Sometimes your pain and your poison can be transmuted into something beautiful, into art, into action, into something meaningful. All over the planet, people grow up in the shadow of industrial toxins, watch their kids and their friends get sick and die, watch their own bodies with wary concern. Lupus, MS, celiac disease, autism, Crohn's disease, asthma - you name it. I'm curious mostly because everyone I know, just about, has something crazy and unlikely wrong with them. I haven't seen anything on autoimmune disease, except that it's a hotspot for diabetes. Statistics are readily available about disease rates in my hometown, telling us that you're much more likely to die of obscure cancers or get heart or lung disease there. Too late for the people who had settled, and too late for all of us who grew up splashing in that water and breathing that air. Later, of course, we learned that the pollution went farther and deeper than the smelter operators had admitted to. They worked hard to restore the bay, and now when you stroll through the new grass and out along the docks you can look down to see bright colonies of starfish and sea anemones clinging to the piers, and deeper down, the quick dark shapes of fish. ![]() The smelter company offered a cash settlement to the people living closest to the plant, and they took it, even though the surveys hadn't been completed. They sealed off the slag heaps and built fancy condos on top of them, planted new grass along the edges, dug up people's lawns and replaced them with new, cleaner topsoil. I still don't know what the mills were belching into the air, or what they're still churning out - sometimes, when the wind is right, you can both smell and taste the air: a sulphuric grit which stings your eyes and irritates your throat. We were told not to fish or swim in the bay, which seemed to us kids to be hilarious: looking down off the docks into the still, metallic depths, we couldn't picture fish living down there at all, let alone anything you'd think of eating. ![]() The waterways were lined with gray heaps of slag from the copper smelter, in some spots enlivened by oil-slick rainbow stains made by unknown chemicals seeping out from the rocks. Arsenic was in the dust we kicked up on the playgrounds, on the berries we picked in the woods, in the small ponds where nothing lived and no birds ever stopped. When I was a kid people weren't so concerned about the pollution. My childhood home was ringed by no fewer than five Superfund sites - and, as we like to say, those are just the spots they've cleaned. I realize that sounds melodramatic, but technically it's accurate. ![]() The two women share a deep kinship with the dragons: Thymara can instinctively communicate with them, and Alise, captivated by their beauty and majesty, has devoted her life to studying them.Įmbarking on an arduous journey that holds no promise of return, the band of humans and dragons must make its way along the toxic and inhospitable Rain Wild River - an extraordinary odyssey that will teach them lessons about themselves and one another as they experience hardships, betrayals, and joys beyond their wildest dreams. Among them is Thymara, an unschooled forest girl of 16, and Alise, a wealthy Trader’s wife trapped in a loveless marriage, who attaches herself to the expedition as a dragon expert. To ensure their safe passage, the Traders recruit a disparate group of young people to care for the damaged creatures and escort them to their new home. To avert catastrophe, the dragons decree a move even farther up the treacherous river to Kelsingra, their ancient, mythical homeland whose mysterious location is locked deep within the dragons’ uncertain ancestral memories. The Trader leadership fears that if it stops providing for the young dragons, the hungry and neglected creatures will rampage - or die along the river’s acidic muddy banks. The few who survive cannot use their wings earthbound, they are powerless to hunt and vulnerable to human predators willing to kill them for the fabled healing powers of dragon flesh.īut Tintaglia has vanished, and the Traders are weary of the labor and expense of tending useless dragons. In return, the Traders promised to help her serpents migrate up the Rain Wild River after a long exile at sea - to find a safe haven and, Tintaglia hopes, to restore her species.īut too much time has passed, and the newly hatched dragons are damaged and weak, and many die. But they could not have staved off invasion without the powerful dragon, Tintaglia. For years, the Trader cities valiantly battled their enemies, the Chalcedeans.
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