any sense!" Seth burst out at last. "There's no charring, no blood. Only that weird smelly slime on the rope and those strange markings on the ground! What kind of creature leaves marks like that? Are they even tracks? How could we not know this was happening right under our noses?" Seth's outburst tapered off, and he bowed his head. His ears were pink with shame that he had not been able to glean one piece of actual knowledge out of anything he had seen in the clearing.

Hakkar smiled to himself, careful not to let the boy see it. Seth was seventeen now, nearly a man, and his earnestness about becoming the next dragontalker to High King Niedrre was endearing. And encouraging. Much better than the pulings of that slack-jawed lazy fool that had sired him. Plus, he had not done badly in picking out the signs.

"Alright, Seth. Stand up straight. There is no shame in your ignorance. Indeed, mine is just as great as yours at the moment." Hakkar fished in a pocket and drew out a small wooden token, painted with the stylized head of a dragon on both sides. He handed it to Seth, saying, "take this and run for town as fast as you can. Get us another goat. I want to set this parley up again, except this time, it's going to be something else." Hakkar flapped his hand, dismissing the boy. "Get going. And, take your sword, just in case." He didn't expect trouble, but the unknown always merited caution.

Seth grinned at him and sprinted for their camp. Grabbing up a shortsword in an unadorned leather sheath, he waved at Hakkar and disappeared through the trees.

Hakkar sat deep in thought for a long while. He was going over the history of the Brond Vale in his head, hoping to find some clue in the well known tale as to what might be happening now.

It was true that there had not always been dragons in the valley. Once there had been no men in the valley, either. It had lain undiscovered for long ages until the First -for that is how the genteel farmers still styled themselves- had stumbled their way down into it, lost and dying, from the jagged and unforgiving mountains that surrounded the broad flat land. The discovery had been a complete accident, only luck in finding the ancient vestiges of a goat path to the valley floor had saved them. That wasn't how the telling went these days, though. Not around here. The First became infatuated with the beauty of the fertile swathe of land on both sides of the river Edwe, and they had stayed. In the beginning, they had needed to. Until they healed and rested enough, they were effectively trapped. The Vale was a high mountain valley, with a waterfall coming in at one end, and going out the other. This was the chief reason it had taken so long to discover this area. Nobody had wanted to make the damn climb. It had taken a lot of doing to open a way out on the downstream falls. Even longer to carve out a viable trade route. The land had proven to be fertile beyond measure. Over the next few decades the First had turned the place into a patchwork of farms that yielded the finest fruits and vegetables the land Selaria had ever seen. Their fame had grown so great that even the long line of High Kings in Folorath-on-Edwe laded their tables with Brond Vale produce. Of course, all the other kings and lords and ladies followed suit, attempting to curry favor by vying to host the finest banquets. Last and least came the common folk who could ill afford such expensive fare, but hoped that they could gain with peaches and leeks what their lack of money, breeding, and title denied them.

Money flowed into the Vale from every corner of Selaria. More people came, hoping for a chance at getting a lucrative farm for themselves. Most of them stayed to work the existing farms, as the First were not keen to part with that they deemed theirs for generations. The farms had grown larger, and with these huge, cash rich farms had come an excess of farm animals. Horses. Oxen. Sheep and goats. Swine. A whole alphabet's worth of fowl. The farmers began to collect more exotic animals as a way of gaining status among their fellows. The mountains of dung produced by all these creatures went back onto the land, enriching it even further.

It was these animals that had at last drawn the dragons. The thrice damned dragons. They had ridden the high winds in from the west, and the mountains had proven no barrier to them. Indeed, the mountains were honeycombed with caves, tunnels and stony grottoes in which the dragons could hide and stage their sweeping aerial raids. They went berserk in a rage of gluttony and destruction that had broadened into a bloody war that...

A strange sound snapped Hakkar out of his reverie. There was nothing helpful in that old story anyway. He listened closely, listened for-there it was again! A low, sibilance that did not come from the wind. it was off somewhere in the trees from whence those odd markings had come.

Seeming to do so without purpose, Hakkar rose to his feet and began making his way to the camp. He wanted the gaudy looking spear of the dragontalkers. He felt something in the air. It raised his hackles and set him off balance inside himself, somehow. He recognized this unfamiliar feeling as dread, but there seemed to be no source. Strange sounds weren't enough to terrify him, he was a dragontalker! He just knew he would feel better with the spear in his hands. That acrid smell on the rope seemed to be everywhere now.

Another noise behind him. Closer. In the clearing. Spear in hand, Hakkar spun around. He raised it to chest height, ready for a mighty thrust, and froze. He could not move. There, in the clearing, was a huge pair of lambent green eyes. They were the size of melons, and they were fixated on him. He could hear that sibilance now as a nearly silent whisper in his head; wordless, but he knew what it was saying. Those eyes filled his vision, and he could barely make out the shape of the monstrous creature that bore them. He tore his gaze away from those terrible eyes to study the thing. It was huge, thirty cubits at least, but its' form was indistinct, vaguely snakelike, yet not. It looked malleable, like it was shifting form even as he tried to discern it. The whisper in his mind commanded his eyes back onto the creature's. It slid closer in an undulating motion that explained those odd markings on the ground. They were indeed tracks. Hakkar dimly wondered why this...this thing had not taken them in their sleep when it had stolen their goat.

The sibilance in his head seemed to chuckle, and abruptly, he could hear words in that terrible cold whisper.

"Because you were sleeping, foolish one," the voice said. The creature's mouth opened and that awful smelling slime dripped from fangs the length of Hakkar's forearm. It spoke again. "I do not like my prey unaware. I want it -you- to know, to see, and feel the terror of helplessness before I take you. Cower now, craven dog, I come!"

Hakkar's dread blossomed into outright terror. He fought against it, knowing it was not his. It seemed to beat upon him from the outside, but he was powerless to stop it invading his heart, his mind. It was the most violating thing he had ever experienced. The creature peeled his mind like an onion and there was nothing he could do about it. His bladder let go but he did not notice. He was caught in this horrid thing's gaze and he knew there would be no escape. Poor Seth, only half-trained, but it would be on him, now. The green eyes glowed brighter, larger. They cut off all his thoughts save one. Hakkar's spear dropped from his nerveless fingers and thudded onto the dirt.

The creature's mouth opened wider and it darted forward as that one thought filled what was left of Hakkar's mind. Notadragonnotadragonnotadr...