by Lilly Wilder
Thomas and William nodded. I gazed up at the mountains. “Let’s go,” I said.
I stood there as the men shifted into dragons, their handsome, sexy bodies of flesh and blood turning into majestic visions of a fantasy world, gleaming scales and fierce jaws. The more I witnessed them in this form the more I was getting used to it, although I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to treat it as something normal. The two dragons stood there, looking tall and mighty. Their wings lay flat against their bodies and I could tell they were itching to take flight. Since I had already flown with Thomas and I felt more comfortable riding on his back, so I slipped the packs onto William’s talons and then climbed onto Thomas, riding him in a different manner to the way I had done the previous night.
Thomas dipped his body and stretched out his wing, allowing me to use it as a boarding ramp. His body was warm and the scales were soft, which I found surprising. I clambered onto his back, straddling my legs over his spine. I would have loved a saddle for security, because although I trusted Thomas implicitly to give me a smooth flight, I was concerned with the lack of anything to secure me to him. I’d already almost fallen to my death twice in just about as many days, and I didn’t want to make it a third time. However, there were bony ridges that protruded from his spine so I wrapped my arms around these as best I could and held on for dear life.
I pointed to the mountain we were going to explore and William was the first to rise. I watched as he spread his wings and effortlessly lifted off the ground into the air, soaring up higher and higher. I didn’t remember the first time I had flown with Thomas, and the second time I had been panicking about a lot of things, so this was the first time that I truly got to experience it.
Thomas dipped his head and stretched out his wings, he bent his legs and then in one smooth movement he seemed to catch the air underneath him and rise. I had been expecting a sensation similar to flying in a plane, with a lot of rumbling and clumsy rattling as the plane broke through the layers of air, battling with turbulence, but it wasn’t anything like that. It was smooth and natural, and quite wondrous.
As we ascended through the air, the wind blew the hair away from my face. I looked down at the jungle as the island rushed away below us, and I gripped onto Thomas a little more tightly, the inherent fear rattling around my mind. My throat ran dry for an instant, but as Thomas leveled out and flapped his wings I became more comfortable and relaxed a little, he was a big dragon, and it was unlikely that I was going to fall off.
Thomas made no sudden movements and the flight was smooth. He seemed to glide and soar rather than swoop in. William was ahead, looking like a blot against the sky, and I was in awe of these two men, these two dragons.
We flew up to the first mountain and circled around the great pillar of stone, inspecting the weathered rocks. We flew past impossibly close and Thomas banked his body so that I could reach out and brush the surface with my fingers. However, there didn’t seem to be any entrance to a lair of any kind, although I was given a stark reminder of how impossible it would have been to climb this mountain. There were barely any footholds the entire way up, it was almost a sheer drop, and it struck me that I was in a place where likely no human had ever been before. Part of the thrill of archaeology was coming upon a place that had been lost for centuries, and knowing that you were the first one in a long time to step into the forgotten world, but this was entirely different. As far as I was aware, I was the first pure-blooded human to be around these mountains.
We flew past the first one and since there were multiple targets to scout, Thomas and William decided to split up and explore different ones. We banked to the left and flew around another column, descending down, and then rising up again as we circled the mountain, as though we had been caught in its orbit. Still we hadn’t seen any sign of an entrance and I worried that we weren’t going to find anything; that Dragon Island was just a myth and we had been led on a wild goose hunt. It seemed that all the lives that had been lost in pursuit of the mystery of Dragon Island had been lost in vain, and a sick feeling permeated my stomach.
Thomas flew away from this mountain and surged towards another, gaining speed, and I imagined that he was growing as frustrated and impatient as I was. When we first set out on this expedition, I thought they were just bored thrill-seekers who wanted some excitement. I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be as passionate about this hunt for the truth as I was, but I had mainly come here to seek my parents, while they were here to seek the truth for an entire race. I was humbled and awed by the secret history that had been woven into the tapestry of the human world, and I wanted to help them learn more about their past. I imagined my parents had been filled with a similar desire, which was likely why they had helped Thomas and William’s father in the first place.
It struck me as intriguing how the decisions made years ago had effects that rippled through our lives. The decisions of our parents had brought us together on this quest, and we were the ones tasked now with finishing what our parents had started, and finish it we would, one way or another, even if we had to return to the world in failure.
The next mountain again did not bear any fruit, and I was growing disenchanted. There were only a few left and I hated that our assumptions seemed to be wrong, but then in the distance we heard William roar. Thomas snapped his head around and headed straight for his brother, who was batting his wings to hover, and when it was clear we had seen him, William ducked behind the mountain. We followed him and saw no sign of him when he turned. We thought he had disappeared and I wondered if he had grown tired and was playing some game of hide and seek with us, but then we heard him roar again and we looked up. There was a crevice and a hole in the mountain through which William poked his head. Thomas climbed the air and guided us in, landing on the stone.
We had made it to the dragon’s lair.
16
The air was especially cold up here near the top of the mountain. I took a moment to look down at the jungle. While riding on Thomas’ back I hadn’t been exactly aware of how far we had risen, but one look outside told me all I needed to know. My head grew groggy with the feeling of vertigo and I stumbled back. The island was a mess of green, the jungle sprawling out like a blanket. From this height, it was impossible to make out details. The sea stretched around beyond the island, deep blue and beautiful, and for a good while the sky was just as clear, but then my eyes saw the dark rim of the storm, the natural barrier that made it difficult for anyone to come in, and I wondered if I we would ever find out if that barrier was some kind of natural force or if it had been placed there on purpose. It seemed too convenient to be natural.
I planted my feet on solid ground and looked into the dark cave. I shivered and rubbed my arms. The cave was wide and there was plenty of room for Thomas and William to move around as dragons, so it lent credence to my speculation. The cave had a ramp lining the edge which spiraled down. The mountain seemed to have been hollowed out. It was like a great big cone, and the darkness threatened to swallow us up. It went deep, deep down, likely into the heart of the island, but it was pitch black.
I looked at the dragons and they turned to each other. Thomas rose and flew into the middle of nothing and flew down, his black form melting into the darkness. Tension rose as William and I waited for his return. I jumped back as he came swooping up and held his position, his head angled straight down. He opened his mighty jaws and his body glowed from within as fiery breath pulsed out in a bright plume. It was incandescent and I had to raise my hands to shield my face from the heat and the brightness. I closed my eyes and waited for the light to fade, before I opened them again to see why Thomas had breathed fire.
Suddenly the darkness had been vanquished. I could see that there were torches placed at regular intervals down the mountain, and one burst of breath had lit them all. They illuminated a way down, but where it led to, we couldn’t tell. There was only one way to find out.
From what I could see, the slopes
that ran around the edge were wide enough to walk down, so I surmised that the dragons had spent some time here in human form as well, but I didn’t like the idea of walking all the way down the inside of a mountain. It seemed as though it would take forever.
I climbed back on Thomas’ back and we descended through the mountain to the depths that lay below with William close by us. The mountain was wide enough for a whole flock of dragons (that didn’t seem to be the right way to describe them, although I didn’t know the proper terminology) could fly as one. I was struck by the notion that coming into a place like this with no information was a challenge, it was as though it was a paper coated in invisible ink; there was meaning here, but I would have to work to figure out what that meaning was. I watched the slopes and the torches and I tried to figure out how the dragons had lived. Did they ever spread out across the island, or had they only lived in these rocky depths, keeping to the darkness aside from when they ventured out to fly freely in the air.
I was used to fantasy stories and fairytales where dragons often made their homes in caves. I wondered if there was a sliver of truth to this; if all the old stories had been influenced by the hidden truth of these real dragons, or if everything we knew had been made up by the fanciful imagination of writers over the years.
The thought struck me that if the dragons did live in caves there was a chance that some might still exist. We had only been on the island for a short while after all and may not have been privy to witnessing a dragon. The place was filled with ancient power and dragons were fabled to be long-lived creatures, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that there was a slumbering beast waiting for us. I swallowed my fear and held on tightly as we continued our descent.
It was telling how long it took us to descend through the mountain and land on the stony ground, showing the impressive height of the mountain. The stone did a good job of reflecting the warmth of the torches, and my skin prickled with sweat. The ground was chipped and strewn with rubble, and the air was stagnant and tinged with the smell of loneliness. It didn’t seem like anything had been down here for years.
I slid off Thomas’ back and looked around while he and William shifted back into human form. We were standing in a circular chamber. I craned my neck up, trying to see the top of the shaft through which we had entered, but I could only see a pinprick of light at the top, my only reminder that there was an outside world. There were huge gashes cut into the stone, perhaps indications of a fight, which would also explain why there was rubble on the floor. Splitting away from the main chamber were tunnels, with huge entrances that were made big enough for dragons to travel.
Thomas and William had reverent looks on their faces.
“Does any of this sound or look familiar to you?” I asked. They shook their heads.
“This is amazing,” Thomas breathed.
“To think that we’re standing here, that this place exists. Father was right,” William said. A somber mood came upon us all as we remembered why we were here, but it was mixed in with excitement. We had actually found the place where dragons existed. There was no denying it now. Our parents hadn’t been pursuing a fool’s errand. It was real, and we had succeeded where they had failed.
I gestured to the chambers; they split off into four directions, and Thomas chose one at random. William grabbed a torch off the wall and used this to light other torches as we walked along, making light blossom like the flowers in spring. As we walked further into the tunnel, the ground shifted from stone to dirt.
“This is clearly an old place, but it shows remarkable signs of engineering. It must have taken them a long time to hollow out this place and build these tunnels, and they must have run the risk of having the entire mountain collapse in on them,” I said.
“Why do you think they’d only have one entrance?” Thomas asked. I contemplated the idea for a few moments.
“Given that dragons are secretive, it might just be because they wanted to reduce the possibility of anyone sneaking into their lair, and perhaps there were only a small number of them, so they didn’t need many entrances. From the looks of it they would have spent most of their time here, so really the rest of the island is just a shell for their real home. That makes sense too, because if anyone came onto the island they’d have to be very fortunate to stumble along any evidence that dragons existed. Do you think that anyone else could be down here?”
“I mean, I don’t think so, but father was always skeptical about the stories we had been told. He always said there was a greater truth, so we might find one of our ancestors here!” His eyes gleamed with excitement and I was excited for him. I slipped my hand in his and smiled sweetly at him, squeezing it gently. William interrupted our special moment though.
“I don’t think you’re going to find anyone alive here,” he said, standing motionless in front of another chamber. The tunnel had curved round and Thomas and I were a few paces away from William, who strode forward. We joined him and gazed upon the sight that had so troubled him, that had led him to make such an ominous statement. Thomas let go of my hand and stepped forward. All I could do was gaze in abject horror. An unsettling feeling swam in my stomach.
The tunnel had led us to another mountain, and I assumed the others would as well. It seemed as the people who lived here had formed a network of chambers that were housed in these huge cones, while only one of them had an actual entrance. But while this led to privacy, it also lent the place the ambience of a tomb, not helped by the sight before them.
Given the size of the dragons, and the assumption that they spent the majority of their lives in this underground lair, I followed on from that to assume that this was a sleeping chamber, which made what I saw even more horrific. There were piles and piles of bones and skeletons of all shapes and sizes. I’d never seen so much death contained in one location before. This was always a risk for an archaeologist of course, having to deal with being in a place where people had died, but this seemed different somehow, and it must have been because many of the bones were charred and cracked. The ivory was blackened and a fetid stench made the air cloying and sticky. We stepped down and moved around the bones, wading through them. I picked some up, they were heavy, and I noticed that some of them were much smaller, and they could only have been the bones of young dragons.
“What could have done this?” I asked. The thought that so many dragons could be killed like this was unfathomable. They were so well-guarded and so powerful that it must have taken something immense to deal this much destruction.
“It had to be a dragon,” Thomas said tersely. He and William were tense, and his conclusion made sense. Given the accessibility of this place and the way the bones were charred the only explanation was that a dragon had killed so many of their brethren, but like so many times when I explored an ancient site, I was left with more questions than answers.
“Has there ever been anything said about a civil war between your people?” I asked.
“Nothing, but again, there’s a lot that has been lost to history; if people knew there had been a war here…” Thomas said.
“Dragons are used to keeping secrets. Do you think some have known about this? Do you think this is why our Uncle was so devoted to preventing anyone from finding this place?” William asked.
“It wouldn’t surprise me. Come, we must explore further and find out what happened here. I do not wish to look upon this death any longer,” Thomas said, and clipped his heels as he turned away. I couldn’t blame him. I imagined for him this was as traumatic as me seeing a mass grave, thinking about all the lives that had been thrown in together, all the people and souls that had been forgotten. William fell into step behind his brother and carried the torch with him. The light receded as they moved away, leaving the bones in darkness. I increased my pace to keep up with them, but as I was about to leave the chamber something else caught my eye. I bent down on my haunches and picked up the fractured remnants of a dragon egg. I turned the
thick shell around in my fingers. It had the texture of stone, and sorrow filled my heart. A life had been ended before it had even begun, was there anything sadder?
I pocketed the shell and ran up to Thomas and William before I was left in complete darkness, falling into step with them.
“Do you think it could have been for treasure? Was this place robbed?” I asked.
The brothers glanced at each other. “I suppose it’s possible,” Thomas said, “but I hope there’s some other clue around here that points to what’s going on.”
We walked back to the main chamber in silence, for there was much on our minds. We took another tunnel and this led to a chamber that was empty. We were puzzled at first but decided that there was little else we could do than turn back and hope that one of the other tunnels led us to something useful. The third tunnel was again empty, and by this point we were getting frustrated. It was becoming clear by now that we weren’t going to find an ancient dragon waiting to greet us, and so we felt more free at expressing our frustration. Thomas and William were less patient than I was however, for I had the experience of knowing that sometimes you had to wait a long time before you got what you wanted.
“Guys, please calm down. I know this is frustrating for you, but trust me, I’ve seen other sites like this. We still have one more chamber to explore, and if that doesn’t have anything specific then we’ll just have to piece together what we can from what we can see.”
“And what can you see aside from a massacre?” Thomas spat. I ignored his tone, knowing that he was in distress at the moment. I pressed my lips together and composed myself before I spoke.
“When we landed, I noticed that there were claw marks and gashes on the walls, and the presence of rubble on the floor. It’s clear that there was some kind of conflict, which suggests that there was more than one faction of dragon here. Now, if our assumptions are correct and there was a small community it means that likely it was one side versus another. We’ve seen that the dragons were used to shifting into human form because they went to the trouble of creating the slopes around the mountain, but I would say that they spent most of their time in dragon form. I also think it’s pretty clear that something has been taken from this place, because I don’t see any reason for these empty chambers, unless there were way more dragons than we believe. The fact that so many of the dragons were in that chamber tells me that whoever killed them did it why they were sleeping, and to kill that many dragons it must have been more than one.” I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the scene that must have happened. It made me uneasy to think of such vicious destruction, but it was my duty as an archaeologist to put the pieces of the past back together.
