Ephemerals

She wasn’t quite sure what this creature was—a giant squirrel? a small bear?—The most recent incursion had shaken her head a bit and it took awhile for the clanking of metal to fully register. For a moment she thought it might be a malformed goat—belled as they often were, tasty musical morsels—but then the sun glinted off the armor and there was no doubt. The royal children of any real age had been spent. They had loosed the last and youngest in a final, last ditch effort to roust her from the mountains.

She had never contested their own existence, though she had been here generations before they arrived, a time so short she felt it unfair to claim seniority. She had wished for nearly a century that she could communicate with these pests. She had tried. If they weren’t so peskily deadly she would just let themselves tire themselves out. Maybe, at some point, they would stop seeing her as a threat.

Instead they kept coming. Swords sought purchase in her body. Poison in the spring couldn’t harm her immune body, but continued to pollute the river down the mountain to their growing city. She hoped each attempt would be the last. She missed the days from before they knew she existed.

The child toddled, chubby fingers in padded gloves, evidently there was a limit to the workings of the tiny hands these interlopers possessed. She reached down to pluck a tree out of the path it would take, a few hours before it reached it, but the poor dear deserved a little less work—it’s legs being remarkably small and unwieldy. She watched it sit to unbuckle the glaives which must have been a great weight. She considered seeing if she could blow them back down the mountain.

She had been alone, for she refused to see these biting things as company, for so long. That didn’t mean she had forgotten the ways of her mother, that she didn’t remember the path of the righteous.

They had flown so much further from the den than they had thought possible. Covered hundreds of miles before the pull of her mother’s heart had snapped and she watched as this goddess, her mother, had turned to ash, shape fading into the sky, drifting down into the surrounding forests. When she breathed in, she knew she would be recycling her mother’s spirit.

Since that journey, escaping the combined might of so many of the little things—retribution for an annoyed burst of flame upon their homes—she had known not to minimize the harm they could inflict. She had sworn to avoid them, knowing it was easy to become annoyed with their noise and commotion. Easy to overstep in trying to stop them.

She had spiraled into these mountains from the dispersement of her mother, heart pulling to the earth as she became the matriarch of her new clan of one. Buried her heart deep in the thickest stone, built a den—all while knowing she was far from the paths of the roving males.

The child’s teeth surprised her as they tore into some dried meat. Dragon teeth did not arrive before maturity—when a dragon took her place as matriarch and buried her heart or when he left the den to seek others. It was a painful process and the roars that accompanied it was an alert to others to steer clear; sometimes it was an alert for their maps to change, to include a new den, and for rovers to create a new trail.

A century and a half and no new trails came to her entrance. She wondered for her two brothers if they had returned to their den to find mother and sister gone. She wondered if their breaths had gone cold.

She watched the child bend to reach it’s unshod hand into the stream she knew would be very cold, now halfway to it’s source from the stone wall the child had set forth from. She snorted a bit at the spring, tendrils of steam hissing. The change in temperature might wake some of the early hibernators, or make others wait a week too late, but it wouldn’t take a decade for things to reach harmony again. She was too interested in what could come next.

The next time the child reached down for a new drink, it lifted its hand away with surprise. It dropped the round bread and plunged both hands in, smiling. She liked seeing it pleased.

She had loved watching these creatures when they first arrived in the valley under her mountain. She had begun to despair from her loneliness. Dragons may be solitary creatures, but they still enjoyed a deep connection with nearby dens. Female dragons usually kept a brood of eggs waiting for fertilization, one at a time. Such occasions were prized for the sharing of news from the outside world, for updated maps that might help connect them to nearby dens that were close enough for safe journeys.

Her own eggs sat dormant, they could wait forever for their chance to be born, but she had missed the connections she had hoped for these long years.

The lights down in the valley, the sounds of stone on wood, the cheers as walls were erected, roofs to block the rain—all the activity had been a joy. She watched for years as they celebrated each spring another year escaping the darkness. She watched them cry over their dead and call into the sky for hope and absolution. She did not know what they needed to be absolved from, but she was sure she was the only one who could hear.

One difficult year, she watched the buried ground extend far past the walls of their village, many holes dug each day, and it touched her heart deep in the stone. She took flight to clear her mind from the pain she hadn’t wanted to touch her.

These creatures, with their bright plumage and songs that drifted up the mountain. She wished more days were songs and color. She resented the days of black and dirges. When the large bells rang out for hours, unsettling the birds, and sending the rabbits to their holes.

There was more that she did not know how to combat. A grief that extended to the dust her mother had left behind.

She watched a storm rise up in the west from her height in the clouds. Without thinking she began to fly around the mountain, a pattern that could gently shift the flow of the thick band all dragon could see, smaller winds branching off. The storm would follow this band, as most storms did, and she could adjust it just enough that only the outer rain would hit the village. She knew this could save the crops, especially as storm clouds like to stick within the valley when they become too large.

She was not careful in her hours-long flight to adjust the weather. Perhaps those who saw her—back and forth, back and forth, traversing the sky between the clouds—could have been ignored, until the sun went down and she shot out a stream of flames in celebration of her success. It had been hard work. Alone, she had forgotten to be small in her celebrations and this was the first time it mattered.

The next day, as she watched the first visitor of what would become a steady stream climb the rocky start of the trek to her, she actually thought it might be out of gratitude.

The child had reached the dead zone. She blushed, ashamed. This was always a sore spot for her. She had been so angered by the deaths the poisoner had caused that she needed to make sure she didn’t miss another one who could sneak so well up the mountain. Not a single creature had realized it had been in their midsts. Even the worms had been surprised when she shared the news.

She had told the animals to avoid the area, a mile-thick band encircling the top of the mountain, a mile from her cave. It was a bare place, a haunted place. She could warn the animals, but she could do nothing for the trees and their cries still echoed in the soil. She had to patrol the area for new growth every new moon and regretted the loss.

She watched as the child reached out for an orange blossom of a wildflower that had bloomed before the frosts would overtake everything. The child plucked it with its grabby hands and wove it into the fine mail on its neck. Next to the dark strands of its loose hair, the cosmo seemed to glow with a fire all its own.

With a final loosening of the bindings she kept on her love for all life, the bindings these weird little monsters had forced her to create, she walked through the trees that had been spared on her side of the barren barrier. She lay her boulder-sized head directly in the path of the child, a half-mile away. She waited, patient, as the thing continued to pick through the ashes of this strange land.

Finally, as if realizing it was being watched, it turned and stared up into her large eyes, a moment of fear followed by the largest smile she had ever seen.