Dragon of deja vu
I tell you the tale of the valley beyond the mountains. Long ago there lived a proud family of dragons. They were celebrated and loved by the people of the nearby kingdom. Magic was strong in their family. Each of them had some wondrous magic ability, except for one. One dragon of the litter had not developed any powers. His brother had control over the growth of fauna, his sister could manipulate the weather. Together the two of them could turn a lifeless desert into a thriving forest. But the one dragon was very ordinary and unremarkable. He did not grow jealous or bitter of his family. He was satisfied with himself.
Years passed and they grew into adulthood. He even managed to find a mate. This dragoness had the power to create peace. Whenever she was around, anger evaporated away like a puddle under the scorching sun. The kingdom nearby grew wealthy over time after regular visits from her. Trade agreements were reached easily. Trust and charity were plentiful and commonplace.
The land was being changed by his siblings. It was once a dry plain where healthy wildlife and ambitious plants were never seen. But it was changing into a beautiful meadow where small trees arose. Wild deer moved in and thrived among the foliage.
His mate loved exploring the changing land often taking him along with her. He was happy to accompany her, but he much preferred the view of the land from the air. She knew this and accompanied him on these flights. They brought joy to one another throughout the years. The thought of being the only dragon without powers stopped occurring to him altogether.
However one night changed this. He slumbered in their hole and awoke in a strange place. He left the hole finding himself in a dense forest. After finding a clearing, he took to the skies to look around. Thick green masses of leaves was all he could see. Yet the place seemed oddly familiar. The mountains and the ocean were in the same place he was used to seeing them, but the mountains were now coated in the forest that extended from below. After a long flight, he returned to the hole from where he awoke. This mystery would be easier to figure out when he wasn't exhausted from flying. When he awoke, he was next to his mate in the meadow once again. It must have been a dream, but it seemed oddly lifelike. He told his mate about the dream wondering if it was something most magical dragons had. She told him no, but was interested happy to see her mate as excited as a curious hatchling.
The next night he had the same dream, but unlike a dream he was in control and could explore as he wished. Hours later, he noticed his reflecting in a body of water. He was larger and appeared to be quite older than he thought he was. It soon dawned upon him that he was in the future. Not just seeing it through some crystal ball, but was actually living in the future. Every time he fell asleep in one time period, he would awake in the other. His memory of the other was always vague and hazy being the nature of dreams.
This was his power. After several days of comparing the landscapes, he and his mate became convinced it was truly the case. She was very happy that he had found his magic. One day she asked him what their family was like in the future. Upon investigation that night, he found no sign of her in the dream. Nor did he find anyone else he knew. He searched for the nearby kingdom to give them a visit hoping to find the descendants of his human friends. No such luck. He did find the kingdom, but rather than greetings of of joy and hospitality, the humans of the kingdom acted as if he was some alien to their lands. Dragons did not visit this kingdom and he could not recognize any family names among those few willing to talk to him. He was shaken by this and tried not to speculate about why this was. She comforted him explaining that their magic gifts were difficult to control at first, and his view of the future was probably very limited. Very little of dreams can be remembered, and he probably just couldn't recall seeing anyone he was looking for.
This did not stop him from exploring further each time he visited the future and worrying more and more why he found nobody. Seeing her couldn't slip his memory that long could it? This explanation was starting to fall apart and so was he. His mate never failed to keep him happy, but a gnawing feeling of anxiety grew inside of him. Had everyone left him? Was this some other universe that existed outside this space?
His thoughts plagued him, and it was even worse in the future. From his mind bubbled up memories that he was certain had not yet happened. The empty woods had given no answers, so he turned to his memories of events that had yet to happen, or already had. The shifting of time was disorienting already, and memories were tangled. He started to turn to memories of his mate. Now and then he would occasionally get freakish moments of deja vu with his mate having remembered the memory he had in the future of the actions they had just done. Happy occasions were giving him mixed feelings as these memories would resonate as he was living them.
His mate grew concerned for him and asked him to relax. Using his new magic so heavily would certainly bring him stress and bad health. But the curiosity could not be denied when he was sitting alone in the dense forest. He would stay awake longer to remember more. Memories associated with places would flash in his mind as he explored the place more. The plants had taken so long to grow. Seeing the life growing had brought them so much joy. The plants from his brother's magic were of such diversity, many were completely unknown. His mate had taken him exploring among the colorful bushes and young trees. Sometimes she would go off by herself when he wasn't in the mood.
One time she didn't come back for a day. She had left to go walking when he was feeling particularly moody. She had eaten some plant that had made her pass out. It was dismissed at first, but she soon became ill. Around this point in the memory his body denied him further sleep deprivation and he was forced back into the present. After telling her that he remembered something bad about odd plants, she suggested that his worrying might be influencing his memory making him imagine new memories that never happened.
He sincerely was hoping this was the case because the next visit to the forest made him recall her death. The illness was brought on by a strong poison in some kind of berry. It proved to be fatal. What was once a vague feeling of unease weighing on his back, was now a terror like needles on his insides. He recalled the grief brought on by this. It was not the fault of his brother for he knew nothing of the plants his magic created. It was not the fault of her, for enjoying the fruits of the land was typical and this had never happened before. Fault was unimportant but his mind fixated on the idea. Why had this happened or was to happen?
In the meadow, he tried explaining what he could recall of her fate. When she had at first been interested in his dreams, she now resented them. She told him that he was just imagining all of this. He had wanted power of his own subconsciously for so long, his mind was fabricating these dreams and memories of the future. He wanted to believe her but the forest would not quiet his mind.
He recalled what happened after her death. He had been dependent upon her powers to keep him happy for so long, joy was almost a forgotten skill. Without her visits, the citizens of the nearby kingdom grew disagreeable and trading slowed. Civil war broke out and the kingdom collapsed.
While in the meadow he did his best to keep these thoughts out of his head, but his memory seemed to grow sharper each day. What was once vague and tangled was fitting together into a clear path that he was living through in the present. Deja vu became more and more common. Knowing little things before they happened grew into a habit. He tried changing little parts of the future, but as his actions were carried out, he recalled from memories of the future him carrying out those actions like inescapable prophecy.
He urged his mate to not eat any of the fruit of the forest, knowing one was out there that would lead to her death. But he had grown hysterical. She no longer believed what he would say, and treated him only with pity for going mad. He tried to warn her, but he himself even knew he sounded mad remembering that he had done so. Finally the day came. She had left him alone after one of his fits of paranoia. She did not return until the following day. He held out hope that he had been going mad or this was another time that this happened. But this was it. She grew ill and in about a week, she was dead.
Mourning came in a pattern that seemed like clockwork to him. He was going through the motions of a memory he had gone over several times. First his sister stopped by, then his parents and his brother. Then at last the humans of the kingdom visited and they gave a funeral. Ultimately a strange human ceremony, but he treasured their kindness knowing he should savor it while it still lasted. A large white headstone was made with ornate patterns of the fallen beauty and placed in the meadow atop the place of her burial. He reflected upon this kindness as he sat under the largest tree in the forest. Imbedded in the tree, was a white stone surface. It was covered with moss and dirt, but he wiped it clean to reveal the ornate patterns underneath. He reflected upon the time this tree had grown from her tomb. His brother swore no responsibility for the tree saying it grew with vigor beyond any he had ever known.
He wept remembering his brother now. His family had grown distant from one another after she died. They too had relied upon her powers to keep peace amongst themselves. Now even the slightest conflict provoked such ill feelings, that isolation became preferable to companionship. His life in the present moved on. He just watched solemnly as the tree grew and social structures fell apart. The present grew into the future where he started dreaming about his memories of the future. He had come full cycle forcing himself to live in dual life through the memory of losing his loved ones over and over again. Memory and reality became a blur. He simply knew the past, the present and the future, and all the while was filled with the feeling of guilt. He should have been able to stop this from happening. No matter how many times he tried to change the future, he knew and remembered that it would never and did never work.
It's uncertain whether or not he ever had these prophetic dreams in the past. After the death of his mate, his sanity dwindled. It's very possible that his madness created the memory of these dreams in the first place just to bridge the loops of the twisting memory brought about by old age. Others would disagree, but not even the dragon himself knows for certain anymore. The dragon lives there to this day. Either a somber prophet or lunatic living in a hole beneath the tree. The tree and his memories are all he has of his loved one. Travelers tell that they can hear his roars of mourning each night as he relives the memory again and again. This is the tale of the valley where lives a dragon wishing he never had magic.
