Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Night He Breathed Fire (Part 11)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Night He Breathed Fire (Part 11)
He had spent his whole life being told, gently and often, that he was not that kind of dragon, until one dream took the trouble to disagree.
Dex had been dozing on the basking rock, in the specific and thorough way that only a reptile with absolutely nowhere else to be can doze, easing toward what he privately catalogued as his second nap since the water dish had last been topped off, when the terrarium's amber light seemed to widen at the edges rather than fade the way sleep usually managed it, and he understood, with the particular unbothered clarity dreams extend to those already inclined to consider themselves important, that he had stopped being a bearded dragon of modest length and modest ambitions and become, instead, precisely what the old stories had always insinuated he might secretly be. His body lengthened by unhurried degrees, the beard along his throat thickening into a mane of black spines, his hide darkening from sand and rust into a deep, banked ember red that seemed to hold its own low light even in shadow, and somewhere behind his shoulder blades he felt the specific, satisfying weight of wings that had clearly been there all along, merely waiting, as a creature of his standing was entitled to assume, for the world to catch up to them.
He found himself atop a mountain that belonged to him in the full and ancient sense of that word, a peak of gray stone and drifting cloud with a cave mouth at its heart wide enough to swallow weather, and inside that cave, arranged with the kind of obsessive, itemized care he ordinarily reserved for the exact placement of his favorite basking spot, lay his hoard, coins gone green with age, a scattering of jeweled cups, one sword nobody had come to reclaim in what he sensed, without needing to be told, was several centuries. He did not so much guard the hoard as audit it, drifting over the pile every so often to confirm the count still matched the number filed away in the part of his mind reserved for Things That Are His, and when a party of goblins made the extraordinary error of testing the lower slopes one gray afternoon, he did not need to do anything so undignified as chase them off. A single look down the length of his considerable nose, delivered from a height no goblin committee had accounted for in its planning, sent the whole delegation retreating in a manner he found, privately, gratifying to a degree he would not have admitted while awake.
Lower down, tucked into the mountain's one green fold, sat a village he had, at some point predating his own memory of the dream, quietly adopted, a huddle of stone roofs and chimney smoke whose residents left him offerings of bread and, on one memorable occasion, an entire wheel of cheese, not out of tribute so much as gratitude, since it was understood by every soul in that valley that nothing came down out of the eastern pass while he was awake to notice it first. It was a wolf pack, lean and considerable in number, eleven by his own instinctive count, filed away on the spot in the part of his mind reserved for Things About to Regret Something, that finally tested the arrangement, pouring out of the treeline toward the outer barns one night with the confident, wrong assumption that a dragon's reputation might have outlived a dragon's willingness to act on it, and Dex, lord of that mountain and, in this particular dream, finally equipped with the one piece of equipment his waking life had always denied him, opened his jaws and simply let the fire come, a long clean column of it lighting the whole hillside gold and sending the pack scattering back into the dark it had crawled out of.
The heat of it was the part he turned over longest, even inside the dream, the pure electric surprise of a thing traveling up through his own throat and out into the night as something other than a hiss or a huff of indignation, and he circled once above the village afterward at an unhurried, sovereign pace simply to be seen doing it, watching lantern light bloom in window after window as doors opened and small figures below lifted their faces toward him, not in fear exactly but in the specific relief of people who had bet everything on an arrangement finally paying off. He did not require their applause, being a creature who told himself he was above requiring anything, but he accepted it anyway, the way a king accepts a bow he privately agrees is deserved, and settled back onto a ledge overlooking the whole valley with the profound, ancient satisfaction of a thing that had, for one night, been exactly as dangerous as its legend claimed.
He woke on the basking rock precisely where he had fallen asleep, wings gone, mountain gone, the water dish once again the size of a water dish and not an afterthought glimpsed from altitude, and lifted his head to find Mike crouched by the glass with a cricket cup in one hand, studying him with the particular fondness of a man checking whether his lizard had baked himself into a stupor. "You looked like you were having a big day in there," Mike said, setting the cup down, and Dex, who had in fact just leveled a wolf pack with his own breath, said nothing, on account of possessing neither fire nor the vocabulary, and settled for a slow, unbothered blink that conveyed, he felt, most of what needed conveying. He considered, blinking again in the ordinary gold of the heat lamp, the vast and faintly comic distance between the mountain he had just defended and the 120 gallons he actually held, between a throat built for flame and one built mostly for crickets and mild, dignified opinions, and found that the gap troubled him not at all, since a creature of his standing understood, better than most, that a nap was still a nap whether it followed a battle or simply preceded one.