When We Were Dragons

by Brandon Berntson

We walked cautiously through the streets and hills, a strange mix of neighborhood, forest, mountains, and stop-lights, looking for familiar faces, the Old Ones, anyone. We kept clear of the panic-stricken, those who’d survived, these unfamiliar, strangely clad people. For all we knew, they’d think we were the cause of all this, lynch us, hang us, or execute us in some bizarre, torturous ritual.

  But someone had to know what was happening. Someone had to have an explanation.

  ~

  We found Dilla-dale after roughly two hours of weaving through the panicked streets. It’s hard to find your own kind when you have to hide from would-be attackers, and we spent more time dodging rocks and gunfire than anything. And this was only the beginning. Despite it all, the worlds—both of them—were unraveling under our feet.

  Dilla-dale wasn’t the first familiar face we’d run into. Humans fled from dragons who were trying to instill calm, endeavoring to placate the denizens of Earth, persuade them we were harmless, despite our appearance. You can imagine the results. Dragons trying to calm humans! A sight you had to see to believe!

  We would have to sort out the confusion, instill order, but that wouldn’t happen anytime soon.

  Trying to ignore all this (as Dilla-dale was doing), we finally found the Old One. He was rummaging through fallen, broken stones, trying to unearth his buried library one book at a time, the remains of his tower. All the Old Ones have one. They spot Paramis here and there: lonely, isolated structures where the ancient ones peruse—for days on end—the mysteries of magic, gods, and the universe. A stack of dusty tomes sat next to him on the ground, and Dilla-dale was just as filthy and disoriented trying to gather them all.

  “Dilla-dale,” I said, and he looked up.

  Four-hundred and some odd years old, the man looked no more than forty. He wore a long dusty robe, which had been brilliantly white at one time, but was now a faded yellow. He had long, thick brown hair and deep blue eyes, a sharp, chiseled face, and a broad chin. The hood of the robe was off, exposing his grimy face, and he stood up after setting several books aside. He seemed relieved to see us. “Justin,” he said. “Karen. Thank God you’re both okay.”

  He embraced us, and we hugged him in return.

  “Have you seen any of the others?” I asked.

  Dilla-dale shook his head.

  In the distance, a large towering mountainside took up most of the sky. Screaming was still audible from a distance, people shouting. A gunshot cracked the air, and all three of us winced at the report.

  “This is crazy,” Karen said, looking around, as though afraid we might be suddenly ambushed.

  “There are casualties on both sides,” Dilla-dale said. “I’m afraid many of the Old Ones have perished along with dragons, and people from both worlds.”

  Dilla-dale, despite the atrocities, seemed strangely calm.

  “I think this is all I’m going to salvage from this ruin,” he said, looking at his books.

  I knew he loved his tower, and seeing it in a pile of rubble pained not only him, but me as well. He leaned over and grabbed several books. Karen and I helped, carrying the larger tomes. Dilla-dale looked around and heaved a sigh. He looked at me, then at Karen. “It’s happened,” he said. “I didn’t know it would. I don’t think any of us knew. Or we didn’t quite believe. Cerras has plans.”

  “Cerras?”

  “Perhaps the Sleeping God is no longer asleep,” he said.

  Dilla-dale’s talk only confused me.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “The collision,” he said. “As it was written.”

  “Since when?”

  Apparently, the Old Ones kept secrets from dragons as well.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s find some of the others, and I’ll explain.”

  Walking from the ruins of his tower, we went in search of other dragons, sticking to the hiding places of strange, towering trees, the three of us carrying an armload of books. The wind blew the scent of death and fire from the north. The clouds were thicker, blacker overhead. With the scent, came the smell of rain, and it was soon coming down as we hurried through the dark.

  I spread my wings over the books, trying to keep them dry, and we made our way across unfamiliar terrain.

  2.

  A Giant Made of Amber Quartz

  The sky was a thick, warm blanket of dark red clouds, pelting our faces with rain. I asked Dilla-dale to hand me the books he was carrying since he was wingless, and they were just getting wet.

  A strange, burning smell was in the air. It was the twisting, smoldering metal from the collision. Mixed with the rain, it made a warm, coppery scent. The belly of the clouds was also a strange, fiery illumination, as if mirroring the conflagrations on the ground.

  We found Cullen Markel, Lila of Percival, and Louis of Olivette, all dragons, looking as scared and confused as Karen, Dilla-dale, and I.

  Cullen had wounded his arm. He sat, dazed, his back against a tree intertwined with metal. A large gash bled, stretching from his shoulder to his elbow. His head was bleeding as well, a copious flow of dark blood covering the side of his indigo face. Lila, a beautiful yellow dragon with silver hair, tended to Cullen’s wounds with strips of cloth she’d made. They looked relieved to see us, and the same feeling must’ve shown on our faces.

  In the intervals, I still remember the humans fleeing in terror, unable to comprehend what we were, and once I thought about it, I couldn’t really blame them. Their planet was in turmoil, and strange monsters were everywhere suddenly.

  I shook my head, weighed by the pressure and impossibility of my thoughts. I had a feeling the world had yet to undergo further horrors. I was thinking too much as always, and it wasn’t doing a damn bit of good.

  “Cullen?” Karen asked, bending toward the indigo dragon.

  “I think he’ll be okay,” Lila said. “He was flying during the blackout.”

  “Heads a little fuzzy,” Cullen said.

  “I think he just likes a lady to take care of him,” Louis said, smiling at Cullen, who rolled his eyes.

  After we got Cullen to his feet, he seemed to shake off the worst, and we retreated to an abandoned barn at a nearby farmhouse. Horses ran wild outside. Inside, blocks of hay towered to the rafters. Louis, who is a dark purple dragon, located some wood. Lila and I cleared a spot for a fire, making a slight depression in the dirt, clearing away most of the hay. After Louis returned, he set the logs in the pit and breathed slightly on the wood, drying them out from the rain. The logs sparked to life. We sat in a circle around the crackling flames. From outside, hovering stars sent rays of light through the cracks in the walls and the roof. A white glow from the stars and the orange fire illuminated everybody’s faces. I could only imagine what sort of devil I must look like with my cauldron-colored skin and thick black eyebrows.

  “Where are the rest of the Old Ones?” Cullen asked. Silvery, dark blue hair matched his skin, pointed ears rising through his hair. His eyes were an eerie color of lavender, which made him more intimidating along with his deep, baritone voice. He had a very intense, angry look on his face, but I attributed that to the wounds he’d suffered.

  “I really don’t know,” Dilla-dale said. “We tend to go our separate ways.”

  That was true. Dilla-dale and the others always worked alone, except when some new, profound wisdom needed to be shared.

  “Dilla-dale is the loneliest loner of the Old Ones,” I said, smiling.

  He nodded. “Murrochoe, more so,” he said. “But I do tend to steer in my own direction. Although, I have you to look after.”

  We all chuckled. We were silent for a while before Karen looked up, playing with strands of hay.

  “Cerras,” she said.

  It wasn’t a question, and for a brief second, a dangerous showdown in the future appeared in my mind like some premonition.

  Dilla-dale agreed, and what we heard next was a brief history lesson (or at least part of it) of Paramis. We knew the basics, of course, but
the Old Ones had kept certain details secret.

  “Cerras was not the first of the Old Ones,” Dilla-dale said. “He was more the father of us all. He made the wind, the stars, the trees, the world we know as Paramis. As home. He made other worlds as well…supposedly. Earth might be part of all that. It’s hard to say. The history of Cerras has many gaps. No one knows how old he is. Or how long Paramis had stood quiet before he breathed life into it. Some—the Old Ones—say he walked for centuries alone, examining every detail of the land, the water, the sky, the forests, before he gave life to it. If you want to talk about loners, Justin, Cerras is a man—or a god, if you will—who walks and thrives on solitude, preferring his own company to that of others. No one enjoys the silence of nature, or spending time in his own creation more.

  “So, once he’d created worlds, he decided to sleep and let things run their course, and in that time, mortals, dragons, the Old Ones, came to be. And the Old Ones followed his teachings. We are more like saints, you could say, and often we can hear the Sleeping God speaking to us, or the Giant God, as some call him. When he was done with his creation, that was just what he did. He walked toward the frozen regions of Canastelle, and for miles, traveled through deep icy caverns until he found a spot to lie down on a bed of ice, where he willed himself permanently to sleep.”

  “You mean, he willed himself to die?” Cullen asked, holding his arm.

  “Only in a manner of speaking,” Dilla-dale said. “He never woke up; that we do know, but I think, because he is a god, after all, that if he wanted, he could wake any time. But as it was—or as it is—his body hardened, turning to quartz and other precious stones…or so I hear. His physical nature was the energy and magic of Paramis. Cerras was the energy, the crux of all life and magic. From him, all matter is sustained, and he enforces laws on how we should live. What else would you expect from a giant?”

  Glances exchanged all around.

  “So, he really is a giant?” Lila asked. “A sleeping giant?”

  Dilla-dale looked at her and nodded. “A giant made of amber quartz,” he told her.

  I bit my tongue and almost burst out laughing. A giant made of amber quartz? Was he serious? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Our planet was a fairy-tale, and despite its history, we’d never heard the details of this story.

  “So, how did the collision occur?” I asked.

  Dilla-dale looked at me for a long time. “I believe it was Lane,” he said, simply.

  I furrowed my brows, and Karen took my hand, squeezing it. I squeezed hers in return.

  “But that’s impossible,” Louis said, his indigo skin turning a shade darker. “Lane doesn’t have that kind of power.”

  “She does now,” Dilla-dale said. “Lane has stolen the Eye of Cerras with the help of Tor-Latress. That is how the collision, as far as I believe, occurred.”

  I laughed, because I had never believed in Tor-Latress. I thought he was myth, nothing more than shadow.

  Dilla-dale looked at me, the expression on his face revealing disappointment.

  “You’re kidding, right?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Tor-Latress, Justin, has always been real. The stories of his presence have been exaggerated, sure, but they are not far from the truth.”

  I shook my head. Tor-Latress. Half spirit, half shadow, made of pure evil. He was corruption, darkness, and horror.

  “But Lane couldn’t have extracted the Eye without help,” Karen said. “Even Tor-Latress couldn’t have helped her do it. Who else did she use?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Dilla-dale said. “She used someone. But it couldn’t have been anyone from Paramis. Paramis doesn’t own that kind of magic.”

  I looked at him for a long time. Then my eyes grew wide. “Do you think it was someone from here?” I said. “From this planet?”

  Dilla-dale took a deep breath. “I think that’s exactly what happened, Justin,” he said.

  I let out a breath, felt my heart gallop, and Karen squeezed my hand again.

  ~

  “So, what does Lane plan on doing with the Eye?” Lila asked.

  The fire was dwindling, and the stars outside moved back and forth, sending pillars and rays of light through the cracks in the barn. The rain had stopped, and we sat, huddled around the dwindling flames, thinking of two worlds torn asunder, somehow brought together again.

  “Rip the worlds apart again,” Dilla-dale said. “The power of Cerras might be enough to do just that.”

  “You mean, she’d send both worlds into chaos again?” Cullen asked. “What could she hope to gain?”

  Dilla-dale looked at him. “Lane, like any tyrant, or madman—or madwoman—in this case, thrives on power and destruction. And she despises her own kind: dragons, the Old Ones, even men. She has always been that way. She thinks it is a weakness, and that dragons have their own destiny. My guess is she’ll try keeping the chaos and confusion going for as long as possible, turning everyone against each other. She might—as crazy as this sounds—even try to destroy Cerras completely. Remember, she was banished for killing her own kind, and she retreated to Canastelle, perhaps to find Cerras’ body. Lane longs to rewrite the pages of history. And she believes she can do it. She longs to sit upon the thrown of creation with the dead god at her feet, and Tor-Latress as her advisor. Lane’s mad enough to believe she’s more powerful than Cerras. What more could she do with the Eye than create the ultimate chaos, send worlds colliding into one another again? But for a different reason. I think the collision was only the beginning.”

  “So, we have to find Lane,” Cullen said.

  “Not as easy as it sounds,” Dilla-dale said. “You forget about Tor-Latress. And with the Eye, who could stop them?”

  “This is insane!” Louis said, his features hardening.

  “So, what are we supposed to do?” Lila asked. “Sit back and watch her destroy two worlds altogether?”

  Dilla-dale shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “But we have to find the others, and more importantly, the Old Ones.”

  No one else said anything. The rain started again, beating on the roof of the barn.

  ~

  After a time, the rain stopped, and we put out the fire, walking back into the misty evening. It was quiet. Whatever had happened throughout the course of that first day, people had either found solace in hiding places, or accepted the strange turn of events. The looting, the terror, and whatever it was around us, had calmed when we surveyed the land. It was a bizarre world, whether we wanted to believe it or not.

  We parted, none of us sure where we were going or with whom, but we promised to remain nearby. Dilla-dale set out to find more of our kind, and Cullen, Louis, and Lila followed him, providing more protection, I supposed, than anything. Karen and I headed in the opposite direction, accepting all the changes, all we’d heard, and all we had to look out for in the coming days ahead.

  Karen grabbed my hand and looked at me. “Things are never going to be the same again,” she said.

  I nodded. Things would never be the same in ways we’d never imagined, and I wasn’t sure I liked the prospect. Then again, what choice did we have? Paramis was not our home anymore, and we had other people to contend with now. Here was an entirely new breed of folk. Were they terrified, awed, shocked, revolted by what they saw?

  My thoughts turned to Lane, hypnotic, alluring Lane in all her evil, green skin, red hair, and yellow-eyed beauty. Lane was one of the few dragons who carried a weapon, a law strictly forbidden on Paramis. It was a long handled saber. We were dragons. What did we need weapons for?

  I closed my eyes, but for some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about Lane. I wanted to focus on what was happening. I wanted to focus on Karen.

  We didn’t know where we were going. It was getting late, and the wind picked up with a cold breeze. What had once been neighborhoods was now a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.

  “Look,” Karen said.

  Ahead of
us, a woman and three children—two girls and a boy—wet from the rain and with stunned looks on their faces, stood in front of a crumbled house. The house had sunk into the ground. The only thing visible was the porch, the front door, and the eave of the house turned upwards, now facing the sky. The ground had swallowed the rest of it. The woman wore a bright red shirt with long sleeves. The kids wore the same fashionable, strange clothes; the two girls had sweatshirts on, pants made of a thick, blue fabric. The boy wore a black T-shirt, the number 17 written in yellow on the front and back. Upon closer inspection, I saw the woman had tears in her eyes. She was holding a hand to her face.

  Not knowing what they might think, Karen and I stepped closer, taking our chances—strange creatures from another world.

  As I look back, that encounter had become the turning point in our lives. It was the most natural thing in the world. Karen and I had accepted these four people, despite their differences, and for whatever reason, they’d accepted us, as though we’d lived alongside each other for years. I guess, in a way, we had.

  The children turned toward us. The woman, the mother, I presumed, opened her eyes wide at Karen and I: one powder-blue dragon, one red demon. The mother’s hair was in a ponytail. Her face was angelic with a healthy, clear complexion.

  Maybe it wasn’t shock, I thought, but a kind of awe. The boy smiled at us. He had thick brown hair, wet because of the rain and big dark eyes, a virtually cherubic face. The girls had long, straight brown hair, matching their mother’s.

  They’d seen others like us, so maybe it didn’t surprise them. As I looked at the ruin they stared upon, I realized it must be their home, and that someone very close to them had been inside when the collision occurred.

  The mother was speechless. I couldn’t blame her. The girls looked back and forth between me and Karen, and I saw the distinct resemblance between the four of them.

  “Your house?” Karen asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “Mom?” the boy asked. “Dad wasn’t still in the there, was he?”