Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Vidar
Ileft that kitchen while Dagr Hellstone was still giving his statement. I did not explain myself to any being in the room, and I am aware of precisely how that will have looked.
Particularly to Margaret.
I did it anyway, because while Dagr was speaking I was growing aware of the enormity of the situation concerning the Legend of the Skyggjar and that there are immediate concerns to assure this creature’s safety in the wildlands.
Dagr was safe and surrounded by beings who love him and there was nothing further I could contribute to that room.
The being I need to help is now the Skyggar, who I know without doubt is indeed real. And that asshole, Yorik Vail, was indeed correct about one thing. He is not going to be the only one trying to hunt down that Skyggjar for a huge payout, he is only the first.
And I need to do something about this, immediately.
Forty beings saw the Skyggjar. Eight of them are credentialed security operators who will file operational logs today because that is what Team Molten Lava does.
Riley Touchstone had two hundred million beings watching her feed until the moment the search began and then she stopped transmitting, which every one of those two hundred million will have noticed.
I am certain Hyrrokin are talking about it right now.
The moment a confirmed sighting reaches the public, the Skyggjar stops being a story a grandmother tells and becomes a located, confirmed, nine-million-credit target.
I have one diurnal. Possibly less.
I must get ahead of this and file the sighting.
Nothing on this planet can be protected until it officially exists.
I will attach every witness statement from the forty beings who performed the search and rescue, eight of them with operational logs, plus my instrument record and the four casts taken eight diurnals prior.
There is also an acoustic reference sample I took from Dagr.
This is, I realize, the most heavily documented sighting in the history of my discipline. And I assembled it entirely by accident.
I must also claim emergency protected status for the Skyggjar, which is not officially an Academy issue.
This goes through Sir Bane Ashmoor’s office, because the Endangered Species Restoration Plan is the only body on this planet with actual enforcement authority for the protection.
And luckily, Bane is my close friend, so I message him, too, while I’m making plans from the vehicle, pulling him into the loop and informing him that he needs to arrive for this meeting.
And now the most important part, I must change my story about this creature.
During my whole career I claimed that this was a legend that needed to be put to rest. The Skyggar was not real.
And now I know I was entirely wrong and I’m going to admit it, publicly.
It is the only way forward. This is how I protect the Skyggjar, by immediately admitting I was wrong in front of my peers and showing them the evidence of my new conclusion.
This way, the protections we will put in place for the Skyggjar will be swift and legitimate.
I need the whole body of the Academy to help me enforce this issue.
This must start today, in the same diurnal. Before every household on this continent locks their children indoors, and before some frightened being walks into a preserve with a weapon.
I request an emergency sitting of the full Academy from the vehicle, which I have on auto drive.
A Senior Fellow may call one on a confirmed species report. It has happened four times in a century.
An hour later I stride into the chamber, still filthy from the search and rescue.
Preserve mud is caked on my knees. Wulver blood is smeared on my bare chest. Smoke wafts from my nostrils and my tail flicks in agitation behind me.
I have not slept and I wear the same clothes I set equipment in eighteen hours ago.
My domicile is on the Academy grounds, in the scholars’ quarter, and I have lived in it for sixteen years.
It is a good domicile, built out of stone with a walled garden at the back and a bench that nobody has ever sat on except me.
The library takes up two rooms and one wall of a third and it is the entire content of my life. Senior Fellows are housed generously.
There was no time for a change and if they don’t like the state of my appearance, they can avert their gaze.
The chamber is full.
Even though the hour is early and the meeting was only called an hour ago, they have all rushed to arrive.
This is because a Senior Fellow does not call an emergency sitting.
They have all dragged themselves out of their beds at extremely short notice to listen to the male they have called Smoke-Hunter for twenty years.
Bane Ashmoor sits in the third row.
He arrived on a transport disk from Perth. My friend is the Fire Lord’s brother, with a title and great wealth, which he used to be in this room this morning. He looks as though he has not slept either.
Bane inclines his head at me.
I nod in return and take the floor. My official report with all my evidence has already been sent to their tablets for them to follow as I speak.
“You have called me the Smoke-Hunter for twenty years,” I announce, starting the presentation.
This is a multi-disciplinary assembly of the best scientists on the planet.
Every type of field of research is being represented here and they are ready to listen to what I have to say. They are also ready to judge.
The chamber goes entirely quiet.
“This morning I report that the smoke was a fire.”
Then I give them the report. I explain the confirmed visual sighting in the eastern preserve, adjacent to the Touchstone gated community.
I show them the pictures and the audio, taken fourth hour, during the full alignment.
Duration approximately six nancos. I explain that there are forty witnesses, of whom eight are credentialed operators of a licensed security contractor with logs to file.
The physical characteristics are stated.
Bipedal. Upright stance. Height approximately a head and a half above a Hyrrokin male of average build.
Arboreal locomotion, hand over hand, descending headfirst, and the interesting fact that such a large creature distributes its weight with a precision that indicates lifelong arboreal habit rather than occasional climbing.
Stride length at one hundred and ninety nanco, which matches four casts I took in wet ground eight diurnals prior, which exceeds the largest catalogued bipedal predator in this hemisphere by eighty.
Eye-shine is gold not red. I have submitted the spectral note.
And an acoustic signature in the low band, for which I hold a reference sample taken from a juvenile witness eight diurnals before the sighting and which the animal reproduced and answered.
Somebody in the second row says, quietly, “Answered?”
“Answered,” I repeat. “It has a language.”
The crowd starts animately talking amongst themselves.
I raise my voice to bring them back to order and declare the most important part.
“I formally withdraw the central conclusion of Fireside Predators of the Southern Continent, of The Hidden One: A Taxonomy of Regional Variance, and of Absence as Evidence. Every methodological finding in those works stands. The catalogue of variants stands. The analysis of transmission stands.” I keep my voice level.
“The conclusion does not. The conclusion was that no such animal exists, which was incorrect and I am correcting it on the record this morning.”
Nobody says anything for a moment.
Then a Fellow near the front — an old female marine biologist, one of the ones who has been here longer than I have — says, not unkindly, “Dr. Coalstone. This must be difficult for you to admit.”
“It is not difficult. It is correct.” I look at the room.
“I was wrong. The evidence shows that I was wrong and I am proud to say I follow the evidence, no matter where it leads.” I put my claws on the rail.
“I would considerably rather be a male who was wrong, than a male who was living in denial and not able to see the truth.”
Most of the assembled are nodding their heads in agreement.
“And now that I have concluded that this legend does in fact have an actual animal, never before documented, what are we going to do about it?”
I have their attention.
“In four hundred years of accounts of this animal — every regional variant, every fire-warden’s report, every transcription of oral tradition in the restricted collection, and I have read all of them — it has never taken a child.
Even though there is a tradition amongst parents and grandparents to tell their children stories of the Skyggjar who will come for them at first flame, this is not true in real life.
There is not a single documented instance in four centuries of a Skyggjar harming a Hyrrokin offspring, and I can cite every account that says otherwise and demonstrate to you that not one of them survives examination. ”
“Last night it came into a clearing in which a fourteen-year-old male was being held at weapon-point by an armed offworlder. And it placed its own body between that child and the weapon, and when the child attempted to step out from behind it, it moved him back with one hand and stood over him again. It would not leave him. The offspring was ordering it to go. It would not leave him.”
“The folklore is correct that the animal is drawn to the first flames of the young. It is correct that it appears at alignment. It is correct about the eyes, which I have been dismissing as ornamentation and which are the single most reliable detail in the entire corpus.”
“But it is wrong about the intent.”