When We Were Dragons Read online

  Brandon Berntson

  When We Were Dragons

  Print ISBN: 9781500987244

  Ebook ASIN: B00CDVZP7C

  Copyright © 2013 Brandon Berntson. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this book may be copied, sold, or distributed in any way.

  Cover art by Ursula Dorado, used by permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, places, characters, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  WHEN WE WERE DRAGONS

  by

  Brandon Berntson

  For Shaylyn and Taylor,

  Lucas and Jacob,

  Kennadi Reese, and Jude Love

  Magical children, all.

  Though most are no longer children.

  1.

  The Collision

  2.

  A Giant Made of Amber Quartz

  3.

  Coming Together

  4.

  Flowers for Carl and a Belated Gift

  5.

  Karen

  6.

  Charlie

  7.

  Cerras

  8.

  Pandemonium in the Land of Magma

  9.

  His Hand in Mine

  1.

  The Collision

  We came here a long time ago, when we were dragons. There were a lot of us then, before our worlds collided: Lane, Murrochoe, the Old Ones.

  My name is Justin Silas. I’m from Amberlye, an eastern city on Paramis, and I’m a dragon. I know what you’re thinking: How can a dragon talk, let alone, write? Your legends concerning dragons, of course, are not the same as ours.

  On Paramis, dragons have two identities. Although, we don’t appear human, we have human forms. I, Justin of Amberlye, stand at seven feet, two inches tall. My skin is slightly reptilian. My dark red eyes (so I’ve been told)—to mortals—look evil, but I assure you, I’m a gentle giant. Random patches of scales splotch my skin. Two hooked protrusions—hints of wings—are visible on my back just under my shoulder blades. My wings are not fully exposed or completely visible until I change. My skin is a fiery mix of orange, red, and black. Karen says I’m a walking conflagration as opposed to her bright, shimmering lilac and blue. I have jet-black hair, which somehow—still unexplained to us—disappears when we change. We carry no weapons, but we breathe a blistering cloud of fire.

  I’ve read similar tales concerning your folklore. There is the legend of Nu Kua in China, a goddess who mothered dragons who could shift from mortal form to dragon form, and they could soar to the highest Heavens or the deepest oceans. This is similar to our kind, though we were not born from goddesses. Dragons on Paramis are born from fire.

  According to the western world (where we ended up), dragons are terrible beasts. I read we were considered manifestations of evil doing, even guardians of treasure. The people of Earth say they’d never seen a dragon until we came along, except in picture books and movies, yet there are plenty of legends concerning us. We are not monsters, at least not all of us. Many are guardians, it is true, though not of treasure. Dragons are watchers and protectors.

  Here on Earth, life is more technologically advanced. Gadgets, gizmos, and trinkets of all kinds baffle me to no end, and I puzzle over them endlessly, trying to figure out how they work. Of course, after the collision, many of these gadgets stopped working altogether, and things became more primitive.

  Paramis is a world without cars, streetlamps, cell-phones, laptops, or modern appliances. Our people (which is a mix of men, women, children of human origin, dragons, and Old Ones, who are more like wizards) are not ruled by a government. They grow their own crops and live off the land. There is trade aplenty. We have a barter system based on abundance and need, and where there is need, abundance is meted out. It is simple. We have large harbors, countless ships, and teeming cities whose entire economy is based on this. The Old Ones enforce the laws, which come from our god, Cerras. The Old Ones keep to themselves and are rarely seen, except by dragons. Humans, much like Earth, are content with agriculture and trade.

  Great forces were at work in the land, and we began to wonder if those forces contributed to the collision. Something was different about us, and something was different about the people of Earth. Karen mentioned it to me shortly afterwards:

  “It’s as if I can feel who I am, but I’m a stranger to myself as well. I don’t understand it. I’ve never felt this way before, Justin.”

  Karen is a beautiful, tall, and graceful dragon. She is slightly shorter than my seven-feet two inches. She has powder blue skin and black eyes with jet-black hair. Karen has a gentle, quiet acceptance about her I admire. She never gets angry and never raises her voice. She is always calm and sensible in the face of danger, and she is light years ahead of me.

  I do not possess her patient quality, however. I am quick to wrath, and when I get angry, my once red eyes—so I’m told—turn a smoldering black. My skin swirls with the color of fire.

  I met Karen in the city of Delayne, a western city on the continent of Mandabelle. Karen has a knack for stories, and children flock to her from all over to hear her weave strange, sometimes true, sometimes fictitious yarns. I’ve seen, at times, hundreds of children, sitting around her, staring with wide, unblinking eyes while she embellished tales of the Old Ones, dragons, and men.

  I knew what she was talking about, though. I felt a stranger to myself as well.

  It was a soulless, aimless time on Paramis before the collision. Everyone was restless. Cerras slept, and Lane was plotting, and the people of Earth felt much the same, at least from what I’d heard. They, too, anticipated a strange, colossal event, and afterwards, they seemed energized, as though some bright, miraculous light hovered just beneath their skin. Not all of them owned it, of course, but it did remind me of Dilla-Dale and the Old Ones, which I thought odd.

  The answers, of course, eluded us. We were the magical ones, were we not? Earth had never, as far as I’d heard, owned such power before.

  But I wondered…

  Magic on Earth came in the form of trickery, illusion, a form of deception. The names Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, among others, propped up, mere charlatans. The magic on Paramis was not trickery. It was quite real.

  The collision combined both worlds, Paramis and Earth, as ridiculous as that sounds. Sacrifices were made. While the collision shook and wiped out Earth’s modern conveniences, Paramis, also, suffered a depletion of its magic.

  Some of our world, however, still exists, vestiges of its history, as is the case with Earth. Canastelle is still an icy region to the north of Amberlye, magical glaciers that look like massive blue Popsicles jutting high into the night sky. The Forests of Glammis, haunted woodlands, are still intact as well. Rumors say Glammis breeds fairy-folk and magical elves, but most of those stories—as your dragon legends—are the stuff of fairy-tales and folklore. There is my home, Amberlye, a modest city on the edge of the eastern sea, which I miss terribly. There is Delayne, where Karen comes from, and that is another teeming port, though much larger than Amberlye. I could go on and on about Paramis, but we’d be here a while, and I have a story to tell.

  According to your scientists, the collision was an impossible event. It should not have been possible, not without universal ramifications and catastrophes on both sides. Earth should’ve dropped from its orbit, sending the entire planet into a frozen tailspin, wiping out all life.

  But that’s not what happened.
/>   The reason both worlds survive is simple.

  Magic.

  Somehow, in ways even the Old Ones aren’t aware, Earth and Paramis fused together, making one, very strange, very unordinary planet. But despite the magic, tragedy ensued.

  Electricity is no longer a luxury. Vehicles are accessible if you can find gasoline and a car with all its moving parts, but most people travel by bike or horse now. Roads lead to abrupt dead ends of grass and walls of towering rock. To the naked eye, it is a strange, colorful, versatile, and bewildering place, yet somehow, extraordinarily unique and beautiful at the same time. The modern technology of Earth merged with the magic of Paramis. For a while, it seemed they’d cancelled each other out. We learned later—and quickly—this wasn’t so.

  Most of the people from both worlds and dragons wondered why Earth and Paramis both, when there were so many other constantly rotating worlds in the ever-expanding universe. We have our suspicions, of course, but it’s hard to understand.

  The collision claimed many lives. It happened during the year 6133 on Paramis, which was 2024 on Earth.

  I was walking hand in hand with Karen when it happened. Though we love to fly together, we also like to stroll together hand in hand and take in the sights, looking up at massive cliff-sides, the stars, or walking between the gnarled boles of ancient trees while listening to the nightlife.

  We were walking along the base of the Mountains of LaSie next to the Corralie River when the first of the tremors shook the ground at our feet.

  Just as quickly, everything went black, the moon and the stars. Screams sounded from nearby villages. Confusion and chaos shook the world apart, and it continued to writhe underneath us.

  “Justin!” Karen cried.

  Clouds swarmed with vicious speeds across the skies. Something extraordinary, even horrifying was taking place, but we had no idea what, and we were helpless to do anything about it.

  I kept my hand firmly gripped in Karen’s—for as long as I was able to at least.

  The sky turned a molten, muddy, blood color. Even the stars—as miraculous as it seemed—seemed to fall from the sky, swirling and tumbling together. The collision was like a giant god holding two worlds in each palm then smashing them together. A myriad of blue lights arranged themselves in the night sky, then dispersed like rocket-fire. Lightning flickered behind the clouds. A rumble shook the firmament. People thought the end was near, which was what Karen and I assumed.

  “Maybe this is the end,” I told her.

  The ground loosened, swallowing villages, houses, and buildings, but then it did something miraculous. In another strange shift, everything seemed to melt back together, reforming and reshaping the land into a great melting pot of houses, trees, mountains, villages, cars, trucks, and buildings. What came out was something like an abstract piece of worldly art on a very grand scale.

  I lost contact with Karen, my hand falling away. I remember reaching out, then nothing at all.

  When I awoke, strange creations dotted the land. Paramis and Earth were now one. Only at the time, we had no idea what had happened.

  Massive hunks of metal were visible, wheels, headlights still on, not driving on the road anymore, but partly submerged by the grass and dirt, as if these strange, man-made configurations—cars, motorbikes, houses, and telephone poles—had become part of the land in their own unnatural, yet fashionable way. Car horns sounded until the batteries died. Trees grew from solid slabs of concrete. Concrete emanated the glow of lights, at least for a while. Automobiles, motorbikes, had somehow meshed and merged with wood, water, and stone. I didn’t know what any of these things were, of course. I was seeing it all for the very first time. Paramis, our home, had been invaded by ancient relics from an unknown land.

  But Paramis and Earth were still here, and although, there were casualties, many had survived. Of course, we didn’t know about Earth yet, not until later. We were still trying to figure out what had happened. We were alive, at least some of us—two completely different races separated by galaxies and stars, light years beyond comprehension…the other side of the universe. Yet, we were farther from home than we’d ever been. Somehow, someway, magic had brought us to another galaxy, and we’d collided with another world. We had not been knocked out of orbit, nor had Earth. We’d merged, been remade, and suffered losses on both sides. We lived on a single planet with two vastly different races, beliefs, customs, perceptions, and philosophies, and many weren’t very happy about it.

  New things merged with the old, combining wood and steel, rock with plastic, all the assortments and accoutrements you could think of. To say the collision disrupted the land, well…that’s what the Earthlings call, “an understatement.”

  Cars and trucks had sunk into the earth, grills matted with soil, twigs and grass growing directly from chrome and tires. Telephone poles, streetlights—all gone or strangely altered—were now a mixture of rock, wood, and steel. It perplexed, allured, and was strangely mind-boggling at the same time. A once asphalt intersection was now a grassy knoll with streetlights suspended over it by two elm trees. Twigs and branches with meshed aluminum and wood remade a stop sign. Comically, the white paint spelled the S and the T, while twigs and leaves made the O and the P. Crystals and gems replaced metal streetlamps, sending out natural auroras of light, instead of the illumination made from electricity and bulbs. During the collision, the stars—swirling and falling from the sky—hovered now inches above the ground, huge white balls of silvery brilliance lighting up the neighborhoods, villages, and cities. You couldn’t look at them for long without blinding your eyes, and they were everywhere. While some hovered inches above the ground, others remained high in the air next to rooftops and trees. Stars, apparently, come in all sizes. Maybe these were stars of a different kind, or a simple light sent from magic to illuminate a newer world. Some were as small as golf balls, while others were the size of large vehicles. All day long, they shift ever so slightly. At night, you can watch them move, as if they’re trying to return to their places in the sky. All of them pervade the surrounding areas. These stars are now scattered across New Earth and Paramis Altered.

  Roads travel for blocks at a time until they abruptly end in a wall of boulders or a sudden mountainside. Some roads go on normally for miles, then end into a copse of aspen or pine trees, sometimes rivers or other large bodies of water. It’s quite astounding. Ancient, gnarled trees from Paramis mesh with steel beams and metal framework, making half-trees, and bizarre, leafy-looking structures. Windows in houses have turned to leaves. Leaves have turned to sparkling glass. The silver grill of a car emerges from the bole of a tree down the block from where I write this, but strangely, the rest of the car has disappeared.

  Bizarre, yes. It was “an understatement.”

  What happened to the forest and rivers, the Mountains of LaSie where we’d been walking minutes ago? Was this a dream? Who were these people around us wearing strange clothes of all colors and styles?

  Apparently, if you’ve never seen a dragon before, the sight is not a pleasant one. Even though we hadn’t transformed into our dragon forms, we were still frightening to look at.

  People fled, panicked. Someone threw a rock at me, chiseling the side of my head, drawing blood, and sending me—as quickly as I had come out of unconsciousness—into darkness again.

  When I woke up a second time, I shook my head, and decided to look for Karen. I only prayed she was alive.

  My knees were shaky. The screaming continued. The confusion around me only made my head throb. People were in pain, some being attended to already. Dragons as well. People from both worlds administered treatment while others yelled and screamed. I was trying to place who these people were. They looked no different than the men and women of Paramis, but they were dressed in garments I’d never seen before.

  How long was I under? I blinked several times, smelling smoke. One second, I’d been strolling with Karen under the Mountains of LaSie; the next, pandemonium surrounded me.<
br />
  A loud, painful ringing was in my ears. My head throbbed from the rock someone had thrown. Despite feeling woozy, I trudged on.

  With relief, I spotted Karen’s lilac form under a large pine tree, electrical wires hanging from the branches. Christmas lights blinked on and off. We had come to Earth at a festive time of year, I would learn later.

  Her chest rose and fell. She was lying on her side, one arm covering her face. She was alive at least, and I hurried over, kneeling down, and gently shook her powder blue shoulder. Leaves and twigs were stuck in her raven black hair.

  “Karen,” I said. “Are you okay?”

  She stirred and rolled onto her back. Her eyes fluttered, opening, and focused on me. Karen has the same shade of eyes as her powder blue skin, a transparent, icy blue.

  “Justin?” she said.

  “Hi, beautiful. Glad you decided to stay a while.”

  She blinked several times, sat up, and grabbed her head. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But be careful. Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so, just…stunned.”

  I helped her to her feet. Together we took in our new surroundings, along with the bedlam.

  Karen was looking at the strange configurations of buildings, houses, trees, and cars fused together, making the most ludicrous structures you’d ever seen. The important thing was we were alive, but our lives, and the lives of the people here, would never be the same again.

  The sky was a molten, reddish black. The clouds were thick, charcoal-colored with scarlet tendrils woven underneath. The wind carried the smell of fire and rain. We’d gotten off easy.

  “We should find the others,” Karen said. “I hope Gill is okay.”

  I nodded, agreeing. Gill was her brother, whom we hadn’t seen in some time. He was usually off on one of his adventures and would visit when he got around to it.