Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Rival Beyond the Glass (Part 3)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Rival Beyond the Glass (Part 3)
The orange shape from the far side of the glass is back, and this time, it isn't leaving. Part 3 of the bearded dragon chronicles finally puts a face to Dex's oldest mystery.
The lamp clicked on at its usual hour, and Dex opened one eye, then the other, then held very still, because something in the architecture of his kingdom had changed overnight and it took him a long moment to locate exactly what. Not the basking rock, that was precisely where it should be, radiating its familiar, righteous heat. Not the water dish, not the driftwood branch, not even the back corner, which continued its long and undisturbed tradition of being beneath his notice. It was the glass. Something was sitting on the other side of it, low and orange and entirely too comfortable, in almost exactly the spot where, many warm cycles ago, a shape or perhaps two shapes, he had never been fully certain, the encounters blurring together the way distant things do, had appeared at the edge of his territory and then vanished before he could determine whether it was ally, threat, or something he simply had no category for yet. He had filed the matter away as unfinished business. Apparently, so had it.
He rose from the cool side of the enclosure with what he hoped read as unhurried confidence and crossed toward the glass at his usual sovereign pace, though privately, if he were the sort of creature who admitted such things, this particular pace was perhaps four percent faster than strictly ceremonial required. The shape did not move. It blinked once, slow and green-eyed, with an air of profound and personal indifference, and Dex felt his beard begin its familiar climb from warm amber toward something closer to a thundercloud, the old signal, the one that had once made the mail carrier take a full step backward through a closed window. This time he added something new to the display, something he realized he had been saving, without quite knowing it, for exactly this occasion: he opened his mouth to its fullest and most theatrical gape and held it there, magnificent and unblinking, a king delivering an ultimatum.
The orange thing yawned back. Not a startled yawn. Not a retreating one. A long, deeply unbothered yawn that showed considerably more teeth than Dex currently had on hand, after which it folded itself into a neat loaf shape on the windowsill, tucked its paws beneath its chest, and appeared to fall asleep in real time, mid-confrontation, without so much as a backward glance. Dex held his gape a moment longer than was strictly useful, uncertain how a creature was meant to proceed against an opponent who had simply declined to participate, and slowly let his mouth close. He pressed one foreleg to the glass. It was cool there, and fogged faintly where his breath had touched it, and on the other side, close enough now that he could make out individual whiskers, one orange ear twitched once, acknowledging him without waking, and Dex understood, in the same wordless way he understood the lamp and the rock and the slow turning of his own small world, that this had never been the invasion he'd spent so many cycles bracing for. It was something else. He did not yet have the word for it.
Mike found them like that twenty minutes later, cricket container in hand, and stopped in the doorway to take in the scene: his bearded dragon pressed flat against the glass on one side, and Whiskey, the neighbor's enormous marmalade cat, pressed flat against it from the other, both of them perfectly still, as though they'd quietly negotiated a truce that depended entirely on neither of them ever admitting it had happened. "Making a friend?" Mike asked, in the tone Dex had long ago filed under fond and entirely too amused, and Dex did not dignify it with a response, because a creature of his standing did not explain himself to mail carriers, felt iguanas, or the humans who loved him. He simply held his position at the glass a while longer, close enough to feel, or to imagine he felt, a warmth that had nothing to do with the lamp, and decided that the far side of his kingdom had just gotten considerably more interesting.