The Hilldwellers & The Dragon's Nest | Cozy Fantasy Story For Sleep

Hey, Jeffrey here, and welcome back to Nightfalls. I've got a favor to ask. If you're enjoying the show, please do help us to grow by sharing us with friends and family. It helps us more than you know. I really enjoy the premise of the hero's journey, setting out against the odds, overcoming trials and tribulations to become the person you were always meant to be. Life's a bit like that, isn't it? Except we never truly arrive, but are always on the journey. Speaking of which, are you ready to return to the rolling meadows of green county for an adventure? Picture an idyllic landscape of gently sloping hills. In the valleys between the hills, wild flowers grow. The sky above the hills is blue and clear, only faintly ruffled by a springtime breeze. And into the sides of the hills themselves are scattered brightly painted doors and shades of green and red and yellow. Behind one of these doors, in a cozy burrow, lives firm, bramble burr and his wife, Carrie. Our story begins there. Before we begin, here's the quick ad break that keeps this free content possible. To go at free, subscribe via the link in the show notes. For a lot of us, making time to take care of our mental health isn't always straightforward. For me, therapy has been part of that. And one thing I've learned is that even after you decide to ask for help, finding care that's affordable and fit into your life can still be difficult. It can sometimes feel like choosing between getting the right support and being able to afford it, which shouldn't be how mental health care works. That's one of the reasons RULA exists. RULA is a health care company that helps you find in network therapy that fits your budget and works with your insurance. Without the endless searching or confusing fine print, they work with over a hundred insurance plans, which means many people pay around $15 a session, and depending on your coverage, it could even be zero. And instead of sitting on a wait list for a month, you can often find a licensed therapist accepting new clients as soon as tomorrow. What I also appreciate is that RULA doesn't just match you and disappear, they stay involved, checking in along the way to make sure your care continues to work for you. Thousands of people are already using RULA to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit RULA.com forward slash nightfalls to get started. After you sign up, you'll be asked how you heard about them. Please support our show and let them know we sent you. That's RULA.com slash nightfalls. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Just a quick note before the night settles in, sleep awareness week is almost over, and so is our 30-day free trial of the sleepiest network bundle. If you've been thinking about exploring the full world of nightfalls and everything we create across the network, this is your final opportunity to try it free for a full month. With the bundle, you'll unlock the entire catalogue of nightfalls, sleep wave and sleep magic completely ad-free, giving you stories to escape into, meditations to steady you, and hypnosis to help you switch off. 30 days gives you space to try something different and find your own rhythm at night. This extended trial ends on March 16th and it won't be available again for some time, so if this feels like the right moment to take your night seriously, tap try-free en apple podcasts or use the link in the show notes before the weekend. There's no better week to choose rest. I'll be here when you're ready. All right, now back to nightfalls. It's a Tuesday morning in late spring. And at first, the morning begins like every other springtime Tuesday morning has begun in Green County, for as long as any of the hill dwellers can remember. It begins with spring settled like a quilt over the peaceful countryside. With a gentle silver mist clinging to the grass of the hills. With apple trees heavy with honey smelling white blossoms and starflowers and clover growing thick in the meadows. With the trilling of bird song from between the branches of the trees. Even though the morning begins just as usual, it is anything but ordinary for fun and carry Bramblebar. Today is their first wedding anniversary. One year on and the hill dwellers still talk about fun and carries wedding celebrations, where the dancing went on for three days. The Mrs. Muck Buckle's famous apricot cake had never tasted so good. What not so many of the hill dwellers realize is that the wedding very nearly didn't take place. What happened was this. Days before the wedding, as Fern was minding his own business in his cozy burrow, a mysterious stranger by the name of Aldrich Stormwind had knocked on his door. And most inconveniently informed him that he was in possession of a fragment of heartstone. The heartstone had belonged to Fern's distant relative, Thaddeus Bramblebar. Until that day, Thaddeus had been the only hilldweller in memory to have ever sat off on an adventure beyond the familiar hills of Green County. But, as Aldrich told Fern, a mysterious shadow threatened not just the middle country, but Green County itself. The only way to stop the shadow was if the owners of each heartstone fragment could make the heartstone whole again and place it on an altar in the sanctuary of light deep in the whispering woods. Fern had a little reluctantly agreed to this adventure. Every fragment of the heartstone had been joined together and the shadow had been defeated. Even better, as far as Fern was concerned, he made it back to Hill County just in time for his wedding to carry. He hadn't been nemty-handed either. The Elvish maiden, Lyrely, one of the other heartstone verres, had gifted him with a beautiful, enchanted flower that would never wilt. Carrie had worn it at their wedding. Now it stood the novice on their mantle just as fresh looking as it had been a year ago. Carrie and Fern began their morning with a pot of freshly brewed dandelion tea. As they sipped their tea, they shared memories of their first year of marriage, picnicking under the stars on mid-summer night, collecting fresh honeycomb from the beehives in their garden, walking together through the winter's first snowfall. But now and then, Fern got a faraway look in his eyes and carrying you he was remembering something else, a grand adventure he had just before their wedding day. She couldn't help but feel a little wistful whenever Fern mentioned his journey through the whispering woods. She had never been so happy and there was nothing more she could want than to live simply and peacefully with Fern among the familiar beauty of green county. And yet, just one, she would have liked to have an adventure of her own. The first pot of dandelion tea was so delicious that Carrie and Fern decided that today, which was after all a rather special day, they would treat themselves to a second pot. But when they went to the garden, they found that there were no dandelions growing there. This didn't concern them. Dandelions grew abundantly on the banks of the radio-criver. They strolled down toward the river bank. On her arm, Carrie held a basket to fill with their dandelion harvest. But as soon as they reached the river bank, it was clear that something was amiss and that this springtime Tuesday morning was in fact not like all the other springtime Tuesday mornings which had come before it. Dandelions still grew in profusion along the banks of the radio-criver. But the river itself was less of a river and more of a modest creek. As Carrie and Fern walked along in puzzlement, they came upon their neighbor, old Mrs. Elderberry, holding an empty watering can and squinting at the much diminished river through her spectacles. Mrs. Elderberry couldn't quite believe her eyes. She'd come down to the river that morning as she came down to the river every morning to fill her watering can and find barely any river at all. The radio-criver had flowed strong and steady through Green County for as long as anyone could remember. Now, all of a sudden, it was half its usual size. By Wednesday, the situation had grown more concerning. The millwheel at mill haven bridge turned sluggishly, groaning with each revolution as it struggled to find sufficient water to power its mechanisms. The washing stones where the hill dwellers had gathered for generations to scrub their linens and exchange pleasant gossip, now stood high and dry. The hill dwellers stood with their baskets of unwashed laundry and spoke in low, worried tones. Perhaps they agreed after a while, the river would be back to its usual strong rushing south on Thursday. But on Thursday, the river shrunk to little more than a stream. It bubbled feebly through the riverbed. On either side of the river's trickle were smooth river stones and patches of dam earth that had never seen sunlight before. The dogs who nested along the river bank huddled together in the remaining shallow pools, looking quite bewildered. Even the graceful willow trees that usually dipped their trailing branches into the water, now found their boughs hanging awkwardly in empty air. By Friday, it was quite clear that there was a serious problem with the radio griver. It was also clear that the hill dwellers' usual method of dealing with serious problems, having a hot scone with some homemade marmalade and hoping that the problem went away of its own accord, was not proving sufficient in this case. The radio griver had all but disappeared. Where once, clear cold water had flowed deep enough for children to paddle and adults to fish, now only the saddest little stream remained. It was barely wide enough to step across and shallow enough that fern and carry could see every pebble on its bed. The hill dwellers were in agreement, something needed to be done, but what? And by whom? The question was debated at length before the decision was made to sleep on it and try to come up with a solution in the morning. That night, Carrie found herself unable to sleep. This was most unusual. Like all her hill dwellers, she very rarely had trouble sleeping, so she plumped her pillows and rearranged her blankets. Still, she was awake. She placed her hands on her belly and breathed deeply in, and slowly out. But while this calmed her, she was just as wakeful as ever. She slipped out of bed and crept into the living room where she lit a lamp. Cleaning and bringing order to her burrow always soothed her mind, so she sat herself to tidying. She washed the windows, pausing now and then to admire the beauty of the night sky. She shook the dust from the curtains and swept the floors. She polished the dining table with beeswax until it gleamed. Then she turned her attention to the bookshelves, which were crammed with books and ornaments, and began to straighten them up. As she moved her hands across the spines of the books, her fingers caught at one of the spines. Its ladder felt more worn, more weather beaten than the others. She pulled it out. It was one of Thaddeus Bramblebur's old diaries. Sitting down at the freshly waxed table, she leaped through it, marveling at its coated writing, its obscure maps, its intricate diagrams. In particular, she poured over his drawings of water systems, which illustrated how water flowed and pooled and could be channeled or redirected. These lessons, she suspected, might prove useful on her journey. As she studied one particularly detailed diagram, showing how ancient civilizations had managed water flow around sacred sites, carried carefully traced the design onto a fresh page of her own notebook. Something about the elegant curves and careful engineering spoke to her. She was not yet sure why Thaddeus' wisdom might be needed, but as she flicked through the pages, a plan was beginning to form in her mind. Carry packed a travelling satchel with sensible provisions, fresh bread wrapped in clean cloth, a wheel of Mrs. Muckbuckle's finest cheese, a flask of cool water, dried fruits, nuts, and a small pot of honey. But she also added items that spoke to her growing confidence in her own scholarly abilities. Her notebook filled with careful copies of Thaddeus' diagrams, her best drawing pencils, and a small ruler that belonged to her grandfather. As an afterthought, she tucked lyrely's magical flower into her pocket, something to remind her of home and of barn. That morning, as the sun crept up in the sky, and sunrise tingeed the hills of green county a blush pink, Carry Brambleburr with a pack on her back, opened the round green door of her burrow, and stepped out into the fresh new day. Behind her in the burrow, a note lay on the table. It was addressed to Farn. He told him that she loved him, of course, and also that she planned to discover what had happened to the radio griver. She would follow its course upstream beyond the familiar boundaries of green county, and she would not return until she had found the source of the problem. Carry paused at the threshold of her burrow, but she did not look behind her, and soon enough she was setting off for her destination, the river's source. The familiar landmarks of green county passed by one by one. The ancient oak where she and Farn had shared their first picnic, the metal where they had been married, the stone bridge where the children loved to drop flower petals and watch them float away on the current. But as she walked further upstream following the trickle that had once been the radioge, the landscape began to change. The gentle rolling hills gave way to terrain that grew rugged and wild. The path became narrower, winding between stands of trees. The air itself seemed different here, charged with the same source of magical energy that Farn had described from his journey to the whispering woods. With each step she took away from the familiar comforts of home, she found herself feeling not more frightened, but more herself as if this journey into the unknown was helping her discover parts of her own nature that had long been sleeping. By midday, Carry had traveled further from green county than she had ever been in her life. The river continued to grow smaller as she traced its core sub-stream. She paused beneath the shade of an enormous beach tree to eat her lunch. It was while she was sitting there enjoying her bread and cheese that she first heard it. A sound unlike anything she had ever heard before, it was a low rumbling that seemed to come from deep within the earth itself. Carry paid close attention to the sound. It was unfamiliar, she decided, but not frightening. After a while, it faded away and she continued on her journey. The trees began to change as she continued upstream, growing larger and more widely spaced. Soon their trunks were as thick as small hoses and their branches disappeared into a green twilight high above. Flowers grew here that Carry had never seen before. Some of them glowed like pearls and others twinkled like stars. Now and then she heard the same deep rumbling sound she had heard before. After a while, she noticed that it wasn't a simple rumble. When she listened very carefully, she could discern a faint tune. It sounded not unlike the lullabies her mother had sung to her when she was a small child, drifting off to sleep. Late that afternoon, Carry finally discovered the source of the radio griver's troubles. She merged from the forest into a circular clearing, dominated by an enormous boulder that rose from the earth like a small mountain. Clear, cold water bubbled up from springs at the base of this great stone. This was the river's source. But the water that bubbled up from here didn't flow freely down the channel in the ground that wound all the way down to Green County. Instead, it was collecting in a large pool that had been damned by an enormous nest. The nest itself was marvelous. It was woven from branches and stones, mud and moss, feathers and threads of silvery gossamer. Carry had never seen such an intricate nest before, nor had she ever seen such a large nest. It was the size of a small house. The most remarkable thing about the nest was not its size or its construction, but its occupant. Carreled within sleeping peacefully in the afternoon sun, was a dragon. The creature was smaller than the dragons in the old stories. It was perhaps the size of a large horse. And yet it was unmistakably a dragon. Its scales shimmered with colors that shifted and changed like water under sunlight, by turns green and grey and silver and blue. Its long tail was curled protectively around a pile of eggs. In her sleep, the dragon hummed her low rumbling lullaby. As she stood at the edge of the clearing, watching the dragon, Carry became aware that she was also being watched. The dragon was no longer sleeping. One of her eyes was open and it looked at Carry with calm intelligence. The dragon was understandably enough, wary. Carry considered her options. How could she show the dragon that she meant her and her eggs? No harm. Moving slowly and deliberately, she unpacked her traveling satchel and began to arrange its contents on the soft grass. Bread and cheese, dried fruits and nuts, and the small part of honey that gleamed golden in the late afternoon light. Then she settled herself cross-legged, but was seemed a respectful distance from the nest, her provisions spread before her, like an offering. She had no experience with dragons, but she reasoned that if a stranger had arrived at her burrow in Green County, the first thing she would do was offer them the best of what she had in her pantry. Why not do the same here? The dragon watched these proceedings with growing interest. After some time, the creature carefully rose from her nest, taking care not to disturb the precious eggs and approached Carry's impromptu picnic. What followed was perhaps the most unusual afternoon tea any hill dweller had ever had. The dragon, who proved to have quite refined tastes, sampled each of Carry's provisions with delicate appreciation. The honey, in particular, pleased her and she hummed with delight at every clawful. Belly full of good food, Carry felt ready to approach the problem of the nest. The dragon needed somewhere safe to nurture her eggs, but the nest's current design simply did not allow for water to flow downstream. Carry reached deep down into her satchel. The dragon, perhaps expecting Carry to produce another tasty snack, watched with interest. Carry drew out the paper she had copied from Thaddeus Brambleburr's book, depicting the intricate water management systems he had observed in his travels across the middle country. The dragon watched as Carry's pencil moved across the paper. She sketched a modified nest design that offered the eggs just as much protection, but incorporated channels that would allow the spring water to continue flowing downstream. When she had finished her sketches, Carry carefully turned the notebook so that the dragon could see her drawings. The creature studied the designs with intensity. After a long moment, the dragon lifted her head and looked directly into Carry's eyes. Then, to Carry's amazement, the dragon began to demonstrate her own understanding of Carry's design by carefully touching certain stones in its nest with one outstretched claw. Indicating where modifications might be made. Working together as the afternoon light grew deeper, Carry and the dragon began to implement her design. It was delicate work. They needed to alter the structure of the nest without disturbing the eggs. But by the time the first stars had appeared in the evening sky, the new nest was complete. Water once more rushed down the channel that led to green county. And in the nest, the eggs were cozy and safe. The nest looked just as it did in Carry's design. And yet, Carry had the nagging feeling that it wasn't quite right. Something was missing. She reached into her pocket and drew out lyrely's magical flower. Then carefully wolfed its stem between the strands of the nest. There, it was perfect. And the dragon must have thought so too because she presented Carry with a gift of her own, a single dragon scale with an opalescent green blue glow. Carry tucked the scale carefully into the pages of her journal. Night had fallen and it was far too late for Carry to begin her journey home. She and the dragon gathered soft moss and fallen leaves to create a comfortable resting place for her. Carry barely had time to savor the sensations of sleeping out under an open sky before her eyes fell closed. It had been a long, full day and she slabbed deeply. She woke it dawn to find the dragon already awake, one eye keeping watch over both her eggs and her new friend. As Carry gathered her belongings and prepared to begin the journey back to Green County, she made a promise to return when the eggs were ready to hatch. The journey home passed quickly. Carry's path was the radial griver, now flowing strong and steadily back to Green County. When Carry crusted the final hill, she could see that the millwheel at Millhaven Ridge was turning once more and she could hear the cheerful sound of water flowing over stones. The hill dwellers were delighted to see Carry. The celebrations that greeted her return lasted well into the small hours of the night. Carry was asked to tell the tale of her journey to the source of the radial griver, time and again. Mrs. Muckbuckle was especially interested to hear about the dragon nesting there who had a taste for her famous cheese. Music played, pies and cakes were eaten and the youngest hill dwellers who it must be said were staying up far past their bedtime, sailed boats made of leaves and twigs down the newly healthy currents of the redeoque. After a while, as the dancing and feasting and chattering continued around them, Carry and Furn locked eyes across the party and knew that they were in silent agreement. Together they slipped away and walked hand in hand over the darkened hills back to the green painted door of their very own burrow. At last, Carry understood for herself what Furn had told her after his own adventure exactly one year ago. There is nothing quite so wonderful as an adventure, unless of course that thing is coming home at the end of it. We'll leave our story there for tonight. I hope you enjoyed Carry's adventure as much as me. Sleep well and sweet dreams.