The Story
A dramatic beginning to the story would have been if the dragon had appeared from nowhere. But it hadn’t. They saw it coming from fairly far off. Far enough away for panic to set in. Airgid was sitting on the windowledge of the pub across from the small village bakery eating a fresh piece of warm bread and watching the activity around her. She’d always enjoyed just sitting and watching people. Old Shanda grinned toothlessly at the plump baker’s assistant as she handed him a steaming loaf of bread. Drokbar, the town’s practical joker, his innocent look broadcasting to everyone that he was up to something again. Airgid had grown to love the people in this town, especially troublesome Drokbar.
She wasn’t from the sleepy village of Pashtu, but the villagers had adopted her as one of their own. She had stumbled into the valley of Pashtuana out of the Dragonsjaw mountains, bleeding and blackened, her body burned as if she had been pulled from a burning house and she was barely conscious. Drokbar had found her while herding sheep. Her paleness stood out in the meadow, even covered in ashes. He was brown from working under the sun and she looked nearly colorless with hair near as white as her skin.
Drokbar was only a young boy at the time, but already had a reputation as a jokester. The villagers hadn’t believed him so he stole one of the blacksmith’s horses, a cart from farmer Thaner and brought her into the village himself.
The bumping of the road as she lay in the back of the cart was excruciating. By the time Drokbar brought her to the village she was unconscious. Her clothes were burned to ash and blisters covered her skin. Red dragon, the villagers knew. Red dragons were very common in the dragonsjaw mountains as far as dragons went. Mean, jealous and prideful, they’d swoop out of the mountains and take what they wanted-jewels, gold and other treasures. Fortunately for the tiny village of Pashtu, there wasn’t anything the dragons wanted and they hadn’t had a dragon encounter in decades.
The villagers had nursed Airgid back to health and taken her in. Airgid couldn’t remember what had happened to her in the mountains or how she had gotten there. There was a blankness in her mind about the life she had lived before Pashtu that terrified her. Most of her life was missing. Whatever had happened during that time had almost led to her death. She knew she had been banished and could never return to her home hundreds of miles away, but even this banishment she couldn’t remember. She only knew because of the brand on her hip. A dragon with its wings drooping and its head to the ground, its tail curved under the dragon to meet the lowered head in a complete circle-a brand of exile. The skin had been burned deeply so that it stood out clearly. It was fresh when the villagers found her and even ten years later, the brand still ached on occasion.
Airgid had no idea what she had done to deserve the brand, but when she looked at it she felt such deep and anguished shame that she knew she was better off not knowing why. She was better not knowing why her family had banished her and hoped for her death in the Dragonsjaw mountains.
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