To Cut Flames from the Air

Chapter I Part II: The Teeth Were Unmistakable

Langley was skeptical of the claim, to say the least. "Are you sure it was a dragon you saw?" he asked.

"What do you mean am I sure?" Eric said. "It definitely wasn't a raccoon. Looked just like the ones in the pictures Elder Ake would draw."

"Well, I'm sure whatever you saw looked like a dragon, but, well," Langley said. "It's more than improbable that any are still living."

"Sheesh, stop speaking big words like that at me," Eric said. "Maybe one of them survived? You ever think about that?"

"One of them survived and then decided to... live at the border of the Agaskolten Clearing?"

"Yeah, maybe! I mean, it'd make a good hiding place since no one would think to look there."

"And you think it would be able to hide for, what, two centuries?"

"It'd just have to be sneaky."

"Eric, it's a dragon. I don't think they'd be very capable of sneaking."

"Whatever, you don't have to believe me," Eric said. "Just know that you'll be eating your words when I find that dragon again tomorrow night."

"You have fun with that," Langley said. "Just know that if you cause too much trouble I won't cover you next time."

Eric stuck out his tongue as Langley set down his pen and snuffed the candles at his desk.

∘∘∘

The two of them were set to work early the next day. Bells chimed with the rising of the sun, and the gates of the Clearing Wall parted to accept the incoming carts of returning traders. Everyone had a role within the Agaskolten Clearing, and even those too young to head a cart for trade themselves had their own chores to attend to.

Elder Brenna's place stood far from the others in the Clearing, a small and ancient house that sat neatly between the mills overlooking the wheat fields. It was one of the first buildings made in the Clearing, and predated the Clearing Wall itself, reared by her grandfather (may Patil keep him) for her parents (may Patil keep them) and then passed on to her. Its distance from the other buildings and the gates of the Clearing Walls, because of this, is understandable, but nonetheless annoyed Eric to no end, as he was regularly tasked with carrying several crates of various herbs and malts delivered from the gates to Brenna's when they arrived in the morning.

"Why couldn't she have just built her house closer to the gates?" Eric said, setting down his crates on the path that wound through the wheat fields to catch his breath. 

Already, there were workers in the fields as well, Eric's age and a bit older, tending to the crops before the sun had fully climbed over the top of the Clearing Wall in the distance. It could be said that there wasn't much within the Clearing besides wheat fields and mills, once the houses thinned once far from the gate on the Wall's eastmost point and left the center clear for tilled ground and golden waves of windswept-stems. To the Plainpeople of the North, they were mere imitations of the Sunlit Fields from Massascelge to Andorville, a checkered quilt of farmland which dwarfed the Clearing in acreage. Indeed, perhaps, the Clearing was a way for those Plainspeople who were pulled Southward by the allure of better trading with Athlascelge and Hungascelge to bring a bit of the land North of the Beoralheome with them. 

"I told you already, there were no gates when it was built," Langley replied, considerably more out of breath than Eric despite carrying half the weight of wares. "They couldn't have known where to build it."

"Okay, well then why didn't they just move it once the Wall was made?" Eric asked.

"Move the house? How do you think they'd do that?"