Why the Mountains Cry Blood

AUTHOR'S NOTE

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. During the Dark Ages, humans and beasts were divided.

Distanced.....

Each being kept to their own reclusively, but there was no mutiny, no war, and certainly not the blood pillaging we have come to know.

Now the great forms of the Draconic creatures, coined the Kuebiko ( translated from the old tongue as revengeful daemon ) are hellbent on exacting reprisal upon the world of the living. Believed to be winged, inferno fiends of the underworld, the people of Isolde (the Ice Nation) hunt and slaughter the Kuebiko’s as beasts.

How this war began is the spectacle of myth. Legend believes that a single girl raised by the Draconic Beasts among the snowy mountain summits of Isolde almost united the two species, enacting the peace treaty we know today as “Bartosis Fur Larense” (translated from the old tongue as the union of unlikely hearts). But humans were merciless in their betrayal of the treaty, and animosity has spawned between the humans and dragons ever since. Now the tale is known as The Betrayal of Isolde. A fable old but not forgotten. – Entry 184 from the sacred scrolls of the Elders.

PART I—A Dragon Without Scales

The towering mountain slopes loom large and in the dark they are lethal. A haunting wind blows and scrapes through the acidic, icy terrain, releasing its breath and spilling snowfall into the traveller's eyes like daggered shards of glass. Feet struggle up the mountain path, as the blizzard descends. The men's faces grow grievously blue, and their trembling limbs wrapped in nothing but wet rags that had frozen from rain is like ice that chills to the marrow.

All around the wind rages as if invisible waves run through the sky only to be lost in the distance. And then the steady, violent susurration of the gale. "Hushia Hushia." These sounds echoed from afar. Long, drawn-out screams into the night. They feel its wrath flowing between their fingertips.

Night or day, the mountain-slopes look apocalyptic, like a waking nightmare lit in icy monochrome. It is the scene of the end of the world. Every crevice of the valley is smothered in dark snowmelt, tall enough to be foreboding and make hearts jolt as though someone had pricked them with a needle. It’s an expanse you will get lost in—certainly. A void where anything and everything may be hidden.

The men of the Isolde village struggle onwards, ploughing each foot through the snowmelt and fighting as their weight sunk them deeper and deeper into that frozen mass and soon they were devoured in white. But they fought on stoically. Not for themselves but for their friends who were missing—lost to that cold, desolate wasteland.

Three days prior an assembly of men from the Isolde village had set foot up the snowy summits and had not returned. Now a search party ensued, urged on by the anxieties and woes of their mistresses.

Dispirited and senses dulled from cold, the men drowned their tremors and shivers in liquor, exhausted by the day but startled into world-weariness by the night. There is no chatter amongst the search party. It is quiet and eerie.

All ears are pressed towards the distance. Listening.

Far ahead from the party, the night watcher shakes as his eyes dart across the void ahead. On his lips arose a fiendish expression, as he became aware of the glare of ruddy light thrown full by firelight somewhere far out in the distance of the snowstorm. He blinked, and his gaze returned mechanically to the light. To his extreme horror, the mass had, in the meantime, altered its position. Two flames were now visible and closer than before. The two balls of blazing sun looked like bloodied eyes in the dark, and the hulking shape of wilderness around it gave an impression of a beast, its nostrils fumed with smoke and its breath like glowing coal. The night watcher shivers, unsure if what his eyes perceive is induced by mania, imagination, or if he bears witness to an inferno’s devil. A gush of wind rises and croons. He swears the beast's eyes meet his own.

“Chief! Err Dragon ahead. The fucken devilry err everywhere!?” he stumbled back to the party. The commotion had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into a new commotion, stifling their flasks and gripping at their weaponry. A Dragon so close to the people of Isolde was unheard of. The demonic beasts preferred to reside in the heart of volcanic lava, lounging in stifling inferno heat, a fever scorched by the tempered sun and the wickedness of hellfire.

“Then the search party must adjourn,” said the chief commandingly, his voice rumbling like thunder, “If dragons have really entered our valleys, then our men err as good as dead. Mere fodder to satisfy the beast's belly. Though I cannot imagine why their kind has suddenly turned upon us!” The chief had the great silhouette of a towering bear, that loomed over the rest of the villagers almost comically. Though his stout, gruffness, and size did not intimidate but offered a rare feeling of safety. As though he could quash any approaching demon in either fist. His hair was black and lengthy and crept down to his heels like a waterfall made of the dark marsh.

The procession of men who, naturally brave, and at times especially, brim-full of courage and of nerve, seemed to reel, as straight and stoic as their condition might have permitted, into a terrified stupor.

The blizzard gave a particularly ugly sigh that rained down upon the frozen travellers, making the journey forward or backward unfeasible. Skin flamed and discoloured in the slow gnawing of frostbite, many elapsed into closed eyes and huddled foetal positions.

Rendered dizzy with the velocity of the wind, and the scathing hatred of the cold eve, the chief watched alarmed as the winter clutched his men in the very jaws of death and lay them to tremble delicately. Soon their faces feigned that cold slumber sought for the dead. Hurriedly, the chief shook his closest companion, whose skeletal face was grey and ashen and flecked brilliantly with a sheath of crystalized ice that dripped from his very lashes, beard, and nose.

“Rudamier! Wake up!! Err cannot rest in such err place!”

The man’s breath was coaxed from his body in smokey wisps. He opened his mouth and uttered in chattering jisps “I can’tt feel anythen.” He looked ghostly as if his flesh was post-mortem, all gaunt and hollow and pale-like.

The chief continued to shake violently at his shoulders and cried around to his men in frenzied agitation. “No we must keep moving. If we stop err we welcome death! The cold will feed upon us tonight if we do not keep em moven.”

As he attended frantically to his brethren he found that very soul-sucking feeling curdling his shaking limbs. It was as if the cold itself was in his innards, cradling his heart and organs and perishing all internal warmth like a candle snuffer. Breathing felt like sharp glass passing through his vocal cords. An almost unconscious dream came to him from the mist, seeking to drag him from his bodily human shell.

Half-submerged in a death-like sleep, the chief was not sure if what followed were strange imaginings induced by an addled mind. For in the distance, rose a sound so fiendish and daunting, that might have curdled the blood in any couragred heart.

The sound had woken the spirit-less men from death, who casted their eyes up in newly inspired horror. Their cornea’s reeling, palsied by the horrors of their situation, as soon their terror-stricken faces were enveloped in the formidable shadow of a dragon. They were conscious now, as the beast's guttural growl shook the very slopes they huddled upon, but so cold were their limbs that still, in the very presence of that monstrous entity, they could not run nor lift a finger.

Closer and closer those sounds reverberated through the ground.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

When the dragon emerged, the celestial light that emanated from its skin soared through their eyes. The ancient reptile-like beast was unlike any dragon to come before it. Instead of reptilian scales, every inch of its underbelly, horns, jagged claws, and vicious tail were dripped in honey-gold jewels. Its physique looked beautiful in the thicket of dark, glowing like moonshine, and as the creature spread its wings lazily the intricate gems underlying the membrane of skin glowed with all the lustre and light of the stars. Dripping treasury, pearled rivière, precious stones that jingled intricately as it moved, the men fell bewitched by its beauty.

At the sight of this extraordinary assembly and of their still more extraordinary golden paraphernalia, skin dipped in jewels and exquisite luxuries, the men did not conduct themselves with a degree of decorum but stared gaping mouthed at the sight of such riches.

The chief fancied himself in the presence of a dream, and as dreams go that visage became further and further estranged. For as the beast's eyes met his own, its snarl opened wide, fangs baring in deadly unison. Only he was not swallowed in the jaws of that bottomless belly, but was startled by the presence of a diminutive young girl, who sat perched contentedly in the beast's throat.

The delicate little creature, with cheeks, blushed with blood and life, rose, tilted her head inquisitively and crawled slowly from the creature's mouth, who lowered its head gently to the ground, allowing her to right herself agilely. Up close the very beauty of her countenance was ethereal and spellbinding. She spoke no words of the human tongue but stretched out a delicate hand to his own and beckoned him to follow her into the creature's gullet. Her hair hung in ringlets and carried the countenance of an angel that had not known human companionship but had made her home among the company of draconic beings.

Perhaps the cold had sickened his mind and warped his senses, but the warmth that ushered from the monster's mouth was a beacon of life at that moment, and without much thought, he began to one-by-one carry his men into the very jaws of the beast. Only once his men were lined up along the creature's throat and entrails did the chief stagger back wearily and sink to the ground. He felt the very fibers of his fingers suckled and nurtured back to life by a fiery warmth. As his eyes began to slowly cloud and close in weariness, he caught the girl’s eyes once more starring onward in curious fascination.

…….

Awake! Awake!

The night was bleak as the skies fell with fantastic terrors. Outside the belly of the beast vivid flashes of lightning dazzled spectators’ eyes, illuminating the jagged mountain slopes, sharpened as savage teeth, making it appear like a distinct colossal figure of—a beast—thrashed in the night, then for an instant, the world is pitched in darkness, until the eyes recovered from the flash. The storm appeared in various parts of the heavens. The violence of its tempest is like the gongs of battle—signaling bloodshed to come.

From above the mountain slopes, the sight of villagers crawling over the vast mass of a sleeping dragon could be seen. They had clambered from the sleeping jaws, taking turns to dart through lengthy yawns as the mighty draconic creature stretched and sighed contentedly in blissful sleep.

Instead of running for their lives, the unparalleled beauty of its miraculous gems caught their fascination, and turned their faces in rapture.

Their hands plucked at the creature’s skin greedily, shedding the beast from its spectacular jewels and regal grandeur, tugging the ornamented gilded scales from skin in hungry haste. Declothing the mighty creatures from its gold-plated armour. The men had scarcely completed their work when the beast began to stir in slumber.

They say it's impossible to wake a sleeping dragon, their slumbers are far deeper than the shallow dreams of mortals. So as the men savagely worried at the beast's body, gouging wounds as they ripped the pearls from the vulnerable slope of its belly, the creature was none-the-wiser.

And slowly the beautiful pearled skin was removed in patchess, leaving the dragon's complexion like a broken mirror, where the cracks of missing glass no longer shined.

Having lathered their arms and pockets in riches, their entire frames quivering with their daring and the burden of such lavishes, they took flight.

The villagers had descended down the mountain slopes when a scream from the top of the abyss broke fearfully upon the night! The chief became aware of the dull, sullen glare of red blood that streamed in rivulets down the sides of the chasm in filthy brilliance. The beast now awakened had become aware of the open wounds that decorated his obsidian unscaled skin, and cried in earnest pain. With each heave, the blood would flow, dipping the virgin snow in ultra-violence.

The chief casted his eyes upwards and beheld a spectacle which froze the current of his blood. At a terrific height, directly above the village troop, the giant beast staggered to the edge of the precipice and howled to the heavens.

The impulses of despair carved from its throats and rose in contagion. No eyes had seen so hideous, so fatal a mark. Blood was its avatar and its seal in blood.

And from the most prominent calamity, of the long catalogue of human miseries, was the true wretchedness and ghastly extremes of agony that resonated in the dragon's screams. To be stripped of glorious dignity is beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which had ever fallen upon the lot of mortality.

When the creature opened its mouth, he believed it was the end. That the monster would breathe its hellfire upon them in vengeance. Only the barred fangs revealed the girl imprisoned like a cocoon in its clutches. Angel hair of ivory, and cherubic features, broke free to survey the scene around her. The chief remembered the scene vividly. It was something he bore witness to which was too entirely horrible for the purpose of legitimate fiction.

The ancient creature gave way. Collapsing on the precipice and the young girl cradled the dead dragon by the muzzle and screamed.

She screamed from the blood of her fallen brethren, its gilded jewels unsheathed and damaged, skin vulnerable and naked like a proud lion without his mane.

The men marched hurriedly onwards, back to the safety of the Isolde Village, but nothing could veer them far enough from the scream that ricocheted throughout the valley, in blood, curdling agony. As they hurried along, by the light of the dawn he could make out the silhouettes of the lost men along the slopes. He passed the frozen corpses of his brethren. Ice cracked, nail stiff, blue tongued.

And he realized that his men had never been eaten at all but had frozen in that cold, cold wasteland. As they ran he remembered peering back at the sleeping mounds in horror.

And the chief reflected bitterly that perhaps they had not been eaten but saved by the fiery warmth of that dragon. Perhaps their men had never fallen prey to the monster but had frozen to death. And perhaps what they had done to that beast was unjustified and ugly.

And perhaps…

perhaps..

perhaps …

And he had the thought curdle his brain at the terror that had unravelled, that perhaps man was far greater a foe than beast.

For he could not forget her face etched in torment as he ran. The blood of her beloved kin falling down the mountain slopes as she stared down at the men in agonized hatred and rage. Quivering in delicate, newly formed grief, loss, that overwhelming feeling that dulled the senses.

And he did not know if it was the cold of the mountains, or the girl’s strange, alluring eyes bearing down upon them in every colour of fury, that sucked the very warmth from his soul and beating heart.