“Conquering others is a way of life for some. Being conquered is the lot of the weak.”
The dragon’s voice, as always, filled the cave even when whispering. When bitterness salted his speech, as it did now, the dull anger in his tone was unmistakable. In the silence that followed, Amanda planted the stick into the small hole in a rock and began rubbing it between her hands.
“I can’t stay long today,” she said, ignoring the challenge in his voice. Rubbing faster, at last she achieved a wisp of smoke. “But I’d like to be happy while I’m here. It might be my last visit. Really, this time. Can we not talk about what the humans did to the dragons?”
Grey breathed, a gravely sound. “Of course, my dear. Old wounds can open without us even knowing it. I don’t wish to spoil your time here. Or my mood during your visit.”
The fire caught on the dry sticks, and Amanda arranged the logs within the stones so they’d catch quicker. “Tell me again, then.”
“Again?”
“Yes.”
Grey’s lips opened once more into a smile. “You wish me to speak of birth, not death? You’re a clever girl, Red.”
Amanda finished arranging the stones and took off her vest, placing it on the floor against the cave wall. She resumed her seat opposite him, her rump much happier now.
“It’s Amanda. And the birth of the dragons is my favorite story. And you tell it very well.”
One massive eye winked slowly. “I have to agree. I’m the best dragon teller of dragon stories there is.” Then the wink became a wince. “There I go again. All right, I’ll be good.”
“I don’t have much time today,” she said again.
“Very well,” said Grey, lifting his head from its resting place as he always did when he told her stories. “Sit and be warm and I’ll tell you again how dragons came into the world.”
* * *
My dragon ancestors came from deep inside the earth. At first, they merely crawled out of caves like this one. When the sunlight met their scales, they drank it in like nectar. Having known only the cold, wet dark of the Underearth, coming into the sunshine mesmerized them. The warmth lulled them. They lived lazy lives of leisure, eating that which was easy to reach: plants, small animals. This was their existence for eons.
When the world changed, when the earth heaved and split and vomited fire, many of the dragons died. Those who could, mainly the young, climbed above the boiling earth to find safety in cliffs of stone, high above the stinking black rock skin that now covered the earth. They learned to hunt for food in the higher reaches. No longer could they merely slap at low-hanging fruit with their tails or lay in wait for a small animal to wander into their lair. As each generation of dragons was born, lived, and died—as the earth itself shuffled off the black shell of rebirth—the lazy lizards who first looked upon the sun with reverence became crafty predators. Hunting required them to become wily and sly. And fast.
Dragon broods, once closely knit, were split. Not just by the upheaval of the earth when so many perished, but by the nature of their new homes. Like this cave, they were small and close. Tight holes of stone nestled along cliffsides, high above the black crust below. Over thousands of years, we grew wings to help us hunt from our caves, which became storehouses for hard times. We guarded everything in our caves, and fiercely. Our wings let us soar over the earth, ranging far from our homes to seek food across blackened lands, but they also made it possible for us to rely less on one another. Whenever one dragon saw another, it wasn’t in kinship he greeted him, but as a rival for his hoard. Thousands of years of living alone and away from others had bred distrust in our kind, even for each other.
Dragons became solitary creatures who rarely sought the company of others—or their own kind, except to mate. By the time the world’s skin began to grow green again and creatures of all kinds—including humans—made homes below, dragons had become the solitary, isolated hunters of the skies you’ve only ever known them to be.
When the lands below grew green again, dragonkind rejoiced. Food was more plentiful and easier to find. Flight became not merely necessary for survival, but joyous, a way of engaging with the world again. The sky felt more like home than the cliffside caves we’d learned to tolerate to avoid extinction. Ancestral memory began to recall that time of leisure when we’d first crawled into the world.
And then the humans came. At first, one left the other alone. Dragons kept themselves apart, living in their aeries, coming to earth only when necessary to hunt what they couldn’t find in the mountains. Humans kept to themselves as well, fearful of the massive flying creatures that looked so much like snakes with wings. They had little affinity with, or need for, one another.
But over time, each race increased in number. As each new patch of green grew from the ashen earth, humans settled and farmed it. Dragons too, with more food and more freedom, mated more frequently and had more young. Inevitably, the two races clashed. One, small but numerous and clumped into tribes, always looking for new lands to conquer and settle. The other, large and powerful but independent, preferring to live alone and apart from its own kin.
Skirmishes escalated to wars. Wars became vendettas. Dragons learned to hate entire lines of human kings. And kings killed dragons for sport. Soon, whole generations of one race had nothing but loathing for the other—
* * *
“Stop!”
The dragon closed his mouth. “Do you have to go?”
“I thought you were going to tell the story of how dragons were born.”
Grey blinked his lazy, heavy-lidded eyes. “And so I did.”
“Why did you have to tell the rest?”
The dragon hesitated before answering. “You’re right. You asked for a pleasant story. It’s hard for me to separate the birth of the dragons from the story of their death. I apologize.”
“Why must you always remember the bad parts?”
“The bad parts?”
“The parts of the story that make me sad. And make you mad. And you know I might not be back again.”
“So you said the last time you came. And you asked me for the story. Never ask for something you do not truly want.”
Amanda stared hard at him. The fire had finally caught, and she could see his scales reacting to it. Bristling, but in a good way, as if stretching out to feel the heat. It reminded her of Grey’s description of the first dragons, when they climbed from their holes in the earth and became drunk on sunlight.
“Do you want me to leave?” she asked, beginning to rise.
“Not especially,” he said. His voice was cautious but prideful. She knew this instinct in him. To push her away until she threatened to go. Then he’d retreat, drawing her back to him. This particular game she didn’t like, so she stood and gathered her vest from the cave floor, brushing it off.
“Amanda, wait.”
The girl turned and looked at him, her expression fierce. “I might not return! Ever! And this is how you wish to end our friendship?”
The dragon turned his head. “I don’t wish to end our friendship at all.”
“That’s not how it seems,” she said, thrusting her arms into her vest.
“Maybe…” Grey was thinking. She could see it. The way he sometimes did when he wanted to take his time and say something exactly right. “Maybe it’s important for me to remember. As the last of my kind. Perhaps if I forget, then I’m afraid I’ll be forgotten too.”
“What do you mean?” Grey had never spoken of being afraid before. It was a strange turn for him to speak of feeling that way. Usually, it was she who had to control her fear in coming here. “People will always remember dragons. How could we forget?”
Grey curled his lip over his broken teeth. “Your people will only remember human stories of dragonkind. Tales of fire-breathing serpents raining death upon villages of women and children. Roasting them alive. Chivalric chronicles of kings on quests, heroically slaying flying monsters.” He puffed out a thick sound that smell
ed of sulfur. “Lies.”
“They’re not lies!” The words sortied from her mouth before Amanda could stop them. “The dragons destroyed whole villages, scouring them like cooking pots that need cleaning. Men, women, children... it didn’t matter—”
“We defended ourselves!”
Grey’s voice embraced the stony walls around them, filled the cave up. The rock shook with ancient anger. And yet under that power, beneath its rolling beat of war drums, a strident sound. A desperation Amanda had never heard in Grey, like the fear before. She opened her mouth to respond, thought better of it, and pursed her lips closed.
“History is merely a collection of stories we tell ourselves to understand how we came to be where we are now,” continued Grey, more calmly. Yet, the tremor beneath his words remained. “And soon, there will be no dragons left to tell our side of things. The choir of history will lose our voice forever.”
“I have to go,” Amanda said, suddenly uncomfortable. Sadness and anger roiled within her. And inside her, Grey’s own rage had reawakened the old terror that skin feels for scales. “I shouldn’t have come here today. There is much to do before we abandon our village.” Her words were laced with bitterness. She turned and walked toward the cave’s entrance.
“Amanda,” said Grey. When she didn’t stop, his voice filled the cave again. “Amanda.” More the desperation, less the anger.
She stopped, her whole body tingling with fear and loathing. She had trouble controlling that natural human reaction upon hearing a dragon’s voice, bred by millennia of dying in the thousands, roasted alive. She hated how it consumed her in that moment, how it made her afraid of Grey without the shield of their friendship to protect her from herself. Her need for him, especially now, terrified her more than any dragon ever could.
More softly, he continued, “Why did you come here? I sense a desire in you to say something but not the will to say it.”
Without looking back, Amanda placed her hand on the sweating stone. Brushed by the fresh wind beyond the cave’s mouth, it felt like her hand might freeze there. She let the cold bite at her face. The pain felt good. It gave her something other than her anger and fear to focus on.
“Amanda?”
Grey’s voice echoed on the stone, but quietly, with the patience of the old.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she said without turning. “But now, I realize it’s foolish.”
Grey turned his head again, ever curious. “No question is foolish, girl. And I don’t want our last meeting to end like this. We both have our peoples’ legacies to contend with, the wrongs we’ve done one another. But you and I, we have no quarrel. Only friendship. What did you wish to ask?”
Amanda turned slowly. She thought of the friendship between them Grey spoke of. Remembering all the times she’d come here, the time they’d shared together, helped her to focus. She remembered how, that first time as a little girl, she’d gone exploring alone and wandered into the cave. Stumbling upon Grey, his snores peppering the walls, had terrified her. And when he’d stirred in the darkness, his tail uncoiling like a snake, she’d shrieked, frozen to the cave floor. But he’d met her screams with a warm smile, and as a child who yet knew nothing of dragons and their shared history of hatred with humans, she’d quickly wrapped herself in the comforting depth of his reassuring voice. Amanda remembered how she’d curled against him, and he’d wrapped his tail around her to protect her from the cutting cold on a night much like this one. This was how their friendship had begun.
“Will you help us?” she whispered. Between the frigid wind and the crackle of the fire, she wasn’t sure he’d heard her. If he had, she expected a roaring response of anger. Or perhaps, and worse, a pitying laugh roiling up from his enormous belly. But what she hoped for was agreement, the generous gesture of one friend coming to the aid of another. “I said—”
“I heard you.”
Amanda turned around and moved a few feet closer to him, away from the wind and toward the glow of the budding fire. She wanted to touch him one more time. Feel his tail stroke the red hair on her head as she fell asleep, like that first night she’d found sanctuary here so long ago.
“No,” said Grey. His voice was quiet but firm.
The ice in his answer chased away Amanda’s warm memories, a wolf scattering sheep from a quiet meadow.
“No?”
Grey cleared the bellows of his long neck with a grunt. “No.”
Now it was Amanda’s turn to be angry. “Why? The Bane will kill us!”
Despite his earlier fury, Grey seemed entirely calm now. “Not if you leave. Give them the land and survive.”
“That’s your solution? We should run?”
“It was yours too, until a moment ago. And why should I help you? I am old. The Bane are many. What help could one old dragon be, in the end? I have no wish to end my race. Or my own life.”
“You are nothing if not a practical dragon,” she sniped back. “Yes, The Bane are many. They’ll find us, wherever we go. My people are simple farmers and herdsmen. There will always be someone wanting to kill us and take our land.”
“All the more reason to move on, if such is your fate. Delay Death as long as possible, as I have done.” Grey laid his head down again, but as always, his eyes stared into Amanda. “Caves make good homes. Climb into the mountains. Don’t come down from them. Be smarter than we were.”
Amanda’s eyes began to well. Not simply because Grey had refused her request, but because his coarse tone, his coldness toward her now seemed to wash away years of cuddling on cold nights and sharing stories until dawn. All banished by this moment of feeling utterly betrayed.
Perhaps she’d only been a distraction to him, she thought in that instant. A human toy he could play with once a week. A mantel to place his trophy of guilt upon for past wrongs. Her anger at feeling so used rose from her gut like venom.
“You speak of lies,” she spit at him, her voice breaking. “All of this was a lie! Your friendship was a lie! All these years I’ve come to you and all that we’ve shared… not friendship, just pretense from the forked tongue of a dragon!”
Even as she screamed it, Amanda didn’t truly believe it. But she was furious with him. Grey wouldn’t save her village. He wouldn’t make it possible for her to come back here again, week after week, and curl up with him when it was cold and talk until the sun rose. He was old and he would die and leave her one day, or his refusal would force her to leave him and flee The Bane today. Her helplessness to stop the fall of any of these fated footsteps fired Amanda’s belly with rage.
Grey had jerked his head up at the old insult. “Believe what you will, human. Speak your platitudes about dragon serpents and their forked tongues.” His tone was dismissive, but his words sounded thin to Amanda, as if he were speaking lines from a play. “I won’t stop humans killing humans. I won’t betray the memory of my race by helping those who destroyed it.”
“I’ll die!”
The dragon regarded her sadly. “As must we all.”
Tears burned her cheeks with cold trails. Crying them made her angry, furious with herself because now Grey could see how much she was hurting. How much he’d hurt her.
“I hate you! And all dragons! Best you die soon and rid the world of your false friendship that never was!”
Before Grey could answer, Amanda rounded and fled the cave, head set hard against the wind.
All that remained was the crackle of the fire and the old dragon’s breathing, the sound of air pushing through worn-out, leathery lungs.
“I am old,” he said to the fire. “What could I do? And why would I ever help a human do a single, solitary thing?”
Grey regarded the flames as they grew in the hearth, set to warm him by the girl who’d been his friend for nearly ten winters. He felt a pang in his chest as he realized they no longer shared that bond. He blinked once and for the first time in a long time, a tear soaked the thinning scales beneath one eye.
* * *<
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“There’s no more time,” she heard her father say to another village elder. “We must move at dawn or be overrun.”
Amanda lay in her bed of hide-covered straw, her little brother next to her. It’d been nearly a week since she’d last visited Grey. He’d merely sat, alone and unmoving, in his cave. As if he waited there for Death to finally take him, a task no human warrior had ever accomplished. And now Death came on thundering hooves for her as well. For all of them.
“The wagons are loaded,” she heard the elder say. “We have but to mount them and move west.”
A horn sounded. One long blast, followed by three short ones. The border guard. The Bane.
“What? So soon?” the elder’s voice slapped against the icy gale. “The king sent word that—”
“Go, now!” her father barked. “I must look to my family.”
Shuffling sounds as her father opened the door to their home and yelled, “Ameris! Get the children up. It’s time. I’ll hitch up the horses.”
The door opened and closed again as her mother sprang from bed and stumbled sleepily across the small room.
“Children!”
“I heard, Momma. I’ll wake Markh and grab our winter clothes.”
“We don’t have much time, Amanda.”
The girl could hear the terror in her mother’s voice. Not fear for her own safety, Amanda knew, but the dread of seeing her children slaughtered in front of her.
“I know, Momma. Grab the jerky and flatbread.” Her mother was looking at her, unmoving, eyes wide with fright. Amanda touched her arm. “Momma! We’ll be all right. But we must go now.”
Ameris nodded and moved away to gather the family’s foodstuffs.
Another long blow of the border guard’s horn. One long, then two short blasts.
They’re closer than we knew, Amanda thought. They’ll be here any moment.
The Dragon Chronicles Page 25