Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: Leagues Under the Tank (Part 16)
Dex was, by birth and by temperament, a creature of sand. He had never once in his life gone looking for more water than was strictly required to drink, and yet here he was.
Soak day had arrived again, the once-a-week ritual Dex tolerated with the specific, martyred patience of a monarch enduring a ceremonial duty he privately rather enjoyed, warm shallow water in the sink and Mike's hand cupped nearby in case of emergencies that never came, and Dex had sat through the whole of it with his usual air of grave forbearance, eyes half closed, until the warmth and the gentle rock of the water against his sides carried him somewhere considerably deeper than the sink had any business going.
He surfaced, so to speak, into the low hum of an engine room, brass fittings and dim amber light and a wall of dials none of which he understood but all of which felt, in the specific way dreams arrange such things, entirely under his command, and when he made his way up a short ladder to the front of the vessel he found a wide, curved window looking out on nothing but blue, deep and darkening blue in every direction, shot through here and there with the slow drifting light of things that made their own glow rather than waiting politely for the sun.
"Depth's holding steady, Captain," said a voice beside him, unhurried and entirely unbothered by their present circumstances, and Dex turned to find an axolotl in a small brass diving helmet standing at what he assumed was the ship's wheel, gills fanned out in a pale pink frill not unlike Dex's own beard, regarding him with the calm competence of someone who had clearly done this before. "Name's Finn. First mate. We're three hours out from the coordinates, if the old charts are right." Dex, who had no memory of acquiring either a ship or a first mate, decided the most captainly response available was to nod once, gravely, and ask a question that made him sound like he'd been planning this expedition for months. "And the charts. Are they, historically, right?"
"Half the time," Finn said, with the easy honesty of someone who had made peace with those odds a long time ago, and pushed the wheel gently to correct their course as the last blue light gave way entirely to a darkness broken only by the ship's own lamps and the occasional drifting, luminous shape that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a fish considerably more interested in decorating itself than in eating them. They passed through a forest of kelp taller than the ship itself, swaying in currents Dex could feel even through the hull, and once, memorably, alongside a whale of such patient, unbothered enormity that it took Dex a full minute to understand the vast gray wall outside the window was a single living animal rather than the seafloor rising to meet them, an encounter that ended with the whale offering one slow, courteous nod before sinking back into the dark, apparently satisfied that the small yellow vessel meant no harm to its afternoon.
The city, when they finally reached it, announced itself first as a scatter of pale shapes on the sonar and then, as the lamps swept across it, as an entire drowned skyline rising out of the silt, towers gone soft and coral-crusted at the edges, arched doorways furred with anemones, an old, patient grandeur that made even Finn go quiet at the wheel for a moment before easing them down toward what the charts, whatever their accuracy, insisted was the treasure vault. They suited up, Dex in a small brass diving helmet of his own that Finn assured him made him look "properly nautical," and stepped out together onto silt that puffed up slow and ghostly around their feet with every careful step.
The vault door, when they found it, was guarded by a sea turtle of truly ancient bearing, shell crusted with the accumulated history of centuries, who studied the two of them with the unhurried patience of someone who had turned away far more impressive expeditions than this one and asked, not unkindly, what exactly a desert lizard hoped to find at the bottom of the ocean. Dex, who had been asking himself roughly the same question since the sink, answered with the only honest thing available to him, which was that he didn't precisely know but intended to find out, and the turtle, apparently satisfied by an answer that admitted its own uncertainty, drew back a fin and let the ancient door grind open.
What lay inside was not gold, exactly, though there was some of that scattered artfully among the rubble, but something Dex recognized on a level several layers beneath thought: a single enormous, sun-warmed slab of stone at the chamber's center, lit from below by some vent of old, patient heat rising through a crack in the seafloor, radiating warmth into the cold water the way his own basking rock radiated warmth into his own glass walls, and Dex understood, standing there in a borrowed diving helmet three imaginary miles under the sea, that some things a creature simply always knew how to find, wherever the dream happened to put him.
The chamber chose that exact moment to disagree with their continued presence, a low groan running through the old stone and a thin, urgent stream of water finding its way in through a crack near the door, and Finn, without missing a beat, was already directing him toward a support beam that wanted only a firm shoulder and a moment's leverage, the two of them bracing together against ancient rock while the turtle, from a safe distance, offered commentary Dex chose not to fully process until they were both back through the door and the chamber sealed itself, groaning, behind them.
They surfaced the ship with the sun's version of morning glowing faint and gray through fathoms of water above them, breaking into open air to a sky Dex had genuinely begun to wonder if he'd ever see again, Finn cutting the engine with the same unhurried competence he'd brought to everything else and turning to offer a webbed hand Dex accepted with as much captainly dignity as a creature soaked through a diving helmet could muster. "Good expedition, Captain," Finn said, and Dex, salt-damp and thoroughly unaccustomed to so much water in one adventure, found he agreed completely.
He woke to find the sink's water gone lukewarm and Mike lifting him gently onto a towel, patting him dry with the unhurried care of a man who had performed this exact ritual dozens of times before, and Dex, blinking in the ordinary bathroom light, allowed himself to be wrapped and carried back to the warm, dry certainty of his rock, deciding, as the lamp's familiar heat settled back into his scales, that soak day had never before struck him as quite so eventful, and that he would, on reflection, be watching the sink rather more closely from now on.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.