Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Dragon of Main Street (Part 18)
Dex had never given much thought to what he would do with unlimited power. That evening, entirely without warning, he was given some.
The storm had rolled in sometime after dinner, thunder arriving in long, rolling detonations that rattled the window glass and sent a physical shiver up through the driftwood branch, and Dex, who maintained in daylight hours that thunder was beneath his notice, had nonetheless spent the whole of it lying very still and very alert on his rock, cataloguing each distant boom with the private, wide-eyed attention of a creature who found the whole business considerably more interesting than he'd ever admit aloud, until the rhythm of it, huge and steady, rocked him down into sleep sometime around the fourth close crack of lightning.
He woke to find the storm had followed him, sheets of rain lit gold and violet by lightning that struck somewhere below him now rather than beside him, and it took a long, disoriented moment of looking down, and further down, and further down still, before Dex understood that the streetlights he was looking at weren't streetlights at all but the ordinary size of things, and that he himself had become, overnight and without any warning whatsoever, considerably larger than a house.
His first step, tentative and enormous, cracked a puddle the size of a parking lot and sent up a spray that briefly eclipsed three whole streetlamps, and the reaction from the ground below arrived instantly and with total clarity even at this altitude, small cars scattering, smaller shapes running for doorways, someone's garden hose left coiled and abandoned in a driveway suddenly looking, from up here, like exactly the sort of prop his dream had thoughtfully provided him a use for. He reached out, curious rather than malicious, and set one claw down beside a garden shed that toppled at the lightest possible contact, a soft, apologetic crumple of a building that made him wince considerably more than the crowd below screamed.
It was the crowd's screaming, in fact, that first tipped him toward paying closer attention to exactly where his dream had deposited him, and once he did, the shape of the streets below resolved themselves, with the specific vertigo of recognizing your own house from an angle you were never meant to see it from, into something achingly, impossibly familiar: there was Mike's street, laid out below him at toy scale, the corner store on its usual corner, the little park with its two bent swings, the whole ordinary shape of his own small world rendered suddenly, dizzyingly tiny beneath feet that could end any of it with the smallest miscalculation.
A helicopter that turned out, on closer inspection, to be an unusually large and opinionated crow circled him twice, broadcasting something to the panicked streets below in a voice Dex couldn't make out from this height but could easily imagine the tone of, and it was in scanning the chaos for some sign of what exactly he was meant to do with all of this borrowed size that he spotted it: three stories up, on a fire escape bent at an angle no fire escape should bend, a small, unmistakable, marmalade shape crouched low and yowling, cut off from the ground by a gap that had clearly opened during his very first careless step.
He knew that shape at any scale. He would have known it at twice this height, upside down, through frosted glass. And it occurred to Dex, hovering one enormous claw uncertainly over a street he could flatten without noticing, that a creature could apparently be handed unlimited power and still, when it actually mattered, only ever want to use it for the one thing that had always mattered to him anyway.
What followed required a delicacy no dream had specifically trained him for, lowering a single claw the width of a city bus down past the fire escape's bent rail with the slow, exaggerated care of someone defusing something rather than rescuing it, the whole street below him gone eerily silent as though holding its breath along with him, and when Whiskey finally, warily, stepped onto the offered claw, tiny and trembling and entirely undignified about the whole arrangement, Dex felt something in his enormous borrowed chest that had nothing whatsoever to do with his size.
He set her down with the exaggerated gentleness of a creature terrified of his own strength, on a rooftop garden three streets over that looked stable and, more importantly, cat sized, and the silence from the ground broke all at once into something that was no longer screaming, a ragged, disbelieving cheer rising up from windows and doorways all down the flattened, rain slicked street, the crow-helicopter banking hard to circle back and get, Dex assumed, a better angle on whatever this was turning into.
He straightened to his full, absurd height under a sky still cracking with the last of the storm's temper, one enormous foot planted carefully clear of anyone's garden shed this time, and allowed himself, for exactly as long as a dream permits such things, the specific and entirely unearned satisfaction of a monster who had turned out, when it counted, to be something else instead.
He woke to actual thunder rolling away into the distance, the storm spent and drizzling itself out over an ordinary sized street, and found, blinking in the dark, that the real Whiskey was visible through the far window, perfectly safe and perfectly ordinary sized on her own familiar sill, tail twitching at the last of the lightning with no memory of any rescue at all. Dex settled back onto his rock at his usual, unremarkable size, and decided that whatever the dream had meant to teach him about power, the actual lesson had arrived considerably smaller and closer to home than any city he'd flattened to learn it.
Dex is a bearded dragon. If you keep one, our bearded dragon care guide covers the lighting, heat and diet the real ones need.