Chapter 12
I don’t know what I would say to someone in the past. I don’t know what I would say to someone in the future. I thought myself
like a coin I had felt, slipping through some impenetrable fabric all on my own, the terror of that loneliness and how it
us had seen it. Simon, Prince Edward, three soldiers—two of them now dead—and myself. We had all seen the dragon. The world
I thought I knew had tilted by another degree.
We all retched and mourned privately for our ideas of reality that were fracturing and splitting open, but we confronted the impracticalities together—namely the lapping lake of fire the dragon had left behind, the magma it had been spitting.
We needed to get out. The lava was spreading.
We ran across the border of the crater’s crumbling lip, away from the sliding rock and ash, feeling the earth still making adjustments.
I felt like a bug-man, a pitiful shrew with no legs to stand on, not a time traveler who had slipped through the fabric of the universe but an idiot who had tripped, a glitch in a system that had made him permanently its mite, of which there were already millions, scattering, sprinting away like fools, passing out and coming to, then passing out again.
The four of us woke up to a deathlike white morning along the shores of a smoldering pyroclastic flow. We nattered and stuttered,
paced, but mostly sat on the ground, exhausted from the adrenaline that had petered out and put us to sleep. We wondered how
long we had been out. We poked at the ashes with our swords. Two surviving horses stood shell-shocked and black against the
rising sun. No one mourned the other horse. No one mourned the two other soldiers.
Simon and I were the most levelheaded. I had time traveled, so I already knew what sick surprises the universe could pull,
and Simon was the innocent who already believed in such easy magic. I thought about the angel he’d said had appeared to him
back in Greenwich. I thought about the dragon’s hulking frame in the middle of the lake of fire and magma. I didn’t know how
to prioritize my levels of disbelief.
We all took turns vomiting.
The lava flow cooled and hardened into a thick black scab across the landscape. I scraped the skin of the ground with my sword
and it ripped open, spitting bright orange magma from the vein. It took my breath away—literally sucked the oxygen from the
air, leaving a dense sulfuric scent. My lungs burned and I coughed.
In other places, the cooled magma was already flaking away into ash.
Reams of gray fluttered into the air like paper, and for a moment I thought it actually was paper, or plastic, or some kind of man-made material, and when I looked closer: I saw that it was.
Butterflies of something unnatural. Something wasn’t right.
I dug my sword into the ashes. Black broke into white, into uneven chunks of material.
Burning things. Metals. Dripping puddles of—
“Look,” said Simon. He raised his sword. Speared on the end of it was still-burning, melting and deformed, but very obviously
a plastic bottle, dripping into ribbons like tipped wax from a candle.
My stomach dropped. I riffled through the ashes with my sword, coughing and spitting ash. Flames sparked anew, smoke flowed
and cleared. The magma was not completely viscous. Parts of it were thicker and broke apart in chunks, melting slower. Materials
burst into flames, thinner plastics melted and seeped, fibers and wires bent and stretched, but all of it—the entire pool
of flaming earth—was junk.
“It’s rubbish,” I said, out of my mind. “It’s . . . a tire?” I noticed the pattern of the treads in a thick slab of rubber
that curled and smoked in the air. Over there was a broken bicycle. And a toasted, cracked computer monitor. There were metal
buttons, nails, plugs, iron and copper and steel. And a kettle, a fan, a storefront sign, chair legs, screws, scaffolding,
LED panels, bells, pill bottles, food packaging, little plastic baggies, plastic bottles, plastic forks, plastic shoes, plastic
watches, plastic phone cases, plastic remotes, plastic pools of goo that dribbled red, purple, translucent, fluorescent, silver,
and gold.
“This is all just someone’s rubbish,” I said.
“It’s like the dragon was throwing up garbage.
It’s rubbish from—from the future or somewhere and it—hey, where are you going?
” I looked up. Prince Edward and the surviving soldier were mounting their terrorized horses.
I ran over to them, dragging my sword, which was coated in melted rubbish.
“I’m not built for this,” said the prince. “Dragons and sorcerers and lakes of fire are all good ploys for politics, metaphors,
whatever—but this—this is something else. Yes, I would deem this a legitimate inconvenience.” He gave his horse a reassuring
pat.
“So you’re just going to leave us? After all that?” I said.
“I’ll ride to Scarborough and inform my men.”
“Can we go with you?”
“No. But I’ll ensure a battalion is raised immediately and sent here, I’ll also write to the king. You’ll be in safe hands,
trust me, I’ll put in a good word with the regiment. You’ll be treated with the highest regard.”
“Wait, stop—I don’t want to stay here,” I said. I tried to step in front of the horse but it kept moving forward. “Don’t just
leave us. Take us with you.”
“And have two more witnesses drumming up hysteria? No. This thing, this whole misadventure, needs real sorting of a kind I’m
not equipped to provide. But believe me, it will be dealt with before my father rides south again. And if it’s not, well then . . .”
His voice trailed off. His face was white and gray. The horse sped up, looking straight ahead. The other soldier followed,
leaving Simon and me on the banks of the smoky bog on our own.
The dragon was a giant dragon. The dragon was spewing molten piles of what appeared to be rubbish not from this world—or maybe from this world, but from a world I thought I had given up.
It was in the fire. It was in the lava. I thought about mummification.
I thought about bog people—about bodies buried in peat and acidic mud, preserved for thousands of years.
I remembered a trip to the British Museum as a child, my face pressing against a display at kid-height, breath steaming the glass between me and the dark-orange skin of a man curled up, mouth torn like a nightmare, eyes missing but watching me.
That same millennium-spanning gaze watched me now as I dug through branded litter.
Coca-Cola, obviously. Apple, Estée Lauder, Tesco, Shell, Pepsi, Intel, Sony, and a host of others I didn’t recognize, their functions more or less the same, in plenty of different languages.
Arabic, Spanish, Korean, Chinese. Some languages I couldn’t recognize at all.
I was losing my mind as I dug, and the only thing that kept me from coming completely undone was Simon’s almost nonchalant mentality.
He was shocked by the dragon and the magma, sure, but only shocked in the way you would be after seeing a tsunami or a train derailment—something horrific but ultimately grounded in reality, something you wouldn’t struggle to recount to someone who wasn’t there. He just didn’t get how it felt for me.
“So these are things from where you came from?” he asked. Something in his voice sounded hollow and staid. Even though Simon
believed who I was and where I had come from, the future didn’t factor into our daily lives—and now that it very clearly did,
there was no way of negotiating the gulf of perspective between us.
“They are, but they look different,” I said, trying to distance myself from the distance between us.
“This looks like a microwave, which is something that cooks things without fire, but I don’t recognize the brand—the company that made it—and the style is weird.
” We watched it sink into the boiling slurry.
The ground was still hot and angry and we stepped back.
Our clothes were drenched with sweat. The edge of the hardening lava touched up against a blackberry bush, instantly catching it on fire.
The flow was finally slowing down and stopping its expansion.
The crater was settling. The ring of the surrounding woodland was like a silent, staring stranger, the edge of reality.
And where was the dragon in all of this?
Had it flown away? Had it vanished off into the future? Was it coming back?
“Why did you want to go to Scarborough with them?” said Simon.
“Don’t you?” I said. “It makes the most sense. We spent a whole week with them, I thought they’d still need us. The least
they could do is give us a place to stay or something.”
“Our house is still fine, we’re miles away.”
“I know, but who knows what will happen when that thing comes back. I thought they’d help us get away from this at least.”
“And abandon our home? You think we’ve earned their favor and now we’re good to go? We’ll just pack up and move to Scarborough?
Become members of court?”
I looked at him mystified. “I don’t know, Simon. But I know there’s a dragon now.”
“We knew there was a dragon before. I knew, even the king knew.”
“Right, but now we really know. And I know for sure that Scarborough exists in the future more or less how it exists now, so I know we’ll be safer
there than staying here and doing nothing, and it seems more beneficial to stay with a prince than not. If a prince ever got
killed by a dragon—if anyone ever got killed by a dragon—I think I would have learned about it in school.”
“My uncle was killed by a dragon. You knew that.” Simon looked at me the same way he had when he very first encountered me on the road to Greenwich. A look of complete foreignness. Disbelief at my speech, at my disregard.
I exhaled. “Yes,” I said. “You’re right.” Ash blew between us and the two separate worlds we inhabited. Spurred by Simon’s