Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Twelfth Day (Part 4)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Twelfth Day (Part 4)
Eleven days running, the orange shape had appeared at the glass at precisely the same hour, and on the twelfth day it did not, leaving Dex to discover that a king's schedule had never really been his own to begin with.
By the twelfth day, Dex had stopped pretending the hour was a coincidence. It arrived each afternoon with the particular slant of light that crept across the windowsill just as the lamp reached its plateau, a narrow gold band that traveled two inches to the left of the driftwood branch and then held there, and for eleven consecutive days, give or take what he was willing to admit as give or take, Whiskey had arrived with it, folding itself into that same unhurried loaf shape as though it, too, kept a calendar of some kind, however it managed such a thing without a basking rock to mark the days by. Dex had begun crossing to the glass a few moments early, not out of eagerness, he told himself, a creature of his standing did not arrange his day around a cat, but simply because the light was pleasant there in the moments before Whiskey arrived, and if a king happened to be standing at his window when a subject, or a rival, or whatever it was these days, chose to appear, that was efficiency, not anticipation.
The rituals themselves had softened without either of them remarking on it, the way rituals do. His gape, once a full-throated ultimatum, had become something closer to a greeting, mouth open only halfway, more punctuation than threat. His beard still darkened, out of habit or dignity or both, but only to a modest charcoal rather than the thundercloud black he'd once reserved for mail carriers and existential crises. Whiskey, for its part, had taken to arriving with its tail already curled around its paws instead of lashing, and once, memorably, on the ninth day, it had pressed one white-tipped toe to the glass at almost the exact spot where his foreleg rested, close enough that he could count, through the fog of both their breath, the four faint stripes across the offered paw before it was withdrawn again, unbothered, as though the gesture had cost nothing at all. Dex had filed that one away carefully, in the part of his mind that had, for many warm cycles, held only the rock and the lamp and the slow architecture of his own territory, and that now, apparently, held room for something else as well.
On the twelfth day, the light arrived on schedule, sliding its two gold inches across the sill exactly as it always did, and the sill itself remained bare. Dex waited at the glass with the patient, unbothered posture of a monarch who assumed, reasonably, that a subject was simply running late, and told himself this for the length of time it took the light to travel from the driftwood branch to the edge of the frame, which was considerably longer than he generally allotted to anything. The blinds on the far side, he noticed only now that he had reason to notice them, had been drawn to a different angle than usual, and there was a stack of something square and unfamiliar visible through the gap, though what any of it meant was well beyond the instruments available to a creature who understood the world chiefly through heat and light and the presence or absence of crickets. The sill stayed empty. The light moved on without company, the way it always had before there was a reason to expect otherwise, reached the edge of the frame, and slid off the world entirely, and still nothing orange appeared to fill the space where, for eleven days, something orange reliably had.
Dex remained at the glass longer than dignity strictly required, which was itself a piece of information he turned over slowly, the way he turned over anything that unsettled him. He was a creature built to measure his world in warmth, in the certainty of the rock beneath his belly and the lamp's steady hum above him, and he found, with some private alarm, that he had apparently begun measuring a second kind of warmth as well, one that had nothing to do with heat lamps and everything to do with a particular orange shape arriving at a particular hour, and that its absence registered in exactly the same place the lamp's absence would have, a coldness with no obvious source. He did not have a category for this. He had categories for threat, for rival, for the vast uncatalogued indifference of the back corner, but nothing in his long and careful filing system had prepared him for the specific, hollow shape of an empty windowsill where a friend, and he allowed himself the word only reluctantly, only in the privacy of his own skull, ought to have been.
Mike found him there at dusk, still pressed to the glass long after any reasonable creature would have returned to the rock, and crouched down to see what exactly his bearded dragon was keeping such solemn watch over. "Whiskey'll turn up, buddy," he said, in the tone Dex had long ago filed under fond and entirely too perceptive, and Dex did not dignify this with so much as a blink, because a creature of his standing did not require reassurance from a human about the comings and goings of a cat, even if, in some small and grudging way he had no intention of examining further, he found that he had listened to every word of it. He let himself be carried back to the rock that night without argument, and settled into its heat, and found himself doing the thing he had never once done in all his cycles of ruling this small gold-lit kingdom, which was to wonder, with something that was not quite worry and not quite hope but sat uncomfortably close to both, what the sill would look like tomorrow, and the day after that, and how long a king was meant to keep a window watched before it stopped being loyalty and started being something else entirely.