Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Pirate of the Sand Sea (Part 5)
Chronicles of Dex the Bearded Dragon: The Pirate of the Sand Sea (Part 5)
Even asleep, a creature of his standing did not surrender the wheel.
The bath had run long, forty full minutes by the small ceramic dish's patient reckoning, and by the time Mike lifted him out and set him back beneath the lamp to dry, Dex's eyelids had already begun the slow, sovereign descent of a creature who considered napping less an indulgence than a scheduled duty of state. The heat settled into him the way it always did, first as a suggestion and then as a verdict, and the last thing he registered before the terrarium dissolved around him was the sand catching the lamp's glow and going the particular burnished gold of a coin nobody had gotten around to spending yet. By the time he thought to open his eyes again, there was no glass, no sand, only water, an ocean of it, rolling gold to every horizon, and Dex found himself standing at the wheel of a ship he somehow already understood to be his.
He was Captain Dexington then, of course, master of the good ship Beardsy's Revenge, and he took to command the way certain reptiles take to sunlight, which is to say entirely, and without the faintest interest in anyone else's opinion on the matter. The driftwood branch that in waking life merely held up one corner of his ambitions now stood as his mainmast, tall and salt scarred and hung with a sail the exact ochre of the heat lamp's glow, and beneath it his crew, four crickets he was almost certain he had eaten in some previous life, hauled rope and swabbed the deck and generally deferred to him with the correct degree of terror. A dragon, he reflected, watching the golden waves crest and fall around the hull, was already most of the way to being a pirate captain, requiring only a hat, a grievance, and somewhere worth sailing to.
The grievance, as it turned out, was waiting for him off the starboard bow in the shape of Captain Chitrick, a cricket of unusual size and even more unusual insolence, who commanded a rival vessel built, near as Dex could tell, entirely out of spite and a few pieces of bark he was fairly sure belonged to him. Chitrick had the gall to fire first, a single dry chirp Dex chose to interpret as cannon fire, and the two ships closed across the golden sand sea while Dex bellowed orders in a voice several registers grander than anything he could produce awake, filing the whole exchange away, as he did most insults, in the part of his mind reserved for grudges he intended to keep at compound interest. The duel that followed involved considerably more posturing than swordplay, a great deal of Dex rearing up to his full and, he felt, quite imposing height, and it ended the way these things generally end in dreams commanded by bearded dragons, with Chitrick's ship simply ceasing to exist and Dex claiming the victory as though it had never once been in doubt.
It was in the stillness after the battle, sand sea flat and gleaming under a sun that looked remarkably like the lamp back home, that Dex spotted another shape on the horizon, enormous and marmalade colored, cutting slow, lazy figures through the deep water the way only something larger and more patient than everyone else could afford to. He knew, in the specific and absolute way one knows things only in dreams, that this was the legendary Leviathan Whiskey, oldest power on the sand sea and the one captain whose territory he had never once needed to test, and something in him relaxed at the sight rather than sharpened, content to sail a parallel course and never closer, an arrangement that felt less like caution and more like the oldest kind of respect. Even here, wheel in claw and a golden ocean stretching out in every direction he cared to claim, some line simply did not get crossed, and Dex found he did not mind it in the slightest.
He woke the way he always did, all at once and with great dignity, to find himself back on the basking rock exactly where he had left himself, the driftwood branch once again just a branch, the sand once again just sand, though it held, for a moment, a faint and stubborn gleam of gold. Mike was crouched by the glass, phone forgotten in his hand, wearing the particular grin he wore when he'd clearly been watching longer than he'd admit to. "You know you drool when you sleep, right," he said, and wandered off to whatever he'd been doing before, leaving Dex alone with the lamp's warmth and the distinct, lingering sense that somewhere past the edges of the tank, a golden sea was still rolling on without him, waiting to be sailed again.