Valley of Dragons

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

Two pairs of eyes stared at me in rapturous attention. The one young, luminous honey-brown and wondrous, the other golden and ageless, the hint of a smile dancing deep within.

My little one stared at me incredulously, then reached out to pull me closer. I adjusted my perch on my daughter’s bed, the lavender sheets bunching under me. The sheets matched the quilt, the walls, the lampshade, even her pajamas boasted sprays of pastel purple flowers. Lavender was a good color for her: shy and quiet, yet playful and endlessly curious.

"No dragons?"

“It’s true, mijita,” I affirmed, “When I was a girl, magic was a fairytale and dragons could only be found in books.”

I could practically see the wheel turning in her little-girl head as she tried to process this revelation. She looked over at the serpentine figure, as if to assure herself that it was still, in fact, curled at the end of her bed.

The black-and-purple dragon blinked slowly back at her.

“Mama,” she said, chewing on her words carefully, pulling on one of her stuffed animal’s silky ears, “if ‘Nora is real in books, and he’s real here, does that mean… we live in a book too?”

“No, mija. This is real. But sometimes it feels like a story.” I arranged her stuffed animals carefully around her, just how she liked it. “But it’s one I will tell you another night.”

She snuggled deeper into her pillow and pouted ever so slightly. “Mamaaa...”

“Not tonight.” I kissed her forehead and stood up. “Mama has to do some remembering first.”

I turned out the lights as Sonora gave her cheek a nuzzle, then he slunk off the bed and followed me to the living room.

It wasn’t much to speak of, really, our home. It had just enough space to qualify it as a house rather than a shack, and the AC unit threw a fit every summer, but it had been my home ever since Sonora and the rest of the dragons appeared. There were memories drenched into the very foundation, and sometimes I thought my small family’s love was the only thing keeping the stucco walls together.

I flopped on the couch and ran a hand through my hair. Sonora climbed up next to me and dropped his head on my lap. In the dim light, his markings glowed faintly purple. He began to hum a gravelly purr, and the heat emitting from his scaly body made me instantly start to sweat.

I ran my hand down Sonora’s smooth nose. “Do you remember that morning?”

He huffed, a wave of heat and smoke wafting from his nostrils. I’d named him for the desert from where he and his kind emerged and made their home. It fit; with him lounging on me it always felt like an August day.

“Of course you do.” People speculated that dragons could live up to a thousand years, and their memory was far and away more reliable than our own. Sonora probably remembered every detail of Dia de los Dragones in stark clarity.

I sighed. It was almost impossible to recall the years before the dragons came.

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.

Not much had changed, really, but at the same time, everything was different.

Before, same as now, there were people, and cacti, and deserts retreating from suburban settlements, but no dragons. There were a million air-conditioned buildings, construction sites, and hot sidewalks, but nothing that hinted at magic.

Any magic the desert hid had been droughted and industrialized from existence long before my time.

Or so we’d thought.

It started when Camelback Mountain sprouted wings. No one knows what caused it; the who or the what that awoke the magic evaded us to this day. All we know is that one morning in early summer, just before the sun rose high enough to sizzle away whatever dew could gather on brown-green lawns, the smoke began.

People near the mountain collectively stopped halfway through their morning coffees to stare incredulously at the plumes of black smoke billowing from the mountain. Then everyone in the Valley, in the state, the country, the world tuned in to watch the unfolding catastrophe, glued to footage of shaky ‘copter cams as earthquakes eroded eons of rock, sending waves of stone skittering down the mountainside into the residential areas that nestled against the mountain.

We watched as the mountain shuddered, heaved, and bucked, looking less and less like a sleepy camel and more like, well, a dragon.

It shook itself, lifting granite wings and sandstone eyes to the sun, then looked down with apocalyptic disapproval on the miles upon miles of city below. The dragon threw its head back and roared.

They say the first dragon’s roar is what brought the others to life. Millions watched in mesmerized horror as the dragon-that-had-been-mountain belched thousands of dragons out from between gasps of flame. Dragons as big as school buses, dragons as small as chihuahuas, dragons all colors of the rainbow. Dragons, everywhere. Humanity’s fondest fantasy and greatest nightmare was becoming real and true in front of our eyes. They were real, they were awake, and they were hungry.