Torn Between

They arrived at Deadmouth in the early hours, a black mark against summer breeze and lilac skies. Ocean waves attacked the cave. Thunder boiled beneath the water. When Scylla closed her eyes and breathed deep, the whole world smelled seafoam green. She leaned against the railing of The Nomad, chains rattling iron, and tried to relax her rage. This wasn’t home, but it was close. A single, piercing scream away. Beside her, Drake scowled with the half of his face that still worked. His fist squeezed knuckle-white around an iron pistol.

“Watch yourself, witch.”

Scylla cast him a bitter glare. She could almost taste his rage-sweat. Could almost feel the blood pumping through the vein on his forehead. Instead, her tongue burned with iron. The lock kept it quiet.

“You’ll die before you betray us again.”

Unable to talk, the sea sprite rattled her chains. The clink was musical. Waves crashed into The Nomad, listing with just a little more danger than was expected, and whirlpools formed around the hull. Scylla pointed a finger at one. It disappeared in a blink. She made a wish. Whirlpools made better wishes than shooting stars—they actually came true. One by one, Scylla vanished the dangers for her captor, untilthe pirate shiprested safe outside the cursed cave. Drake grunted a sound that may have been approval. He did not lower his gun.

“Good, but not good enough,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

Scylla held up six fingers. The captain struck her with the butt of his weapon.

Drake was a harsh man with a soft background, the kind of boy that grows up never wanting yet always needing more. Eventually the thefts piled up so high it was either the seas or the noose. He choose piracy. In appearance, he stood tall, stone-faced and barrel-chested, dressed in black and covered in scar tissue. His knuckles were either white in restraint or stained red with blood. A fear aura draped his body like a wizard’s robe. His claim to strength was both in the magical and the mythical, though Scylla knew better. Four months ago, both halves of his face worked.

Four months ago, The Nomad carried a full crew. But 20 men had a strange way of becoming 14, and Scylla knew Deadmouth would claim the rest. Whirlpools granted wishes. Cursed caves contained cursed treasure. The sea sprite looked up. A small cloud hung softly in the sky. She was almost home.

Boots stomped as the rest of the crew filtered onto the hull. Like all pirates, they were a ragged bunch: hairy, broken, all kindness replaced with brute strength. A few moved like walking hangovers while most skulked like crows ready to rend. Those that didn’t carry guns kept swords or long knives, not capable of killing Scylla but sharp enough to cause pain. When the voyage began, they had taken turns, but now they gave the sea sprite a wide berth. It turned out, women and pirate ships made for ill luck. Rigging ropes became nooses, and dry decks slipped as if wet. Cooked food spoiled with poison. Scylla showed them her six fingers. When they cringed with fear, she grinned. It hurt to smile, burned with iron, but she couldn’t help herself. Not here, not when she was so close to freedom.

“Frhyftsyrz,” a skinny creature covered in coral jewelry sighed. He waved a wand. Scylla fell to her knees, wrists burning, her skin cracking apart. She wanted to scream but couldn’t. Her entire body felt like a ceramic bowl that had just been knocked from a counter.

The ship’s wizard jabbed a boney finger into the back of her neck. If the rest of the crew were crows, Roland was a cat. He liked to play with his food.

“You are not as close to freedom as you think you are,” he said. “Not here, not ever.”

Scylla tried to rise, but Drake put the barrel of his gun to the back of her head. It smoked against her skin. A whirlpool appeared beneath the ship, and after a nod from the wizard, Scylla made it vanish.

“I wish,” Roland said, his voice a whispered hiss. Scylla’s blood ran cold. “I wish for all your little wishes to come untrue, fae. Every. Single. One.”

Scylla screamed—at the world, at the injustice, at being so close to revenge yet so far away. They had captured her far from home, a small sprite with a big curse trying to flee the deaths that followed like a shadow. Even now she saw them, the possibilities. It was so easy to slip aboard a ship, to hit one’s head or plunge overboard for no reason. Bad weather. Bad health. One more could yet die. She looked out at the water, with its white crests and salt smell, and saw no more whirlpools. Then she looked up. The cloud was still there. They were safe to enter Deadmouth, but they were not safe to leave.

Dressed in grime-stained white, the sea sprite rose and brushed herself off. Her chains clinked. She was a small thing, no taller than Drake’s shoulder, skinny, with sickly-blonde hair and dark green eyes. Fish scales covered her body in patches of rash. She smelled like wet dog. But she had enough rage left to make them all scream, and soon, they would. Roland controlled the sea, but he did not control the clouds.

“Let’s go,” Drake ordered. “Get the boats loaded. Ropes, torches, bags. We have until sunset before the tides return in full. I want to be rich before then.”

What was left of the crew cheered. There was nothing in the cave to be afraid of, not when Drake held them so. Beside the captain, the wizard gazed with black eyes, his vision not on the present but the future.

Scylla needed to kill them both, but she only had enough magic left for one.

*

Roland threw her into the last boat with a rough hand and a muttered curse: “Arytigu.” Scylla felt her body go numb, turn to glass on the outside while her insides cracked with desert. He pushed; she fell. It was hard to instill fear when pain made her whimper like an injured animal. Roland was a dark wizard, more skeleton than man, with skin so thin she could see every blue, spidery vein in his body. Most of the crew said he was a dead thing brought back to life by his own magic, a Lich who kept his blood pumping with curses. Scylla thought it might be true. For their entire voyage, she never saw a death possibility around him. Not even during the big squall that had almost sunk the ship. Cursed, the man was uncursable.

Her teeth chattered against the lock in her mouth. With her tongue locked away, all she could do was rest against the floor and wait.

“You could at least look grateful,” Roland said. He nudged her with his boot. “To serve a king is an honor.”

“I am not a king yet,” Drake said from the bow. He used an oar to push their boat around a dangerous chunk of rock. The mouth of Deadmouth was filled with them, jagged teeth ready to chomp at any ship that got too close. The wind whistled with strange direction.

But with Scylla on board, the water obeyed. With the wizard on board, she obeyed.

“Not yet, but soon,” Roland said. “I see two paths, and one of them is you on a throne.”

Drake smiled, but only with half his face. “And the other?”

Roland shrugged. “Death is always the second path. It does not concern me.”

Even with a water sprite captive, it still took hours to navigate the jaws of Deadmouth. Tired, angry, the pirates beached upon a cracked bed of white sand. It scraped at the boats with a rattling sound, bone on bone, and the wind shifted to a colder temperature.

“Dysmf,” Roland said.

Scylla got up. Her body ached. A crest of water washed to the shore, and she stepped towards it. Drake stopped her with a point of his gun.

“No,” he hissed. “No. You do not get to enjoy this.”

“Look!” one of the crew called. “The … the color’s changed. It’s….”

The view of Deadmouth from The Nomad was a tapestry of sunrise, ocean green, and speckled rocks. The view from Deadmouth saw a land of black, white, and grey. Not a single speck of color could be seen from the cave entrance. The Nomad rested at anchor atop a grey ocean, its sails the proper black but its hull as monochrome as the water. The rocks, once mossy green and strange shades of brown, now stood dull white.

Roland stepped into the sea, his hands stretched out. He still held onto color.

“A trick!” His coral jewelry clacked together. He shrugged at the water, and because Scylla was his slave, the water obeyed. Then he pointed at the sky, at the little cloud that hadn’t been there an hour ago. “Cheap magic, and nothing more.”

“But the gold,” another of the crew tried to ask.

“Gold is gold,” Drake grunted. He turned to Scylla. “But not all treasure is gold, is it witch?”

Scylla stepped back. She watched the cloud drift closer. Fear overtook rage, not for herself but for the weather. Her chains clanked. The wizard was amiss, knew something he wasn’t supposed to.

“Good,” Drake said. He patted at his chest, where under his shirt, he held the key to her. “That’s more like it.

“Let’s go!”

Drake used his gun like a king’s scepter: He gestured and watched his kingdom obey. The crew marched, each carrying sacks and empty chests ripe for filling.

Roland sauntered behind, more spells on his lips. Scylla knew what he was doing. He was crafting another key.

*

Deadmouth widened the further they went, growing deeper, wider, and more desolate. Their torches burned with cold light. Soon, the sounds of the ocean faded away, replaced with a stagnant emptiness that skittered along the stalactites. Footsteps trudged along the ground. Though the cave was empty, the pirates kept their voices low, each taking his turn to glance up, at the jagged fang-shaped rocks reaching for them. They wanted to know why it felt like something evil was watching. No water dripped, but strange, cloud-like fog swirled along the ceiling. Scylla watched her captors breathe deep, drawing in stale air and letting out little puffs of moisture. She wished for the water. She needed water.

“How long,” one started to ask.

“Minutes,” Roland said. “No cave is this deep or wide. We are being tricked. I see through it, and now, so do you.”

The pirates nodded, but none relaxed. It didn’t feel like minutes, and the weight of the cave tricked the heart into thinking the place was a tomb. Iron burned against Scylla’s teeth. Iron burned at her wrists. When she stumbled, the butt of an iron pistol burned against her face.

“Move!” Drake ordered.

A scar-tissue of a man named Herch picked her up, only to shove her forward. Scylla tripped over a rock and landed hard. Everyone laughed when Roland told her to, “Dysmf,” and his magic forced her to her feet like a puppet.

“Out front,” Roland said. He waved her ahead. “You lead. Find all the rocks worth tripping over, so we don’t have to.”

Scylla moved to obey but a heavy hand grabbed her shoulder and yanked.

“No,” Drake said. The light from a torch caught his cheek, making it look sallow. Dead. “She stays next to me.”

Roland shrugged. “If you wish, your highness. But she is out of tricks. Six are dead, and six is all she can kill. She is harmless.”

“No one is harmless. Not here, not in this cave.”

Herch took the lead, a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other. Confidence kept his shoulders back, his head high, but the uneven ground made him walk with a slow, shuffling gait. Scylla saw possibilities swirl around him. He could trip on a rock and crack his skull open; he could blunder into a stalagmite, barely illuminated. She could make his pistol go off, blowing his hand apart and bleeding him dry before anyone could save him. All of these things would please her, but none would help her. No, she needed a wish. And if she could not get a wish, she needed to kill Drake. He had her key.

Because Roland was wrong and the captain was right, she was not out of tricks. She had one more left to play.

Her sister had the other.

*

The squall struck The Nomad with all the power of an angry God. The sky blinked from clear to storm-cloud black in an instant, and rain pelted the hull so hard it sounded like rocks beating against wood. Men ran for rigging ropes or cover depending on where they stood while Drake screamed orders no one could hear. Roland promised the captain a crown and a kingship, but the weather cared for neither. He was too mortal for that. Scylla watched them fight to survive, following the possibilities with her mind. Any one person could fall from the ship, get struck by lightning, snag against a rope. It was early in the voyage, and she had only killed two so far. She was hungry for more.

They deserved to suffer. Every. Last. One.

Scylla found her victim, but before she could take the sacrifice, make the man disappear in a puff of violence, the storm snapped a piece of rope. It whiplashed into the pirate hard enough to tear him in two. No one heard his bones break, his flesh rend, but they all saw the storm carry his torso over the railing. The rain washed the rest away.

Scylla ran for a better look, hoping to see a whirlpool where the body had fallen. She had wishes to make. Instead, she found dark waves and angry white foam. The ocean swallowed the body.

“I wish!” she screamed. “I wish they were all dead!”

She looked around, saw the possibilities through a haze of rainwater. The storm drenched her from head to toe, saturated her with so much water that despite Roland and his magic, she felt powerful. So many could die today, yet only four more by her hand. She began choosing targets.

But like all squalls, this one vanished as quickly as it appeared. A thousand possibilities shrunk to just a handful, and every set of eyes locked with hers. Scylla held up her hands in surrender, but to The Nomad, they were red with guilt. And blood.

Calm, kinglike despite bleeding from a fresh wound that made half his face look like exposed meat, Drake walked over to Scylla and shot her twice in the leg. The iron burrowed deep into bone. It would take four days of pain before she found the courage to pull the bullets free. By then, Roland had stolen her magic with curses, and all the pirates had threatened to throw her overboard.

She was bad luck. She was a witch. She had conjured the storm. She would kill again.

With the temperament of a pirate, Drake hauled Scylla to the deck and forced her down. Roland hissed with magic. From a deep pocket, he produced an iron lock.

“You are mine,” the wizard shouted, his arms moving, his jewelry clicking together with the pageantry of it all. “And now, all of the ocean is mine.”

Scylla screamed until she couldn’t.

*

From the outside, Deadmouth appeared a small, sharp thing unworthy of its many rumors and legends. Now deep within, the pirates began to reconsider. They weren’t exploring a cave but a chasm, one with cathedral-like ceilings and a thousand whispered riches. Jewels glimmered in the deeper stalagmites. When Roland touched them, they burst with color: sapphires, rubies, garnets, and strange, square-shaped hunks of metal made of rainbows. The gems came freely from their homes, and the pirates rushed them into their sacks and chests. Deadmouth contained enough treasure to buy Drake his kingdom and then some.

When the shiny rocks were claimed, Drake ordered them further in. Water dripped up ahead, and even the most cold-hearted pirate thought it sounded like gold.

“What is wonderful about the fey,” Roland said, giving Scylla a jab with his wand. “Is that they must follow rules. Tell me, why do you collect treasure?”

Scylla scowled.

“For pleasure? For fun?” The wizard shook his head. “Or is it because you are nothing more than dogs collecting bones?”

Spite made the sea sprite defiant, but magic kept her docile. Were it not for the lock in her mouth, she would have threatened the man first, and then spoke the truth second. Scylla wanted treasure to buy her way to womanhood, to shed her scales and her rage. Fae hated, and fae played, but they had holes for hearts. Only the desperate horded treasure, and Scylla knew desperation better than most. It was why she had left her home, why she had journeyed so far away with a promise, a hope, and one last contract.

Deadmouth ended in a sheer rock wall decorated with old paintings, tapestries, and anything else of value that could be hung. Fog swirled around the ground like snakes, coiling and twisting between mounds of gold. Even in the colorless world, it shined, radiated more wealth than a God could spend. Drake grabbed Scylla’s arm with painful fingers, only to let go.

“It’s more than I ever dreamed,” he whispered.

Roland shook his head. “A fancy, your highness, but I’ve stepped into your dreams. They are bigger than this.” He watched the fog with a hunter’s eyes, his hands flexing not with claws but spells. “We will make them bigger.”

“Is the key ready?”

“Yes.”

With a nod from their captain, the remaining pirates descended upon the golden horde, whooping, hollering, all fear forgotten. They moved as if invincible. Scylla watched them plunder. She hated them all the more.

“You,” Drake said, speaking more with his gun than his voice. “Make her appear.”

Scylla felt her skin crack with fear. She tried to shrug. Roland spat magic.

“Do it.”

Scylla shook her head. She tried to look confused and not terrified. Her gaze betrayed her. Drake followed it to the fog, and to the cloud hidden in the fog.

“We know, witch,” the pirate captain said. “And we know who she is, too.”

“Right on time,” Roland said. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled forth an iron key. “Just like we dreamed.”

The cloud grew in size, twisted bigger, brighter, until even the treasure-hungry pirates took notice. Gold fell from hands to plink against the ground, and heavy sacks slumped half full.

“Captain!” Herch called. “Captain, what’s that?”

“Treasure,” Drake said. “Worth more than every ounce of gold in this place.”

Charybdis grew in size, swirled and spun on strange axis, a tornado without rules. Scylla tried to scream at her, to run away, to leave before it was too late, but the lock kept her tongue swollen with pain. She stepped away. Her chains burned hot against her skin. Roland laughed. He held up his key with one hand, and then two fingers with the other. No possibilities swirled around him.

“Water and wind,” he said. “A kingdom that is the entire sea. All seven oceans.”

“Every ship that crosses my path will be torn between you two,” Drake said. “Except that’s not true. They’ll be torn between me.”

“You’ll make a good king,” Roland agreed. Then his face broke into a snarl. “Pnru! Grra Qsom smf pnru!”

Scylla dropped to the floor in convulsions, just as Charybdis made to strike. The spell struck the cloud and stopped it cold. A crack like glass breaking echoed throughout Deadmouth, and in the midst of that angry storm, a spirit fell to the ground. She landed in a heap, a thin, broken creature with malnourished limbs and white hair. Roland dug into the many pockets of his person and found a set of iron chains.

“We’ve learned,” he said.

“Do it,” Drake ordered.

Everyone gathered in close to watch. Charybdis stood on shaky legs, only for Roland to throw her to the ground. Scylla needed to kill him, but no possibilities formed. Herch shoved her into the ground. He could still die. The pirate next to him could still die. She watched them tear at her sister’s home, take the treasure that might one day buy freedom; she heard them threaten and promise and laugh.

Charybdis screamed in pain. “No!” she cried, her voice a starved sound. Roland grabbed her by the tongue. Drake shot her in the stomach.

Scylla hunted for deaths, the sacrifices that were her burden, but none would help her. Only Charybdis could sink full ships. She hungered, and hunger killed more than hate. It’s why Scylla could only take six. No, she needed a wish. Her hands dug into dirt, gold coins, and sharp rocks.

A possibility struck her then, just as Roland was clamping his iron prison around the air sprite. Scylla could harm herself—she could spend a death on her own blood. It would flow. It would twist into the ground, where it would disappear. The whirlpools at Deadmouth granted wishes. With shackled hands, she reached for a sharp rock.

“Good luck,” Herch whispered. He kicked her. No one paid them any mind. The ground was hard, and the scattered treasure made a makeshift basin. “You can’t stop a king.”

In a clumsy flash, Scylla jabbed the rock into her wrist. The possibility vanished. She was out of tricks. Pain dug deep, and blood flowed free, spilling into the ground. She begged it to obey her. Far away, crouched over her sister, Roland spun and waved with the coral pageantry of his magic. Scylla watched the movements. Her blood followed suit.

“Hey!” Herch called. Roland almost stopped what he was doing to see. Drake looked back in alarm.

“Watch her!” he barked.

Herch bent down, his knife flashing in the strange, colorless light, but it was too late. Scylla’s blood spun a single circle and vanished. To Deadmouth, it was a whirlpool. She made a wish.

“Charybdis,” she roared around the lock in her mouth. The words slurred, and the iron burned two of her teeth to pus. “I wish you could kill them!”

The fragile, starving girl vanished in a puff of tornado. An angry cloud formed in her wake, a twisting cyclone big enough to fill the entire cave. Pirates screamed. Shots rang out. Roland yelled magic words that didn’t work, and then a hand reached out from the center of the tornado and yanked. The wizard flew into its maw, into a swirl of angry clouds and sharp rocks that were teeth. Blood fell like rain.

Herch ran towards his king, his gun firing at the monster cloud, his sword flailing. Charybdis grabbed him next. They all watched him fly into the air, never to be seen again.

Panic overcame the remaining pirates, which made them all the easier to kill. If Scylla was an angry flood, then Charybdis was a revolted God. One by one, she picked the pirates up and devoured them, until all but Drake remained.

He tackled Scylla to the ground and put his iron pistol to her head.

“Do something!” he roared. “I command it.”

Scylla raged. She had her magic back, but she couldn’t kill him. The six deaths were spent. She could, however, hurt him. Make him scream. Make him wish he were dead until he was. She flailed with her sharp rock and caught the pirate captain in the arm. Blood spilled. Red. Iron. Water. She grabbed at the water within and yanked. Drake howled as a chalice of blood spun from his arm like thread from a ball of yarn. His gun fell to the ground.

With a delicate, cloud hand, Charybdis reached into Drake’s shirt and found his key. She handed it to Scylla.

“No!” Drake roared, but he was already being lifted off the ground, and into the tornado maw. The would-be king became food.

*

“Welcome back,” Charybdis said. She walked barefoot among the wreckage, her pale feet collecting cuts and leaving beige footprints. “I missed you.”

“Yes,” Scylla said. Talking felt strange, painful. Everything was swollen. The word whistled through her missing teeth. “I am home.”

Charybdis held out her hands, and Scylla fell into the hug. She was too angry to weep, so she did not. She could hear her sister’s stomach growl.

“You’re not human.”

“No,” Scylla said. “No, it didn’t work. It wasn’t enough.”

The air sprite let go, stepped back so she could look around her plundered, stained home. It held enough treasure to buy the world. “Do you think there will ever be enough?”

Scylla shook her head.

“I am hungry,” the air sprite said. “So hungry.”

She fell to the ground in a heap, letting gravity find her resting spot. Gold trinkets cut her skin, but Charybdis didn’t care. She did not feel pain. Scylla joined her. She ran her fingers through a stain of blood and let her magic find the water in it, twisting it into little shapes. First she made Drake, then she made Roland. Then she drank the blood and hated.

“I’m still angry,” Scylla said.

“I know.”

“I wish I could drown the world.”

“I know.”

Charybdis reached for Scylla’s hand. Her grip was weak, starved, a child’s hand with a thousand corpses staining the fingernails. Scylla leaned into her sister and squeezed. She wished she could feel more than fear and rage, because deep down, she knew this was love.

“I’m still angry,” she whispered. She was too angry to weep.

“I know.” Charybdis said. “I know.”

Why Dragons are not Pets

Part 1: The First Day

Well, I guess I should start at the beginning. I found the dragon on the first day of winter, or what I consider to be the first day of winter. It was probably closer to Halloween. See, I have this little joke with Brett that the first real day of winter begins when the last red leaf falls from my black-cherry tree out back. Not the last brown leaf, and not the last yellow leaf. It has to be the last red one. Some years, winter comes pretty darn early.

That day was nice. Winter in spirit but not temperature. For my part, I was climbing an elm tree, thick gloves protecting my hands, safety glasses on my face, and a chainsaw somewhere in the mix. I was pre-cutting the lower limbs so Brett could toss ‘em into the chipper. Gives most trees a kind of shrug shape to them, in my opinion.

“Sorry bud,” I thought. Never actually talk to the trees. “I don’t like it either.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the tree would have said, big ol’ branches hacked away. It’s a sad day when you gotta get cut down. “Wish I had seen the lightning coming.”

“Couldn’t have dodged it anyways,” I reminded it.

“I know.”

Poor thing. It was a lovely elm, ‘bout three times taller than any of the nearest houses, and split down the middle with a scar blacker than my truck. The storm a few nights back had beat it senseless. Hadn’t done much good to the house or garage, either. See, Brett and I were at one of those foreclosure properties, where the house looked like someone had built it out of termite-eaten wood and duct tape. Hardly worth a look, ‘cept there was a power line in the yard—right next to that dead elm. That’s why we were there.

Brett was down below workin’ the chipper. Now and then I’d hear it roar to life as he tossed a fallen branch in.

I kept climbing, cutting where I needed to and readying the tree for its big fall. The thing with elms is they like to twist on the way down. I think they’re dramatic; Brett thinks they’re just dumb. It’s probably a good thing I found the dragon and not him, because he wouldn’t have saved it. He’s a little too practical for that sorta thing.

It took some careful work, but I got myself to the top. Found where the lightning had hit the tree, too. Dug a crevice into it something fierce. Was big enough for an animal, because I could see something moving around in there. Probably a squirrel. They’re opportunists, those things.

“Out,” I said, hoping to scare it away. I gave the tree a tap.

Nothin’ came runnin’ out, so I snagged my little flashlight. That’s when I found the dragon.

Musta screamed a bit, because Brett yelled at me asking if I was okay.

“Yeah,” I called back. Dunno if he heard me. I barely heard me. Blood was pounding in my ears like mad.

The dragon glared me up and down with a pair of yellow eyes. He looked a bit like the devil, and also a bit like the foreclosure house. Worn and tired. His head was kinda toad shaped, wider than it was long, and covered in little ridges along the eyes. His body was thin and skinny, maybe 20” long and patterned with brown diamonds. He had a tail, legs, and little clawed feet.

But how I knew he was a dragon and not just some lizard were the wings. They jutted out his elbows and folded down his back like he was wearing some kind of lizard-skin coat.

“Well Goddamn,” I said, and then I frowned because I don’t normally take the Lord’s name in vain.

The dragon opened its mouth, but nothin’ came out. He just sat there shivering. Poor guy. If I needed a sweatshirt and gloves to survive the first day of winter, then he was doomed.

“Easy,” I said. I held out my hands. I had a backpack on, and he looked like he could fit inside. “Let’s get you somewhere warm, okay?”

I’m glad I was wearing gloves, because he bit with every last ounce of strength he had. I wear some thick gloves when I cut down trees, and he tore right through them. Didn’t break the skin thank God, but he did leave a nice bruise. Got me to take the Lord’s name in vain again too.

“What?” Brett yelled. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I shouted. “I’m comin’.”

I wrestled the dragon into my backpack and started down. Brett met me at the bottom, one hand in his pocket, another holding a cigarette.

Brett’s one of those guys that can scowl the paint off a wall if he’s in the mood to. He’s in his late 40s, wiry for how strong he is, about 5’7” if he’s wearing his tall boots. He’s got his hair cut short to try to hide the fact that he’s going grey, but it ain’t working. Sometimes when the light hits him, I think he looks like a badger.

“What the hell?” he asked.

“I found a dragon.”

“Oh good,” he nodded with his cigarette. “Just perfect. The trees tell you that?”

“I don’t talk to the trees,” I said, though I felt myself blushin’. I guess sometimes I do.

He pointed at my backpack. “Why’s that moving?”

I eased my bag to the ground and zipped it open. Brett flicked his cigarette away. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Dragon,” I said. “It was up in the tree.”

“Looks like a lizard.”

I nodded. “I think dragons are lizards. Or maybe lizards are dragons, like how all squares are rectangles.”

Brett just looked at me. “Paul. Sometimes I think you’re crazier than I am.”

By that point, we had taken it to my truck, and I dug out a blanket from the back seat to wrap the little guy in. He was shivering all over and looked pretty sick. Dunno how a lizard can look sick, but this one did. He kept hissing but there was no threat to it.

“Should just leave it here,” Brett said. “I don’t trust it, and neither should you.”

I shook my head. “I can’t just let it die! It’s a dragon!”

“Dragons ain’t supposed to be real, you know.”

“Yeah, well….” I couldn’t argue with that. Sometimes Brett is real hard to argue with. He’s right more than he’s wrong, which is annoying as all hell if you don’t mind me saying. But I did keep the dragon.

We got back to work after that. It took about six hours to cut down the elm and chip it into mulch, and when it fell, it twisted like an Olympic ice skater, but it landed where I wanted it. The dragon slept through the whole thing. I dunno if Brett forgot about it or just didn’t want to say nothin’, but we drove back to the shop in silence, and then I drove the little guy home.

He acted docile enough as I wrestled with my key to get him inside, but I’ll tell you true: I was out of my element. So after I got him situated in the spare bedroom, I did what anyone would do in my situation: I logged into Facebook. I’m a modern man; if I don’t know something, I ask the internet.The internet recommended a Facebook page called “Herps and Derps” which I thought was a bit silly, but it had over 30,000 members and every one of them was posting pictures of their snakes and turtles and lizards. They were talking about how to care for em, how to pet em, and how often they crap in their water dishes. Some of the pictures was even kind of funny.

My post was a pretty simple plea: “I found this dragon in a tree. What is it, and how do I take care of it?”

Well let me tell you, I got a mess of responses almost right away. Like all 30,000 of those people were on right then and there. I guess the important ones were:

“Oh my gosh! What’s its name?! 😀 😀 :D”

“Cute!”

“Wow. That’s some impressive Photoshop work. Those almost look like real wings.”

“That’s a bearded dragon. Looks half dead though. What did you do?”

I looked him over. Never was one for pets, so I never had to name one before. Wasn’t sure how. As for the second one, well, maybe he was a little cute. It’s strange, because he looked a bit like the devil from some angles, and then real harmless from others. You know how kids want to grab every dumb thing they see and pick it up? I felt like that, at that moment. Like I wanted to pick up this dragon and pet him. I didn’t though. He bit through my glove a bit too easy for that.

The Photoshop thing would become a bit of a running joke with the group. Could never convince them my dragon was real, no matter how hard I tried.

I responded to the fourth person. “I found him in a tree I was cutting down. House was abandoned. I don’t know anything other than that.”

“Do you want to keep him?” she asked. Her name was Julia. Her profile picture was a woman in her … oh who the hell knows these days. Let’s call her 25. She had enough piercings in her face to fill a jewelry store. She also had a damn chip on her shoulder the way she wound up lecturing me. Information was good though. Can’t knock someone who knows a thing or two.

She was kind of like Brett in that way. Bet those two would kill each other if left in a room for more than ten minutes though.

“Yes,” I said after a bit of thinking. God don’t just give out dragons, so I felt I had to. Plus, I was mighty curious. “What should I do? What do they eat?”

Julia told me. Apparently my bearded dragon looked fully grown though very malnourished, being so scrawny and all. They’re supposed to be fat around the sides, like an oval. But adult bearded dragons can eat fruit and vegetables, so I wandered to the fridge and grabbed a banana. I ate the top half and cut the bottom into pieces.

When I got back, my dragon was kinda sitting on all four of his feet, if that makes sense. Like he was ready to jump. He scampered right over when I put the food down though.

He made a mess as he ate, but he did eat. Tore the paper plate apart and swallowed some of that down too before I took it away. He hissed at me.

“No!” I said, like you would a dog. “You can’t eat paper.”

Another hiss. It was sorta like how when I think at the trees, only the dragon was actually talking back. I liked it.

“Okay,” I said. Then I went back to the fridge and grabbed him a pepper.

He ate most of that, and then he found a spot under the bed to sleep. I filled a cereal bowl with water and set that next to him. Didn’t need Julia to tell me dragons gotta drink too.

Laying under the bed, half cute and half evil, it got me thinking that he looked a bit like a bat. Or his wings did. That got me thinking of Ozzy Osbourne who bit the head off a bat once.

“Gonna name you Ozzy,” I said to him. He didn’t look at me. Lizards, I don’t think, care much about having names.

Part 2: The Next Six Months

In some ways, living with Ozzy was a bit of a blur. I remember more of the little things than the big ones, and I guess maybe that’s why I held onto him for as long as I did. Dragons aren’t really pets, as it turns out. Like wolves aren’t pets but dogs are.

That next morning, I checked on him and ‘bout fell over. I don’t know how he did it, but he trashed most of that spare bedroom. Weighed less than a pound and wasn’t even two feet long but managed to drag the comforter off my bed and mush it into a little pillow cave for himself. Was bits of cotton and pillow fluff everywhere. He then tore all the silver latches and knobs off the hutch I had spent most of last year restoring! Scratched it all up and down and put bite marks in the wood, even though he don’t got any teeth.

Also he crapped in his water dish.

“Ozzy!” I yelled. I pointed in front of me, expecting him to come wandering out of his pillow cave, but he didn’t. “Come here!”

So the thing with lizards is they don’t listen like dogs do. Tell a dog to come, and he’ll wag his tail. Dogs are nice like that. My sister has a dog. So does Brett. Ozzy just hissed from inside his cave.

“You get out here, you.”

I bent down to have a look, and there was Ozzy, lying on a mound of shredded fabric and all my silver knobs and latches. He had them piled together, with his tail wrapped around them like he owned them. I just shook my head and went to grab breakfast. Made myself some eggs and cut up another banana for him.

“Here,” I said, and Ozzy wandered out to look me up and down. “Breakfast.”

Instead of hissing, he dove in, making a banana mess on my carpet. Seemed happy enough though, so I gave him a pet. When that didn’t lead to any hissing, I tried picking him up. That did lead to hissing, and just as soon as you can say “hey!” he was flapping his wings and heading for the hutch. He crashed into it with all the good grace of a drunk falling over.

I laughed. He sulked back to his food, but it got me thinking. Lizards are cold blooded creatures. Need heat lamps or rocks or whatever to stay comfortable, but Ozzy felt pretty warm when I had him in my hands. He didn’t need a lamp. I didn’t really want to get him a cage, either, not with those wings of his.

“Dunno what to do with you,” I said.

Wound up taking another picture of him for that Facebook group. Then I grabbed my stuff, got in my truck, and drove to the shop. Brett and I had more trees to chop down, and the weather was good for it despite being winter. Around November is when things get real busy. Everyone’s got their last-minute fall project that needs to be done before it snows and they don’t want to go outside. We cut trees down in the snow though. Work all year round.

“Happy Monday,” Brett said as I walked in. He was lookin’ over the chainsaw, making sure it was going to last the day.

“It’s Wednesday,” I said.

“Feels like Monday.” He tapped at the chainsaw, which was his way of saying it was good to go and that he should have his first smoke. “How’s the lizard?”

“Dragon,” I corrected. “And he’s good. I named him Ozzy.”

Brett reached for his lighter. “I dunno,” he said. “More I think about it, more I think he’s a lizard. On account of dragons not being real.”

I laughed. “Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“If you say so, Paul.”

We had our morning pow-wow, scoped out our next job on Google maps, and then set off. I let Brett drive so I could scroll that Facebook page. We was all in pretty good spirits.

Lot of good spirits that first week, really. Went to the pet store for the first time in my life. Almost gagged on the smell. Like old fur and sawdust. Wandered around all confused until I found the reptile area. Julia had given me a list of things to get, but I couldn’t justify most of it. Ozzy didn’t need a big tank when he had a whole bedroom, and he didn’t need a heating pad when he felt pretty warm to the touch. Did get him some calcium powder and crickets though. Lizards don’t process calcium very well. I think even dragons struggle with it, because Ozzy always perked up when I remembered to dust his food.

It was a bit before Christmas that things got a little sour. Ozzy was out and about, crawling on some tree branches I had brought him, when I reached into his little pillow cave. I wanted them silver latches back so I could fix the hutch—or at least try to fix the hutch. Was too cold to be outside, but I woodwork in my garage and there’s a heater there. Seemed like a nice weekend project.

Well, Ozzy, he was havin’ none of that. He scampered to the top of his tree branch and hissed long and loud, his wings all fanned out. Looked a proper sight right then.

“No!” I told him. “You can’t have these.”

Another hiss. I think he was mad enough to fight me.

Instead of taking his bits of silver, I reached into my pocket for a quarter. I showed it to him, and he calmed right down. Bit like a crow that way, I guess. Ozzy liked shiny things. I threw that in with the other bits. This turned into a bit of a thing. Whenever I found something shiny that I thought Ozzy would like, I’d bring it home for him. Little stones, or paperclips. Gave him a stainless steel screw once, but I dremled down the point first so he wouldn’t hurt himself on it. He wasn’t one for plastic though. Knew the real from the fake.

I remember taking lots of pictures of him for that Facebook group. Had fun trying to convince everyone Ozzy was the real deal. Never succeeded. I think Julia started to believe me near the end, but in the beginning, especially the first two or so months, everyone just thought I was being silly. Had one stranger message me with Photoshop tips because he could see the seams in the pictures, whatever that means.

“Curves, not levels” he said.

The first time Ozzy shed I freaked out. This was around the third month. Walked in on him, and he looked like half a ghost, all dusty with old skin. Snapped a pic for Julia right away. She told me what was up. We were talking pretty regular then, me and her. She worked from home most days and had her social media up basically all day every day.

“It’s normal,” she said. “Just give him time, and the old scales will peel off. He’ll probably eat them.”

“What’s this all mean?” I asked.

“He’s growing.”

“Thought he was fully grown.”

“Lizards never stop growing, they just slow down.”

Well that got me all kinds of concerned. I looked around the spare bedroom, which was a bit worse for wear thanks to Ozzy’s claws and poor flight paths, and wondered what the hell I’d do if I woke up tomorrow and he was twice his size. Or four times!

Julia told me he’d only be a little bigger, less than a millimeter.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“It’s fine,” she said.

It wasn’t though. Walked in on him the next morning and he was six inches bigger. Almost a full yard. Most of the extra length went into his tail, but enough wandered to his head and wings to give him a pretty impressive look. He ate twice what he did the day before for breakfast, and when I petted him, he was burning hotter than my furnace. Not scalding, but worrisome.

Which got me thinking that in the stories, some dragons breathe fire.

Was around month five that Brett and I got into a massive row. Wasn’t even about Ozzy, not really. I wasn’t paying attention, and he was in a tree preppin’ it to fall, and when he called for help, I was a bit late in the helping. He didn’t get hurt mind you. But he did see me spacing out and got mighty pissed. Didn’t want to work with someone too busy thinking at trees and clouds and pet lizards.

I don’t blame him. Didn’t then, and don’t now. Our job is dangerous if you’re not careful, and even simple mistakes can lead to mighty bad accidents. But he said some pretty hurtful things to me that day, and I thought we might be done for. Would have been my fault. I felt so damn rotten, let me tell you.

Worse part was: He was right. Reason I wasn’t paying attention was about Ozzy. He had gotten bigger again, and he didn’t seem to know his own strength. Caught him clawing at the window to get out, and his claws were putting actual cuts into the glass. Can you imagine? I need tools to cut glass, and he was doing it with his fingers.

But my favorite memory of Ozzy was after his first growth spurt but before his second. I was in his room reading The Hobbit because Julia told me to do some proper research on dragons if I was gonna keep asking her dumb questions. That was her recommendation. She liked Tolkein. Well, I’m about to the point where the dwarves are singing again, just sitting on the floor in Ozzy’s room, and he crawls up my back and sits on my shoulder. Weighed about two pounds. Maybe three.

He didn’t cuddle or nothin’, but he did wrap his tail around my arm like he does with his treasure. We was content in that moment, just me and him.

It really made me realize how lonely my house was before he showed up. Was married once, and when that ended, I guess I just slipped into being alone. I don’t think you realize that as it happens; it just does. The bad becomes the normal, and you don’t do nothin’ about it.

Part 3: The Last Hour

I said it then, and I’ll say it now. The Lord works in mysterious ways. At least, that’s how it all went down in my mind. Only reason my house ain’t a pile of ash and insurance claims.

Brett and I were halfway to a job when I realized I forgot my climbing shoes at home. Don’t even know why, as I usually leave ‘em at the shop. Well, Brett, he says he can just do all of the climbing today, but I wanted things to be fair. I hadn’t forgotten our fight, even if he had.

“You don’t owe me nothin’, Paul” he said, one hand going for his cigarettes then stopping. I don’t let him smoke in my truck. “It’s fine.”

“Not fine,” I said. “Plus it’ll only be a few minutes. Got all day. Just two trees and some bushes.”

“If you say so.”

We pull into my driveway, and I guess I got one of those strange tickles in my stomach. Like how I think at the trees, only instead my house was thinking at me. It said, “Hurry up! Hurry up right now!”

I get out, and I motion for Brett to follow. He gives me a puzzled scowl.

“What now?”

“Dunno,” I said. “But we should hurry.”

As I get to the door, I can hear the smoke alarm going off. I yell some real bad words and barge my way inside, eyes ready to panic but my body moving to the garage. I keep a fire extinguisher in there, by my woodworking tools. Brett, he ran back to the truck and grabbed one out there. Can’t remember if that’s an OSHA code or if it was because our chipper started smoking real bad once, but we always keep one on us just in case.

Ozzy met me in the kitchen, his eyes devil like. By that point he was a little over four feet long and a real surprise if you weren’t expecting him. Reminded me of an alligator, the way his torso was shaped. Just strong. Lots of ridges, and some spikes down his back too.

I wasn’t expecting him because I always keep him in the spare bedroom when I’m not around, so I yelled my head off and almost kicked him in a panic. Almost shot him with the fire extinguisher, too.

“What did you do?” I yelled.

He hissed at me, but it wasn’t an angry one. I think he was scared too.

Brett barreled in with the other fire extinguisher. He then said some real bad words, because he hadn’t seen Ozzy since I found him.

“This way,” I told him.

We followed the smoke to the spare bedroom, which was missing its door because Ozzy decided he didn’t want it no more, I guess. His pillow cave was normal, though a bit too small for him these days. Window was cracked like a spiderweb from him attacking it. And my damn hutch, the one I spent almost a year restoring and prettying up, was burning a merry little sight. Smoke puffed off it like a campfire, scorching the wall black and staining the ceiling.

I aimed my fire extinguisher at the floor and sprayed it full blast, going up and down. Brett got next to me and did the same. We got lucky as hell. Fire had only been burning a few minutes, I expect. It was controllable.

“Paul,” Brett demanded when our fire extinguishers were spent and my spare bedroom was the worst I’d ever seen it. “We need to talk about your pet.”

“Ozzy!”

I ran out into the living room, but my dragon was nowhere to be found. I called him a few times, and Brett just shook his head behind me. I couldn’t see him, but I’d bet my truck he had an, I-told-you-so look on his face.

We both hear a yelp of some kind from out back, so we run out the door and veer off behind the house. That’s when I see Ozzy flying towards my black cherry tree. He looked huge then, and I guess he was. Four feet long, but his wings were probably closer to six with them all outstretched. It was the first time I realized he really belonged in The Hobbit and not my house. All the pictures and the games, it just wasn’t meant to be.

“Ozzy!” I called. I wasn’t crying, but I think I maybe wanted to. Knew what was gonna happen next.

Well, Ozzy landed at the base of my tree and scurried up it like a squirrel. Scared a handful of birds out of it who didn’t know what the hell was going on.

I tried to run, but Brett, he just put his hand on my shoulder.

“Paul,” he said. “Let it go.”

“But he’s my pet!”

Brett shook his head. At some point he had managed to snuff down half a cigarette in the time it took us to get from my bedroom to my backyard. “Just let it go.”

Ozzy got to the top of the tree and stopped. He was all crowded with branches and leaves, because by that point it was late spring, but I could make out his shadow. He looked at me, and his eyes  were more devil than harmless, but they recognized me. Ozzy hissed, long and loud. His way of saying goodbye. And maybe that he was sorry. Can never tell with lizards.

I waved. Didn’t know what else to do.

That’s when a lightning bolt struck my tree, only it didn’t strike it from the sky but from the ground, if that makes since. Like it was going up through the tree and into the sky. One second Ozzy was there; the next he’s gone, replaced with a light so bright I almost fell on my ass. Thunder boomed even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I got up. I guess I did fall on my ass. All around me, house lights were flicking on and off as the power grid figured out how to treat the lightning strike.

“Goddamn,” Brett said.

“Yeah,” I said.

We just stood there and watched as all the leaves on my black cherry tree fell off. Most were black, but a few were red. Winter came real early that year.

Part 4: Now

I got me a new pet now, an actual bearded dragon. His name’s Smaug after The Hobbit. I take pictures of him pretty nonstop and send them to Julia and the other people in that Facebook group, who to this day don’t believe me I had a dragon. Oh well. At least Brett does, though he don’t like to admit it. He hates being wrong.

And that’s my story. It’s been six months since Ozzy almost burned my house down and made it winter in May. Paperwork with the insurance company is all done and squared away. No one believed me about the dragon, but there was an outlet behind that hutch. Fire department was fine with blaming that, seeing as I wasn’t home when it started. It worked itself out. Room’s all fixed up, too. That was a project.

Smaug’s a nice little guy. Got him a big tank and a heating pad and lamps, and he loves bananas the same as Ozzy did. Peppers too. Likes to stick his tongue out at me. He makes the house feel a lot less lonely. I think that’s what it’s all about, in the long run. That, and talking to trees.

Faerie Wine

They say to never drink the faerie’s wine. The berries are cursed, the vintage enchanted. The taste is caldron stained. Why, even the bottle is a trap! For every sip taken, it must take one back. Or so they say.

The best thing one can do with a bottle of faerie wine is accept it graciously and, when the giver has left your life forever, bury it in the back yard, underneath the oldest tree. If there are no trees, a bush will suffice. If there are no bushes, then the bottle is to be regifted with a firm warning to never, ever drink it. A bush should then be planted, not because a bushless lawn is cursed but rather, it is a sad patch of grass to look upon. Bushes attract squirrels in their branches, moths in their leaves, and mushrooms in their shade. Life begets life, and kindness more kindness.

Or so they say.

Or rather, so Abigail’s grandmother used to say. But now Nana is dead. The shortest teller of tall tales—for Nana barely hit 5’0 on a good day—can no longer tell Abigail what they say; or what I say; or what you say; or what anyone, anywhere says, for that matter. Her last message to the world, her last story, resides on a small gravestone wedged into fresh earth, the letters carved in Gaelic. It’s not a message for Abigail but the fairies and the witches and the trees. No one in Abigail’s immediate family knows what it says, and the few aunts and uncles learned enough to read the dead talk refuse to.

It is not a message for them.

“Or so they say,” Abigail mutters. She can still say things too, but she doesn’t want to. She’s too sad for that.

 But let us return to the bottle: It is made of glass, as all good wine bottles are. It has a cork, blackened with berries and night sky, and a label with writing much too small to read. When Abigail squints, the letters swim. The color is both pink like the sky at sunset and purple like the sky at sunrise. It is heavy, heavier than a bottle of wine should be.

At the bottom of the bottle, molded into the glass, is a small door. When flipped upside-down, there are few details, just a frame and a little grains in the wood, but from the front, when tilted at an odd angle, Abigail can see a doorknob.

It looks twistable.

They had buried the bottle together, two years ago and underneath a full moon. Abigail was 12 then. It was a bright, sunny day. The two were playing in the back yard when Nana received a package from someone called, “The Acquaintance,” a mystery person long dead with a grudge not forgotten. He put them both to work. Nana had not been happy about her gift, but Abigail had been more than eager to help bury it. They made a game out of it, one with many strange rules like, “No you can’t use a shovel. The bottle will know. It must be your fingers and your palms, and you must get dirt underneath your nails.”

That had been an easy one to follow.

They also needed both a cat and a squirrel to watch. This proved harder, but Nana had a way with animals. They found a squirrel named Tag willing to munch on a nut and bark between bites and a snooty black cat that would not give up her name at all. Her tail swished throughout the entire ceremony.

Spells were cast, or so Nana had said, and by 2:00 in the morning, the bottle was gone, buried like a coffin with a promise that it would be forgotten. The squirrel barked, the cat nodded, and Abigail’s parents yelled loud enough to wake the village once they realized their daughter was not in her bed. It was way passed her bedtime. It was passed Nana’s bedtime, too.

Abigail uncorks the bottle. She thinks, that should have been harder, but then, she thought digging it up would be harder, too. Nana had wanted the bottle buried deep those few years ago, unfindably so, yet Abigail hadn’t even dirtied her new black dress in the excavating. A few pawfuls of dirt and there the neck was. A quick tug, and up the rest of the bottle came. The dirt fell off it like rain, happy to be away from the strange glass with its strange writing and its strange weight.

“I miss you, Nana,” Abigail says to the empty room. It’s what all the adults are saying one floor below. And this is what all the adults are doing, too.

She brings the bottle to her lips. She takes a drink.

She feels the effects immediately, though they aren’t what the TV said they should be. Instead of becoming woozy or silly, Abigail feels like she is shrinking. She isn’t actually shrinking of course, but her body argues that it is smaller, her limbs tiny and brittle, like the smallest push might snap them in two. She sits on the floor. She watches the room watching her. Nothing else happens, and this gives her the courage to take another drink.

The taste is like her favorite juice mixed with fire and iron. It makes her eyes go wide and her tongue try to dance away, yet Abigail enjoys it. It reminds her of those sour candies the bullies like to bring to school and trick everyone into trying. They are gross at first, but only at first. They end sweet.

Abigail takes another drink, and her body continues to shrink in spirit. Her emotions and mind do as well. Everything is smaller. In a way, it’s nice to be small. Small sorrow is easier to handle than big sorrow, and Abigail is sick of big sorrow.

A breeze blows through the closed window, rustling the curtains and the little trinkets collecting dust in the little room. Nana called it her study on Monday and Wednesday and Friday and her junk room the rest of the days of the week. Wooden shelves with ornate, rusted-out metal bookends dot every wall, many holding moldy diaries or wooden dolls. A few carry empty jars. A cluttered desk hugs one corner and a rocking chair that squeaks too loudly to make it good for napping lives in the other. The breeze sends the chair into a fit, and Abigail gets up to steady it.

Walking is hard after two glasses of faerie wine. The legs tend to fight each other, and the knees become too scared to do anything more than wobble. Thus, Abigail doesn’t so much as walk to the chair as fall into it. She lands hard, bruising her arms, but the wine does not spill. Faerie wine is good for that. She does not cry, and faerie wine is good for that, too.

Still small, but now rocking comfortably to the squeak-toy moans of what is a haunted chair, Abigail brings the bottle to her lips. She readies herself for another drink and, curious, bored, sad, and lonely, looks inside. The glass door jiggles against its hinge. The knob twists back and forth, like it is locked but only barely.

“Huh,” Abigail says. Huh, she thinks.

 “Drink me” the bottle says, but not out loud. Faerie wine cannot actually talk.

Abigail drinks, and the ghost possessing the rocking chair speaks a riddle in the language of ghosts: What howls at the moon when it is not full?

The knob twists and turns, and the glass tumblers give way. The door opens. Abigail peers into a world very much like own yet different, off in a way that is both pretty yet upsetting. She is looking at the tiniest sliver of garden, at a shaggy willow tree buzzing with insects. The sky is slate blue and the tree is fluffy, yellow-green. She tilts the bottle, and the door moves with it, scanning over the garden. There are flowers and bushes, red-bricked walkways and statues of scary monsters. Bugs infest everything. Abigail can’t hear them, yet her mind conjures the noise, and it does a very fine job of it. They buzz like a thousand flies examining a corpse, the sound swelling in time with the stench.

Flies talk to each other through their wings, and so it is true of these faerie insects. Whispers hover through their swarm, each bug remarking on the little girl looking down from the heavens.

“The door is open!” one fly flies. “We are free!”

“To the door!”

“To the door!”

“To the door!”

Abigail does not hear the bugs, and as she moves her spyglass around, she doesn’t notice them. Oh they are there, and they are gross, but one bug is the same as another to a sad girl from another world. She is more curious about the strangeness in the garden, the reason it doesn’t look right. It’s not the statues of monsters, with their drooping tentacles and howling faces, nor is it the plants she doesn’t recognize. It’s the sky and the grass. It’s the horizon.

The answer, of course, is in the subtleties. In faerie, the horizon is darker than the foreground. Abigail moves the spyglass back up and watches slate-blue fade into ocean-blue. In our world, where magic knows how to behave itself, it is the opposite.

A bug appears in the bottom of the wine bottle. Abigail flinches. It swims in a strange circle, its wings fluttering like propellers, its body glistening when it shouldn’t. Up close it is beetleish with fly wings, thick and round and dopey. It reminds Abigail of the snitch from Harry Potter, only black instead of gold. And with a face, of course. The faerie beetle has eight, spider eyes.

It should be noted that faerie beetles are extremely poisonous when they swarm.

It should also be noted that Nana did not like Harry Potter or his wizarding adventures, which were wrong in literally every way they could be wrong about.

“Yuck,” Abigail says. Her voice is tiny. The beetle is not.

Abigail stands. Her legs prefer to sit and do their best to fight back, but she succeeds in balancing on her feet. The haunted chair offers another thankful riddle: What is the thing I stole when you were looking right at it?

Abigail cannot find the cork.

“Where?” She asks, but the word tastes slurred in her mouth. She doesn’t like the feeling. It’s gross.

The bottle vibrates as two more beetles worm their way through the glass door. They swim in circles, chasing each other like a merry-go-round. How come they don’t drown? Abigail wonders. Wondering in her head is easier than talking out loud.

The cork is not on the ground or the shelves or even the chair. Panic rumbles in Abigail’s stomach, because faerie wine has many rules to it, but Nana only told her a few. She doesn’t know what to do now that it’s been opened. She doesn’t know how to stop feeling small. Another beetle crawls through the door. Abigail looks inside, and all she can see are a cloud of buzzing, black insects.

Where is it? thinks. She sets the bottle down to search the floor on her hands and knees, but it immediately threatens to tip.

“Oh no!”

Abigail grabs the bottle and shakes it. This succeeds in upsetting the beetles but not stopping them.

One leaves the confines of her swimming pool and begins to march up the side of the glass. “I want to bite!” she whispers with her wings. “I want to eat!” Poison leaks from her eyes.

Abigail screams, but no one comes to rescue her. The adults are downstairs, being sad and drunk, and she is upstairs. Her companions are a ghost and the wind. The ghost does nothing; the wind blows. The bottle continues to fill with beetles.

There are, of course, plenty of ways to plug a bottle of faerie wine, assuming you have a bit of magic about you. Abigail does, though she doesn’t know it. Nana also has plenty of enchanted items in her study, odds and ends that would work nicely as wine corks, at least temporarily. Abigail knows none of this though. The ghost does but it is unhelpful.

The wind also does, but wind has poor eyesight. It makes to nudge an ink pot and hits the frilly curtains protecting the windows instead.

Still screaming, Abigail rushes to the curtains and yanks one down. The plastic curtain rod falls with a crash that goes unnoticed below, and Abigail wads up the parchment-yellow fabric and shoves it into the bottle. The first beetle reaches the fabric and stops. She pokes at it with her hands, and she looks at it with her eyes, and finally she spits on it with her poison, but the fabric holds. It isn’t that it’s magic—it’s not—but that the beetle is small.

Abigail sets the bottle on the ground and sits beside it, cross-legged. Slowly, over the course of an hour, it fills with beetles until all the wine is gone. They squeeze against the glass, their wings buzzing and breaking against the weight of their brothers and sisters. The bugs curse and howl in their bug language, but Abigail cannot understand them.

Huh, she thinks. I guess more than just water can be bottled up.

This thought makes her feel better, and as she forces herself to her feet, she puts on a blank smile. It looks convincing. Faerie wine is good for that, too.

Abigail returns downstairs. It is more socially acceptable to be sad and alone and drunk around people. The beetles can wait until tomorrow.

From Stone to Sand

Rhindle fell into a rhythm—swing his axe, heave his shield, swing his axe again. It was more like shoveling than fighting, but it kept the monsters at bay. At least for now. He huffed and grunted, and the monsters flowed and bubbled, their bodies an oozing mass of red meat. When one grew big enough to create a hand or tooth, Rhindle chopped it in two. The monster fell, Rhindle shoved the parts away, and a new monster took its place. It was hard to tell if there were tens, hundreds, or thousands of the things, or if they were all just one singular creature.

Pitch black crawled along the cave, barely kept at bay by the small lantern stuck to a pole and poking out of Rhindle’s pack. It threw just enough light to show the nearest monsters but not those furthest away. There was enough oil for another few hours, but once it went out, Rhindle knew he would die.

“Bah,” he said. He was a dwarf. Dying came with the territory.

Until then, he kept up his rhythm. The monsters did not scream when cut, nor did they growl when ready to attack. They did not bleed, though they looked like blood. Chopping them felt like cutting through thick orc flesh. Rhindle stuck to that thought; he quite enjoyed chopping thick orcs, and it made this travesty of a mining trip seem survivable. A monster rushed for his face, and a quick swipe severed the thing in two. Crimson strands collapsed onto the cave floor. A few flew into his blonde beard but did not stick. He felt his hair tug as the goopy bits sought to get back to their friends.

“Alright,” Rhindle grunted. “Well that explains tha’.”

The dwarf had his back to a wall. From touch alone he knew it contained both quartz and lime deposits. From the sound of his pick slapping at the rock, he knew somewhere deeper was a vein of quicksilver. Treasure abounded in the Nameless Cave. Death did too. Risk always came with reward.

And Rhindle had found the reward. It was a small obelisk of gold tucked into a pouch hanging around his neck, a magical item if there ever was one. Taking it had summoned the monsters.

“Bah,” Rhindle said again, his axe destroying another clawed hand. The monster fell. Another took its place.

*

It’s called it The Nameless Cave because no other names seem to stick. For a few years the citizens of Gir Laduhr tried Shimmerdoom due to all the glittering quartz and warped panes of glass in first few chambers, but the name felt too human and played at the idea of ghosts in a way even the most superstitious dwarf found silly. Then a few years ago, King Davael Rubyshaper ordered the eastern tunnels expanded and a group of unlucky explorers found themselves in front of a rock dragon actually named Shimmerdoom. Those dwarves died, we retaliated, and now Shimmerdoom’s head lives in Davael’s throne room. The Nameless Cave lost its name again.

The humans in the region, meanwhile, don’t call it anything because they have the good sense to never enter it. Their words, not mine. They’re not wrong though. If I have one regret in my life, it’s that I entered that cursed set of tunnels. It’s that I saw and found and know.

But you don’t put a cave in the ground and expect a dwarf to not go exploring. You just don’t.

I was not the first dwarf to find my way into those halls of glass, a pick in one hand and an axe in the other. I won’t be the last. Perhaps someone will read this and think twice, but we are dwarves, after all. Yell “fire” in a crowded cave, and see how many rush to find the flames. Those that don’t are cowards.

I thought myself better though. The Nameless Cave would not take me, and when it spat me out, it would not change me. I am made of stronger stuff. I am stone.

I am wrong.

*

Blood flowed from a cut in Rhindle’s forehead, trickling into his right eye and staining his beard. Blinded, he held his shield higher to compensate and continued to chop and slash. The monsters beat against him, sending painful jolts through his arm to quiver in his shoulder. The rhythm had changed—swing and push was now swing and swing, but Rhindle could live with that. For now.

A monster ducked Rhindle’s swipe and contorted under his arm. The dwarf braced and wasn’t surprised when his lower abdomen exploded with pain. He yelled and chopped. The yell died in his throat, and the monster died at his feet. Another took its place. Rhindle chopped that one away, too. He regained his rhythm, now with the added surprise of a bloody neck. Nothing had stabbed or bit him there. He shrugged the wound aside and felt blood sticking to his beard and tunic. It was deep, but not enough to kill him.

“Bah,” the dwarf gurgled.

A clawed, red mess of flesh grabbed his shield and yanked. Rhindle let it go. His eyes went wide, and he rushed from his spot of safety, desperate to retrieve his only line of defense and cursing himself for not holding on tighter. A larger monster swam into his path. Rhindle felled it with two solid chops, but without his shield to shovel the debris aside, had to jump over the parts. He tripped. The ground rushed to meet him. Rhindle landed hard, his armor groaning bruises into his ribs, his lantern flicking dim. Blurry shapes surrounded him.

A monster grabbed him by the shoulder, digging deep and drawing another quiet scream. Rhindle bucked and kicked, but the monsters were too big now, their limbs and claws too strong. He could chop thick orc flesh all day, but this was ogre, sterner stuff and stubborn too. Rhindle swung anyways, felt his axe strike deep but not through, and let that weapon drop too.

“Well,” he whispered. “Ye got me. What’re ya gonna do?”

A different monster smashed Rhindle’s lantern. The light in the cave went out, save a small glow coming from Rhindle’s chest. Puzzled, the dwarf reached for the light and felt the wound in his neck. He poked a blistered finger into the hole, and the light vanished. Darkness swallowed the battlefield. The monster affixed to his shoulder squeezed. Rhindle gurgled another failed scream and swatted at it, trying to make the pain stop. Light returned to the room. The monster shook him until little red flowers exploded behind his eyes.

The monster’s teeth elongated, becoming as big as a worg’s. Its head oozed into something resembling form, a coiling soup of blood and rope. Rhindle waited, his arm going numb, the monster growing eyes. He thought about spitting but didn’t have the heart. He thought about kicking but wasn’t sure he could move. Maybe it was the loss or blood, or maybe it was the light in his throat. It shined brighter, almost filling the cramped chamber, but the trade off was that Rhindle just didn’t care anymore.

“Ye can have it back,” he said.

“Good,” the monster said. It didn’t speak dwarvish but an older language, one of caves and rocks. Rhindle didn’t know the word yet understood it perfectly. It chilled his blood.

“I’m sorry.”

“No you’re not.”

The monster blinked. It had finished growing its eyes. They started as little glass orbs, like a frog’s eyes, too stupid and round to actually work, but now they looked like panes of glass. Rhindle recognized them. He had walked by them in the earliest chambers of the Nameless Cave. The monster leaned in close, and the dwarf watched his past self walk through those mirrors, axe in hand and pick in the other. His shield lay across his back. He saw himself explore, stop for lunch and a beer, and then dig out a few pretty rocks. It had taken hours yet flashed by in seconds, the tunnels scooping their way into a more interesting room, one with a pretty golden trinket atop a pretty stone pillar.

Rhindle struggled to reach for the pouch at his neck. His arm was soaked with blood, and his shoulder hurt, but more than that, he just didn’t see the point. He had lost, and he wasn’t sorry. He deserved to die. If only he had the courage to ask.

When his hand fell to his side, the monster reached for him. The claws on its hand thickened into stubby quartz fingers that gleamed red. It stuck one into Rhindle’s neck. Pain exploded in the dwarf’s throat, a fire tornado that swelled into his head and then down into his feet. He was dying. He didn’t care.

Instead of killing him, the monster pulled out a lump of gold in the shape of a heart.

“This belongs to me now,” it said.

“Okay.”

The monster laid Rhindle on his back. It looked the dwarf over in a way that reminded Rhindle of his mother. It was both annoyed yet tender, not sure how to balance scolding this stubborn child with wanting to kick him in the kidneys for being such a thoughtless bastard. The hole in Rhindle’s neck closed. Life returned to his shoulder next, bringing a stiff pain that would hurt for another week yet not prevent him from mining, fighting, or drinking.

Except Rhindle really didn’t have the heart to mine, fight, or drink anymore.

*

I’ve seen other dwarves come and go from the Nameless Cave. We always enter alone, and we always leave a little more alone than when we entered. Stone erodes to sand and dirt, and so the failed treasure hunters pack up their things and head south. A broken few even shaved their beards. I think one went to live with humans, but I cannot be certain.

It’s not the strange monsters that leave me shaking at night, nor is it almost dying alone in a dark hole. Those are dwarf things to deal with, and I am a dwarf. No, what scares me now are the rocks above my own bed. They watch me. If they wanted to, they could bloom into panes of glass and talk. The caves have a language, an old tongue of rock and salt, and the kingdom only lets us live here because it does not know we have intruded. We have not found its heart. Yet. Because even now, Davael has us expanding further and further, looking for the gems that are his namesake. One day we will find this cave’s heart. It will give us a choice, but in doing so, it will take.

It will make all of us into me.

South then. It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? There are dwarves there, a small clan living in caves of ice instead of rock. I am told their riches lay more in smithing than jewels or gold, of hunting for strange bones embedded in sheets of frozen water. Because that’s the thing about bones: They can’t hurt you. They’re safer work, and much younger than even the youngest stone in Gir Laduhr.

I don’t expect to ever find my heart. That was stolen from me, and I am to blame for it. I do hope though, that I will find my will.

I am a dwarf who is no longer a dwarf. I am sand.   

I am wrong.