Before Qaylie was born, Granddad would come down from the mountain to the town when he was needed. But that was over ten years ago; now he stayed in the mountain, and those who needed him went to him instead.
Qaylie liked to go before it was dawn. The sky was brightening now, a hazy shade of midwinter grey. Wisps of windswept snow had covered the well-worn path, and sat on the pines in grey, sullen lumps.
Icicles glittered around the mouth of Granddad's cave, turning the crevice into a grinning, toothy mouth.
She grinned back. She cupped her mittens around her mouth, and shouted, "GRANDDAD!"
The winter air echoed the word. And then the sound began, the low, grinding, scraping noise of metal on stone. It sounded huge. It sounded heavy.
It sounded old.
It was.
Granddad pulled his head out of his cave. Things tied into his horns - jewelery, bottles, skulls, tied together with fishing nets and bits of rope and lengths of yarn - clinked and clattered and clanged against each other in a ghoulish windchime.
He was missing a tusk. The other had been carved into scrimshaw depicting a valley full of fire, the flames twisting into awful, leering faces.
He pulled himself out of the cave. His neck was a carpet of wrinkles. His talons pulled his bloated, scarred belly across the stone. His fleshless wings hung limp at his sides. He was the colour of cold iron, and he was the shape of a nightmare.
He wore spectacles. One of the lenses was a round stained-glass window from the church back in town.
Qaylie held out the pack. "O Great And Terrible Baradir The Red!" she recited. "I Come Bearing A Tithe, In The Awful And Desperate Fear That You May Not Yet Snuff Out Our Fleeting Lives."
The dragon hummed. Pebbles and little bits of ice vibrated with the sound. "And I accept it," he rumbled. "And may you live to grant me more tithes, you tiny, ill-born, insignificant insect."
The two stared at each other, refusing to let a flicker of emotion cross their faces.
Qaylie broke first. She sprung, laughing, and wrapped her arms around Granddad's snout.
"Happy birthday, Granddad," she said.
Granddad laughed. Under the cool, black scales, Qaylie could just feel the furnace glow.
***
"Tolma made you some more string art," said Qaylie, pulling out the awful webby thing from the pack.
"She's getting better at it," said Granddad, hooking it on the end of one massive talon.
"And Burk's made you some more jam - he's trying stonefruit again, he knows you like it."
"Oh, lovely."
"Granddad?"
"Hm?"
"There's another dragonslayer in town."
Granddad didn't say anything. He was staring in apparent fascination at the string art.
She wondered how well he could actually see these days. His black eyes glistened with so many glittering cataracts that they looked like windows into a sky full of stars.
"Dad's seeing how long they can stall him," said Qaylie. "They want to hold it off until after today at least."
Granddad carefully hung the string art off one horn, where it hung alongside a cuckoo clock and the skull of an elf.
He smiled at her. "I'll be sure to send him packing then," he rumbled with something like fierce pride. "Just like all the other ones, eh?"
Qaylie pursed her lips. "Packing" wasn't the right word for it. Qaylie had seen four dragonslayers come to the town over her life. They came in gleaming armor, and they swaggered like the weight of the world made their legs wobble. Then they'd come back down from the mountain, looking embarrassed and rather thoughtful.
Most of them left after that.
But... but there had been some trouble with that last one.
She began tracing a looping shape in the snow with a stick. "Granddad?"
"Hm?"
The words were treacherous and refused to leave her heart.
If she was able to, she'd say something like: "You're getting very old, and eventually there's going to be one dragonslayer who won't care that you're just a silly old crocodile who likes terrible string art and always lights the midwinter bonfire and always tells the terrible dirty joke about the gryphon and always-"
"You know the funny thing about that horizon?" Granddad rumbled.
She blinked, and realized that tears were starting to form in the corners of her eyes. She rubbed them away angrily. "Sorry?"
"There used to be a mountain there," he said, squinting his night sky eyes at a bare patch of horizon. "I remember it well. It was shaped like a - well, it had a very memorable shape.
"But it's not there now. I can't remember what happened to it."
She stared at him. "Isn't that odd?" he said. "A mountain. It should've been there forever. And now that I'm looking for it, I can't see it any more."
He shook his head, his decorated horns making little clattering noises. "Humans think that the world will never change. That tomorrow will be like today, and that old dragons will always be there. Like mountains should be.
"But the world is always changing, Qaylie. Once you get to my age, it never stops changing. The mountains roll and crumble and fold in on themselves. The rivers split and disappear, and new rivers come and carve canyons across my valley. I've watched more empires than you can count form and try to take this valley from me."
He grinned at the images playing in his mind. "Oh, how they burned. The world is always changing, but that sound is one thing that never does. And then someday..."
He sighed. He looked somehow even older than before. "Mountains disappear."
He stared at that empty spot on the horizon.
He said: "Don't use your sleeve."
"Sorry, Granddad."
He unhooked what might’ve been an old battle flag from his horns. "Here's a tissue."
There were some soggy noises.
"I don't want it to change," Qaylie muttered through the fabric.
Granddad butted her with his snout. She looked up into a sky full of stars. "Ah, but that's the special thing about dragons," he said. "I am Baradir the Red, and this valley will never forget my fire."
And then the dawn broke - creeping over the mountain ridge with the dull, inevitable pace of a glacier, and trailing red light across the clouds, the frost on the pines blazing with orange light -
Like little glowing embers.
And as Qaylie watched, the valley below was filled with silent, gleaming fire.
"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.
You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.
It may be cold here in Saskatchewan but here at the International Prospect Cup fans are hoping for something hot on the ice. Canada-Russia final showcasing the two most talked about prospects in the world, Canada's Shane Hollander and Russia's Ilya Rozanov.
for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:
anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.
If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)
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