Chp.35: The queen of the valley

Neytiri soared placidly above the valley she used to call her territory, her eyes darting from side to side to admire it in its entirety. She wasn't hunting: hers was a simple flight of pleasure. Even though dragons spent most of their time doing nothing more than eat and sleep, occasionally it was nice to fly just for the fun of it.

Flying was always a beautiful feeling, even for those creatures that were naturally inclined to do so. Taking flight and soaring through the air, watching the world below her shrink until gigantic trees were the size of ants, gave Neytiri the feeling that she could encompass her entire territory. It was as if she was a supreme entity and everything below her had to do as she wanted. Which wasn't so much different from reality after all.

As far as she could remember, she had always been the absolute ruler of that land. Since she had come hundreds of years ago and settled there, she had found no rival who really dared to threaten her supremacy. The few newcomers who used to pass through the valley had learned to avoid that place and now kept away from there, and apart for the few times she had called them to breed, no dragon had ever come there.

She was the absolute ruler of that valley, the queen in the truest sense of the word. Her every whim was law. If she wanted to eat, she hunted what pleased her most and no one could oppose to her choice. If she wanted to sleep, she could do it anywhere she felt comfortable, whether or not it might already be home to some other creature. If she wanted to drink, she went to the lake and drank all the water she wanted, and none of the inhabitants of those waters would have dared to attack her. In that valley, she could do whatever she wanted.

Neytiri loved her lifestyle. Sometimes it was a little boring, but it was certainly better than having to constantly fight and flee, as she had done for decades before she managed to find that beautiful valley. She had lost count of how many times before she had collided with newcomers or even with other dragons; she had risked her life for too long. Compared to that time, her current placid and quiet lifestyle was much preferable. She enjoyed being the queen of the valley and had no plans to change, at least not in the foreseeable future. The valley gave her everything she needed and no one came close to her: what more could she want?

Nothing, that was the answer. She had no reason to want anything else. She had literally won in the race for survival, unlike what probably happened to her brothers and sisters. Neytiri no longer even remembered their names: even if they had been very close for a few months, the ruthless laws of the world where they lived had inexpressibly divided them. Many of them had died even before they left maternal supervision, and she had no idea what had happened to the others. They were probably dead too. Maybe someone had escaped that fate and like her found a safe territory of her own, but honestly she didn't care. She had always relied just on herself to survive, and what little affection she had developed for those of her own blood quickly faded over the years.

Now, even if she met her old family again, she wouldn't have treated them any different than any invader, and they probably would have done the same to her. That was the nature of dragons, they protected what was theirs from everything and they had no lasting emotional bond. Neytiri was a fervent believer in that law of nature and she didn't care if it was right or wrong. All that mattered to her was that her territory remained hers, always and only hers.

But suddenly, she felt something. Her nostrils flared as a peculiar smell made its way into her olfactory tract. After all those centuries, Neytiri had learned to recognize every single smell present in her valley, and she knew exactly what that was: something burning. Precisely, wood.

Her eyes narrowed. She hadn't used her fiery breath to set anything on fire, not recently at least. Of course, it could always be a natural event: it wasn't uncommon for a fire to start on its own, for example from lightning or dry grass. However, the sky was clear and the air temperature was quite cool, making these assumptions very unlikely. Also, the smell was too faint to belong to a wildfire, as if something was stopping the fire from spreading. Which left her with only one option: intruders!

The only ones who could light a fire and prevent it from spreading uncontrollably were the newcomers. Neytiri flapped her great wings violently and flew at full speed towards where the smell was coming from. There she found a small column of smoke emerging from a small fire burning in the center of a camp. Some newcomers were sitting around it. They had a human-like appearence, but with pointed ears and long dragonfly wings. If Neytiri remembered correctly, they must have been fairies.

The great dragon wasted no time: as soon as she saw the intruders who had dared to enter her territory, she saw red. She swooped at them with a loud roar. The fairies saw her coming and tried to escape, but Neytiri spewed a torrent of flame from her mouth. When she was done, there was nothing left of the entire camp and its inhabitants except smoking ash.

Neytiri watched her work with satisfaction. She didn't care what the fairies were doing in her territory, she wouldn't even have let them walk around it, let alone camp there. She was the only one who could dictate law in her valley and the newcomers weren't welcome there. If they dared to come there, that was the fate they deserved: to be burned by a fire so hot that it didn't even leave the bones intact.

Neytiri flew away satisfied. Even though she was still angry that someone had dared to enter her territory, she wasn't about to do anything else. She had already killed the culprits and that was enough for her. After all, it was certainly not the first time that a group of newcomers dared to enter the valley. It had happened so many times that even though she hadn't kept count she was sure it was over a hundred by now, and the one of the humans a few months ago wasn't certainly the last.

Normally, she would have forgotten that affront in a day or two. After all, from her point of view, being angry with the fairies was like for any newcomer to be angry with a fly for months. It would have been ridiculous.

The problem was that this time after squashing the aforementioned flies, more other ones arrived. The next day, Neytiri awoke to the distinct smell of another fire. She rushed out of her cave like a hurricane and again she found fairies camping in her valley. Once again, she set fire to them and burned them until they were eradicated from the world. She couldn't help but feel a pang of pleasure as she heard the brief screams of the newcomers as they were brushed by her fire, and that were charred alive just a second later.

Neytiri was very annoyed this time. Added to the anger at the intrusion was the fact that this had happened twice in a row. Never in her life had such a thing happened to her. From her point of view it was like an insult: it was as if the fairies were telling her that they weren't afraid to come there and challenge her authority.

Things got worse when the event was repeated for the third time in a row. When Neytiri smelled fire again the next day, she flew with such speed that she generated a violent blast so powerful that the trees below her bent, even though she was flying several dozen meters high. This time she didn't even leave time for the fairies to see her arrival: she hurled a jet of fire at them while she was still very far away. This was even more terrible than the other two times, since the fire had had time to cool down before hitting the fairies, who therefore didn't char immediately but burned very slowly in an agony of screams and pain. Neytiri was so furious that she even stirred the ash with her huge paws, wishing she had more intact corpses to lash out at them.

But of course, that didn't help. The next day the fairies were there again, and the next, and the next. For a whole week Neytiri found the fairies encamped in her territory. Her anger became more tangible every day, to the point that she started breathing fire into the sky and breaking rocks to release some stamina, and all the creatures in the valley were terrified and hid as much as possible fearing her wrath. This also made a little more difficult for her to find food and increased her anger even more.

In the end, she had enough of it. She decided that it was time to do something, something more concrete. If the fairies wouldn't have stopped coming to her valley, then she would have killed them all before they could! Neytiri didn't like the idea of ​​leaving her territory, but this time she was way too angry. She was willing to ignore if some newcomers dared to enter her territory, but after so many had dared to come to the valley, she could no longer tolerate it. For the first time in many years, she would have left her territory, even if only for a short time. After all, she knew exactly where the fairy city was: it wasn't far away and indeed she could have reached it, burned it and gone back in less than a hour.

Of course, attacking newcomers was still a risk. The newcomers could be very dangerous. But by now she had made up her mind: she flew into the sky and let out a roar so loud that the whole valley could hear it.

"I've endured too much!" she growled angrily as she stared at her great territory, which was now being continually threatened and usurped by the pathetic creatures. "Apparently the people of the neighboring forest have forgotten that they shouldn't come here. I will have to correct this mistake. Now they will see me and remember who is the only true queen of this valley!"

The great dragon rushed to the mountains and quickly overcame them. Her scales gleamed as they were struck by the morning sun, and the sound of her wings caused any creature flying nearby to flee. Her fury was almost palpable, and no one with sanity would have attempted to approach her.

As Neytiri flew away, someone was watching her. That someone was Haku, who was smiling satisfied. "Right. Fly fast, mother. You have work to do" he said as he watched the great dragon disappear into the sky.

Of course, the fairies had never come to Neytiri's territory. They were too busy with their war with the ogres for one group of them to come there, let alone several groups in a row. It had all been a plan hatched by Haku.

The rune of invisibility (or better, the rune of illusions!) could create very realistic illusions. Haku was already able to create images and make them speak as if they were real. To fool his mother even further, he had built a camp with some of the things he had stolen from the fairies or had snatched from their stolen corpses after a battle with the ogres. And then he had also used those same corpses to spread the scent of the fairies in the camp, to make everything more realistic. He, on the other hand, had had to work very hard to hide his scent and his tracks. After all, he was trying to fool an adult dragon, the creature with the best senses in the world, so he couldn't afford to make mistakes. He'd been lucky that Neytiri was angry enough to incinerate the 'offending newcomers' before she got too close, or she might have noticed that those illusions didn't have body heat or the electric field typical of living beings (both things dragons could sense).

In the end, he had gotten what he wanted. He'd had to push his luck many times, coming here every day while Sarpa took control of the ogre army. But he had finally managed to piss off his mother enough. And just in time: Sarpa had just become king the night before! He too would have been happy when he found out he didn't need to attack the fairy capital since a dragon had already razed it to the ground!

And Haku would finally have known if the gods were a real danger or not. If the fairy capital was destroyed, all of them would have died; even if the gods did not intervene in the affairs of mortals, according to legends they did when it was for saving a race from extermination. Therefore, now Haku just had to stand by and see what would have happened.

He immediately started to run. He didn't have a chance to outrun his mother's wings, but he wanted to get close enough to see at least half the battle.