random etchings

Story 4: let sleeping dragons lie

Elisabet was driving through the hill country, singing with the radio when the hill moved. It was subtle at first, as though the hills sighed in their sleep and settled into a more comfortable position. The road swayed, and the radio broke into static. She turned it off.

The hills were divided into a patchwork of fenced enclosures dotted with flocks and herds of animals. Along the road were stone fences, ancient and moss covered and so narrow that if she didn't know the road so well she would have slowed to a cautionary crawl. As it was, as she turned off the radio, she slowed, because something was off.

She knew this landscape, from childhood, but as she watched, it was as though the curves and valleys were redefining themselves, somehow. She stopped. It was a bad place to stop, and she knew it, but she couldn't help herself. She blinked, and she saw that the ridge that she had known all her life wasn't a ridge of earth. It was a shoulder.

Around her, livestock started running, washing up against their fences and rebounding as they tried to get away from the earth beneath their feet. She felt her mouth drop open as she realized that the shoulder she saw was attached to wings, to feet as big as her car (which admittedly was a small car, but still, feet) to a spiny tail twisting and tumbling up the hillside like the stream she remembered picnicking beside as a child.

There was only one word that could mean this. “Dragon,” she breathed as the shape became clearer and stronger, the shape of its neck dipping down into the valley where she sat in her car as though the beast had curled into itself in sleep.

“And it's waking up.” She put the car back into gear and raced away, one eye still on her mirror where teeth were redefining themselves out of a cave where she remembered playing as a child. Finally, as the hill she knew and loved redefined itself completely as a sleeping dragon, she saw its eyelid snap open and it stared at her retreating form with its vivid green eye. For a moment, she thought it saw her, but surely it was too big to pay attention to someone so little as she was.

Until it moved.

Then she knew it saw her. It reached out with its front foot, picking up her car in its claws, that looked more like fingers now that she could see it closer. It brought the car around at stared at her through the windshield. Her wheels were spinning valiantly, but in midair, all she was doing was wasting gas. She turned off the car.

In the resulting silence, a laugh passed into her mind. Not her laugh. It was a man's laugh, deep and resonant. Then a voice in her head: Woman.

She frowned. “What's going on?”

As though in answer the voice came back to her head. It's only been a thousand years that we've slept. Have you forgotten everything?

“Are you the dragon?”

Yes. It's time we woke. Elisabet shuddered as the dragon brought her and the car closer to his mouth and showed his teeth, which seemed longer and sharper the closer the got to them. By treaty, every dragon is to be granted a bondsperson to interact with the human population. I choose you.

With that, a flood of information overtook her, pouring into her head like a tsunami, overwhelming her and sending her into oblivion.

As she fainted, she knew that all over the world, the dragons had awoken, seven hundred thousand strong in every land, from the waters, from the ice, from the deserts. They were awake again. And nothing would be the same again.

Word count: 636