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I remember smoke.

The war ended when I was just a little girl, no more than five, but I can remember still the smell of smoke. The whole country still has the stain of soot on it from those years.

People don't mention the war. I'm not certain if that is because they are ashamed or if they are still afraid. Some of the older men will talk of it occasionally, the ones with burns on their faces or the ones who walk on wooden legs. The war is real to them still and you can see it in their eyes when they watch the winter fires burn. My father told me not to stare when I was young. "Anna, those men carry their injuries for your sake and mine. Do not disrespect them."

In the subsequent years of the war, one name was hard to pick. Parliament called it the "War of 1853." Newspapers took a more editorialized name to heart, "The Great Dragon War of the Second Age." Unfortunately, this one stuck, despite several other contenders for that title. My nanny, Elsa, taught me about the war in her own way. Her stories were fantastical and overly embellished, but they sent me to my aunt's library with questions.

Elsa told me once of the Leviathan of Troy during the First Age. In her tale, a giant sea dragon turned into a human and traveled to the Greek city of Sparta. Finding the daughter of the Spartan ruler to be the most beautiful woman the dragon had ever seen, he kidnapped her and fled to Troy where he intended to keep her as his consort. Elsa told me of passionate love driving armies together in a clash of blood and sweat until the dragon presented himself and dueled the Spartan king. In the manner of all Elsa's tales, the conflict between her father and her lover was too much and the girl threw herself from the highest tower of Troy. Having lost his will to fight, the dragon returned to the sea and was consoled by Poseidon while the Spartan king went to his daughter and wept till his eyes were taken by crows. My aunt chastised Elsa for telling me such macabre tales, but I adored them.

After I learned to read, I started to look for books that held Elsa's legends. I found them, but they were always in my aunt's academic histories which discussed myths and their origins. From these dry texts I learned of the other dragon wars. The myth of the Leviathan was based on an actual war that raged through the Mediterranean in the early days of the First Age. A dragon ruled Troy and sought to expand his empire by confronting the Greek free cities. The free cities banded together against the Trojan slave empire controlled by the Leviathan and his ilk. Armies of thousands of men clashed as the Leviathan's brood mothers scorched the battlefields with their infernal flame. Ultimately, they were overthrown. An Athenian king played on the Leviathan's vanity by building a great iron sculpture of the beast in feigned fealty. The Leviathan fell for the trap. When the creature came to see the king's creation, powder in the iron dragon was lit. The explosion tore the metal frame to shreds, throwing shrapnel in every direction and plunging a hunk of metal in the great dragon's heart. With the monster mortally wounded, the Greeks descended on him before he could react, hacking him to pieces as brutally as they could. With their master dead, the slaves turned against the Leviathan's consorts and progeny. Troy was freed and the dragons were killed. The battle of Troy changed the fate of the human race. The Greeks proved that the dragons were mortal not only to the other humans, but to the dragons themselves.

.

And so my childhood went. Elsa told me other stories of brave, tragic dragons and I would turn to history books to find a harsh reality of war and devastation. The world around me was no different. Despite my nanny's affection for dragons, the rest of the world retained a very bitter resentment. The villagers cursed the very word and would spit on the ground at the mention of any dragon's name. A few sympathizers existed here and there, but they would be shouted down and sometimes threatened, so they kept their mouths shut. As I grew older, I knew my father was among them.

My father, Lord Arthur Ingram, had long been friends with the Maxwell line. Richard Maxwell, one of the Wyrm's closer advisers, had gone to university with my father and become fast friends. My father sent us away the night the mob came for Richard. He had spent the evening arguing with guards, pleading for mercy, but the fear and hate had already started to fester among the populace. "They weren't just angry about the dragons' influence," my father would muse in the company of other old men. "The whole country was bloodthirsty for change, and nobles were not much safer than the dragons. It's hard to blame them. Too many winters had taken too many children."

I was just a babe, but Elsa has told me the story since. "His lordship came galloping up to the main house. He ordered all the staff to be gathered at once. I was just a chittering young thing at the time, more words than sense. I was thinkin' we were all about to be sent off. I'd heard of other lords coming in at the dead of night, drunk as skunks, and dismissing good people without so much as a note of reference. I figured I was safe though, seeing as I had you, the wee one, to look after. So we gathered all up in the main hall. And I remember it as much as it happened yesterday, Lord Ingram stood up on the stairs, looking out on all of us. He tells us that trouble is brewing in the city and that it wouldn't be safe there much longer. Great man, your father. He told his whole staff, some hundred or so, to get out of the city and go to any family we had in the countryside. Like Tabitha the cook, she had her boys living over near the river. Lots of folk had relatives out of service, field laborers mostly. Lord Ingram told the head butler to make certain our wages were sent to us wherever we went and he expected us to reconvene at the manor when he returned. That's when he gave you over to me and bundled me off up here to Lady Ethel's home."

I asked her why my father had been so sudden and adamant. "Well, I reckon he knew some things from his dealings with the Maxwell flight, family that is. They call them flights for some reason or the other, like a flock of birds I reckon. Dark days were coming and they knew it. That Wyrm was stirring up trouble and the factory boys were itching for a fight. Fore we knew anything, they were rioting in the streets. And then came that awful day. They brought Mr. Richard out to the middle of Luxley Square and told him to change. He refused so they beat him, prodded him, cut him. Then he rose up bigger than anything and tore into those boys. Not sure what they expected. Poking a dragon and threatening his life can only end one way. They threw nets and pinned him down. They'd rigged up that damned machine already and that was that. The blade came down and Mr. Richard died. Sent the Wyrm into a rage, just as your father thought. Started a war, they did."

The story was told to me piece by piece over the years. The dragons had been living among us for thousands of years, rarely changing into their more bestial forms. One of their kind took to calling himself Wyrm and preached racial purity. The Wyrm shamed his kind for hiding among humans, called them cowards. Father said that most dragons wrote off the nonsense as foolish posturing, but a few listened. Once Richard Maxwell was slaughtered, everything changed. The Wyrm's following exploded and they started raiding garrisons, weakening the standing armies in preparation for conquering the country.

"You have to understand," my father told me once. "Give a man a great weapon and he would be just as dangerous. Power is corrupting, but there was nothing inherently evil about the dragons. They were not destined to attempt an enslavement or to burn down the cities. The Wyrm took them down that path. The same as Lord Kyle made monsters of all of us. Atrocities were committed on both sides, Anna. Remember that."

A normal dragon was roughly fifteen to twenty feet in height, from the bottom of their front paws to the top of their head. The bulk of the body was usually at the ten foot level, the size of a small house. Their necks were long and serpentine while their bodies were thick, like that of a great cat, but scaled. The tail of a dragon was as round and as heavy as a small timber, capable of crushing a man to death with one blow. Massive leathery wings, usually twice the dragon's height could create a gust of wind strong enough to fell a tree. Any part of a dragon was dangerous -- scales like armor plating, claws like razors, and fangs like swords. And, of course, the fire. A full grown dragon could spray a torrent of fire up to thirty yards, igniting anything in its path. At the center of the flame, the temperature was enough to melt steel. They were not hard to paint as villains.

For decades, a true dragon had not been seen in our part of the world. Rumors abounded that dragons migrated to the New World before other settlers so that they could assume their true shape and hunt natives for sport. Silly legends. Though some dragon may have revealed himself to the Native Americans before the Battle of Big Creek, the encounter between the native army and Cornelius the Black was well documented as it marked the turning point for the British control of the Americas. Cornelius served the king as his attack dog during the imperial days. After the Natives banded together to stop European settlements from going any further, Cornelius was sent to the front line of the Royal Army. He revealed himself to the Native leaders and demanded they surrender. They did not and so Cornelius incinerated them all. The black dragon then led the charge in a rout of the assembled warriors, eradicating the army of fifty thousand in the span of a few hours. The soil of the New World was bought with brimstone and death.

Despite this grim history, the Americas were vast and unpopulated, so I imagined that some dragons took the opportunity to return to a more natural life. As a young girl I imagined coming across a great red asleep in the meadow, a curling trail of smoke drifting up from its mighty jaws. Dragons had learned to hide to be part of human society, but surely they must have yearned to be free of their smaller forms.

The Wyrm devastated entire cities as his power grew. My father and several others maintained a staunch opposition while trying to broker peace, but the populace did not want peace. They blamed the dragons for their poverty, for their lack of food, and, by then, for their lack of homes. The dragons told them to swear fealty and they would be provided for and spared, but Lord Kyle brought a different message.

Elsa's version was my favorite, "I heard it first from a milliner in Coren. He said he was there when Argyle the Bronze came to New Harrisburg. The great beast flew down into the center of the city and spoke with that gnarled voice that they have when they're in true form. The milliner said Argyle gave them a choice, join them as their subjects and slaves or be burned in their homes. Folk didn't know what to do of course, but then came Lord Kyle and his Hunters. They must have been waiting for the right moment. They sprung their contraptions and had Argyle tangled in a net he could not tear or burn. Lord Kyle himself rode forward on his horse and shoved a pike right in the dragon's heart. The milliner said he still hears the beast scream at night. I think he hears cats fucking. Pardon me, your ladyship."

As the war raged on, Lord Kyle rose to power quickly. Using his new nets and launchers he was able to capture or kill all of the Wyrm's supporters. He preferred to capture them my father told me, "Kyle wasn't just trying to win a war. He wanted the people to see that dragons could be conquered entirely, turned back into mere beasts. Water mixed with mulled fox lily forces them to change, not sure how, but Kyle used it to keep them as dragons. He bound their mouths shut and sawed off their claws, sometimes ripped them out by tying them to horses. His methods were brutal, but effective. The world saw that dragons weren't mythical creatures of power, but animals of flesh and blood, like us. He would bring them to Lady Purity, a great guillotine in the middle of Luxley, use that abomination to chop their heads clean off, and then parade it around the city before adding it to his collection."

Little of it deterred the Wyrm, I learned. He claimed a dragon's life was worth a city and Kyle's brutality only brought more to his cause. They grew more radical each year, eventually determined to wipe out humanity in the New World and establish a dragon empire in the Americas. It was bleak. Foreign powers were hesitant to involve themselves in the turmoil for fear of a similar problem starting in their own countries. The Wyrmflight would have succeeded if not for a few of the remaining dragons coming to their senses. They conspired against the Wyrm, attacking him in his home, in what became known as the Betrayer's Downfall. My father had to explain the name for me.

"Well, Anna, to many of the dragons, the Wyrm had betrayed the principles of their race. For thousands of years they had all lived peaceful, happy lives alongside humans. Many of them had human wives and half-human children. At first, the Wyrm offered them safety from fear driven mobs, but it soon became clear that the Wyrm saw them as traitors as well. Their own families were at risk of his wrath, they had no choice. And we are grateful. They named him Wyrm the Betrayer and sought to do what even Lord Kyle could not."

Betrayer's Downfall became a crater. They confronted the Betrayer at his lair where he had convened his war council. Many dragons fought in the battle and I can only imagine such a sight of awesome destruction. Through fire and torn flesh, dozens of dragons fell to the Wyrm and his ilk before he was brought down. His head was presented to Kyle as a peace offering. Then, to the disgust of my father and many others, Kyle arrested the ones who brought the offering and had them executed.

"Folk turned on him," Elsa told me. "When he was defending us from rampaging dragons he was a hero, but when he started murdering innocent dragons who sided with us, people started seeing that he weren't much different than the Wyrm. Some crazy folk use to say that they were one in the same. Kyle was simply the Wyrm's human form. Nonsense, but all kinds of rumors started popping up around then. Any surviving dragons went into hiding and Kyle would swoop in and take their property the moment he caught whiff of them. What was rightful theirs even if they never puffed one cloud of smoke."

The Dragon Laws effectively robbed any dragon of their lives. Kyle claimed that all dragons had accumulated their wealth through subversion and lies. For this reason it was forfeit and claimed by the state. More dragons were found and arrested by Kyle's Hunters, squads of well equipped men who bullied their way through towns on their zealous mission. As I learned my history, I was very pleased to see that Kyle did not get away with it.

"Once the war was over," my father explained, "we were allowed to reconvene the Parliament. We made quick orders to have Kyle detained. Our investigators found that he had certain proclivities that the public would not have appreciated. The man was mad. His hatred for dragons came from some ludicrous desire to be one himself. He believed in old legends that if you drank the blood of a dragon you would become one. Or that if you hoarded enough gold and slept on it long enough. Utter nonsense. We sent men to arrest him, but he doused himself in lamp oil and threw himself in a fire. Others in Parliament chose to omit these indiscretions from the official record."

So the war ended and the recovery began. The country entered a new era of prosperity as the soot washed away and life began anew. Construction boomed and peace returned to humankind, though at a great cost. The Dragon Laws were repealed, but the sentiment remained. Dragons lived on, but in secret, and always with a knife at their throats.

These were the stories of life before me or at least before I mattered. As an infant, I knew little of the world around me and how steeped it was in tragedy. My own tragedies seemed small in comparison. My mother died in childbirth and my father was a man beyond stress in the years of my youth. I had few friends other than Elsa and my father often lamented that I was born into a broken world. Books taught me everything I could learn about my country's history, and I had the advantage of a safe library to experience it in. I persisted with my daydreams and fantasies of kind dragons in meadows. My wild ideas were encouraged by my loving nanny and my morals were tempered by my grizzled father. In due course, I had my eighteenth birthday and arrived in the world as Lady Anna Ingram.