My boots break the surface of the ankle-deep water, sending ripples across the flooded courtyard. The distorted reflections of buildings, half-visible through the mist, remind me of wet mornings back home, when I saw my city suspended upside-down in puddles. Captured in a trembling picture, where it could be forever preserved, impervious to disease, or death, or dragons.
Urgh. I shake off the thought. I’ve never been one for reminiscing. Here is all that matters; the buildings provide some cover, and this water is miserably cold.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise. It doesn’t. I’ve been braving the inclement weather on these blasted mountains for weeks now. A thought comes to me, cold comfort; it would’ve been much worse when the peaks were still snow-capped, sprouting seracs like wildflowers. They’d been the highest known to humankind. Before the attack, it could get cold enough to kill.
Height of arrogance; my mother had often said in her broken, lispy common-tongue, the thought that once they bested the mountain, they could best its dragons.
She’s been vindicated in the years since. Turns out you needed more than religon and a vague notion of mystic runes to keep dragons off your land. Especially when it’s not your land in the first place.
But good sense has never stopped the nobles.
They were not the first to climb these peaks. Those were the thrill seekers, hundreds of them, some who had returned, others who had dissolved into the rarified air. Then, there were the scholars, those who had discovered the extensive cave systems and discarded bones and had, whether through ingenuity or desperation, struck a deal – their lives for their knowledge. They’d told the dragons everything about the world around them – about Arcadia, the kingdom that spanned from sea to sea and ran up against the base of the dragons’ mountains. About human language, about cities, about agriculture and literature and astronomy. When their reserves were exhausted, they were released – with only one provision.
Bring us more. We wish to learn.
Then came those who wished to teach. They’d built a thriving community in the arms of the mountains, birthing a thousand scholars and fostering a beautiful symbiosis between dragon- and human-kind.
And, finally, there came those who wanted glory.
The generals, or sons of generals, who – once all the work had been done – had sent runners to the presses and unfurled their flag on what was meant to be neutral territory. Arcadia lays claim to the Cradle of the Sky! They might as well have sounded war-horns.
To this day, I don’t know what the nobles expected the dragons to do. Roll over and forsake their birthright? Acquiesce to the humans, the same that had betrayed their trust and turned what was to be a place of scholarly pursuits into a battleground? Pretend they hadn’t been taught, by our own texts, just how flammable our cities were?
I can’t ask them. They’d gone with the rest of the capitol, over in an instant – a single, searing instant of nightmarish agony. I wonder if they’d been happy to die among their gold and fine perfumes and accolades and conquests and such. I wonder if they’d forced their staff to wait on them until the end. I wonder a lot of things about the capitol, and I will never get answers. Unlike my city, there hadn’t been a single survivor.
Some part of me wonders if this is my mother’s fault. Not directly, of course. But she was known to be partial to the dragons, and more than a little cryptic. I’ve no doubt she would’ve warned the nobles in some convoluted fashion. The dragons have their warmongers, just as we have ours. As if there was anything actionable in that statement.
I could’ve told the nobles what she was dancing around in two words. What does a dragon do when it gets angry?
What it does best. It burns.
The entrails of the ruined complex spill over a half-acre at least, moss-encrusted rubble scattered like an abandoned game of mahjong. The shapes of still-standing buildings loom from the mist – I veer away from them. Hundreds have died in those halls, and I have no doubt that remnants still linger in the shadows. Best to keep clear.
“Unless you want to try our luck?” I direct over my shoulder. The muted, somewhat fearful jangling of weapons, traps, cooking supplies, prayer beads, carabiners, and other sundries is answer enough. Like me, my supplies have a healthy self-preservation instinct.
Not that we are likely to survive the day. But I would rather have the songs sung about our adventures be heroic ballads about fighting dragons, not cautionary tales about the curses they leave behind.
“Ah, well. Ready for the fight?”
I knock the pack with my left elbow, and it clatters joyously. Of course, they are eager. Like me, fighting is all they have left. Unlike me, they are actually good at it.
“Onwards!” I squelch on through the mud, towards a landmark that juts up through the fog like the prow of a wrecked ship.
It’s a good idea to talk to your things. My mother had drilled it into me when I was young, and hadn’t yet learned their value. Advice, my love; she would say, gently, as she cleaned the remains of another smashed cup. Talk to them, like they are friends. Do you want to hurt friends?
It helps though the long, lonely, frostbitten nights. It reminds you that you’re still human, with a voice, and thoughts, and emotions. And it helps when there’s nobody else to talk to. These are all things I learned in the first couple of months, when the only thing on my mind was to get away from the stench, away from the bodies, away from those still alive but too far gone to help, away, away, away…
What happened here had not been a massacare. It had been a warning, spelled in ant-lines of burn-blackened scholars stumbling down the slopes, and underscored with smoke so plentiful it could be seen from the capital.
Keep your fingers to the ground, dear, my mother had written to me the week after Arcadia had officially declared war upon the dragons. The tremors will come any day.
‘Any day’ happened to be the day she was begging the House of Lords to lay down their arms. I don’t know if she was successful, or if they got to her in the first place. They might have dismissed her as casually as one would swat a gnat away, as they had done so often before, and I’d have lost all my family for no reason at all.
“I suppose it’s a good thing there’s no way of knowing.” My rucksack rustles in response. A warning. I shouldn’t be saying things like that here. Today. I might offend the na’go, and I need them on my side for this.
That’s who my mother represented – not us, not the dragons – na’go, the spirits of nature. To her, the land was theirs, and we – human and dragon alike – were their children, meant to share it.
I thought her naive, in those final days. How could she host refugees in our house, hear their stories – how the dragons had burned buildings until they were nothing but ash, how they’d batted aside scholars who days ago had been their friends, how they’d killed some of their own kind who had tried to stop them; how snow on the peaks had melted, then steamed over, boiling hot, killing people retreating up the slopes, how the glaciers had collapsed, soot-muddy water spilling into the basin as if the mountain itself was bleeding; how the air had crackled with laughter as the dragons had watched them flee, killing who they felt like, the merrymaking of demons – and think that peace between us was possible?
I tried not to think of her at all in the aftermath.
The water is clear, now, though I disturb black silt and darting minnows as I step. Maybe they are the real children of the na’go. I don’t think the spirits of nature will want anything to do with us ever again.
After all, we had been the invaders first. We’d torn up the tumbling moraine, displacing animals and plants, then created a temple to our worst impulses. The dragons had driven us away, and, finally, the na’go had reclaimed their land.
But here I am. To bring back the trauma.
I crest the top of the landmark, a piece of large rubble. I’d seen it from a scouting mission weeks ago. Before me, the courtyard spills into a crystal lake, all that remains of what was once a time-ravaged steppe. Mists curl across the courtyard, ghostly fingers reaching out to the only living thing for acres – me.
I drop my rucksack, spilling its load. A sword, a woolen blanket, traps, cooking supplies…everything one needs to survive. Originally, it had also contained everything I’d wished to preserve. Of my city, of my old life. But struggling to survive makes pragmatists of us all. The pack had gotten a lot lighter. Along the way I had shed pictures, letters, mementos, keepsakes…
…and, most recently, approximately seventeen bombs.
Pragmatic thought: if assume you can best a dragon on open ground, you are already dead. That’s why you use underhanded tactics. Or, more accurately, why you bring along incendiary devices – designed to explode when exposed to high heat – and spend three weeks planting them in strategic locations around the battleground. So, when the dragons inevitably breathe fire…
I drop to my knees and stare at the sword, whorled with intricate patterns like the veins of a leaf. Just as light.
“You would hate me for this.” I say to it.
It’s a mistake. This sword might keep me alive for precious seconds, long enough for a dragon to maneouver so the explosion hits just right, but I was never able to say these words when my mother was alive. What’s stopping me now from saying them to her blade?
“You were always on their side. Not the na’go. The dragons. You never believed they would do anything to us.”
The sword remains silent. The mists seem to press closer, and I shiver, drawing my jacket closer around my shoulders.
“We broke the treaty. Sure. So they killed us all. Including the scholars who they knew had no ill intent. Their friends, mother. Their friends!”
My voice is nothing, in this valley. It barely reaches the crumbling slopes to either side of me – it will definitely not reach the far side of the lake, where the dragons reside. Still, there is danger in it.
I don’t care. I scream, scream, until my throat is hoarse.
“Why would you want to protect this? Why?”
There is no answer. My anger cools, solidifies into something like steel in my chest. I don’t understand my mother’s reasons. But I have my own. I know what I want to do, and why. And nothing will stop me.
I stare off into the mists, curling in great eddies across the water. I hear the buzzing of dragonflies. I taste morning dew.
I speak, addressing the na’go.
“I am the burning of the fields in the spring, to prevent the summer fires from spreading.”
A hush falls over the clearing, as if a greater being is considering what I have to say.
“I am the rain, to quench this parched land.”
My voice is ragged, but I continue. The words seem to come from somewhere other than my chest.
“We need this to stop. And I’m here to end it.”
For a moment, the mists halt.
Then they move inwards, as if blown by invisible wings. The visibility drops.
I breathe. No time to think about it – they clearly haven’t been swayed. I wrack my brain for something else to say.
“I – I promise not to hurt you. I’ll be careful, it – it’s only this and I’ll go away, I don’t want this land-”
The mists press onwards. Now there is panic, rising in my chest like a tidal wave and splattering stomach acid against the back of my throat. This is my only chance.I can’t waste time, I can’t afford to lose before I’ve even begun.
“I don’t want to die.” I admit, watching the mist roll in. “I don’t. Is that what you want from me?”
Closer, and closer, blanketing me -
“I don’t want to kill!”
The mist wooshes under me, breaking around the shattered prow like a wave on the shore. I stare at its eddies and currents, watch as it roils, slows, pulls back, then dissapates.
The blanket of white retreats. I swallow, throat dry.
“I don’t. Please, believe me. I – I don’t want revenge, or glory, or any of it, I just want it to stop. My – my mother, she was an ambassador. I come in her stead. I won’t incite anything, and I know I just planted bombs all over your valley, and I know that was stupid, but-”
I hiccup pathetically, and draw my knees up to my chest. “We need hope. All of us. We can’t live in fear forever. Either I parley, or – or I die. But I refuse to turn and run.
“So, please.” I finish. “Let me through.”
The world holds its breath.
It holds it in the fireflies teetering through the mist, holds it in the roosts atop the crumbling rocks. Holds it cupped against its verdant chest, moss on the marble, algae in the water, dragonflies in the air.
The ghostly fingers of the mist twine together, interlock, worry as if kneading, as if they are a parent worrying at my face one last time. And I am struck with a realization – what parent could truly hate their child?
I sob, and lean into the mist’s embrace. What a cruel irony; that this world that has fought me for so long, whose cruelty has driven me to accept this role… now refuses to let me go.
The embrace is short lived, and the mists unfurl. Unclasp, drift away slowly, loosely. Letting go. No compunction, no regret. The goodbye I hadn’t said, for the mother I had never understood.
I wipe at my eyes. The sun is brilliant, now, setting the crystal waters ablaze.
Beyond, in the shrouded mountains, a figure rises. Its constellation of silvered scales throws the brilliant sunlight back at me.
Not long, now, before the valley rings with its discordant screech. Before those wings, large as sails, blow away the last of the na’go.
“Will they accept me for what I am?” I whisper to the sword. “Or will I be considered another abberation? Something that… brings destruction?”
It doesn’t matter. It seems to say. You have made your choice. Only you know if it is the right one.
“I do know. I know that this is the only way forward.”
Then you must go. And I will be here. It says in response.
I hold my breath.
I will be here. It says. Always.
I hear the thump of distant wings. The dragon, approaching. It will either parley or attack. I close my eyes and drop the sword. My life, for the first time in years, is out of my hands.
Before me, indistinct, like the sun through closed eyelids, I see a being of iridescent light.
I will be here. She says. Waiting. For you.
I open my eyes and rise to my feet. I’ve never been one for reminiscing.