"Anna, you must leave today.”
Anna weighed her mother’s words, placing each one upon the golden scale of truth she had
been taught resided in the space under her jeweled breastplate. It was a sacred space, and it produced harmonic chords that reverberated like water waves when the bearer spent time in the thin world of contemplation. The words rang, a hammer and crystal chime bell, resonating truth. And sadness, a lamentation sogreat it seemed the whole world might reel with shock at the loss. She smelled ozone, and tasted words of fire in her mother’s admonition. She pondered a long time.
“Are you sure of this thing, mama?” she finally asked.
“We have seen the plans. There is a terrible weapon, with the strength of ten suns, that
will rend the very land into glass and the air into ether. All who stay, on
both sides, will be evaporated by its force, and the earth and rocks shall be
melted into something inhospitable. We cannot fight such as this.”
“Then you must come with me!”
Her mother paused, stretched a long tail, curled it lovingly around her daughter, and gazed off with exquisitely intelligent eyes filled with the dignity of the old. She
seemed to Anna almost resigned, and it scared her.
“This is my home, Anna. One spends an entire lifetime finding home, and one does not just
leave.”
“But mama, you can make a new home!”
"Home is not a place, Anna.”
Anna struggled with this. She was young, not yet 42, a child really, by her species’
accounting.
“I have spent centuries here, Anna. Long ago, when I was a youngling, and the valleys
teemed with life beyond compare, I was hatched into this world. It’s hard for
you to imagine how we lived, how beautiful everything was. How beauty like that
becomes woven into the fabric of one’s life, how every breath one takes yearns
to be part of something so elevated and sacred that its remembrance brings
tears to one’s eyes.
When I look at the desolate valley below us, I remember my best friend swimming in a river
so clear you could make out the details of crayfish on the rocks 20 paces
below. I remember how the water tasted, and how we laughed and played in it all
afternoon. When the sun set, it was outlined crisply by the clarity of the air.
It fell like a sharpened stone cutting a neat descent through the golden skies,
lighting the world in shades of liquid fire.
I recall climbing the distant mountain on foot, before my wings grew, and scrambling
over a rock ledge that was made entirely of soft blue green crystals, shimmering like the wings of dragonflies. Those rocks contained erinite, a mineral used by these people for making themselves a virtual reality they can escape to when their own world becomes too depressing. I have been told of this sadness that infects them, and have been told that the world they make tries to replicate the one we had before they came. Yet, no matter how they try, none of us will ever be able to bask in the golden amber morning with the scent of
fireflower in the air. They took the fireflowers and tried to cultivate them, but did not realize that only this valley had the right minerals for the scent to be created.”
“But Mama, all of that is gone now anyway. How can you still call this your home?”
Anna’s mother slowly balanced on her hind legs, stretching towards the sky, trying to
find words.
“My dear, the blood of many I cared about was spilled on those rocks over there, last
week. My youngness will always be remembered in the shape of that valley below
us. That mountain was where I met your father. The place I raised you is behind
us. Our food comes from the plain beyond the valley. This is, and always will
be, my home. I would rather die in it than in an unfamiliar place, surrounded
by strangers."
“But you will die!”
“Yes, I will.”
“And nothing will come of it! Don’t you want to live?”
"I want you to live, Anna. There is no more room for my kind in the world. This has become
a world of the young, Anna, your world. My
world is here, in these stones, this devastated valley. If my blood is
fused into the rocks, I will be immortalized, here, and will live as mothers
always have- through offspring.”
“You can fight, can’t you? You can destroy their weapon. Without it, they will be
powerless against you.”
“They have more than one, Anna, and too many of us would be lost to mount more than three attacks. They will butcher us for our scales and leave our mutilated bodies to
rot under the hazy sun on polluted ground. Those who survive will die of wounds
and infection and thirst. There is no way to live, Anna. There will be nothing
left here to sustain us. There is no honor in killing for a cause beyond the
realms of possibility.
You must make your own way, and you must rewrite our own existence. Gone are the days
when you can live as a society, I fear. You will spend the rest of your life
hiding, seeking quiet places and food. You will find scattered enclaves of us,
and in them, will you find companionship. You will be tested, for you will live
in a world dominated by the desire to dominate. I cannot tell you not to hate,
because it is not in my realm to do so. I will say it has been my experience
that hatred does little to purge one of mistakes, damages, and sorrow.”
“Mama, I don’t want to live in that world!” exclaimed Anna.
Her mother looked at her sternly; not unkindly, “That is not your decision to make, Anna.
I am your mother, and it is mine. However selfish it might be, my last act as a
mother in this world will be to make a stand to protect my children. I sent
your brother into hiding yesterday; you shall go this evening, and find him.
Mind you, you must be far away by morning. You will see, tomorrow, a fire so
vast it will scorch the sky, and if you listen to the wind, you may hear the
the sighs of thousands as we finally go back home, hopefully... to somewhere as beautiful as the place that was taken from us ."
"I wonder,” she paused, “will anyone notice we are gone?”
So Anna resigned herself, flying to a mountain on the border of the land. With dawn a raging
fireball scoured the sky and she felt the hot winds against her skin. The time
of dragons was ended by that one move; the time of man begun. The world of men did
not mourn the passing of the dragons. Anna would live her life a fugitive. It was bitter restitution that the men also destroyed their own croplands and underground sources of water. Within a month, all settlements were moved, and dragons retook what little remained to call home. They spent hard lives seeking a lost Beauty that would never resonate
again for them. Yet, they gradually grew accustomed, and in time, forgot they once knew the secrets of immortality. This was the greatest loss of all.
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