Chapter 16 #2
“That’s a good question. I don’t know. The last thing I knew, I was investigating the contents of a grave to confirm the presence of a body.
I’m pretty sure the body wasn’t there.” I realized I was babbling, and I flushed, snapped my teeth together, and worked to soothe my frayed nerves.
Once I had better control over myself, I said, “I’m sorry I’ve intruded. ”
“Are you a deep night or a shining dragon, little one?”
I frowned, wondering what he meant. “We don’t call our colors that where I’m from, but I can understand why metallic dragons might be called shining dragons.
I have metallic heritage. I also have other colors.
” I eyed the dragon’s forelegs, and I found a patch closest to purple. “I have that color, too.”
The dying dragon regarded his forearm, and after a moment, he nodded.
“Yes, that is a deep night color. You must have come across one of my bones for you to be here during my time of dying. I suppose this is better than dying alone. Very well. I accept your intrusion and welcome it. I am Krikolios.” The iridescent dragon stretched out with a low groan.
“Do not appear to be so distressed. Nothing lasts forever, and when our time comes, we return to the ice so that our spirits can return to the great sky. I was born when the ice first came, and I die with the great ice that birthed me. It warms more than I can tolerate. Then the sickness came.” The dragon’s eye, a swirling gray and blue, regarded me solemnly.
“Do not worry, it is not a shared sickness. It is just age and time. The old fades and the new comes.”
Great. The mercury dragon had found at least one ancient dragon bone. “What would you like me to do with your bone? Or bones? I don’t know what I touched.”
That would bother me for quite a while. The last thing I remembered, I was reaching for the first piece of gold in the casket to photograph it, register it, and put it aside so it could be taken to the station for processing.
“You try to honor me despite not understanding my customs. I appreciate this. You may keep my bones and safeguard them as you see fit. Have you earned your name, little one?”
“I’m Kirani Kinsley Ramons,” I replied. “My friends and family call me Kinsley, which you are welcome to do.”
Krikolios lifted his head to stare down his muzzle at me. “Ramons? You carry with you a powerful name, an ancient one. They who have embraced the dark waters. And your other line?”
How old was my father’s lineage? “Scaretti.”
“Ah, the clan of the burning sky, those who whisper to the fire mountains. You are a child of fire and dark waters?”
When I thought about it, that was an apt description of my parents. “I am.”
“I see how you have come to be here, then. You carry within you the whispers of the world. You have no idea how to control the whispers.”
I could only assume he thought of magic as whispers. “I really don’t. There are those who are going to teach me, but right now, I’m the first to admit I know nothing. I have been able to see how someone has died for a while, and it happens when I touch a body. Or what’s left of one.”
“Then you must have found one of my bones without realizing what it is. That is fine. When the ice takes me, some of my bones will survive. Some will not. My teeth and claws will last the longest and are prizes to be cherished. If you are a carver, then it is an honor to turn a bone into something of use, even if the use is to be treasured.”
“Art.”
“An interesting word. I appreciate it. Art, then. Your language is odd, but you carry with you the appropriate whisper, which is why my whisper works with yours. To show you my gratitude for the company in my final hours, I will teach you what I can of your shining and deep night whispers, that way, my song is still heard in the next age.”
“Is there anything your bones should not be used for?”
“You do not have taboos with your bones?”
“We bury them, and we wish for them to be left in repose or they are turned to ash and scattered.”
Krikolios tilted his head this way and that as though trying to puzzle through what I meant. “Do you feed the bones to the fire mountains?”
“A Scaretti dragon can reduce a corpse to ash, but we have tools that allow us to make fire hot and long enough to reduce bones to ash. We do this as part of our burials if someone does not wish to be returned to the ground.” I regretted that I had gone into the past without anything more than my clothes.
My work tablet had plenty of examples of burials and cremations in the Merorie case files.
“Fascinating. But yes, we have things we expect of our bones. We do not consume the bones of the dead. We do not use the bones for selfish gain. We do not use the bones to interfere with the cycle of life and death. That is all.”
I grimaced at the thought of anyone attempting to eat a dragon bone. “Why would anyone consume the bones of the dead?”
The iridescent dragon flashed a toothy grin at me.
“For power, of course. Were you to consume any of my bones, you would gain all my powers should you live. But if you are not equal to the task, my bones would devour you from the inside out and leave you nothing but dust when finished. But if you were, perhaps, desperate and unafraid of joining me in death, you could make use of my whispers for a time. But it is not done because no dragon wishes to become the death of another dragon unless it is a matter of honor. There is no honor in death through greed.”
A possibility existed, one that hurt enough I hesitated to speak of it. What if Madam Merorie meant to use Krikolios’s bones on her quest to restore her son and husband to life? “Can a dragon whisper someone back to life?”
“No, little one. There is no return to life once the living go to the ice. At most, a whisper can create the mockery of life. Why do you wish to know?”
“The body we were checking on was the mate of a shining dragon, one who went mad from his loss and the loss of their child. She wished to break the cycle of life and death, and I am trying to find all those she killed and sold,” I confessed. “I wondered what she might do with your bones.”
“Dark and terrible things, all for naught, for my bones could never grant the whisper her heart surely desired. But I do not understand what you mean by sold. This is not a word I know.”
“Do you trade or barter?” I asked.
He nodded. “We do, at times. Once, I brought the carcass of a great furred animal to the little humans struggling at the skirt of the ice so they might survive until the sun was kinder to them. They gave me one of their blades in exchange. A claw, as they do not have claws of their own.” Krikolios shifted his weight, reached down, and pulled a leather bundle out from beneath him.
He took his time opening it, battling stiff fingers and claws no longer capable of retracting.
He pulled out an obsidian blade. “Yes, this will do. I will teach you some of my whispers with this. A shining whisper, one that defies the very boundaries of time itself. I will use my last whisper so that this may join with you while you traverse the whisperways.”
The dragon held the blade out to me, presenting the hilt, which was wrapped in a pale leather. I reached out and curled my fingers around it. “Thank you, Krikolios. I will treasure this.”
“Yes, I see you will. The gleam of it is in your eyes. Now, listen closely, and if you cannot hear first, feel. My time comes to an end soon, and you have much to learn.”
* * *
Approximately 13,000 BCE
The Edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet
Montana
Time was an eternal symphony, rising and falling through the ages, and every life, no matter how big or small, played a part.
Even the stones contributed with soft percussion when fate deemed they move, be it through a volcanic eruption or the falling of a foot knocking it aside.
When a voice fell silent, more came to take its place.
Rather than the tangled weave I’d come to expect from mythology, I struggled to make sense of the endless song of beginnings and endings.
With the patience of a long life backing him, Krikolios gave his blessing for me to listen to the song of his life, guiding me to the specific thread of music gliding through the universal melody.
He came to a spot where the music took a break, which is when he said, “I danced through time during this when, taking my music with me and adding it elsewhere. This is what you need to know when you take something from somewhen to somewhen else. For a time, the song will end, lost to the great dance. This is okay. Sometimes, it is better for something—or someone—to be lost for a while. There are some dragons still lost to the somewhen, drifting through the melodies, neither here nor there. Shining dragons are not the only ones who can make this journey. A few night dark dragons can as well. But those never return, not without the help of a shining.”
As Krikolios approached closer to death, he struggled to move, but he took the time to point out colors in his scales, indicating black, blue, and purple among the night dark dragons who might become lost in the song of the universe.
“For you to be Ramons and Scaretti, it may well be you were born to behold, listen, and compose the great melodies. A burden I would wish on no one, but a necessary sacrifice for each generation. There must always be someone who can slip into the great dance and correct the melody should it go astray.”
Krikolios directed my attention to another gap in the song of his life. “I slept in the somewhen then, for I had witnessed the rise and fall of many species and did not wish to keep company with decaying bone and tragedy.”
There were several such times in his melody, and I would spend a great many hours contemplating the consequences of his reality. “But were there no other dragons?”
“Then, we were few and far between, and we only reunited long enough to have offspring, few of which survived. Let us return to my present, and then I would ask to see you as you are when a dragon. I can help you with the transition, as you are adept at listening to the whispers, you will be better able to learn the how of it.”
“I haven’t seen my reflection yet, but I have different colors like you.”
Krikolios flashed me a toothy grin. “It will be good to see another like me. I have long been alone, and that would be an excellent final sight as the ice finishes claiming me.”
His magic whispered, and I listened to the sound of it, and bit by bit, witnessed and understood how he interjected his melody into the song of the universe to pull us both to the final notes of his life. We skipped a few beats during the return; more of the ice had crept up his body.
“It is a rapid process,” the old dragon informed me.
“It starts in time measured by the passage of days, and near the end, it speeds along with the beating of my heart. Then I will be gone, and all that will remain is my memory and the echo of my song in the symphony. Please allow me to see you. Try first on your own, little one, and I will help you if you cannot. Listen to the whispers, and when you hear them, feel them. That should be enough to move you along.”
I wondered if the old dragon had a better understanding of me than Pascal, who had focused on the feelings without any mention of hearing anything.
But sure enough, when I stopped to listen, I could make out a faint dissonance, as though my body fought with itself over which shape it should be.
I expected two melodies but identified three, one weaker than the rest. After a few moments, I identified the line that sang strongly of dragon.
With nothing else I could think of trying, I attempted to seize the sound.
Then the feeling, soft and warm yet somehow hard and cold, swept in. A moment later, the world shifted, I dropped, though not as much as before, and I exchanged flimsy human flesh for scale, hooves, claws, and wings. I stretched, and I whistled to the old dragon.
“Oh, you sweet and beautiful youngling, so new to your scales and the sky you haven’t yet found your voice.
You are shining with the darkness of the deepest night offering you contrast. You are the sunrise and the sunset, brilliant with the promise of things to come.
Cursed and gifted all at once, for the ages await you should you live well and with care.
You could even take your mate with you through the ages, for the strength of your whispers will surely extend his time no matter his shade. ”
While it took me a few minutes, I listened to Krikolios’s coaching until I could transform again on my own. Then, mindful of his words before the lesson on shapeshifting, I said, “He is the yellow of the sun.”
“A color with the potential for long life. A most troublesome color at times, but beloved all the same. Stay with me a while and listen,” Krikolios requested. “My time ends soon, and I do not wish to make this final journey alone.”
* * *
Approximately 13,000 BCE
The Edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet
Montana
Over the course of my career, I had witnessed death time and time again. Sometimes, the death came on the heels of violence, the victim struggling to defy their fate. Those deaths hit me the hardest.
I hated the helplessness of it all.
Krikolios settled, rested his head on his claws, and waited for the ice to finish claiming him.
I sat with him, and when the glacier engulfed his shoulders and lower neck, I told him of my parents, of Erik, of Erik’s family, of our carbunclo, and of my hummingbird.
When I ran out of the people in my life, I told him the stories of the city and how humanity had built massive communal nests for themselves, choosing to cram themselves together in tight spaces.
After that, Krikolios wasn’t left waiting long. The ice cracked and snapped, and within a few mere minutes, it consumed him. To my relief, the light faded from his eyes within moments of the cold reaching the middle of his neck. I stayed back, holding on to the gifted dagger while observing.
Once his head disappeared within a foot of ice, the process halted and a serene quiet fell over the glacier.
For a while I remained, marveling over how I, just through touching an old dragon’s bone, had offered him peace in his passing.
For as long as I lived, however, I would wonder if that little could truly be enough.