Past the Point of No Return

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

The cryptic remark kept sifting through Karri’s thoughts as she abandoned the council. Concluding a long and dire meeting, the elder scribe had turned to her - as she often did - and shared yet another small, indiscernible piece of a puzzling narrative that surrounded the Valley’s origins.

Karri’s feet slid about in her tired boots, splashing along the mucky riverbed. Loud squelching squeaked from each light step as her instinctive footing fought with a careless gait. The young girl’s mind was drifting through important elsewheres.

It was a given that the Valley was going hungry. It was a perilous risk to leave, to summit the rocky cliffs that were slick with waterfalls, like blood trails emerging from the Earth’s body. Few of the group’s best hunters had managed to escape its grasp, most falling prey to the dense, jungling tendrils that hid raptors like fangs behind smiling lips - the lushness was an enticing facade.

Early in the meeting, Karri had observed the scribe’s face etch a rather odd complexion at the flock updates. It seemed the bush moa birds that dwelled in the Valley had finally been hunted through, leaving no more than scattered feathers as a reminder of their existence. Adelaide’s expression, the pencil dropping from her mouth, eraser at last free of her gnawing, had shown with the darkness of irony and the familiarity of things known long in the past. Her surrounding council weren’t phased by the news, curt nods and sighs rusted into passive discussion of the next options. Perhaps Adelaide’s tendency to listen and write, amassing data like leaves in a cinched river, allowed her to see a fuller picture, a more correct order of events, than the rest of them.

In fact, upon the tragic news of the moas’ demise, Adelaide’s face was more than mournful, it was remorseful. And disappointed. Weary wisdom lines dug deep into the spongy forms of her cheeks and forehead. She even reddened a dusting in shame, the short and surely dull pencil peeking its way back into her frown. And so Karri mirrored her mentor, confused to be emoting the guilt and regret that didn’t feel quite applicable of the peaceful scribe.

The riverbed began to be disrupted by thick, twisting roots that explored outward under the water and sifted solidly into the mud. Weaving about the gnarled legs, Karri made a practiced turn into the forest. She savored landmarks that escaped the gaze of all others - the boiling-pot-sized rock that boasted a streak of quartz, the young willow tree that stooped just a tad lower than the rest, and the specific stump that colonized a breathtaking biosphere of moss and fungi.

Hooked behind the rippling trunk of a gum tree, Karri plucked her spear: a homemade weapon of strong hardwood wattle with a flint tip she mothered many moons carving. She had bound the two pieces together with coral vine stems. And along the wooden handle, she had taken the dyes of flowers and saps to paint the faces of different creatures she encountered in the wilderness; They were reminders both of why she carried the spear and why she hoped never to use it again.

The Karri Forest, for which she had been named, was rather dry aside from the flood zones of the rivers. Karri trees stretched sixty meters high in faithful guard over the Valley, soaring above the heads of other eucalyptus, tingles, and jarrah trees. Adelaide had taught the girl a full complexity of the forest, even claiming that the Karri trees would one day - many years in the future - burst with flowers. The child’s eyes had squinted and lips had pursed, but she siddled quiet hope that her namesake could evolve into something so beautiful.

“Please be there, Zanth.” She whispered to the wind, traveling further upstream, swift in distancing herself from the mulling village. The undergrowth was sewn with vibrant ferns, mosses, and liverworts. Karri could name every plant that took root in the same red dirt as herself. Agile feet wandered of their own accord, lingering over each stone and stump with a passing caress given to friends rarely seen. Yet she remembered the trail, its path as fresh in her mind as the earlier anguish at the council house.

As the meeting folded its leaves in close, a consensus was reached by the elders and hunters alike: the Valley needed to secure a new food source. And the next simplest creatures to perish at the hands of hungry stomachs, were the dragons.

Small, swishing wisps of creatures, the dragons were hardly larger than the jungle perch that swam alongside them in the rivers. Intricate scales and delicate fins sliced through the waters, and awestruck children sank deep into the muddy banks to spectate their playful acrobatics.

In Karri’s mind, the dragons were categorized between the fish and the birds. Growing into the scribe’s role, she often detailed observations of the Valley’s inhabitants in a worn notebook that Adelaide had gifted her. The cover treasured a fading illustration, drawn by a younger version of Adelaide’s crinkled fingers, of a pair of dancing fish unlike any Karri had ever witnessed. Koi, the elder had told her, knitting a story of her past with loose, silky tendrils of thought. As the scribe was to the girl, the koi seemed akin to the dragons. Vermillions, ochres, and ivories caressing the currents, minds surfacing to the same narrative.

Karri relished the tranquility that emerged from staying still long enough for the world around her to burst from hiding - to shake off the silence that slunk underneath logs and settled into damp moss, to brush back the bracken from bright eyes; and to continue on in their paths forged uniquely by the wayward compasses within them all. Thus it was through this methodical documenting that the girl came to know the animal she called Talia.

Karri passed through a sunlit glen, marigold-colored blossoms of desert flame flowers swelled the field, lighting the whole meadow aglow in amber. It was here that she knew her companion would be sleeping in the sun, stretched out on flat, warm rocks. They always met in the yellow meadow.

“Talia, let’s go!” Karri called, the spear weighing heavier in her small hands. An impulsive darkness struggled in her stomach and crossed her downturned eyes. Then the brush began to rustle and twinkle in sway, parting to reveal the mother thylacine that made her heart bloom.

Adelaide had once said thylacines were like small tigers, but Karri had never seen a tiger and never heard the odd name brought up again. However, she imagined the striped back and strong muscles of Talia on a larger frame in awe. The dog-like creature walloped against Karri’s legs, flattening into her gentle rubs and scratches. Karri knelt, and the animal huffed the girl’s unkempt braids and snorted an eager greeting. A smile split her dry lips, and she studied Talia’s satellite ears swivel, tuning into countless sounds in the busy forest. Adelaide had also once told her a tale of little blinking lights up in the sky - not stars - called satellites. They were made of curved metal, some of them even larger than the village huts, and they scrutinized sounds so quiet and so far away that no one else would ever have heard them. The elder recollected that in her youth, they were so invasive that the night sky cradled more blinking lights than blackness, and she mourned that the stars had faded even longer before.

The strange pair embarked, letting the breeze wash over them like river current. Karri imagined that the wind swishing through the trees sounded like the ocean, the loose and pull of the tides. She dreamed of seeing a body of water that enormous someday. Talia’s padding feet might leave ambling trails in the sand, just as her own often did in the muddy riverbanks. And she conjured the scent of salt and blue flax lilies, running her fingertips through grassy leaves.

Karri had vague memories of those vibrant, indigo flowers. A man used to stomp heavy rubber boots on the woven doormat of the hut where she grew. He’d smell of saltbrush and sea, crushing blue bundles in his hairy arms. He was a weathered man, gone far more often than present. Adelaide’s humming in the kitchen would pause as she welcomed him with warmth, situating the lilies in chipped terracotta pots. Karri was perplexed by the scribe’s attachment to the man, seeing how he was so unreliable. The old woman didn’t care for impermanent things… or maybe she simply no longer does. Eons downstream surged the ocean’s wrecking waves - and even hunters were eventually barred from the dangers.

When Karri surfaced from the past, she was still surrounded in thick forest. And it still sounded like an ocean, except the rushing was now real. Talia cleaved into the lake, spraying darts of water through the air. Karri’s thin lips turned upward as cool droplets splattered across her skin. Her laugh was a youthful melody rivalrous to any kookaburra or lyrebird belting in the canopies overhead.

The girl wandered the rim of the lake, insignificantly small amid the galing force of the waterfall’s nadir, until she came to an alcove in the stone cliff. Her hand traced along delicate lines of umber and iresine red, following as a story unfolded - faces with thick outlines and dark eyes, fingers and toes pronounced like petals on stalks. Cave paintings, Adelaide had called them. That was the last time the two were this far away from the village - and it was the furthest they ever traveled together. The scribe warned her to never again venture out without the hunters’ aid after the ozraptors ferreted a path down into the Valley; and after the menacing night when Karri and Talia first met.

A slap of drenched fur against her calf tore Karri, again, back to the present. Talia battered ahead, lashing through a thicket of vines and bracken at the back of the niche. The girl followed, feeling the familiar steep rise of rock, stepping up sculpted stairs in a tunnel that filtered its way upward through the bluffs. Many moons had passed since she last summited the run, so her stomach toiled heavy, a fat monitor lizard boiling away in blazing sun.

“Oh, please be there, Zanth,” She repeated, resting a steadying hand on the thylacine’s striped back. Her thumb bristled against the raised scar that slashed Talia’s hindquarter, and she again wished to abandon her spear.

The staircase swam through the rock, and the darkness indulged Karri’s mind to wander anew. When she was younger, Karri would scamper out to meet Zanth once a month, splashing alongside seemingly infinite gasps of dragons in the waters above the ridge.

Yet the longer the village roots seeped into the Valley, the more dangerous the Karri Forests seemed to become. Horrid, thieving hunters zipped through the trees, hacking dirt and stone alike with cunning claws. The ozraptors, luckily, were rather small - stretching up only to the hunters’ waists. They had avoided the bustling of the village thus far. But they were hot and brutal, preying on the rivers’ jungle perch and dragons, and sieging hunting groups that strayed into their territory.

Karri had been detailing Zanth in her notebook on the wicked day ozraptors raided the bluffs. She and Talia had grappled back through the undergrowth into the stepping tunnel, flinching the beasts’ shrieked warbles with throbbing ears. The young girl was certain that Zanth had fought the raptors and retreated upstream. In her innocent eyes, he was immortal.

A shiver traipsed her shoulders. She would search for Zanth yet again.

Atop the cliff, there was a serene pool. It was gorged swollen by a river and emptied over the edge in the great waterfall that reaches the village, having long ago weathered away the Valley from surrounding plateaus. Karri and Talia hiked closer to reach the pond, tussling through a dense understory of wisteria and orchids, shaded by looming acacias.

As they broke the treeline, yellow light washed over the land. Seemingly floating above the pool was Zanth, the golden dragon. Its shimmering tail fin curled beneath it, resting on the water’s surface, never breaking the tension; hovering. Karri’s torso uplifted for finally seeing her old friend safe. Yet the relief dissipated. Kneeling on the maroon bank, was an old woman with a rounded back and faded robes.

“We have to save them, Karri.” Adelaide whispered, facing the glowing creature with a calm awe that befell familiarity - hence Karri wasn’t the only scribe muddling her rules.

The young girl gravitated closer, the thylacine now forgotten for the puzzling sight before her, “The dragons,”

“Yes, we mustn't lose them again. My family fought such wars to get back to them, back to this time.” The scribe then regarded Karri, a wide, desperate urgency in her eyes - unlike the steady willow of a woman that Karri had rested beneath her whole life. “The Valley is green, Karri. I was brought up in a broken world. A disaster. Everything was grey. Everything was poison. People were nearing extinction.”

Karri knelt beside her mentor, clutching her wrinkled hands. Her heart tumbled, feeling as though raptors were circling. “What happened? What would cause that?”

Adelaide’s tired eyes darkened and closed. “We did it to ourselves… But now we have a second chance. A chance to keep balance and protect the bounty of this land. An exceptional chance to live alongside so many unique creatures that were lost to my world.”

On occasion, she heard talk of Adelaide’s world. Others in the village labeled it blasphemy or a sad showing of age. Karri begged it was simply her mentor’s childhood or dreams. She ignored it. “How do we do that?”

“You have to persuade the village. It falls to you, Karri, as the next scribe; the next record keeper of future, present, and past.”

The girl’s mouth remained closed, unsure of what shape to form to relay the worry at such pressure. Zanth glided across the water, coming to a pause before the pair. Adelaide rested her forehead against Karri’s furled brow, a weary smile complicating the path of tears down her tanned cheeks. A lurch tore through the girl, she wanted to freeze and laze time piecing together the troubles and confusion. Yet time on this Earth was a precious thing. The dragon enveloped them, fins revealing their length in air as effortlessly as in waters. And the golden brilliance sizzled white-hot until the girl was forced to close her wide eyes.

Silence echoed. Yellow dust fluttered away in Karri’s breath, taking with it the last remnants of Adelaide in the breeze. Amber ocean laved over her as Zanth submerged once more. The world seemed lighter in color, as though everything was filtered through suns. Karri felt lighter. Although, there was now a tangible weight crystalizing above her. It was delicate while sharp. It was impending, curious. In a wash of tide, Karri waded through everything of the cosmos. She inherited Adelaide’s fatigued knowledge and recollection of the past of the Valley, and of the scribe’s earlier life in a different land and time. She felt the anguish of a dying world, she lived the hope of a second chance, and she finally understood her place in prehistoric yesterdays.

The lightness allured her eyes upward to see ringlets of ivory nestle shades of spring. Beautiful, spiraling flowers adorned the Karri trees like precious, suspended bursts of memories. Over the cliffs’ edge, the forests facaded snowfall. And like the Valley’s metamorphosis, so was Karri on the verge of blossom.