A Novel by
Teel McClanahan III
Modern Evil Press
Phoenix
ISBN: 978-1-934516-53-9
Copyright 2004 Teel McClanahan III
Some Rights Reserved.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, entities and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Published By Modern Evil Press at Smashwords
ISBN: 978-1-934516-02-7 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-934516-53-9 (eBook)
“What time is it?”
“November seventh?”
A deep sigh. The sound of a page turning.
“So what now? Where do we go from here?”
“Don’t ask me. This was your idea.”
“I didn’t know there would be real dragons. I thought he was making that part up.”
“But you believed the part about the treasure. You know Larry, you can be a real dolt sometimes.”
“What about you? You came with me!”
“I didn’t believe a word of it. I’m just here because I didn’t want to face Mrs. Cravitz again without my homework.”
“Well you’ve got to believe it now, don’t you? Dragons. Treasure. Forget homework. We’re going to be rich!”
“If the dragons don’t eat us first, sure.”
“Shhhhh! I think they heard us.”
Heavy breathing. The sound of a book closing. The sound, something like giant sheets of leather sliding across each other, stirring dust their direction.
Larry is not the one who sneezes, but he is the one the dragon sees first.
• • • • • • • •
Ghadshyk looked up from his book in a daze. He had been reading for hours, completely immersed in another of Neal Stephenson’s masterful but exceedingly long novels. He thought he’d heard a noise of some kind, but he didn’t see anything out of place. He noticed that he’d been sitting a little wrong and was sore, so he put a bookmark in The System of the World and closed it, setting it aside.
He stood up and stretched his arms and legs out, then unfurled his vast wings, stretching and twisting them to try to get the blood flowing through them again. “I shall have to get some exercise in today; I’m getting pretty stiff lately,” Ghadshyk thought, letting out a little “Unnnnghh…” as he stretched his sore muscles. He thought he heard another little noise, just as he had stretched his neck most of the way around.
“I hope I don’t have rats in the walls again,” Ghadshyk mumbled to himself as he looked around for the source of the noise. He tried to be as quiet as possible, in case it came again.
And it did. A tiny sneeze. And Ghadshyk’s head spun around fast and he saw two tiny eyes staring at him from the top of his china cabinet, just before they disappeared behind his commemorative Star Trek Enterprise NCC-1701-B Collector’s Series Plate.
“Hello, back there,” Ghadshyk began, “you’re not a rat, are you? I hate rats. They eat all my best crackers, and make nests in the heating shafts so the whole place stinks of rats when I fire the heater up in the autumn.” As he spoke, Ghadshyk moved slowly and cautiously towards the china cabinet, watching for whatever was hiding to try to scurry away. He knew his first reaction would be to try to smash it or breathe a fireball at it, but he restrained himself. That particular collectible plate was virtually irreplaceable. It had taken Ghadshyk over two years of hunting on eBay to find one in good condition, and he was not about to destroy it because of some rat.
• • • • • • • •
“It’s coming this way!”
“Why did you have to sneeze? Now it’s seen me! What am I going to do?” Larry looked about ready to wet his pants. He could see the hole in the wall they had come in through, but when the dragon’s eyes had met his, Larry had jumped the wrong way. Now his friend could surely get out, but if Larry tried for the hole in the wall he would have to run across eight feet of empty space before he was out of sight again. He was done for. The dragon was sure to kill him and eat him, now. “You go on without me. We shouldn’t both have to die!”
Without another word’s encouragement, Larry’s friend was gone, just like that.
Larry was still staring at the empty spot where his friend had just been standing when the wall he’d been hiding behind began to move slowly away. His peripheral vision just barely noticed the movement, but he was almost too afraid to turn his head, and it felt like an eternity before he was facing the direction of the movement.
Larry was face to face with a dragon.
Now he really did wet his pants. The dragon’s head must have been ten feet high, but Larry could have reached out and touched the dragon’s snout, it was so close. Suddenly the corners of the dragon’s mouth began to lift up, snarling at him. The dragon’s eyes lit up, apparently happy to see such a feast. The great beast’s expression continued its contortion, and suddenly the dragon began to let out a deep and hearty laugh, which Larry could feel blowing across him and reverberating within him. Everything went black.
• • • • • • • •
Ghadshyk reached out slowly and carefully to grasp his cherished plate without disturbing the creature lurking behind it. He lifted the plate slowly up. He did not want to startle whatever was hiding and have it run out of sight. Ghadshyk wanted to get a good look at the thing that had invaded his home. When the plate was finally out of the way, Ghadshyk leaned in close until his face was mere inches from the tiny creature.
Standing on two legs, wearing tiny clothes, hairless except on top. Ghadshyk realized what had happened and a smile spread slowly across his face. He had gotten himself worked up over nothing. It wasn’t rats at all, but something far less insidious. It was a human child, come in the wrong way through a hole in the wall. And it had wet its trousers at the sight of him!
Ghadshyk couldn’t help but burst into jovial laughter. He hadn’t so scared a human child in centuries. Not since Merle had set him up down here, he realized. Ghadshyk had simply forgotten how frightening his appearance could be to those who didn’t know any better.
When Ghadshyk finally stopped laughing, he saw that the human child had fainted. Ghadshyk carefully picked up the child and replaced his collector’s series plate to its stand. He delicately carried the child to his kitchen and set its unconscious body on the cutting board by the sink.
Putting on his reading glasses to see the tiny buttons and laces better, Ghadshyk cautiously peeled off the tiny human’s soiled clothes. He had to use just the sharpest points of his claws to grasp the miniature closures, so he was extra careful not to tear holes in the fragile fabric of the more fragile skin of the child. After a few minutes, Ghadshyk finally had the boy – he could see now it was a boy – out of his wet clothes.
Before dealing with the clothes, Ghadshyk lightly lifted the boy up and rinsed him off with a gentle spray of water from the tap, turning him over to be sure he became properly rinsed. Then he patted the boy’s unconscious body dry with his softest hand towel and set him back on the cutting board.
Looking at the boy’s miniscule garments lying beside him on the counter, Ghadshyk decided they were too small to be put in his washing machine. He washed them by hand, right there in the kitchen sink. Now soaked but clean, the dragon dried the tiny clothes by laying them out flat on the counter and blowing the tiniest line of fire his mouth could muster, back and forth just above the clothes. He flipped them over and repeated this, careful not to singe them with the hot air as they dried. Soon, the clothes were as good as new.
• • • • • • • •
Larry woke up to find the dragon’s enormous claws trying to work the buttons on his shirt. Larry screamed. The dragon jumped back with alarming speed, pulling its deadly hands back from his chest in a flash.
A great, deep, gravely voice boomed forth, “Now don’t go wetting your pants again! I just got them clean!”
Larry couldn’t understand it. The dragon could talk! It was talking to him! Larry screamed again.
“Calm down, boy.” This time the dragon’s voice was lower, but it was still the biggest voice Larry had ever heard. “I don’t want to hurt you, just calm down.”
Larry’s life flashed before his eyes. It didn’t take long – he was only twelve years old – but it ended with remembering sneaking in with his friend. With seeing the dragon perched on what appeared to be a mountain of gold and jewels and other treasure. With the dragon’s menacing snarl just feet away. With Larry being such a coward that he had peed his own pants and fainted.
“Stop screaming, boy,” the dragon took off its glasses and remained a fair distance away, speaking in its least menacing timbre, “I was only trying to button up your shirt.”
Larry realized that his pants were clean and dry. He was sure he’d wet them, but now they were dry. So either the dragon was telling the truth or… maybe this was all a dream.
“I don’t know how you got in here, but you’ll have to go out the same way.”
“You… you washed my clothes?” Larry mumbled feebly.
“What was that?” the dragon asked, “You’ll have to speak up, boy.”
“You washed my clothes.”
“Well I’ve already said that, now haven’t I? You’re going to have to pay more attention, boy.” The dragon sighed, and a great hot wind crossed Larry’s body. It blew the unbuttoned halves of Larry’s shirt apart briefly.
“Hey!” exclaimed Larry, looking down, “My shirt is unbuttoned! And where are my shoes?”
“I tried to explain that too, boy.” The dragon grabbed the shoes from the other side of the swimming-pool-sized kitchen sink and dropped them next to Larry. “I had simply not finished redressing you when you suddenly awakened and began screaming.”
Larry buttoned his shirt indignantly. “I don’t see why you had to take off my shirt if I only peed my pants. What are you, some kind of giant pervert?”
The dragon was aghast. “What in the…? How dare you?! You break into my home and I have the decency to clean you up after you soil yourself instead of just swallowing you whole, which I’m sure you were going to accuse me of wanting to do next, and this is the thanks I get? Perhaps I ought to have gone with my first reaction to seeing you, and just blow you away with a fireball, eh?”
The dragon spit out a fireball that looked ten feet across. It roared across the room, passed within just a few feet of Larry and exploded into the colossal sink. Larry could feel the heat of it as it passed by, like a sunburn on just one side of him or like standing too close to a bonfire. This time, Larry was too scared to scream. He just stood there, frozen, staring at the terrifying beast.
“Go on. Finish getting dressed. And put your shoes on. You’re getting out of here before you make me angry.”
Larry didn’t want to see the dragon get angry, and dropped flat on his butt to tie his shoes. He was so nervous he accidentally tied two of his fingers into the laces of his left shoe on the second attempt to tie it. The dragon put its glasses back on and leaned in.
“Oh, relax. I’m not going to hurt you,” the dragon tried to be soothing as it helped Larry free his fingers, “there’s no need to be so nervous.” The dragon tied Larry’s shoes perfectly as he sat stunned and stared, stupefied. “Just try to show a little respect, boy.”
Larry nodded silently and stood up. The dragon’s hand descended on him and closed around him, lifting Larry from the cutting board. As the dragon walked back into his den the hand flattened out, palm up, so that Larry was riding atop it, watching in awe as the ridiculously oversized home bobbed around them. The china cabinet loomed, and suddenly was under him. Larry was eager to avoid enraging the dragon, but at the same time, didn’t want to leave so soon. He’d only just begun his adventure; how could he tell the guys he just left like this?
“Go on, get off.” The dragon tilted his hand a bit, to encourage Larry to step off it. “I need you to show me how you got in here, so I can seal up the entrance.”
Larry reluctantly slid off the giant finger onto the top of the tower-like china cabinet, realizing that as soon as he was gone, he was gone for good. “But what if I want to come back?” Even Larry was surprised that he asked.
“Why,” the dragon paused, but just for a moment, “you’ll have to use the front door. If you decide you want to risk being burned alive again, and are sure you won’t soil yourself, come by again tomorrow.” The dragon grinned his fearsome grin. “After school, of course. No more playing hooky, boy.”
“Wh… Where’s your front door?” stammered Larry, feeling ashamed.
“1009 South Wilson. I’ll be expecting you.”
“You… You mean my friend has been living across the street from a dragon all this time and didn’t know it?”
“I guess so.” The dragon’s massive shoulders shrugged. “But you can’t tell him about me. Not a word.”
“But he was here with me. He saw you, too! I have to tell him something.”
“No. Don’t tell him anything. Just bring him with you tomorrow after school. But for now, just show me how you got in so I can close it up.”
The rest went by in a blur. Larry showed the dragon the hole in the wall he’d crawled through and then said goodbye. The climbing and crawling and darkness between the dragon’s home and daylight had seemed much more intimidating before Larry’s conversation with a real live dragon. By the time he reached the surface, he was just dying to tell someone about it all.
“You made it out! Finally!” His friend helped Larry out of the storm drain that marked their initial entrance, asking, “What happened? You’ve been gone almost an hour! I was scared you were dead!”
“Too scared to come see for yourself, I guess.” Larry brushed as much of the dirt and dust from the tunnels off him as he could.
“Well… You know.” Larry’s friend gulped audibly. “I was sure you were a goner.”
“Obviously I did okay on my own. No help from you.”
“Look, I’ve faced my share of dragons… I just … ”
“You what? You just wanted to run away like a little girl, right?”
“Hey! You were about to wet your pants back there, and the dragon was headed right for you! It’s not like I have an enchanted sword in my backpack or something! What else was I supposed to do? I thought you would be right behind me as soon as you had the chance, but before I was too far away I heard that thing roaring! What happened?”
“I’m not going to say.” Larry turned and began walking in the direction of home.
“What?” His friend followed along close behind, “You’re not going to say? That’s insane! You just faced down a dragon and lived to talk about it. You have to tell me what happened!”
“Nope. Not a word.”
“Come on, Larry! Give me something! I set out here for an hour waiting for you!”
“Look. After school tomorrow…” Larry stopped in his tracks and faced his friend, then seemed to change his mind and continued walking away, “No. No, you don’t deserve it.”
“What? After school tomorrow, what?”
“Well, if you’re really nice to me, maybe I’ll tell you. Ask me again tomorrow at two o’clock.”
“Uggghhh!”
Larry and his friend went back and forth like that all afternoon. His friend would ask him what had happened, or what he was planning, and Larry would deny him. The next day at school, it continued in the halls between classes, and in notes as they ignored their teachers. His friend would try to trick him into giving up some tiny detail, but Larry never fell for it, never said a word. His friend was in agony by the time two o’clock rolled around and the final bell rang.
“Okay, it’s two. Now will you tell me?”
Larry was already walking in the direction of his friend’s house. “No.”
“After all that, you’re not going to tell me?”
“I said that if you were nice I’d tell you, now what have you done that was nice? You’ve been pestering me all day!”
“I gave you my pudding at lunch! And then I bought you an ice cream, too!” Larry’s friend was walking backwards, just ahead of him, so that he was facing Larry as he thought of all the things he’d done. “I let you copy my Geometry homework, and the answers on the test in History! What else could I have done? Carried you on my back to school?”
“That would have been pretty nice.”
“Come on, Larry! You’re being ridiculous! You’re a foot taller than me, and two years older! You’d probably break my back!”
“There’s only one way to find out, I guess.” Larry pretended he was going to try to jump up onto his friend’s back, but his friend moved out of the way too fast for him, and darted towards his house, now just around the corner. “You’re going the wrong way,” Larry shouted after him.
The two boys crossed the huge, perfectly green lawn towards the tiny house that was marked 1009 slowly, as though at any moment the dragon might burst out the front door and gobble them both up. That the house was barely larger than the dragon’s head did not factor into their fear. Larry knew he had been asked to meet the dragon here and he kept glancing up in case it was planning on dropping out of the sky onto the enormous lawn right in front of them, but his friend didn’t know any of it. His friend was afraid because Larry, the one leading them to this house, the one who had faced down a real, live dragon and escaped alive, looked more scared now than he had in the dragon’s lair.
Finally they stepped onto the small porch. As Larry reached out to knock on the door, it opened just before his knuckles could make contact. Larry’s arm fell limp at his side.
“Hello.” An old man, probably in his late forties or early fifties (which is quite old to a twelve-year-old) stood on the other side of the open door, and stepped through, onto the porch. He wore a strange outfit, cut like an old-fashioned suit, made of what looked like a soft leather, and colored the deep blue you see when you look straight up into the clear center of the sky. His hair was white, but it seemed to pick up a tinge of blue that matched the deeply entrancing blue of the suit. The man’s eyes were black, through and through, so deeply black that looking directly at them was like being blind in two perfect eye-shaped spots in the center of your vision. He stood what seemed to the boys to be eight feet tall. He introduced himself, “My name is Ghadshyk,” and extended his hand toward Larry.
Larry was a little confused, though he really hadn’t known what to expect here today. He met Ghadshyk’s hand and shook it, mumbling “L-L-L-L-Larry. I’m Larry, and this is–”
Ghadshyk cut him off, “I already know your friend. I doubt very much that you really do.” Ghadshyk cast a piercing gaze at Larry’s friend. He looked like he wanted to breath fire at him right there on the street. “He is not welcome in my home.”
“But… but,” Larry dropped his voice to a whisper, “the dragon said…”
“Your friend is not welcome here.”
“It’s okay, Larry. If I’d known this was who you were taking me to, I wouldn’t have come. I apologize, Ghadshyk. I’ll be going home.” He paused, looked over his shoulder at his house just across the street and said, “But now I know you’re here and you know I’m there.” His eyes met Ghadshyk’s and Larry would have sworn they were blacker than the old man’s eyes in that moment. “So let’s not forget our agreement.”
Their gaze did not break for a long moment. Larry’s hand was still in Ghadshyk’s grip, which felt more and more like a glove than a warm human hand.
“Impossible.” Ghadshyk’s voice in four syllables showed a world of depth and hate and history. It rumbled not just across the air from his lips to their ears, but down his arm and into Larry’s, creating a deep, empty stirring the like of which Larry never wished to feel again.
Larry’s friend turned and began running away, light and carefree as though nothing strange had happened. He glanced back at Larry saying, “See you later, Larry!” His eyes looked normal again. Ghadshyk did not release Larry’s hand until the departing boy had disappeared behind his closed front door.
“Sorry about that.” Ghadshyk’s voice had returned to its friendly, welcoming tone, “Don’t ask, though. Don’t ask me and don’t ask him. It doesn’t concern you, boy.”
“Oh… Okay.” Larry hadn’t understood what had happened at all, but he was more immediately wondering about what this strange man’s connection was to the dragon. “What about the…”
“Be patient. You’ll see. Just follow me.” The old man turned and entered the house, and Larry followed. The door closed behind them on its own, though it did not appear to have one of those mechanical door closers on it.
The inside of the house appeared to be just one big room with a closet in the corner. It was furnished sparsely. There was only a single, simple chair next to a frail-looking card table, and dust bunnies huddled in every corner. The only light was the sunlight filtering in through the well-worn curtains that hung over all the windows. Larry didn’t think to notice that there was no apparent way the room would be lit at night. He didn’t wonder long about the unimpressive room at all, because Ghadshyk had made a beeline straight for the closet door.
It took Larry as long to take in the room visually as it took Ghadshyk to cross it physically, so by the time Larry began to wonder about the room, Ghadshyk already had the closet door open. Larry could see that it was not, in fact, a closet at just about the same moment he had begun to wonder what would be in the closet. And by the time Larry stepped through the door and began down the stairs he had stopped wondering altogether and now was just trying to take it all in.
Ghadshyk was descending the stone steps rapidly ahead of Larry, so Larry only caught the most obvious features as they dropped into the cool of the underground. The stairs seemed to spiral around a large center at the top, but the sharpness of their constant turning increased as they went down. The steps, the walls, the ceiling, it all seemed to be carved out of solid stone. Whoever had done the carving had not only had a lot of time, but immense skill. The corners of each step were sharp, the ceiling described a perfectly smooth parallel surface to the angle of the steps, and there was a complicated and ornate relief carved all along both sides of the corridor down. There was no apparent light source in the spiral staircase, no torches, no glowing from the walls, no shadows creeping along around and behind them, but Larry was able to see nonetheless.
Larry was intrigued by the carvings on the walls – it seemed to be playing out the history of a great army of dragons – but he was more presently distracted by Ghadshyk, walking ahead of him. In the dim, non-source light he nearly didn’t notice it at first, but Ghadshyk’s skin was gradually shifting hues to match the blue of his suit. The white hair on his head seemed thinner than it had been at the door, nearly transparent, and the edges of Ghadshyk’s collar, sleeves and all his clothes’ seams seemed slightly out of focus. Larry tried to move faster down the stairs to see what was happening but he simply could not keep up.
The light seemed to be dimming or flickering as they continued down and down. Larry had no idea how deep they were now, and he didn’t care – Ghadshyk’s legs appeared, in the insufficient light, to have separated into three. Ghadshyk’s arms seemed almost to be two to a side. Larry hoped that the rapid movements and uncertain lighting were just playing tricks on his eyes. What he was seeing just didn’t make sense. Ghadshyk’s head was enormous and hairless and now seemed scaly, too.
The stairs went down and down and down and the circle drew a tighter and tighter spiral as they dropped. The third leg was definitely not walking. It seemed rather to be swaying back and forth and lengthening as the other two legs began to shift and fold and Ghadshyk’s whole posture changed, though his height did not seem to. At the same time, Larry saw that the two appendages he had taken to be extra arms were coming straight out of Ghadshyk’s shoulder blades, rather than his sides. They had no hands at their ends, and looked more and more like loosely folded-up umbrellas. On top of all that, Ghadshyk no longer showed any sign that he had been wearing – or even could have been wearing – the suit. His skin, what had been there before as well as that on his strange new limbs, was that same deep sky blue that the now-vanished suit had been. Larry followed on, not understanding what he was seeing, but rapt.
Then suddenly, just as the spiraling of the staircase seemed about to become so tight that it would run into itself, they came upon another door. It looked like the same door they’d come in, and as Ghadshyk reached out to grasp the ornate handle and open it, Larry realized that those hands were not hands.
Those fingers were not fingers. The door opened, and light from beyond it flooded the stairwell.
Those fingers were claws. Ghadshyk stepped into a room that was familiar to Larry and totally foreign at the same time.
Larry could not move himself over the threshold into the room, but stood, slack-jawed, as Ghadshyk, the dragon, turned to face him. He turned and the long tail that was definitely not a third leg swung around behind him. He stood up tall and the giant wings that were not arms and definitely not umbrellas unfolded behind him with a very familiar sound. Ghadshyk’s head no longer held much resemblance to the man who had answered the door, full of perilously sharp teeth and with the look of something about to spit fire. The only resemblance was in the still-black eyes that regarded Larry with the same feeling of welcome that had met him outside.
“Are you coming in, Larry?” There was the voice from yesterday, deep and reverberating through Larry’s body, though it seemed to be on a more reasonable scale. In fact, Larry realized then, that was what had seemed so wrong with the room and the dragon; it all seemed foreign because it was no longer insanely larger than him. In very point of fact, the room seemed quite normally sized, like the living room of most any home Larry had been in during his life.
Except there was the dragon, Ghadshyk, standing before him, and there was the china cabinet behind him, with the plate resting atop it… A plate that had been big enough for Larry to hide behind the previous day, but which now seemed too small to really even eat from.
Larry walked into the room.
“So… What happens next?”
“I guess that’s up to you.”
Half an hour later, Ghadshyk had taught Larry enough of the rules and basic strategy of the board game Go that they were able to begin a proper game. Larry had been paying so much attention to learning the game and was so at ease with Ghadshyk’s friendly demeanor that he had nearly forgotten he was sitting across from a dragon.
“To tell you what I know you want to understand, I have to go way back, and you’ll have to be willing to listen to me rambling on and on, perhaps for many days, even weeks, before we get to the parts that relate to what you want to know.” Ghadshyk placed a white piece on the Go board and looked up at Larry, “You can come over after school every day if you like, but I must insist that you do your homework each day before I begin my stories. On weekends, you must go out and play. I won’t be the one to entirely steal your youth from you.”
“Okay.” Larry placed a black piece on the board.
“Your parents will want to know what you’re doing every day after school, as will your friends.” Ghadshyk placed another white piece, “Do you know what to tell them?”
Larry quickly placed a black piece on the board that blocked in three white pieces completely. He took these white pieces from the board and set them aside, replying, “I can’t tell them I’m hanging out with a dragon. I guess I’ll have to lie and say–”
“Wrong.” Ghadshyk placed a white piece on the board. “I will not have you lying to your parents. You will simply not mention that I happen to be a dragon.” Larry was watching Ghadshyk, wondering what he meant for Larry to tell his parents exactly, and put down a black piece. “You will tell them that I am a tutor, and this will not be a lie because I will be helping you with your homework every day. If they want to know how you found a tutor who works for free, tell them I am retired, which is true enough, and say that your ‘friend’ has studied with me before – he cannot truthfully deny it.” Ghadshyk placed another white piece, Larry another black, and Ghadshyk continued, “And if they wish to meet me, I can come to them with the appearance of the man you met at the top of the stairs today. As for your friends, it will have to be the same story; you are being tutored. Since you will be playing with them on the weekends and will very certainly see an improvement in your marks at school, I expect that none of them will give it a second thought. They’ll assume your parents are forcing you to see me.” Ghadshyk placed one more white piece on the board and in a sweeping but very accurate movement pulled the fourteen black pieces he had blocked with it from the board, setting them aside as he waited for a response from Larry.
“You’re going to make me study and do well in school and keep the biggest secret I’ve ever even heard of in my life from everyone I know, and in return you’re going to let me hang out every weekday with a real live dragon and you’re going to tell me stories about your life as a dragon the whole time, right?”
“I’ll also help you improve your Go game, if you like, but that sounds like a concise version of same.”
“Sounds cool to me.” Larry placed another black piece on the board, connecting two very long ‘dragons’ that now stretched from one end of the board to the other together. “But you have to do one more thing for me.”
“You’re making demands of me now?”
“It’s not such a big thing, really.”
Ghadshyk considered his response and carefully placed a white piece on the otherwise empty left side of the board, the only piece on that side of Larry’s dragon. “What is it?”
“If I get straight A’s at the end of next term, you’ll tell me what was going on between you and my friend back there today.”
“I told you not to ask about that.”
“I’m not asking, I’m negotiating. Really it depends as much on you as it does on me. I haven’t got an A since fifth grade. You’d have to be one heck of a tutor.” Larry placed another black piece on the board, beginning to enclose the entire left side of the board and properly create a large ‘eye’. “Of course, if you aren’t that good of a tutor, some questions might be raised about why you like to spend several hours every day alone with a twelve-year-old boy. It just isn’t done, these days.”
“Larry,” Ghadshyk placed another white piece on the left side of the board, “I think you’re forgetting my stake in this. I have quite nothing to lose. If you claim I am a dragon, who will believe you? No one in America believes in dragons, or in most of the rest of the world, for that matter. If you claim I have molested you, the authorities will find not only that the house at 1009 S. Wilson has remained unoccupied for nearly 90 years, but that the closet door does not lead to the staircase as you’d claimed, but to what is, in fact, a closet. There is no human named ‘Ghadshyk’ and there never has been. All that would come of it is that you would be made a fool of and become the boy who cried wolf. Plus you would never get a chance to see me again. It’s your loss, Larry, not mine. If we get started and your grades do not show improvement, it’s you who will face having to come up with an explanation. Even the rat hole you originally crawled in through has been sealed up now and a spell cast so that no one, not even you, can even stumble across that path accidentally, let alone with intent. If you want to find out more about me, about this place and about dragons, you’ll play along, study, get good grades, and forget about trying to get something out of me I’m not willing to give. It’s your move, Larry.” Ghadshyk indicated the board with his clawed hand, but Larry felt he may have meant otherwise. Larry continued his black dragon’s progress around the board and remained silent.
“Remember that today we are playing first, but that in the future we’ll do your schoolwork first. Tonight you’re going to go home and do your homework alone.” Ghadshyk placed a white tile on the right side of the board this time, “but first, a little story.”
“Once upon a time, in a land far away–”
“Where was it, really?”
“This story takes place … Well, I won’t tell you exactly, but in a high, mountainous region of what you know today as China.”
“You’re Chinese? You don’t sound Chinese to me.”
“If you mean to say that I don’t sound like a Chinaman, that is simply because I am not one. I am not a man at all, really. I am a dragon, and all dragons – true dragons – originate in the region I am referring to which is now known as China.” Ghadshyk took a sip of his tea and continued, “As far as sounding like a Chinaman goes, I can do that too, if you like.” And suddenly Ghadshyk was speaking in another language. Larry, of course, did not know Mandarin or Cantonese and most definitely did not know the ancient form of Cantonese that Ghadshyk was now beginning to tell his story in, so he simply threw up his hands.
“Okay, okay, you sound Chinese! But I don’t really know Chinese, so could you go back to English?”
Ghadshyk stopped, grinned, and said, “Of course.”
“Hey, how did you learn English so good if you’re from China?”
“First, the proper use would be ‘how did you learn English so well’, Larry. Second, if you will just sit back and let me tell my story, that will all become clear.”
“Go on.”
“As I was saying, this story takes place long ago, in a land quite far away from here. I was a young dragon, not quite two hundred years old yet, when–”
“You’re over two hundred years old? Wow!”
“I’m over six hundred years old, Larry.”
“How long do dragons live?”
“Depends on the dragon. Usually at least 1200 years, so long as they are not hunted down by evil men or worse. The oldest dragon I still know to be alive was around when Siddhartha – Buddha – was born. That’s around three thousand years ago, Larry, and this dragon was old enough to leave our enclave and seek out Siddhartha.”
“Wow. How old does a dragon have to be to leave the …?”
“The enclave. At least two hundred years old, which I would have got to, had you not interrupted me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s no problem, it just makes the stories take longer and takes a lot of the flow out of the actual telling.”
“There’s just so much I want to know. Shouldn’t I ask?”
“Yes, I’m not telling you not to ask, I’m just saying that if you would learn to practice a little patience, I’m sure I’ll answer all your questions in the course of the stories. I’ve spent a lot of time around humans, more than most dragons ever do, and I know what the differences between human experience and dragon experiences tend to be. For instance, most humans have no idea what it feels like to fly under their own power, free, out in the air. I have been in airplanes, but … like so much else that humankind has come up with, it is utility first and experience last, with so many needless factors like monetary cost and labor intensity in production taken into account first that the experience ends up as an afterthought or just the combined result of the things that came first in the designers’ minds.” Ghadshyk cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. What am I doing, rambling on like this about human engineering practices? You wanted to hear about dragons.
“All right, from the beginning,” Ghadshyk continued, “Long ago, in a land far away from here, when I was a young dragon, not even two hundred years old, I saw what seemed at the time to be the strangest thing that ever could be. I saw a pink dragon.”
The Story of the Ugly Dragon
Ghadshyk swooped down from the clouds to see what the strange pink creature moving along in the distance could be. As he approached, he saw that is was not quite like anything he had ever seen before. It was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a dragon. It was as though someone who had never seen a real dragon had tried to sculpt one out of clay. Which was another strange thing about it; it was an odd pink color, like it really was made out of pale clay. It had strange-looking wings, clearly too small to lift it into the air, and it walked instead along the ground. Ghadshyk came down almost to the ground and circled around it to get a better look.
Whatever it was, it was about the right size for a youth of a dragon, only eighty or ninety years old and only about fourteen feet from the tip of its deformed snout to the end of its too-thick tail. Ghadshyk was easily twice as big. He swung around and set down in front of the creature, which was when he saw the most striking thing about it: The eyes were all wrong.
Instead of proper black eyes, this thing had only a tiny spot of black at the center of a ring of blue – the only blue to be seen on the whole beast – inside another ring of white. It was perhaps the strangest thing Ghadshyk had ever seen, and it was looking right at him. It had stopped walking as soon as it had noticed Ghadshyk circling it, and seemed to be taking what it thought must be a defensive posture. No real dragon would fold their wings up entirely like that in a fight, though; it would put them two beats behind in taking to the air, and that was where any real fighting takes place. Ghadshyk himself had his wings ready to lift him from the ground at a moment’s notice.
“What are you?” Ghadshyk asked in the high-dragon tongue.
The creature made an awful noise in response that sounded like it had not quite mastered the use of its tongue and throat and lungs yet, and was struggling to make even what strange little noises it gurgled and burbled out. Ghadshyk laughed out loud. Whatever this thing was, it certainly wasn’t a dragon. Even the dimmest of true dragons could speak basic en-dragon by the age of twenty, and this thing, though three times the size of a twenty-year-old dragon, could not get even a basic sound out of its mouth, let alone a proper greeting in the high-dragon tongue.
Suddenly though, the creature before him did something totally unexpected. It began to change. Ghadshyk noticed it first as simply a change in size, as that change was the most noticeable part of the shift. Then he saw that the shape of the creature’s head and face was moving, in what looked to be a quite painful way, gradually to look more and more like a real dragon. The creature’s odd wings were unfolding and expanding and lengthening and it looked like they were thickening from their prior gossamer appearance into a proper leathery one. The creature’s tail thinned and stretched and grew ridges, the scales on its back shifted and interlocked differently and the texture of its hide became suddenly like something very familiar to Ghadshyk.
After only a few short moments, Ghadshyk found himself standing before what seemed to be a mirror image of himself, except still that it was the same pale terracotta color that it had begun. The strange eyes were now looking out from an exact replica of Ghadshyk’s face, and their insane appearance in that familiar face was quite a disturbing thing for Ghadshyk to see. He flinched briefly away.
The creature seemed again to be attempting vocalization. It gurgled and burbled as before, but it was a lot closer to the sounds a young dragon makes when trying to speak than the monstrosity of sound that had been coming from the creature before. “Huughr-bblk bbbrlekdffnik … kerrakkawhasst… ghaaarrra.. rrghuuu..” It was clearly struggling, but now it looked directly at Ghadshyk and waved its arms about in a way that Ghadshyk had never before seen. All Ghadshyk could guess was that it wanted him to do something, but for the life of him, Ghadshyk could not quite work out what it was. Again with the noises, this time at the same time and in sync with the strange hand gestures, “Ghhwwhaaakk.. ghaaaart..haar.. Ghaat haaart rrhhooo…”
Ghadshyk had an idea. He repeated himself, “What are you?”
“Ghhwhaat… haaar… hyoo?” The creature said this and then extended an arm and finger in Ghadshyk’s direction.
“What are you?”
“Whhat.. aare.. hyoo?”
“What are you?”
“What..are..you?” The creature leapt up into the air and fell right back down, not using its wings at all. Again, it was making strange hand gestures, this time more up and down than around and around each other as before. Ghadshyk guessed that it was glad it had mimicked him.
“So now you can mimic one phrase, great. It takes years to even learn enough of basic en-dragon to communicate on the very basest level.” Ghadshyk sighed. “I wonder whether I shall ever know what it is you really are, besides a good mimic.”
“Hyoo… maaann…” It tried again, “Hyoomaan.”
“Human? There’s no way you’re a human. I’ve spent nearly six decades studying with the elders to learn all there is to know about humans, and humans can’t change size and shape at will and they don’t have the mental capacity to learn even basic en-dragon.” Ghadshyk reconsidered, thought perhaps that the creature was simply mimicking something it had heard someplace else. “Have you seen a human? Are there humans near? I’ve never seen one before.”
“Naaat… Not neeer.” The creature turned, and using its mirror image of Ghadshyk’s arm, extended the arm and a single finger out in the direction it had been walking from when Ghadshyk had first arrived. “Fffhhaarrr… Ff-ff-far.”
Ghadshyk didn’t know what to think. That this strange creature, this amazing mimic of his appearance and now his speech might actually be understanding what he was saying just didn’t seem possible. But it had clearly said that humans were not near, then had indicated which way they were, and that they were far. Ghadshyk had not said the high-dragon word for ‘far’; how could the creature have mimicked it if it had not heard it? It seemed still to be having more trouble controlling its recently reformed mouth than with command of the language. It was motioning at him again.
It had its mouth open and had one hand with that single extended finger it kept using to indicate specific things, this time extended backwards into its own mouth. The other hand was extended towards Ghadshyk’s head. It seemed like it wanted to see the inside of his mouth for some reason. Ghadshyk didn’t see why not, and opened his mouth wide. The creature leaned in closer, almost as though it wanted to put its head inside Ghadshyk’s mouth entirely, but at the same time it was feeling around inside its own mouth with its hands, rubbing all over its tongue and teeth and even back to its throat.
It pulled back a bit and shook its head back and forth, then looked up at Ghadshyk hopefully. It put its hand in its own mouth, then moved its arm towards Ghadshyk’s mouth, as though to do the same thing. It went back and forth a couple of times, closer and closer, and Ghadshyk didn’t move away or close his mouth, so the creature finally put its hand cautiously in his mouth and began feeling around. As it did so, Ghadshyk could just barely see the subtle changes taking place on the inside of the creature’s mouth. The teeth moved around and sharpened and the tongue’s entire definition changed. The creature’s hand tasted strange, salty and savory, but not altogether like dragon flesh. The claws of the creature were searching further back into Ghadshyk’s throat than he was entirely comfortable with, but the creature seemed to sense it, and Ghadshyk’s entire throat and mouth suddenly went numb.
He could no longer feel the probing hand in his mouth and throat, but Ghadshyk was very aware of its presence. He could see the creature’s arm disappearing into him, and could feel the creature’s hot breath getting nearer and nearer as he was leaned into. He didn’t like what was going on, but knew that he had basically invited the creature to do all this, so he just patiently waited it out. Sooner than he expected, and before the creature’s arm was out of him, the feeling returned to his mouth and throat. He just about choked. It felt as though the creature’s arm was all the way down his throat into his stomach, and was rooting around for something there. Ghadshyk could feel his body trying automatically to expel the foreign body, and the creature noticed almost instantly and pulled its arm out.
The arm was covered in goo and other colored fluids that had apparently been in Ghadshyk’s throat. The creature swung it at the ground to get the goo off, and then seemed to have another idea. It turned its head down to face its arm, coughed a couple of times, then blew a huge blast of flame at its own arm, which quickly caught fire. Clearly the creature had not been expecting the massive pain that it was now experiencing. Had it been a true dragon, it probably would be fine, but had it been a true dragon, it probably would only have used a tiny jet of fire to evaporate the goo from its arm, and only then if no stream was nearby to wash off properly.
The creature was hopping about now, still not using its wings at all, trying to get the fire on its arm out. Ghadshyk felt sorry for the thing, and beat his wings a couple of strong times to create enough wind to blow out the fire entirely. The creature’s arm was now charred black, seemed not to have much skin or other soft tissue left on it, and could basically not move. It was quite as bad a sight as Ghadshyk had ever imagined, but perhaps only because he was looking at a mirror image of himself, damaged intensely and in apparently quite severe pain.
In a move Ghadshyk had never seen a true dragon perform, the strange, injured creature fell backwards, resting on the ground on the place where its legs met and its tail began stretching out behind it. It cradled the burnt arm towards it, and seemed to be whispering something to it. Suddenly the burnt arm began to glow as though now consumed in a green fire, and the strange green light danced across and around it as though it wanted to do more damage to it than the proper fire had already done. Except that this time the creature was able to put the green fire out with a simple blow of its own breath and when the green light was gone, the arm was entirely repaired.
This was a strange creature, indeed. Not only was it an amazing mimic, but it also apparently possessed great magical ability. Ghadshyk thought that perhaps it was actually some form of magic that had allowed it to change its shape as well, but no magic Ghadshyk had heard of would explain the apparent ease it had shown in learning the high-dragon tongue. He thought he’d seen perhaps enough, and ought to go let the elders know about the whole experience. Then, standing, it spoke:
“Sorry about that. I uhhh… I found your … do you say glands? Yes, well, I had found the organ that allows you to breathe fire while investigating your throat shape, and wanted to try it out. I guess I don’t quite have dragon skin yet, though.”
Ghadshyk just stood there, slack-jawed.
“I can see that you’re a little surprised that I’m able to speak the high-dragon tongue so well when a moment ago I couldn’t get out a simple phrase. It’s all in the construction of your voice box and mouth shape, you see. I couldn’t see the proper shapes from the outside, so I couldn’t form them on my own insides. Without the right voice box &c., whether I knew the language or not, I couldn’t have pronounced it at all. Thanks for being so compliant while I rooted around inside you. Sorry the numbness wore off so fast, but I’ve never tried that spell on a dragon before.”
Ghadshyk didn’t even know if there existed a reasonable response to what was occurring before him. Nearly two centuries of education had left him unprepared.
The creature continued on, “Really, until I saw you, I’d never even seen a real, live dragon. I’d heard stories and absorbed countless books, sure, but never really seen a dragon with my own two eyes. The way you dragons stay so isolated here in these mountains all the time, it’s a wonder anyone believes in your existence at all.”
“I uhhh… I think that is the point. During my studies these last nineteen decades I was taught that the most important thing for any dragon who ventures out of the enclave is to stay high in the sky and remain unseen by man.”
“Which explains, perhaps, why you’re the exact deep blue of the sky – you blend in perfectly when flying overhead. I barely saw you before you set down right in front of me.”
“Exactly. That is why all true dragons’ flesh and scales always magically take on the perfect deep blue of the top center of the sky above. We are a reflection of the perfect beauty of a clear sky.”
“You’re quoting a book now, right?”
“Yes, by my greatest teacher, Mendykkha. He has taught me the most important lessons I have learned. He is the first one I will miss when I take advantage of my coming of age and finally get to leave the enclave.”
“I thought you said you were over 190 years old. You’re not even considered an adult yet?”
“No, and I certainly don’t feel like an adult yet. It will be another fifteen or twenty decades before I even reach my full size. Still, I wish to see the world beyond these hills, as soon as the time is right. I have never seen a man, or the ocean. In fact,” Ghadshyk looked left and right, scanning the sky nervously, “I am much further from the enclave than I am supposed to be right now. If the elders found out, they might give me another decade or two to study and learn patience before they allow me to leave.”
“I won’t tell them if you don’t tell them.”
“You still haven’t told me how you learned our language. Most dragons spend at least a decade learning en-dragon, and then from that basis spend five or six more studying the high-dragon tongue. According to my studies, no creature alive today besides dragons has either the life span or the mental capacity for either language. Humans are said to be the next most intelligent creatures beyond dragons on the Earth today, but it would take longer than their average life span to learn the high-dragon tongue. Since you clearly aren’t a dragon, and you couldn’t be a human, I don’t know what you are, but … do you?”
“Of course I know what I am.”
With that, the creature began to shrink and deform again, not back to the not-quite-a-dragon appearance he had had before, but to something even stranger to Ghadshyk. When the transformation stopped, Ghadshyk was standing before a creature not more than six or six and a half feet tall, standing upright on two skinny legs and with two arms hanging down limply at its sides. It had a funny round head with a strange bush of longish, dark-colored fur on top. Based on the descriptions he had heard and the sketches he had seen, this must be a human. It had the same strange eyes that the creature had had, now much smaller, but the same creepy appearance emanated from them, their blacks being only a tiny part of the eye. The whole of the human’s body was a paler version of the same pink hue that it had been as a dragon, and it was scale-free and looked quite soft.
Then, with a wave of the little thing’s hand and a puff of colored smoke, it was covered in oddly-colored bits of … something. Ghadshyk had heard that humans wore something called ‘clothing’, but since there was no dragon equivalent, it had been impossible for the elders to explain what ‘clothing’ meant with any effectiveness. Something they wear in order to protect their fragile bodies, but serving a multiple purpose of being a visual cue to attract mates and ward off predatory humans. Ghadshyk didn’t understand how that was possible, as dragons select their mates based on a complicated system that relied on emotional, intellectual, and personality factors, as well as the wisdom of the more experienced elders and each dragon’s own preferences, not just in what they desire from a companion and their offspring, but how they prefer to live their lives and spend their time and keep their living spaces. The color a dragon appeared to be was always the same as another dragon in the same spot on the same day, so appearance simply was not a factor. As far as warding off predators went, when dragons could not hold their tempers in check and struck out against another, they were simply restricted back to the enclave and carefully tutored until they could learn proper levels of temperance, patience, and understanding, whether it took a single decade or a dozen. Usually dragons learned appropriate temperance long before they ever grew large enough to cause any real damage to another. This was an important part of why coming of age was never even considered before a dragon’s two-hundredth year; the dragons believed that a proper upbringing and education was important for every member of their small society.
So, while Ghadshyk could see the tiny human’s clothes right there in front of him, and had studied humans to the greatest depth that the teachers and elders were willing and able to give him, he still didn’t understand them.
The tiny creature spoke up, in a tiny voice that very nearly got carried away on the wind, “I’m known as Merle. I’m a wizard, and yes, I am a human.” Merle was speaking now in Cantonese as it was spoken in the region at the time. There was no way his human body could have pronounced the high-dragon tongue. Luckily, Ghadshyk had studied and learned several human languages and was able to understand him and reply in turn.