HONORABLE MENTION, 2021
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY MARIE RAVEN
In my country, we live with dragons. Our region is remote and the way dangerous, but travelers, perhaps having heard a rook in a distant land, come to seek the truth in the rumor.
Every legend of a dragon is the tragedy of an adventurer. One narrow path winds up our mountain, from soft moss in the blue-green forest to hard stone beyond the last stunted trees. There, provisions spoil and nightmares invade sleep.
They’ve heard of the fiery breath and diamond scales of a dragon who has spent a thousand lifetimes stealing precious things. Those stories don’t explain that this is the dragon of Hate, or that the only thing you take from a dragon’s hoard is what the hoard takes from you. Rumors are never quite truth.
There is a dragon on the mountain, but so too are there dragons throughout the journey to get there. A forest along the way is so laden with songbirds they look like fruit ready to drop from the trees. Here is the place of the hoard of Intentions, and seekers return broken by the drag of things left unfinished in their lives. There is another dragon to the south who hoards Dreams. No one returns from going that way at all.
In one way, we are not so different from the dragons: we gather small slights, fears, and ambitions. Many of us starve for love or wealth, even among abundance.
My own collection of books and writings was not unlike a hoard. I studied the dragons because, while there’s no great wealth to be lifted from a dragon’s treasure, I wanted to believe we could unlock something valuable from understanding them.
Perhaps that was my folly, but failing at it, I thought I could at least map their territories, thereby making them easier for the unprepared or the unwary to avoid. Instead, I wound up contemplating my map on a late autumn evening, intending to find a dragon of my own.
My adventure had begun with the village smith in the warmth of the public house.
“We ought to invite a dragon of Happiness to make our fair hamlet the place for its hoard,” she said.
We had laughed. Even with thin harvests and too much smoke on the mountain, we made our own fortunes and had done so for centuries.
But later that night, I stared into the unmarked map spaces around our village as though I might see the dragons there from within my own dim room. I gathered some provisions and set out at first light.
In the river, there is a dragon who hoards Restlessness. She is seldom seen, but you smell the wind and brine of her if you linger too long on the bank. That one built a bridge near where we draw our water, connecting the village earth to the forest beyond.
I had never crossed it. When I put a foot on the stones, I thought I saw a swirl of scales beneath the water.
After sunset on the third day, the moon rose so bright I walked on past nightfall. Paper birch like silver needles pointed to the sky, their pale leaves rustling overhead. Thicker forest and darker shadows lay ahead. I pressed on, imagining I’d stop for the night at the forest’s edge.
All at once, the shadows rushed me. Rooks blackened the sky and beating wings filled the wood. I threw my arms around my head and ran, fleeing the hoard of Rumor.
I didn’t stop running until the cries of those black birds had faded. Here, moonlight split the canopy in dappled patches, and I braced my hands on my knees to breathe and collect my bearings.
Among the litter of birch leaves and spruce needles, tiny trails marked the forest floor. They did not criss-cross everywhere; they flowed instead in one direction: toward, or away, from some precise destination. As my eye traced this cartography, I met the gaze of a silver fox. Her muzzle was going white with age, and her golden eyes were keen and careful. She turned and paced down one of the paths.
I followed at a respectful distance, and in time a little stone structure with lit windows coalesced out of the darkness between trees. My guide went ahead and vanished into the hut without hesitation, but I slowed as I saw the silhouette of its resident.
Inside, a dragon sat before a loom. The curve of her great back and long neck cast an enormous shadow in the firelight, while her nimble claws made simple work of weaving. I crept closer, trying to glimpse some evidence of her hoard and the ineffable danger it might pose me.
She passed shuttle into shed, then paused as a white mouse appeared from under her stool. Its red eyes glittered and whiskers twitched in the gentle hearth light. Setting the shuttle aside, she plucked a morsel of bread from a platter beside her and offered it to the mouse.
The fox emerged again, hopping onto a footstool beside the mantel, and leveled her golden eyes at me. I froze, failing to duck away before attracting the attention of the dragon.
We shared a long, uncertain stare.
Then she spoke. Her voice was so soft, yet I felt it echo in my heart as the forest trembled.
“Would you like to come in?”
Every legend of a dragon is the tragedy of an adventurer. I looked into her ancient eyes and stepped into the warmth of her hearth fire. My sea-wind dreams, my sleepless nights and ink-stained fingers, my maps and my books all fled from me like dark birds into sunset. The space in me for all I had yet to learn and give to another so that they too could continue learning filled with stillness.
I set my bones beside the fox and the dragon returned to her loom.
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Marie Raven is an American writer and musician setting down new roots in southern Norway, though the landscapes of her fiction could be anywhere and probably are. She spends most of her time writing long and short fiction, playing guitar poorly, singing well, and struggling through the magical territory of becoming bilingual as an adult.