There weren't always dragons in the Valley. As strange as the thought may seem now, there weren't ever dragons anywhere except for those written about in myths and legends or found in books or films. Stories conjured by the imagination of a species that constantly craved distractions of the sort. Imagination, now there's a word that you never give much thought to in a serious context, it's no small thing it turns out. Imagination, if harnessed by those with the proper resources, given the right conditions, and a conducive environment, can become a power. A power that can ride on winds strong enough to pierce the thin veil that lies between the realm of its namesake and the realm of reality. A power, that can change everything.
There was a time when flying through the air like a bird was nothing more than an imagined fantasy. Mankind started to imagine not just the vision of it but also began to envision how it may be done. A single seed, planted into a mind capable of letting that seed grow, eventually bore the fruit of flight, not in fantasy, but in our reality. Over the next hundred years, the idea of mankind taking to the skies became an everyday thing. Common enough that the labeling of fantasy to flight is hard to believe. Today, it's almost laughable to think it could ever have been a fantasy in the first place. It's hard to imagine a time when humans couldn't fly across the world to any desired destination. In my lifetime, I have never known a time, until recently, when taking a flight wasn't a reasonably simplistic and safe option.
It's a foreign concept to think about how something that has existed for the entirety of one's life, at one point, didn't exist at all. To have been only an imaginative thing, purely fantasy, and thought impossible by the masses. It's not that hard to think about now, though. Not since the impossibility of ever seeing a real-life dragon became not just a reality but the full-fledged living, breathing, flying nightmare, of the entire human race.
How did this happen? Well, it all really started back in the mid-19th century. A time when the curiosity of mankind about how humans seemed to inherit specific traits gave way to a new variety in the field of biological research. A category that we now call genetics. Gregory Mendel, a scientist at the time, became overly curious about how people seemed to have the same traits as others in their lineage. He suspected that these traits were passed from parent to offspring in some capacity, so he began to pour his attention into trying to prove that suspicion. Harmless enough as it may have seemed at the time, the power of his imagination took on a life of its own. It became so strong, so intense, and so inspiring that it became contagious. As effortlessly as a gene from parent to their offspring was passed, so did his desire for answers flow straight into the minds and ambitions of his colleagues.
Mendel's work over the years eventually built a framework that was used to understand some of the foundational principles of heredity. His experimentation produced a methodology that became a prototype that's still relevant today in the field of genetic discovery and understanding. As the years passed, both mankind's curiosity and knowledge increased. The exploration of genes didn't stop with just answering the age-old question of heredity. Scientists kept the experiments going; they learned that genes are made up of DNA and that DNA has a double helix structure. They learned chromosomes provide the nice neat packaging of genes, that they traveled in pairs, and that every species has a set number of them. Next came the discovery of how to clone DNA, resulting in the birth of the first cloned being, a sheep named Dolly, back around 1996.
The desire for knowledge, to imagine the hows of the impossible, didn't stop there. Research and experimentation continued. The DNA of animals was cataloged and spliced together as humans started to believe that they too could harness the creative power of God. Then 20 years ago, it finally happened. Mankind's curiosity and drive to know more, to do more, to ask if something could be done, while neglecting to ask if it should be, birthed something that the world had never really expected to become a reality.
Archaeologists had discovered well-preserved cartilage cells containing viable samples of dinosaur DNA 10 years prior to the creation of the first sky demon. At first, the mission was to study, never was there an initiative to create. The powers signing the checks weren't interested in the potential liabilities of making the fictional Jurassic Park a real place, not yet anyway. But then, one of the researchers had a thought, an idea, a curiosity which, like Mendel's, quickly became a seed that grew. As previously mentioned, the human imagination can be a very powerful force, so powerful that it can not only change how humans live and advance but, if pursued in ignorance, could also cause the destruction of our entire species. This researcher, whose identity has never been publicly revealed, without realizing it, became the catalyst for just such a thread of imaginative disaster.
Allegedly, what started off as a rhetorical joke, a "what-if," a "wouldn't it be cool" type of comment, spread like a flu through the ranks of the small research lab. The researcher's spark of imagination caught fire in the minds of the other 3 researchers. If the newly discovered 75 million-year-old partial chromosome yielded enough DNA to reconstruct just a few of the tens of thousands of possible prehistoric genes, then perhaps those genes could be combined with that of a reptile, theorized to be the closest living kin, to complete any chromosomal gaps. Then perhaps they could reconstruct a complete chromosome pair. This could theoretically be enough to work with. Sprinkle in a few gene splices here and there, and it became a soup that the team eventually realized may be viable enough to incubate.
The team, knowing that they would never get an official green light, and feeling confident that this genetic soup wouldn't come to full fruition, wouldn't live, yet could potentially provide invaluable data, decided no harm could really come from 'conducting a small internal experiment'. The data they thought, would provide insight into the viability of multi-species gene splicing, and although they wouldn't be able to share any of that data publicly, they agreed it could still give them a competitive advantage. It was a great plan, solid, except for one tiny detail. The genetic mix actually did survive. The research team took measures to keep it all under wraps by hiding any proof of the experiment that they could. They kept quiet even when Alba, the name they had given the experiment, was born. For months they were successful; nobody knew anything other than the fact that the research team was still analyzing and mapping the discovered prehistoric DNA samples.
Alba was strong, healthy, vigorous, and showed signs of having the intelligence of a species comparative to that of a dog or a cat. They were able to teach her a few tricks between the times that they poked her, probed her, stuck her with needles to take blood samples, and of course, strapped her down to make sure she didn't wander anywhere that she could have been discovered. Things were going well, on track, nothing to be concerned about until Alba aged 6 months. At which time, the team noticed that she had started to grow much quicker than she had previously up until that point. They got bigger equipment and stronger shackles hoping that the growth spurt would be over as quickly as it had begun. That hypothesis sadly proved to be irrevocably wrong.
Instead of Alba's growth slowing down, it sped up exponentially. At 6 months, she had been the size of a large cat. 1 week later, she had grown to the size of a large dog. At the 7-month mark, she was as large as a well-fed adult mustang. Her growth didn't seem to be slowing, and the team, who had increasingly become concerned that the experiment would be found out, decided unanimously to terminate Alba. They wouldn't be able to sustain a secretly safe environment for a living creature any larger than she had already become. Not without being discovered, which most likely would lead to arrest, potentially followed by some time in prison.
The decision had been made; All that was left was to see that the deed was done. But when they tried to poke Alba with a needle containing a chemical that would stop her heart, they were surprised to discover that in addition to her exponential growth, Alba's skin had also hardened to the extent that it bent any sized needle that they tried to poke her with. Attempting to penetrate her skin with any sharp object in fact, always ended in the same outcome. Even when the object was one forged from high-quality carbon steel. The only variance then, would usually end with shattered fragments when it failed to bend. So much for the age-old legends which pitted armored knights wielding lower quality steel against the likes of such a beast. They were also surprised when they realized that Alba's intelligence had also drastically improved. So much so that it was already too late when they finally realized that she seemed to understand what they were doing to her, that they were trying to kill her.
The details get a bit murky at that point but suffice it to say that the research team wasn't able to terminate Alba. The situation reached a critical point when she started to break the chains that bound her, also her once seemingly frail wings, which the researchers had speculated would never be functional, had matured and strengthened enough to bear her flight. The situation escalated with her eventual escape by means of destroying any wall, door, or human that stood between her, and the freedom of the open sky.
The research company informed the government, at that point fear of any repercussions aside, they really had no choice. The government, deployed the military once briefed, instructing each of the branches to bring the creature to its end at all costs. It was a threat to global security to have a new species that humans didn't fully understand flying around freely in the world. The Air Force sent an armada of fighter planes to hunt and destroy Alba, who had since flown out of the range of probing radar, and was smart enough to keep herself hidden. The Air Force and eventually their equivalent in every country that possessed air assault capability, launched into flight perpetually for months trying to locate Alba's whereabouts. These events, of course, were all kept very confidential and were never disclosed outside of small, need to know circles. So in terms of the entire world, nothing had changed, and life continued to function normally without any hint of danger to the public. To the compliment of the extensive cover-up campaign, not so much as a suspicion was ever raised any higher than the brow of a very few number of people who had happened to even notice the increase in 'military aerial training drills'.
The global joint military effort tracked signs that Alba was still alive by investigating any occasionally strange report of a very large UFO sighting that their respective government received. Though they were certain some of the reports were Alba making her long awaited appearance in monitored airspace, none of the sightings were ever close enough in either geography or in frequency to triangulate a specific location. This went on for almost a year until a squadron of fighters finally spotted her while cruising their daily flight path along the western border of the United States.
At first, she appeared only as a speck, both on the radar screen and by the retina of any of the pilots that had peered through the domed glass of their fighter jet in her direction. The squadron's initial thought that they would finally be able to put an end to this ongoing crisis. The collective consensus had been in line with the thinking that it would be a piece of cake to bring down the single creature. It was, after all, a dozen highly skilled pilots in heavily armed aircraft against one lone flying creature made of flesh and blood, of which, had been reported as roughly only being the size of an adult horse. Easy odds, right?
What that squadron leader, and the rest of the world didn't know was that Alba had had yet another surprise up her sleeve. The initial research team had observed external female genitalia when Alba was born, which had prompted only a surface-level investigation into Alba's gender and reproductive capabilities. What the research team would have discovered, had they been more thorough, was that Alba had experienced a few deviations from the research team's original genetic blueprint. The combination of genes that were used in her conception had mutated, causing her reproductive system to become capable of reproducing offspring without a contributory need from another of her species. Biology always seems to find a way to spread itself, and her biology must have had some amount of natural intelligence to know, at some level, that she was alone, born as a unique one of a kind creature. Enough to re-design itself to not need either the coupling process, nor the byproduct of it, in order for her to procreate.
What the world also had not known was that due to her reptilian genetic contributions, when Alba did reproduce, it wasn't a single offspring, but an entire clutch. A clutch that bore twenty-seven more of her kind to be exact. Her offspring, like her, had grown normally, requiring her nurturing for the first 6 months, and then also like her, had hit the same exponential growth spurt that she herself had underwent. The result culminated in a pretty big surprise when the squadron that spotted Alba and was following in a high-speed pursuit of her, arced around a mountain range that she had seemingly retreated behind. The image must have looked like a living page pulled from a fantasy novel, the squadron rounding the bend, high on the thrill of being on such a noble quest, the first humans to be on a literal mission to slay a flying, historically fabled abomination. The surprise, and sudden changes of their expressions as realization hit them that their expectations were wildly off. The fear that flooded their systems as they took in the sheer size of Alba. She had grown considerably since that last report. She wasn't the size of any horse bred or born in our world, in estimation, she was probably closer to the size of the entire horse's barn.
As the squadron hurriedly attempted to change their approach, to re-align into a more sensible attack formation, they each simultaneously felt a wave of anxiety wash over the pit's of their stomach's. The feeling told them that regardless of what came next, regardless of what formation they could achieve, it was already too late. They had been tricked, lured into a trap that they were not adequately prepared for. Alba was waiting, hovering, already in an attack position, and she wasn't alone. Behind her, all twenty-seven members of her kin were also hovering, floating in the air, waiting for the squadron to join their welcome party. Every one of them were ready for Alba to give her signal, which she did, as soon as the squadron had begun to appear from around the bend that she had known would cause them to loose their visibility of her. So much for easy odds; not one single pilot from that squadron survived the onslaught that was given to them on that day.
The official report and video clips from a few of the fighter jet's black boxes gave the world the first glimpse of real-life, living, breathing dragons. The world was forever changed, and the population of mankind was forever tamed as the years went by and the number of dragons continued to increase exponentially. The first of the long list of attacks to be lead by Alba and her kind against the threat that they deemed mankind to be, was made right here, in this very Valley. Humans fled, the military having discovered no means of killing, or even hurting the dragon kind lead to an evacuation. They relocated all of their resources further inland, giving themselves time to regroup. It didn't help. We had found ourselves on a course to be undone, by a creation of our own making, by creating something that we didn't fully understand, while bathing in ignorance and the pride of self-entitlement, gloating at our own superb design.
Fast forward 18 years later, and the war is still raging. Nobody wants to openly say it, but most of us know that it's a war that we have no real hope of winning. Not unless something drastically changes that is. Ironic, that from the list of envisioned potential circumstances, thought up by some of the top think tanks in the world, the notion of dragons obliterating the human species, would have been laughed out of even the very last slot. A poetic justice of sorts delivered to us by the byproduct of both, the power of our own human imagination, a power that had forged myth into reality time and time again, and the blinding power of human pride, that allowed the world to at first miss, then over confidently falter in preventing that new reality from being shattered.
Our world is no longer one where humans are the most dangerous species in it. It has since evolved instead to become one that the sky beasts had not only imagined, and seemingly planned, but one of which they have also taken control of. Now, all we can do is to continue to fight every day, for the survival of our very species in a world that no longer appears to include the need for, nor even a want of, the human race. Unless we can shield ourselves from the storm of change that we have started, our age will pass. And from that oblivion, from the ashes of our very destruction, the only legacy that we shall leave behind will be the rise of the age of dragons.
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