Chapter Twenty-One #2
Fireheart was at the centre of it. Her time worn body, so scarred and mutilated, sparkled as the lights reflected off her scales with the shimmering of endless sand dunes.
In that moment, it seemed to Frida that Fireheart was the desert, the night, the entire world.
She stood transfixed, wonder washing through her so strongly it made her knees buckle.
Then the lights dimmed, and Frida couldn’t help but let out a cry of dismay.
Fireheart’s snout dipped, exhaustion ingrained in every wrinkle, every scar, every tattered edge of her broken wings.
‘Zookeeper, I want to show you something.’
For the first time, her voice lacked that crotchety tone Frida had started to become familiar with.
Though dark had returned, a faint persistent light lingered in the far corner of the cavern.
Frida stepped towards it wordlessly. Fireheart fell in beside her, the dragon’s chest labouring at Frida’s shoulder, and before she knew it, the two of them were looking down at that light, gleaming in a nook of the rock.
Half-hidden in a pile of sand, smooth dusty pebbles and a few pitch-black feathers. A nest.
Frida leaned forwards. Then she pulled back, her breath rushing out of her lungs so fast, her head seemed to fizz. She gaped at the dragon, but Fireheart wasn’t looking at her, she was busy nudging a little speckled pebble back into place with one long, red talon.
‘Fireheart,’ Frida stammered, taking a few quick steps backwards, holding out her hands as if to ward herself. ‘No. That’s not— You can’t . . . I . . .’
Fireheart didn’t answer her. She nudged the pebble gently one more time, made sure one of the feathers was sitting just right, before she swung her head and fixed one inky eye on Frida, the lines of fire in her narrowed iris smouldering.
‘Azizam. It is not for you to tell me what to do, dear.’
Frida stood there, shock rippling through her in waves.
The monkeys had crowded in, arrayed around the nest wide-eyed. Maybe they too had similar legends, or maybe they just felt its power.
Dragons were hoarders. Like crows, they’d been collecting treasures long before humans had even been a thing.
Precious gems, sparkling metals: a dragon’s hoard was legendary.
But some didn’t have a hoard. Some – the most powerful of dragons – had just one treasure, which when they found, they kept unto death. Their Jewel.
The most popular theory, published in 1958 by Dr Bernard Panning OBE, stated that these dragons needed a Jewel, required it, like an extra limb.
Panning theorised that they split a portion of their power into this Jewel, siphoning it off to be used as and when needed.
Needless to say, once this theory was publicised, dragon hunting increased a hundred-fold, and the worth of a dragon’s Jewel became incalculable.
People sold their bodies and souls to get their hands on them.
It was a kind of mercy, then, that Jewels were so vanishingly rare, for not one had been successfully stolen.
Not that had been recorded, anyway. Thieves had tried of course, but more often than not those thieves ended up barbequed.
Fireheart was thought to have a Jewel. A diamond.
Throughout history, it had been given lots of names.
In Arabic, it was Nur al-Sama – Light of the Sky.
In Persian, Ghalb-e Sahra – Heart of the Desert – or Ateshnur – Firelight.
The name used at the LEZ was Star’s Bane, coined by Oxford scholars in the 1700s.
It was said that Star’s Bane was the size of a goose’s egg and worth more than the entirety of good old England.
Yet no living soul had seen it, and most thought it was pure myth.
After all, dragons were meant to die without their Jewel, and Fireheart was very much alive.
Once some determined thieves had decided to find out for sure, and their ashes – like so many thieves before them – were probably still blowing somewhere on the wind.
That was when the first zoo guards had been employed.
As the years slipped by, the memory of Star’s Bane faded into legend.
Soon its name was only spoken by aged scholars and occasional conspiracy theorists on the dark web.
Once in a while it surfaced as an answer in a pub quiz at the Crown, but that was about the extent of it.
Most sensible people thought Star’s Bane did not, and had never, existed.
Fireheart flicked her tongue, her belly’s fire deepening to blood-red.
‘That’s your Jewel,’ Frida whispered.
‘Yes.’
‘Everyone said it was lost!’
‘And do you believe what everyone says?’
Frida ran her hands over her face. ‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Well then.’
Frida couldn’t take her eyes off it. It sparkled. The scholars had been wrong; it was smaller than a goose’s egg. A lot smaller. A tiny sliver of starlight that had dropped to earth.
‘It’s so . . .’ she began, and meant to say beautiful, world-changing, god-kissed, spectacular, magnificent, resplendent, but – it wasn’t. It was wrong. Something was missing. She didn’t understand what she was looking at.
‘What happened to it?’ she asked stupidly.
‘Broken,’ Jellybean trilled, his monkey poetry soft with sorrow. ‘Pink crackles broken.’
Frida hadn’t realised she’d fallen to her knees.
He was right.
It was merely a shard, a fragment. Somehow, the rest had been sheared away, but what force in the world could break such a thing?
And where had the rest gone? Feeling sick to her stomach, she took in the web of hairline fractures, the universe of cracks breaching its translucent surface.
They were endless. Frida shook her head, trying to deny it.
Dr Bernard Panning would have sold all his children to be where she was now.
But he’d been wrong. The Jewel hadn’t just been a piece of Fireheart’s power.
Whether it was her new dragon brain that told her, she didn’t know, but Frida could feel the magnetic pulse between the dragon and the broken stone, unalterable as gravity.
She could see where the desert sands should have twinkled, the places where Fireheart had once flown, living, breathing, loving, dreaming.
The scathing dust storms and the basalt flats, the volcanic hills and the dry arid cliffs. Gone.
The broken heart of a dragon.
That’s what lay in this nest before her. That’s what Fireheart was showing her. She could almost feel Fireheart’s pain as if it were her own – a raw endless ache of shame and sorrow. ‘Who did this to you?’ she bit out, tears running unchecked down her cheeks.
It was long time before Fireheart answered. ‘Sit down zookeeper, and I’ll tell you.’