Ignited By Fire

The Bonded Years

Long ago, we were one, the people of the Sorra.

We thrived with the desert, and built our cities from stone, with large sprawling stone houses, schools and places of worship and entertainment that expanded as the decades passed, the miles of sandy desert as far as the eye could were fertile for our crops and ways of life.

From the beginning, the dragons shared this land with us, finding home in the hundreds of caves in the mountains that edged the Oke Sea, occasionally coming down to hunt in the woodlands.

On occasion, individual families bonded with the dragons, and as a society we lived in peace and harmony for many years. The legacy of the Bonded Years is still present today, with detailed stone carvings of dragons and their young found in places of worship, the details so refined that even decades later it was clear how painstaking the process was to complete. Paintings of this time are still depicted today, appreciated more by the upper class as art, and as a part of history. I had always been fascinated by this time, eager to hear any stories about the bond between the dragons and my people.

Everything changed in the third year of the drought that plagued us. Food stores were depleted, and many got desperate watching their young and their old waste away to nothing. Men weakened, the elderly died, pregnant women lost their babies, families mourning children that hadn't been born. It was then, in which the men of Sorra looked toward the caves in which the dragons lived.

The hatchlings born to the dragons were smaller, and unable to fly in the first weeks of life. Their mothers moved into the lower parts of the mountain when they gave birth in order to be closer to the woodlands to hunt. It was during this time that we began to hunt them for meat. As the newly hatched dragons couldn't fly, the meat was tender, and the protective scales they developed in the first year of life hadn't hardened enough to be impenetrable, with a copper arrow able to kill a young dragon on impact. Although significantly smaller than their mothers, the meat of a young dragon was enough to feed a large family for over a month.

At first, this was done quietly and led by the Baru family and many of their friends who had decided to follow, who were hungry enough to break the unspoken agreement between our people and the dragons.

In the fifth year of the drought, the people of Sorra went to war over the hunting of the dragons, the Nadir family fighting fiercely to protect the dragons, despite being weakened by the drought themselves. Before it was done less than a year later, we had managed to decimate more than ninety percent of the dragon population, and those that remained flew high enough into the mountains that we could never reach, destroying the natural paths that led up to the peaks.  Only accessible by flight, the only reassurance that they still inhabited the land were the screeches of play, anger and sorrow that occasionally pierced the night, and the glint of the scales highlighted by the moon. Even that, however, had ceased long before my time. 

The war did not only decimate the dragons. The people, divided over the horrors the Baru family inflicted on the people and the dragons and disgusted by their view of the land as something to be conquered and drained instead of revered, split into two. And with an ideological divide that could find no middle ground, the Nadir family broke off into West Sorra, vowing to protect the dragons and the land we lived on while the Baru held the mainland.

It has been said that as a thank you for the vow to never hunt the dragons, the land was blessed with the breath of fire as a year later, the drought in West Sorra ended.