Port of Dragons

by Leigh Loveday

Her hometown, Ffion had decided, looking back towards land from the old stone pier, was full of dragons. A wyrm here, a wyvern there, tucked into parks and factories and the warren of tight streets that tumbled inelegantly from mountainside to sea. Rampant or dormant, they lifted her heart.
 
The closest she’d found so far had nested in the ramshackle beachfront fairground, more allure than alarm these days in its ragged rollercoaster crest.
 
Downwind, fiercer fellows hunkered in the steelworks where town became wasteland, all ridges and combustion and nocturnal furnace roar.
 
Behind them all, the mountain itself: a stunted hill really, so deeply enfolded in sleep that its week-long inhalations went by entirely without notice.
 
Studying it, striving to regain lost detail, Ffion found the daylight beginning to fail around her. She sighed, and stirred her limbs to lead her home.

As she walked the pier’s crumbling span, she reached out to touch the great jack-shaped stones that braced it on both sides, known to everyone in her orbit as the Dragons’ Teeth.
 
Ffion smiled sadly. A town full of tales to hide in. She walked away and left them there, on the shoreline, to pick up again another time.
 
Far out in the bay, catching the low winter light, the last remaining leviathan raised its head to watch her go.

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LEIGH LOVEDAY grew up on the Welsh coast and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He writes short fiction aggressively slowly, landing in the likes of Uncharted and Shoreline of Infinity. Find him at @leighloveday.bsky.social.

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