CHAPTER FOUR
I’m rooted to the ground as Everest deposits me on the silt and heads over to greet the serpentine menace.
“What?” I repeat, a broken record.
“Make time,” he calls over his shoulder.
Calliope lowers her head so he can affectionately pat her snout.
I flash back to when I first met her, and Everest told me about how he and two of his siblings stole a few eggs from a grouchy dragon tender, intent on rearing them on their own.
Calliope became his, and I’d sensed the delicate love she felt for him as she let me pet her.
That had been the first and last positive interaction between us.
As if she can read my mind, she lifts her jewel-scaled head and gives me a look that simply cannot be misinterpreted: a command to stay exactly where I am and make no sudden movements. That won’t be a problem.
“I heard you the first time,” I call shakily.
I’ve always known Everest and his siblings make and maintain timelines as we know them.
But the details around how have remained obscure.
“I’m asking for more clarification. You see, the logistics of what you’re asking me to help with are above my paygrade.
It’s not like I’m cooking us a meal or knitting you a scarf – not that I can do either of those things.
And if you need doctor stuff, then I would remind you that I haven’t actually practiced in an eternity. ”
“Well, I’d say you’re still a doctor, just of time and the universe instead of human beings,” Everest quips.
“Unless making time requires a scalpel and sutures, I’m not sure the analogy applies,” I say. “Besides, why now?”
“What do you mean?”
I cross my arms. “I’ve wanted to know about what you do for so long, and you’ve never told me.”
Everest frowns. “That can’t be true. You’ve never asked.”
I gape at him. “I asked you constantly when I first got here, and you’d either make vague promises and disappear, or feed me lies. I had to figure all of it out for myself – or with Quill’s help; thank goodness for her.”
“I told you things!” Everest’s forehead is grooved in deep thought. Unfortunately, his thinking face is quite endearing, and I have to wipe the fond smirk from my face before he sees it.
“You once told me that your mother sent you time in little packages,” I remind him. “Delivered via storks.”
He winces. “Okay, well, I was drunk. And you didn’t believe that. Besides, I meant more recently. You know I didn’t take you too seriously back then.”
“Ouch,” I deadpan.
He reaches over to gently flick my nose, grinning when I smile reluctantly. “I’ve since learned I was wrong. Seriously, had you asked me again in the last few years, I would have shown you. Honestly, I thought I already did.”
My sense of feeling human has been deteriorating exponentially, but interacting with Everest reminds me that despite my defunct human bodily functions and immortality, I’m far from truly supernatural. His memory is as fleeting as a message carved into sand at low tide.
“I suppose I don’t know how I would’ve shown you,” Everest continues to reason. “You refused to come down here.”
“If you’d told me what you were doing, I would’ve come!”
He raises his eyebrows. “You’ve said, and I quote, I will saw off your eyelids if you take me down to the river. An empty threat, too. Not something I would’ve pegged you for.”
He’s not entirely wrong about that. I recall the day things went wrong between Calliope and me: the morning after the fair’s annual eclipse festivities, when I came down hoping to avoid Everest and all the ghosts, only to find a very upset Calliope who had clearly heard about what happened the previous night.
“Well, if you’d like to answer my burning questions before I’m incinerated, that would be much appreciated. ”
Calliope huffs.
“If I’d known you’d be this polite around her, I would’ve forced you down here long ago,” Everest says, walking over to a giant rock. “This process is better shown than told. Come, sit.”
The rock is a few inches from Calliope’s mouth, which is equipped with some very sharp teeth. When I don’t move, Everest looks up and has the audacity to roll his eyes in my direction. “Oh, come on, she won’t hurt you.”
“Have you told her that?”
“She’s been told for a long time,” Everest says, still pointing at the rock.
Calliope turns her head in disgust but doesn’t look like she’s protesting.
Well, this is more patience than she demonstrated when I feebly attempted to explain to her that what happened between Everest and me was a mistake, never to be repeated.
A charred crop of grass mere inches from where I was standing had showed me how she felt about that.
I don’t understand dragons.
Only the lethal pull of curiosity, the need to know what “making time” means, pushes me to take a step forward, then another.
Even without Calliope breathing on me, I can feel her heat, the sheer gravity of her body.
She locks eyes with me and snorts, but it’s absent of the rage that has deterred me from coming down here.
Everest dusts the rock of fallen debris. “Do I have to sit here?” I ask, sitting down.
The river is right at my feet, the water shimmering silver under the moon. Reeds sway in the breeze on the opposite bank, which leads deeper into the woods until you hit the boundary past which I cannot go.
“Positioning is important,” he says. “Now, you might be tired after this, but don’t worry, I’ll carry you back to your tent.”
“You will do no such thing–” I start, but the sight of him moonlit against the sky stops me short. Everest has always been beautiful, but right now, with the lines of his cheeks contoured by shadows, his hair set alight by the moon’s shine, and his body vibrating with zest, he looks angelic.
It’s taken centuries for us to build our close friendship despite our differences, which remain as vast as the widest realms. Besides, physical attraction has never meant much to me, and I’ve spent most of my life happy without romance.
My needs have been more than satisfied by platonic relationships; but sometimes, like right now, I wonder if that’s entirely true.
I shove that thought right out of my brain.
Everest rolls up the legs of his pants and walks into the water until it’s up to his calves.
Like everything else at the fair, this river is not normal.
I noticed that when I first came down here and studied the water, observing words in the foam that eddied around rocks.
Quill later told me that the river is the birthplace of time (Everest told me the words were his bedtime stories), and she only put me out of my misery after I frantically searched the archives for information on magical time storks.
“So how does this work?” I scrutinize the details more carefully now. Maybe it’s the moonlight – or what I recall from Quill – but the water’s color shimmers much like healthy time. Everest bends over, elbow-deep in the river. “Does this feed directly into the carousel?”
“Correct,” Everest says, sticking his tongue out to the side as he grabs hold of something underwater. “See, you didn’t even need me to explain.”
“You would’ve saved me a couple hundred years,” I grumble.
Everest pulls, and the earth shudders as an enormous shape appears in the river, eventually emerging from wherever it’s been tucked into the ground.
It’s long and cylindrical, with sleek metal rods that stick out in either direction to form some kind of stand.
As the object rises further, water cascades over sharp blades of rotors.
“A turbine,” Everest clarifies. “It processes what you see in the foam: the ingredients that make up time. Lost thoughts, dreams, memories” – his eyes surreptitiously dart to me – “and regrets.”
I squat closer to the river. Calliope’s neck stretches until her face is right next to mine. I shudder at the proximity, but she’s only looking at the passing scripts with me. There are too many words crisscrossing, but there are legible fragments.
…abandoned bridge…
…farmer’s market…
…mushroom-shaped welcome mat…
It’s a flood of lives. I feel it then, a shift in energy that gives way to unending awe.
Suddenly, I want to inch away, afraid of what the river may reveal to me.
Would I see words that remind me of Sunday mornings at the breakfast table, fighting Nova over who gets the last piece of bacon?
Of going on morning runs through campus with my father, or my mother massaging oil into my scalp, telling me she loves me more than the whole world?
Of long nights at the hospital and lower back pain, but also the exhilaration of doing what I’d dreamed of doing, of being where I was supposed to be?
Everest continues, “This is time. A collection of moments, things we forget, things we treasure, pieced together until it forms a pretty little mosaic. Well, not so pretty for some people.”
I swallow, unable to find the words. “So how do you– Wait, put your shirt back on!”
Everest’s shirt lands next to me before I get the words out. My skin heats at the sight of his bare chest and corded arms, glistening with droplets of water. Thank God for the night and my dark brown skin. Next to me, Calliope makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a chuckle.
“I’m about to make time; stop telling me what to do,” Everest says.
I flush. “And do you have to be naked for that?”
He winks at me. “No, but I look a lot better this way.”
Any retort dies on my tongue, because in the next second, Everest leans forward, the muscles in his back rippling as he holds onto the turbine and turns.
The entire river shifts.