Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Day Everything Changed (Part 2)

The heat lamp clicked on at 7:43 a.m., same as always, and Dex opened one amber eye to confirm that yes, the world still revolved around him. It did. What it did not do, he discovered approximately four seconds later, was keep the revolving to a reasonable and dignified pace.

There, on the far side of the enclosure, directly on the premium basking rock that Dex had personally claimed, scent-marked, and mentally registered as sovereign territory, sat a stuffed toy iguana. Green. Felt. Absolutely motionless in that particular way that Dex recognized as either supreme confidence or an audacious bluff. His human, Mike, had placed it there the night before with a cheerful little laugh that Dex had catalogued under troubling, and now it occupied twelve square inches of prime heated real estate as though it had earned the right through lineage or combat. Dex rose slowly from his cool side perch, his scales catching the morning light in a way that he privately considered quite magnificent, and fixed the intruder with the long, unblinking stare that had, on at least two occasions, made the mail carrier deeply uncomfortable through a window.

He advanced across the enclosure with the measured, swaying gait of something that had absolutely nowhere to be and every intention of arriving there with maximum presence. The felt iguana did not flinch. This, Dex noted, was either remarkable courage or a profound tactical miscalculation. He stopped at the edge of the basking rock and lowered his chin, letting his beard darken from its usual warm amber to something closer to the color of a small, very serious thunderstorm. The parietal eye at the top of his skull, the one Mike liked to tap gently with his fingertip while whispering ancient wisdom in a tone he found only slightly less irritating than the iguana's continued existence, registered the lamp's warmth overhead, and Dex held himself perfectly still in the glow of it, waiting for the intruder to acknowledge what was now a formally issued warning.

The felt iguana did not blink, because of course it did not blink, and this was the part that Dex found most personally offensive. He himself could go extraordinary lengths of time without blinking, a talent he considered among his finer qualities, but when he did eventually blink it was a choice, a decision made from a position of total control, and the distinction mattered enormously. The iguana's unblinking was simply structural. It had no choice. It was, in the final assessment, stuffing wrapped in craft felt, and yet here Dex stood, beard darkened, heart doing something that was almost certainly not quickening because a bearded dragon of his stature did not quicken, and he could hear Mike moving in the kitchen beyond the glass, the soft scuff of his slippers, the small percussion of the cricket container being lifted from the shelf, which meant breakfast was coming and he was standing at full defensive posture over a toy. He made a decision then, the way he made all decisions, slowly and with great ceremony, and stepped with one deliberate foreleg directly onto the basking rock, planting himself beside the felt iguana with the air of a creature who had planned this exact configuration from the beginning.

Mike appeared at the glass a moment later, cricket container in hand, and stopped. He looked at Dex, then at the felt iguana pressed against his side, then back at Dex, who was basking in the full warmth of the lamp with his eyes half-closed and his beard returned to its usual amber, the picture of a creature who had surveyed the situation, made his assessment, and decided that some rivals were simply better kept close. He smiled in that quiet way he had, the one that meant he understood something without being told, and Dex let him have it, because magnanimity, he had always felt, was the true mark of royalty.