Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Great Molt (Part 10)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Great Molt (Part 10)
A dragon does not simply lose his skin; a dragon retires an entire administration and swears in a newer, shinier one, and Dex meant to conduct the transition with appropriate ceremony.
It began, as these things always do, with a dullness he refused to name. The scales along his flanks, which had for months held a rich amber luster he privately considered one of his more distinguished features, went matte and gray almost overnight, as though someone had drawn a thin curtain of ash across him while he slept, and beneath that curtain sat an itch so constant and so undignified that Dex spent the better part of two days pretending it did not exist. He was, after all, a creature of his standing, and creatures of his standing did not squirm against a heat lamp like some itch addled housepet; they endured, chin lifted, eyes half lidded in an expression he hoped read as serene indifference rather than what it actually was, which was a lizard gritting through an itch he could not scratch with any of his four available limbs. Still, filed away in the part of his mind reserved for Symptoms Noted But Not Yet Confirmed, he registered the dullness for what it was, the opening notice of a transformation, and decided, with the gravity such an occasion demanded, that he was not merely shedding skin. He was retiring an old self.
There followed a stretch of days in which the itching graduated into something closer to a low, constant static, and it was somewhere in the middle of that stretch, gray and restless on the basking rock, that Dex encountered a worry he had not expected and did not much care for. He had assumed, in the loose and confident way he assumed most things about himself, that whoever emerged from beneath the old hide would simply be a brighter version of the dragon already in residence, and yet lying there scratching his chin against the warm stone he found himself turning over a stranger question, whether the dragon underneath would still recognize the water dish exactly where he'd left it, would still know Whiskey's particular slow blink through the glass, would still be, in whatever way mattered, him. It was not a fear he intended to voice, being incapable of voicing much of anything, but he carried it quietly for the better part of an afternoon, the small private anxiety of a king wondering if the crown would still fit the head that came out from under it.
By the fourth day the old skin had begun to loosen at the edges, pale and papery along his jaw and down the ridge of his spine, and Dex, done with waiting for nature to finish what it had started, threw himself into the work of it with the focus of a general overseeing a long campaign. The driftwood branch became his primary instrument, its rough bark exactly suited to catching the loosening flakes at his shoulders, and he dragged himself along its length again and again, angling his jaw against a particular knot in the wood that seemed, in his estimation, put there for this exact purpose, while the basking rock handled the harder work along his back, its coarse warm surface worth, he decided, more than every other feature of the terrarium combined. Long ribbons of pale gray hide came away in the process, littering the sand beneath him like the discarded correspondence of a court in the middle of a reshuffle, and twice he caught himself checking a stretch of newly bared scale with something that, in a less composed animal, might have been called eagerness.
The one holdout was a small stubborn patch near his left front toe, dry and unwilling no matter how many times he dragged it across the rock, and it was Mike who noticed him worrying at it two evenings running and intervened without any particular fuss, filling a shallow dish with water warm enough to loosen things and setting Dex in it for a few patient minutes before working the last of the patch free with a fingertip so careful it barely registered as touch at all. "Hold still, Your Majesty," Mike said, in the same dry, unbothered tone he used for most royal proclamations issued from inside a terrarium, and Dex, who would have denied needing the help if he had possessed any mechanism for denial, allowed it anyway, some old wariness about hands near his feet dissolving a little further into the warm water.
What was left, once the last of the old hide had worked free, were scales of a brighter, cleaner gold than he had worn in months, catching the heat lamp's glow in a way the dull version of him simply hadn't, and Dex spent a long while afterward on the rock doing nothing more than existing in the new skin, turning his head this way and that to feel the strange, pleasant looseness of it, a fit somehow both identical to and better than the one he'd had before. Through the glass Whiskey had settled into its usual watching post, unbothered as ever by the fact that an entire transformation had just occurred four feet away, and Dex looked back at it with the same steady patience they always traded, some quiet, wordless part of him relieved to find that the recognition still held, that whatever had emerged from under the old self was still, unmistakably, the one Whiskey knew. He settled deeper into the warm stone, brighter and lighter and strangely unhurried, and let himself wonder, in the soft unbothered way a creature allows himself to wonder only after something real has changed in him, what else in his small considerable kingdom might look different now that he did.