Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Long Drop (Part 14)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Long Drop (Part 14)
Dex had never once doubted his own courage. He had, on occasion, doubted the ground's willingness to wait for him.
Dex had eaten unusually well that afternoon, four dubia roaches of exceptional size followed by a wedge of butternut squash Mike had warmed slightly under the lamp before offering it, a small kindness Dex accepted with his customary air of a monarch receiving nothing less than his due, and the combined weight of the meal and the particular gold thickness of early afternoon light through the glass had done what a full stomach and a hot rock always eventually did to him, which was to lower his eyelids by degrees until the terrarium, the driftwood branch, and the small tyrannical business of being Dex all dissolved together into something considerably less solid.
He surfaced into wind. Not the mild, obedient breeze of the mesh pen in the yard, but a real, insistent, world sized wind, cold at the edges and thin in a way that made his lungs work for it, and when he opened his eyes there was no glass anywhere in sight, only a vast pale sweep of cloud stretched out below him like a second, softer ground, and a narrow steel platform beneath his feet that had no business existing at whatever impossible height this was. He was, he understood with the swift, unquestioning logic dreams specialize in, standing at the open door of the sky itself, and he was not standing there alone.
A dozen other dragons flanked him along the platform in matching harnesses, goggled and solemn, and pacing the line with her claws hooked behind her back in an attitude of profound unbothered authority was, of all people, Nettie, the same blue tongued skink who had spent four days the previous winter making it clear exactly how little his royal theatrics impressed her, now apparently promoted, in the specific and generous way dreams promote people, to Wing Commander of an outfit stenciled along the platform railing as the High Sky Corps. She looked exactly as unimpressed by altitude as she had been by rank. "Bearded dragon," she said, not quite a question, giving him the same flat, evaluating look she'd once given his opinion of the guest tank's water dish placement. "You've done a lot of dramatic staring at things from a rock. Let's see how you do staring at things from twelve thousand feet."
The briefing, such as it was, involved a great deal of pointing at a harness buckle Dex did not remember agreeing to wear, a rapid and largely un-followable explanation of when precisely to pull the small cord looped over his left shoulder, and a closing piece of guidance from Nettie that amounted to trust the fall, which struck Dex, even in his current dream addled state, as advice better suited to a fortune cookie than an actual airborne emergency. The dragon beside him, a lanky younger fellow with a nervous, flickering throat, whispered that the trick was not to look down until you had already jumped, and Dex privately filed this away as the single most useless piece of advice he had received from anyone, in a dream or otherwise, and then, because the line was moving and dignity demanded he not be the one holding it up, looked down.
Cloud, and beneath the cloud, impossibly far beneath it, the vague dark green suggestion of a whole world, hills and rivers and what might have been a lake catching the light like a dropped coin, all of it so far away and so entirely indifferent to whether one specific bearded dragon made it down in one piece that something in Dex's chest, some old cold-blooded instinct several evolutionary eras older than his opinions about himself, delivered a single unambiguous message: this is not a basking rock, and there is no glass here to stop you falling. He had never, in his entire dignified life, admitted to being afraid of anything, on the grounds that fear was the sort of vulgar public display he left to lesser reptiles, and he was not about to start admitting it now, in front of a promoted skink and eleven strangers in goggles, so what he said aloud, in a voice he was reasonably satisfied came out steady, was simply, "After you, Commander."
Nettie's opinion of that particular delaying tactic arrived in the form of a short, businesslike shove between his shoulder blades, and then there was no platform at all, only air, tremendous quantities of it, roaring past his frills and tail and the four small legs he was pinwheeling with a total absence of the dignity he'd promised himself only seconds earlier. The cloud came up to meet him in a cold, wet, momentary nothing, and on the far side of it the world reassembled itself at terrifying speed, green and brown and rushing upward with the specific, focused urgency of a surface that had never once, in the history of surfaces, changed its mind about being hit.
Somewhere above and beside him, other dragons were pulling their cords in neat, practiced arcs, blooming into wide, sail-like membranes that caught the air and slowed them into lazy, showy spirals, and Dex, scrabbling at his own shoulder with a foreclaw that suddenly felt three sizes too large for the job, found the cord, pulled it, and produced, for his considerable trouble, nothing whatsoever. The ground did not care. The ground, if anything, seemed to be taking his continued descent rather personally.
What happened next happened the way his best displays of temper had always happened, which is to say entirely without his permission: the loose fold of skin beneath his chin, the one Mike called his beard and Dex privately considered the single most eloquent part of himself, snapped open in a sudden defensive flare, wide and dark and trembling at the edges, an old, honest reflex meant for staring down rival lizards through glass and never once, in the whole design of him, intended for catching wind at speed. It caught wind at speed anyway. The fall didn't stop so much as it changed its mind about him, his plummet folding sideways into a long, shuddering glide, and Dex, understanding perhaps one word in five of what his own body had just done on his behalf, decided this was an excellent time to stop questioning it.
He rode it out low over the tops of the clouds, beard fanned wide and catching every current the sky offered him, and for one long, suspended stretch of borrowed time the whole dreamed world opened up beneath him exactly the way the real one never had, hills folding into forest folding into a silver thread of river, a landscape with no glass anywhere between him and it, close enough now that he could pick out the shapes of rooftops and the pale ribbon of a road, and it occurred to him, with the particular clarity available only to a creature currently being held aloft by his own chin, that falling and flying turned out to be nearly the same act, told from two different distances.
The rest of the squadron caught up to him in a loose, admiring formation, the nervous young dragon from the platform whooping in a way that suggested he had forgotten every piece of advice he'd given anyone, and Nettie herself dropped alongside Dex with the same unbothered economy of motion she brought to everything, glancing sideways at his fully deployed beard with an expression that might, on a face less committed to unimpressedness, have been respect. "Didn't peg you as a natural," she said. "Didn't peg myself as one either," Dex answered, which was, for him, practically a confession, and Nettie's only reply was a short, satisfied huff before she peeled off to bark landing instructions at somebody's cousin.
The ground, when it finally arrived, did so far more gently than its earlier attitude had promised, a long skidding touchdown across dream grass that smelled improbably of Mike's actual backyard, and the squadron gathered around him in the loose, backslapping way of people who had all just done something they weren't entirely sure they could survive. Someone produced a length of ribbon from nowhere in particular and looped it with great ceremony around Dex's neck, and Nettie, arms crossed, delivered what he understood to be the highest praise available in her vocabulary: "Not bad, for a lizard who mostly just glares at things."
Dex stood there in the settling dust with his ribbon and his aching, gloriously overworked beard, and allowed himself, just once, the small private admission that he had been afraid up on that platform, properly afraid, and that the fear had turned out to be a good deal more survivable than the not knowing had been, a piece of information he suspected might prove useful again someday, on some future ledge he could not yet picture, real or otherwise.
He woke on the flat rock exactly where the roaches and the squash had left him, no wind, no ribbon, no eleven strangers in goggles, only the lamp's steady gold and Mike's face at the glass, wearing the look of a man who has just watched his lizard's throat pouch inflate and deflate several times in rapid succession for no visible reason. "Big dreams today, huh," Mike said, tapping the glass once, gently, and Dex settled his chin back onto the warm stone, beard closed and ordinary again, and found himself, for reasons he had no intention of explaining to anyone, considerably less bothered than usual by the small, familiar drop from the top of the driftwood branch down to the sand below.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.