Wait It Out
“How’s the dig going?” Alexandra asked.
“It’s… going,” Marcus replied. “It’s kind of… you know?”
He shrugged. “I guess when I got into palaeontology I was expecting something a bit more glamorous.”
Alexandra laughed.
“Yeah, kids always think about dinosaurs,” she said. “But this is still good enough, right? Sure, this is tertiary or even quaternary, post-ice-age, but they still bring us in for this because…”
She waved a hand. “There’s not really a good term for someone who studies animals that have been dead for a few thousand years. Archaeologists are more focused on human activity.”
Marcus shrugged. “I guess? But… you know, I was picturing… Alberta, Canada. The Karoo Basin. Somewhere like that, not… the upper Meuse valley.”
“At least the food is good,” Alexandra pointed out. “So, what have you found?”
“Mostly, more wolf bones,” Marcus said. “This place must have been a den for generations for there to be this many, right?”
“Could be, but don’t get too attached to that viewpoint so early,” Alexandra replied, all business now, and looked over how much the junior palaeontologist had done.
There hadn’t been much change during the day she’d been away, which was about right. They were dealing with what was clearly a palaeo-cave, a cave that had been subsequently buried and filled in with loosely consolidated sediment, and it had been someone out for a walk a while ago who had discovered bones and led to a more thorough investigation.
Now they were several feet down into the mud and earth that had filled the cave, and – as Marcus had said – they’d found a lot of wolf bones and teeth. Along with other things, as well.
“Well, if nothing else, we’ve got some good evidence about… uh… it would be early bronze age, right?” Marcus added. “It’s been a while since I looked any of that stuff up, but I’m pretty sure it’s… copper age, then bronze age when they add tin to it? And that’s found in Cornwall, so that’d be fairly nearby.”
“Sounds right,” Alexandra said. “Though I couldn’t tell you the dates – obviously because we’ve got so much biological matter we can carbon date, so we’ll know once the samples get back to a lab that can do the work. But probably not before then, before then it’s just guesswork.”
She was about to continue, but Marcus held up a hand.
“...uh,” he said. “Did you hear something?”
“Like what?” Alexandra asked.
“It was inside the cave,” Marcus replied. “I heard something moving.”
“I doubt it, but let’s go and have a look,” Alexandra decided, picking up her hard hat and putting it on. She shrugged off her backpack, extracting a notebook and torch, and Marcus followed her towards the cave mouth.
“How big did it sound?” she added.
“Bigger than it should be!” Marcus replied, nervously. “I could understand a rat or something, but it sounded… yeah. Big.”
“It’s probably just a snake, or something,” Alexandra assured him. “And yeah, I know, that’s not great to hear, but you’ve got walking boots. Whatever it is, it’s going to be more scared of you than you are of it.”
She grinned. “If you were in Alberta, it could be a bear. That would be a lot worse, right?”
“Yeah, that doesn’t really help me,” Marcus muttered, then he and Alexandra froze as something moved.
Something very big.
“...I am no longer interested in teasing you,” Alexandra declared, then there was a kind of crackle of moving earth. Something emerged from behind a wall of hard earth and rock, poorly lit by the light of Alexandra’s torch, and both palaeontologists stared.
They couldn’t help it, because what they were seeing was… amazing.
And glorious.
And impossible.
It had a green reptilian muzzle, with a stripe of white down the lower jaw and the throat, and a crest of blue and red feathers atop the head. Behind that were forelimbs with what looked for all the world like furled wings, with red and blue and green-white patterning along with a flash of orange behind.
And it was looking at them with alert curiosity.
Then it yawned, before shaking its head and focusing.
A moment later, something-
-Marcus felt like he was falling, or floating. Like there were explosions of colour and light around him. Red and white, green and blue, each one different, each one with cascades of meaning associated with it.
Red… heat and sunlight, aggression and strength…
Blue… cool and supple, contemplation and wisdom…
Green… solid and unmoving, endurance and toughness…
White… ephemeral and moving, adaptability and intelligence...
…
and SONG…
- and Marcus sprawled backwards on the earth.
He was back in the cave, but it felt like he could hear and feel more than before. It was… baffling, and impossible to put into words, somehow…
“What the-” Alexandra said, sounding amazed and pained at once,
“You too?” Marcus asked, then the creature loomed over them.
“I do hope that worked!” it sang, without words, the impressions forming in their minds without seeming to pass through their ears. “Darktooth-my-Creator devised Enkindling by itself, but I had to work out much of how it could be done over my Great Sleep.”
“What the fuck?” Marcus asked.
The creature looked mildly disappointed, then frowned, before nodding.
Bizarrely, Marcus could see… colours, pulsing through it. Red and blue, green and white, mingled in a multicoloured pattern that seemed to trace every part of its body and connect in a kind of woven crown at its head, like antlers or… something else.
It felt like they weren’t there, and yet they were real. Or perhaps that they weren’t real, and yet they were there.
“I understand your confusion!” the creature… said. “It is difficult to learn to talk in a different way to the way you have been used to. You must try to send meaning, not merely expect the sound to do it for you. That was the problem that the Artist had.”
“...what did you do to us?” Alexandra asked.
“Enkindling!” the creature said. “It is when a Draak expends a little of their Essence to reach out and grant power and the might of the elements to a beast… and normally make them significantly smarter.”
They made a sort of smile, like they were trying to copy something they’d seen once. “That is not necessary for No-Tails. I understand that you are intelligent. But you are normally very bad at Singing and this made conversation impossible.”
They tilted their head. “Oh! I should ask – have you Taillessgone past the Grey-To-Come? All-Mother saw that the Great Green and the Great Blue would rise again after the Grey-To-Come, and I decided that rather than follow Darktooth-my-Creator, or the All-Mother, or Many-Times-Burned, I should seek a different Way.”
They coughed. “I have always quite liked sleeping.”
It took Marcus a long time to process that.
“...have you been asleep since the bronze age?” he asked, eventually.
“I do not know what an Age of Bronze is,” the creature said, then looked… dismayed.
“I have not introduced myself!” it declared. “I should.”
It advanced, but not in a threatening way. Instead, it went right past them, out into the sunlight, and Marcus and Alexandra followed in a shell-shocked sort of way as the huge, beautiful creature struck a pose.
“I am Draak-Kin!” it said, tail thumping the ground and wings spread in the air. “I am the Fang of the Great Green, Beloved of the Four. Keeper of the hidden ways, Beloved of the Spirit of the Great Green, Master of the Good Ways of all Beasts. Friend to the Artist.”
That done, it tilted its muzzle. “You can probably call me Spiritkeeper, I know that the names of the Kin are long. I never bother to use the full names of others.”
“You’re a dragon?” Alexandra asked. “But…”
She sat down, hard.
“Oh, bloody hell.”
“Yeah, that’s about how I feel,” Marcus admitted.
“Spiritkeeper just said that it had been hibernating since – well, obviously since those wolves were here, if not before,” Alexandra said. “I don’t… I don’t even begin to get how that could be possible, but I’m looking at it.”
She waved a hand at Spiritkeeper, who preened – seeming quite pleased with the attention.
“And… that would sort of explain why we’ve never found one, right?” she asked. “Look at it, really look – gracile form, mostly avian structure… psychic powers don’t fossilize, but depending on how rare this species is taphonomy might mean we simply never actually get identifiable bones that would be anything we’d identify as a dragon. Obviously this species could be the origin of a lot of the stories about dragons that we know from our history, but Spiritkeeper has been underground for so long that all of recorded history has happened… since then.”
She frowned.
“...but surely…” she began. “Spiritkeeper, what happened to other, Draak-Kin?”
“I understand your meaning!” Spiritkeeper said. “And I do not really know. I know that Darktooth-my-Creator took many of us to evacuate the planet, though. I know what All-Mother wanted to do and do not know if they succeeded. I can only assume that Many-Times-Burned failed, since you are here. But-”
“Hold up, hold up,” Marcus said. “Evacuate the planet? That’s… impossible, isn’t it?”
“Darktooth-my-Creator was very wise indeed,” Spiritkeeper said. “If he said he could do it then I do not want to say that he could not.”
Alexandra started to laugh.
“I… think we need to explain to a bronze age dragon about… enough of modern culture to get consent to take photos,” she said. “Or maybe even ask them to make first contact. Because this is absolutely wild.”
