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The Awakening of Dragons

Chapter Twelve

Written by Arian Mabe (Amethyst Mare)

Commissioned by NomexGlove

“We can’t go through with this!”

“It’s not right!”

“They’re our children!”

“Quiet!”

Sandra stood tall, taking the lead, the one of them who had lost a child with her partner, although she didn’t make it well-known to everyone, not when so many other things had happened to the dragons. She hissed, drawing them to a softer kind of quiet, dragons and humans alike gathered before their meeting plateau. Where torches had been turned on, brought by their human friends and family, a fire was the greatest illumination, lighting up everyone there, all that needed to be seen.

It was a blessing that their friends and family, those that had been able to come, had come back to the edge of the magic-affected zone with them, slipping by those guarding. Chaos was a good thing and the officials were not as well practised as they might have liked to think, the holes in their defence and plan allowing them to move through, even if not unseen. Oh, they knew that they were there, dragons and humans conferring, though they had more at their disposal.

“Sandra, we do not mean to go through with this and I know you do not agree with them either,” Tilsa said calmly, her voice raised to be heard, though the concern for their young ached in the pit of her stomach. “What are we to do? We can’t compromise here… And they won’t agree either.”

“No, but some might.”

Heads turned to Alan, sitting close to Darius, though the dragon and the dragoness had never seemed all that close before, not obviously so. They exchanged a look, nodding faintly, and stood together, as one.

“Did you see how the crowd reacted?” Alan pressed. “They didn’t want the same things as the officials! The head… Whatever. Everyone there was there for quite different reasons and they’ve already made their first mistake, that was if they wanted to control us at all. If they’d wanted to keep things concealed, they shouldn’t have let anything go through to the media at all.”

“Yes,” Arya agreed. “Their hand was already swayed by other dragon colonies emerging too. If they hid another, that would be worse for them. Plus, it sounded like people were expecting us by now, that bits had leaked through.”

“There had been some rumours, sweetheart,” her mother said, resting her hand comfortingly on her daughter’s thigh. “Nothing concrete, the blurry photos I showed you.”

“It was enough…” Arya pressed. “It was enough to make us real in a good way to people, for people to start thinking about us. Maybe just as a fantastical sort of thing, but if we can show them what we can do, that’s all the better for us.”

Sandra sighed and shook her head.

“Really, it is a fool’s folly,” she said, interjecting, even as the other dragons murmured around her. “They expect to hide us…but we’re dragons! It doesn’t make sense, they’re scraping at what they think they’re going to be able to do, but they don’t know yet what they are going to do.”

Alex nodded, sitting close to her wife, as they so often were situated. She leaned into Alex, seemingly unconsciously, taking comfort. For no longer was Sandra the sole mother of the flight of dragons, all of them taking on different roles within the flight, becoming the matriarchs, finding themselves. How they were to develop into a type of society where each member had some strength to give and a position to lead from, all coming together as one matriarchal society, was still to be seen…

“But that means,” Alex said, continuing from what her wife had started. “That they are struggling here. They are rushing to contain us, to hide us. Maybe they want to take extreme measures, but I haven’t seen anything to suggest that, not yet.”

Alan frowned, kneading her claws into the dirt, cutting it up, forming and shifting it. Her unrest was perhaps more unsettling than the rest.

“They could though, we don’t know that, we know that the military isn’t exactly restrained when it comes to using force…” She murmured, the others craning their necks and leaning in to hear her, not usually one of the quieter ones. “But… But I think we can get people on our side, like Arya says. I think that’s our best chance, our best hope, right now, to protect our children and ourselves.”

Arya nodded, looking from one to the other, though she already had their support: she always had done. Darius’ eyes gleamed and he gestured with a front foot, sweeping from one side to the other.

“If we show them…that’ll get us ahead. That’ll get us into a position where we can do something, not just flounder around not knowing what will happen. We have information now!”

And they had just the means to get themselves out there, even if there was not, of course, any phone signal that high up in the mountains. That was just why there’d been an emergency contact list before, though Sandra had slipped up, back then, on notifying the correct authorities as to their plans for that day. In hindsight, that still had been for the better.

But they still had phones and electronics in human hands up there, offering a means of connection that they had to make use of, quickly too, if they were to change the course of events.

Darius steeled himself. It would not be easy and the lighting wasn’t great…but maybe, just maybe, they could get enough together in time for the next day. His heart pounded more than it did when he was flying, adrenaline pumping, breath catching, his body not suited to such high levels of stress. Humans may have adapted to it, but beasts such as dragons were most certainly not used to it, not in their new bodies.

“What do you mean, Darius?” Brent’s father asked, not catching on. “What do you need us to do? What are you going to do?”

If a dragon could have smirked, Darius did in that moment, firelight glinting in his eyes.

“Get us online, make sure everyone sees this, put us everywhere,” Darius said, his tone allowing no room for argument. “The people there… They weren’t looking for ill, there was no harm in them. There was no threat there.”

Arya made a face.

“Not like there was from that Head of Dragon Relations,” she agreed. “He was as vicious as a snake waiting to strike. Yet even a snake would not strike without due need and he has no need, not now, not ever. But what power does he truly have? It’s who he answers to that we need to appeal… He’s the best we’ve got right now.”

It was not easy, everything confused, befuddled, twisted up into a mess that they needed to untangle. He was not their enemy and yet they could not help, in a way, seeing him as one, the man who wanted to see their offspring stripped of their right. Arya shuddered, though strove to suppress it. It was wrong, so wrong… Already, the mountains felt like their home, a base that they could not give up so easily, so flying did not seem right. And there was no telling just when their young would be able to fly and get about either, if running away seemed like the best option at the time either.

Wherever they went…humans would find them, she was sure. If they were looking for them, a growing colony of dragons could not go on the run forever and that was not the sort of life that any of them wanted to bring their offspring into.

What the humans, if their offspring were not granted equal human rights, would do to their children, however…none of the dragons knew. It was not a question they wanted to be answered, though they had seen enough of the cruelties of human beings towards animals in their lifetimes to know that it was not a life for anyone, not the life they wanted to push their children into.

They had to fight for their right to be.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Darius brushed past her, pushing onto a solution, something that could help, the hour already late and the night wearing on. “But they’re not important. We’re not going to convince them to change their minds, not in one night. I wish we had more time, but we don’t – but we can pull in people who have more ideas as to what dragons can do for them.”

Brent frowned, her tail flicking back and forth slowly.

“But what can we do?”

Santino grinned, standing.

“I know… Can you film this?”

It may have been dark, but it was still light enough, with the fire, for Santino to show her life breath, letting the slow, languid sweep of it across the entire plateau demonstrate just one of many things. If their medium was going to be recordings in such a way, it had to have a more visual appeal, so she grew flowers with great, folding petals, painstakingly asking them to bloom so that the camera phone could pick up as much detail as possible.

No one had witnessed Santino’s power for some time, though it was merely the most developed of them – Brent had shown the ability to use it too, along with Anniyah and Jenson, even if Santino’s was the most progressed. But it still struck awe into them, the dragons sitting in silence at the glowing bloom, tendrils of green glowing and snaking their way across the ground as if with a hint of phosphorescence. Grass sprouted in thick swathes and, for the finale, though it might not have been as impressive as a recording as it was in person, Santino grew a great oak tree, at the edge of the plateau so that they may have shade, great, gnarled roots sinking into the ground.

Where there had been rock, all broke to dirt, changing the very fabric of the mountain that they stood on in the pursuit of new life. The roots sank down and down and down, seeking out moisture and sustenance, the branches reached for the heavens, thick and flush with leaves with rounded edges, the uneven display of them traditional to the shape of oak tree leaves. No acorns, however, peppered the branches for it was not the season of that, though there would come a fair crop in the Fall of the year.

The tree rose and rose, though there was more for them to show, recording the flash of the dragons’ flight, even in the darkness, how they fanned the flames of the fire with their wings. Moving off the plateau, they set fire to the trees and smartly doused the flames, if not completely incinerating them, demonstrating their control, though to show such firepower was not, perhaps, more than something merely impressive.

Their talks, however…cameras facing them, self-conscious and shuffling, were perhaps the most compelling. They spoke of the love they had for their eggs, how they could not wait for them to meet the rest of the world, all that they had experienced as dragons, how their transformations had come about – in as much detail as they could for the time allowed.

Time… Oh, what they could have done if only they had enough time. Everything they said felt woefully inadequate, yet the underlying strain of tension and frustration was impossible to ignore. They could talk and talk and talk and yet they had to trust that all would reach the right people, across the globe and not only in their country. They would return to the ranger station at the meeting place after midday the next day, as agreed, but time was ticking and they could not tell who their messages would reach, or if they would even reach enough in time to cause a ruckus.

That was all that was needed. A commotion. A stirring, the beginning of new thoughts and ideas. They didn’t expect an agreement and contract to be agreed in a day and it would be left unfinished – but it could buy them time, time until their young hatched and, perhaps, even time until they grew larger and stronger, better able to fly and fend for themselves, with their parents.

The dragonesses, with great care, flew their human charges back down the mountain that night so that they could be back in the range of phone signal again, uploading all the videos they could to every site they could. From there, it was out of their claws, only so much they could do, hoping against hope that it was enough.

Arya closed her eyes, pausing on the ground as the others took flight in the dark. If she’d been human, she might have squeezed out a tear, yet the tear ducts of a dragon did not respond to emotion in that way. The only tears that would come from her eyes would be if something was wrong inside the inner workings of her muzzle, her body flushing out a foreign body from her tear duct, perhaps.

Please… Please, let it be enough.

The enormity of it settled over her and she recalled her speech, what she had delivered with as strong a tone as she had thought she could manage. Yet even her tail had drooped, tiredness catching up with her. Even as dragons, they were not meant to go on indefinitely. Yet all the time, during her studies, that she had spent giving presentations in the sciences set her right, her head high, her body instinctively trying to push her shoulder blades back. Maybe, one day, she would still work in the sciences, though there was a whole new world opened up to her, one that dragons had a foot in the door to explore.

But, first, she had to play her own part in ensuring the safety of their children, doing all she could, all that she and her sisters could.

“I’m Arya… I have kept my name,” she’d said, the little light on the phone showing her that it was recording, the dancing light of the fire flickering and dancing on her rich scales, though it distracted her eye. “I… I want to tell you how much this has changed everything for me. I wanted to go on in my career, I wanted to be the best of the best. And now I’m a dragon, I’m a mother, I’m waiting for my eggs to be hatched, along with my sisters – those closest to me in the entire world. We’ve seen love lost and love gained here and we know that we are here to do good in the world. We only have intentions of positive will and I want to help in any way I can… I want to make things grow, like Santino, I want to spread life to all corners of the world. I want to take away as much illness and as much suffering as it might be possible for a dragoness to do, with the help of those with me.”

It had been hard to keep going, but she’d had to. There was no other choice in the matter, not as her chest tightened with emotion.

“I need to do it, I need to do it…to be myself. This world has given us so much and we can do something to heal it, to keep this world kind and loving and safe for humanity, for humanity and dragons and every other creature in the world. I don’t know how far our powers as dragons are yet to stretch, but I want to find out. I want to have that chance. I want to bring up my children in a world where that chance is there.”

_ _

Arya had spoken about her eggs less than the other dragons, but her speech struck home, her mother wiping a tear from her eye. For her, she only hoped it had been enough.

They’d find out the coming day, time ticking away. She could almost hear the old clock from the hallway of her childhood home. Tick, tick, tick, tick… There was no escaping that clock, a constant reminder of the passage of time.

Taking a breath, she spread her wings and joined her coven in the air.

Together, they would face it all. Together.