Chapter One: Wood

The wind was picking up again. Ilara hated that. Of any time for the wind to bully the world with its strength, why must it always be when she was at the top of a tree? Eastward leaning, the pine bough that had been of ample strength to hold her lean frame a few moments before was now swaying violently in the gusts that came before a storm, prompting her to slide down a branch or two for stronger bearing. This necessary move was always an annoyance, for it detracted from the allure of her stance. There is always a modicum of novelty detracted when one has to settle for the second or third bough from top, rather than the actual top. Of course she knew the reason the wind always seemed to get so strong when she ascended to her favorite terrestrial position; when Ilara climbed, it was always to watch an interesting sky. There were the usual attractions—beauty, like dawn and dusk and wisps of irregular cloud formations. But usually, like a bleeding sunrise mingled with roiling thunderheads over a distance, views most glorious produced an accompanying wind of some strength. This particular blast was a result of the storm she was studying with keen interest, rapidly approaching the slope of the mountain her current pine grew upon. For now she clung to the thin upward stretching limbs of the pine’s peak and awaited the onslaught, mindless of the pine needles scratching her limbs and the sap and bits of shedding bark sticking to her hands and hair. She was intent on the black and flashing glory of the furor to come.

She certainly wouldn’t stay up there through the storm. When the wind died deceptively down, the sky grew ominously dark and hued green, and lightening became close enough to allow thunder an immediate retort, she would slip down to the bottom like a falling cone, to land gracefully on the soft soles of her leather boots.

Only a few moments passed before the signs were clear that it was time to descend. Once back on solid ground, Ilara prepared to delight in an activity her siblings used to say suited her moodiness and esoteric personality. She liked to walk around the forest floor during a storm, allowing the falling sky to saturate her. Even the lightening and its accompanying booms did not deter her from the practice. She would often wander during the most impassioned parts of the storm, when the sheets of water came so continuously down that it seemed each drop was connected to the one before and after it.

When she found a place, between the stretching branches of two adjacent pines, Ilara closed her eyes and waited for the wind to pick back up and the rain to crash against her shoulders and head and stream down into her boots. It did not take long for what she anticipated to arrive. She stood there for a few moments, feeling each drop and beginning the tensing effort not to shiver. When she was thoroughly soaked, her jaw clenched tight, she opened her eyes and began to make her way to the river. She wanted to laugh and cry but for now she knew she had to put off the strengthened feeling of the moment; she had just had the impulse to attempt something she’d never done, and if anyone knew Ilara, they knew she was impulsive.

Rushing and dancing in its cleansing flow, the Caerith River came into sight. This was the place she sought. Slowing when she reached the riverbed and crouching down, Ilara stilled herself like an ancient stone, as if she belonged there and there she would remain until the rending of the earth. Anticipation and excitement caused her heart the boost her body required to keep warm. Blood rushed through her veins and the effort to keep still was unhindered by any need to shiver.

She waited. Her eyes were held on a single rock jutting from the undulating waters. The rain kept on and the winds grew stronger. The crashing of thunder became louder, closer. Ilara kept still, her eyes intent on the jagged rock in the river.

She had been there for as long as the storm had raged—at least an hour’s passing—when a blinding flash of light struck her peripheral vision. A tree some distance away burst out into a sizzling explosion of light and heat and the most terrifying sound Ilara had ever heard—a growling, hissing, fleeting sound of agony. Poised and dangerously used to the sudden outbursts of a storm, her eyes alone lifted and she watched motionless as elder oak’s life slipped out of him with sparks and smoke. His limbs and trunk had been hewn down the center to reveal what youthful flesh might have sustained him countless years to come. She was nearly distracted as she saw the scorched wood doused with the continuing rainfall, but her will and purpose was resolute and her eyes found their former focal point in the swelling river.

When at last the storm seemed spent, Ilara nearly gave up hope of finding what she sought. Exhaustion and hunger nearly pulled her to her feet to return to camp for rest and supper, but what remained of her dwindling hope and conviction kept her still. When it seemed like this would result in merely disappointment, there came a sudden movement under the surface of the river, beneath the skewed reflection of the sky overhead and the intermittent ripples caused by the last remaining raindrops. A vibrant blue coil was there and then gone in so little time it could not have been known if it had ever existed. Ilara remained poised. Out of the corner of her eye came the shocking realization that a shimmering blue creature was climbing up the bank and then moving smoothly over the wet surface of the forest floor. She dare not move, but a slow turn of her head was more movement than she could contain. She stared as the shimmering scaled creature crawled on its four short legs over and through the little puddles of varying depth filling every depression in the ground. It stopped when it was facing the oak still mourning the flaming destiny its height had made inevitable.

I knew it! They exist. Ilara thought as she elatedly observed. The river dragon was smaller than she had expected, but moved as gracefully as she had imagined. It was the length of a small serpent and its body was as thick as Ilara’s arm, with sharp blue spines running down the length of its horizontally coiling torso. As the sun began to reemerge from the clouds, it’s rays caused the river dragon’s scales to shimmer in hues of varying color, all complimenting the stark blue.

As Ilara watched, the river dragon had yet to notice her as anything more than a rock or some other benign fixture of nature. Its slithering gait led it to the very foot of the stricken oak, where steam still rose in the mists that lingered after the storm was spent. To Ilara’s fascination, the dragon began climbing the hot, torn trunk and climbed down into the rent wood until it was obscured from her sight. She took this as her chance and moved fluidly to a nearby tree and ascended to a low bough with a swift leap. There she perched, looking down into the oak’s corpse and watching as the blue reptile devoured the glowing ashes of the tree’s very heart.

The ethereal creature was eating the steaming wood splinters by ripping the soft innards off with its sharp jaws and swallowing them whole. Steam and smoke lifted out of its nostrils as it ate in ravenous ferocity. By the time it seemed to have finished its feast on the still warm body of the unlucky oak, the dragon began discharging bursts of bright flame from betwixt its white teeth. Its energy seemed renewed and it crawled out of the oak’s trunk and slithered animatedly right back into the river, where it disappeared beneath the flowing waters.

Ilara got down and walked, still dripping, to the river’s edge and stared down into the depths where the creature she had just seen became as invisible as nonexistence. She felt a strange thankfulness wash over her as she realized her endeavor to see a river dragon would have been fruitless had she not been present for the lightning strike of the oak, undoubtedly what drew the dragon from its watery lair. She laughed at her luck, for that is what she assumed it was.
Next time she would use mostly-consumed firewood, still hot, to lure one to the surface. It would be a great improvement to just waiting for it to rain. She had assumed from legends that rain was what drew the beasts out of the rivers, but now she suspected the truth was that these beasts required burnt or heated wood to create their own flames. She wondered what purpose they possibly had for flame underwater. She laughed. Her love of adventure and mystery had had its fill for today and she felt satisfied, but she would continue pursuing this new beast. Surely she could get a reward for such a catch in a town, if only she could find some sort of apparatus to contain a wood-eating, fire-breathing monster, even if said monster was only as large as her own arm. She’d have to find a town nearby and make some inquiries and discover if anyone would be able to pay for such a rarity—that is, such an impossibility. She wondered if anyone would even believe her. But if they did, perhaps whoever could pay for such a catch could also provide the fee to a smith for making a metal basket-weave cage of some kind. Still, this would mean she would have to leave the forest, a place of solace and solitude she hoped she wouldn’t have to leave before the onset of winter. A sigh escaped her and she admitted to herself that she could not stay here forever.

And so she headed back along the riverbed, down the mountain, to the place she had made camp at the joining of the Caerith River and the River Theine, which had brought her this far. Despite the sobering realities of her situation, she still wore the smile that the afternoon’s pleasures had brought her, the smile which obliterated, momentarily, the pangs of longing she had for her siblings all that day and the two months she’d been gone.

But now, back at camp, the glory and ecstasy of that day’s discovery took a blow. It was agony seeing once more her overturned riverboat on the shore. She could not be near reminders of her memories without succumbing to an adhesive gloom, which stuck to her and followed her everywhere until some blissful distraction made rid of it.

Despite the acceleration of gloom she knew it would cause her, she went to the boat and began to trace the intricate etchings along its sides. She slipped under it and lay on her back, looking up pensively at the carved flowers and scenes Daelia had spent so much time and dedication carving into the seats and walls of the sturdy boat. Ilara’s fingers found their way over the patterns they knew by heart and she expelled a heavy sigh, her emotions having been too greatly varied and extreme lately to have much left to express. She wondered what Daelia was doing right now; where she possibly could be; if she was all right. She wondered similar questions for all her siblings as she lay there and freely partook of the moody gloom she was so prone to.

Having no strength to continue focusing on the reminder of her sister, Ilara slid halfway out from under the boat and looked at the clear, dimming sky of evening. She half fancied she saw one of Wren’s falcons flying overhead, but it was nothing more than a common hawk.

She had lost her appetite and will to move. Her eyes shed their nightly tears, grown less and less impassioned since that first night. For hours she lay there motionless, letting the deep of night set in around her. Eventually she slid back under the boat and reached up for the blanket she kept there and wrapped it around her for comfort and to still the shivering that had set in again. It was here that she usually slept—a practice of mingled comfort and torment. She felt close to her family under this last piece of home, but the unavoidable recognition of the emptiness she felt in their loss consumed her thoughts and made sleep a difficult thing to attain. But on this night sleep came quickly, for she wanted nothing more of the waking world.

It had been this way since her journey began; sleep came at such random hours that she never truly knew time save for when she saw the movement of heavenly bodies. She usually awoke late in the day, having had no luck with sleep for many dark hours. This became such strong habit that unless she was especially depressed and went to sleep early, she would spend most of her waking hours in the darkness of night. Late afternoon became the time she awoke each day, bathed in the river, and ate her breakfast. The rest of her day was soon the evening and night, where she roamed and hunted and climbed trees to watch the moonset and the sunrise and the cycle continued. Often she would explore a segment of land around the river for a few days and then pick up and journey further south. She didn’t know what she was seeking down the Caerith River, she only knew she was living. Just living.

In the two months she had been gone she had reached a mountain called Mt. Wedra, upon which a mainly coniferous forest clung to the steep slopes as far up as a waterfall that poured down to supply the Caerith for another hundred miles. It was in this forest she had seen the dragon and had learned the reason this forest had been called Dragonwood Forest for centuries.

On the morning after she had seen the river dragon, she gathered her things into her boat and set off for a town she knew of only as a spot on a map—a map which she hadn’t seen since the day before she left her home. Of course, it might not even be where she thought it was, twenty miles further down the river, but she had nothing to lose and so she set off with little anxiety. Had she known how far from predictable her journey was about to become, she might have chosen to change her course.