Let Elkin do her worst. He reached across to shake Finch's hand.
“I'm in, sir,” he said. “When can I start?”
* * *
As soon as they materialized in the Halcyon atmosphere, Fairy informed him that the passengers were waking up.
How are they? Prince glanced through the open cockpit door into the passenger bay of his (gently used, like-new condition, still really expensive, but his) starship. The refugees the Knights had picked up from a Greenjacket bombing on Scandinavia 6 were blinking and disoriented, but seemed fine.
Fairy sent him an image of a scared animal hiding under a bush.
“Got it,” Prince said aloud. “I'll be nice.” Refocusing on the controls, he took one last look at the pristine violet of the sky before taking them below the cloud cover. The spaceport, all glass-bubble domes and spiral-shaped landing pads, glittered with the evidence of recent rain.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “welcome to Halcyon. Local time is seventh hour of the morning. It's a beautiful cloudy day here at Aurora Spaceport. In just a few moments, you'll be on your way to the lovely Chrysalis Refuge. For now, please remain seated and keep your safety belt fastened while we come in for a nice smooth landing.”
From behind, he heard a voice say, “How the blazes is he so cheerful? What's wrong with him?”
Prince grinned at Fairy, who inquired whether he would like her to enlighten them.
No, he said. They'll find out for themselves.
And, with a jolt, he landed the ship on Halcyon soil.
About Mindi Briar
Mindi Briar's favorite book as a child was Commander Toad in Space, an early sign that she was destined to become a gigantic nerd. Originally from Seattle, she enjoys traveling and has spent several years living abroad in Korea and the UK. She loves cats, fantasy books, tea, and correcting peoples' grammar. “Refuge” is based on the novel she's currently writing.
The Dragon of Kou
by Caroline Bigaiski
The Dragon of Kou has ruled the skies for as long as I remember.
He is a majestic beast the size of a streetcar. When the sun catches on his scales, everything is painted the soft blue of a hydrangea, and they say his eyes are green but blind, as he does not need to look to see.
I know this is a lie. His eyes are indeed green, but they see, farther and better than anyone else's, and when they cry, storms reach the ground and fling trees around like a puppet master gone insane. Sometimes he smiles and the light touches everywhere, and we can feel his warmth on our skin.
Baachan tells us stories of the Dragon of Kou with the energy of a teenaged, lovesick fool. She sits in her chair, reclined so her back won't hurt, and looks at some faraway place none of us can see. There's a smile on her face and she keeps touching her prosthetic arm, which Kaasan says Baachan has had since she was a kid and was in an accident in the Wind Farms. The arm is a bit obsolete now, with mechanical parts showing and some sort of glow-in-the-dark quality, representative of times long gone, like the Wind Farms that have been turned into educational spots with the evolution of solar power, now capable of providing for us all.
But, in Baachan's days, that arm was high fashion, Wind Farms were the main source of energy, and the Dragon of Kou went missing for fifty days.
Baachan says she was sixteen years old. Whenever she tells the story, I imagine the girl from the pictures we have in the house—hair plain brown like most everyone else's from the city, tall and thin with eyes too big for her face and a nose too small, her skin the same tawny beige both my mother and aunt sport—dressed in bright green or blue trousers loose on the waist and tight on the calf like they did in those days. She says that, on that particular day, she had a pair of shoes that were made of silk and were as comfortable as they were ugly.
I'm not sure if I believe that, because I have shoes like this and they are definitely not ugly, but I do believe the rest. I don't have a reason not to.
Baachan says she left early, before sunrise, using the solar paths to guide the way through the city. Aka was already there, the pet dragon that still behaves like a baby whenever we are around, chasing us in the garden and up the stairs, growing tomatoes everywhere he goes like he isn't almost as old as Baachan. He went with her even if she hadn't invited him, which pretty much makes the story legit as I wouldn't accept anything else from Aka.
It had been forty days since the Dragon of Kou had last been seen in the skies, which meant that it had been forty days since the weather had been anything but unbearable heat and bright, burning sun. Energy was scarce because there was no wind, and the only food being traded at the community fairs was that grown by pet dragons like Aka, who were small and sweet and had the ability to make fruits and vegetables appear from thin air.
There was no water because there was no rain, no school because there was no energy, no entertainment because there was no motivation, and Baachan had had enough.
“I don't even like tomatoes,” she always jokes, petting Aka affectionately when he's sleeping on her chest, which he most often is when she tells the story.
So there went Baachan and Aka, the girl and her pet dragon, in some desperate attempt to find the Dragon of Kou. Considering he was an enormous reptile six meters long with blue scales, Baachan guessed it wouldn't be that hard.
She smiles sheepishly when she gets to this part, because we might be young but we know it was a naïve thing to think. I reckon she knew this too, but went anyway because this is the sort of person Baachan is.
Reports showed the Dragon of Kou had last been seen near the Dragon Cove, a wide forest to the north where wild dragons lived free. People normally didn't go there because dragons are carnivorous monsters and it is advisable not to walk into the home of a people-eating creature if avoidable, but Baachan did anyway.
That's just the sort of person she is.
Nowadays, the Dragon Cove is surrounded by a high-tech fence that is dangerous to humans trying to trespass but does nothing to dragons who want out. That's because dragons normally don't want out, unless they are hurt and need help, and there are veterinarians 24/7 close to the fence to take care of this.
“Dragons are peaceful creatures,” Baachan says kindly. Her voice gets lower when she's talking about dragons, with the same cadence it gets when she's talking to Hikari, the newest addition to our family. “Unlike us, they don't go looking for trouble.”
Except that Baachan didn't really go looking for trouble. She went looking for a solution.
Back in the day, the Dragon Cove wasn't surrounded. There were guards that patrolled the perimeter, but they were human and few, and Baachan was able to sneak in without any problem. Thick and thousands of years old, the forest is always covered with a meter-and-a-half high fog that stays on the island. It can only be reached through a thousand-year-old bridge that Baachan describes as 'hauntingly beautiful.' Thin and long, it is built with vines and wood by no one knows who. The bridge is inside the fence now, too far to be seen through the rips, but I believe Baachan.
Why wouldn't I?
She tells us she crossed the bridge with her heart in her throat, not sure when it had last been used, not sure it wasn't going to crash with her weight or eat her whole like the carnivorous plants from the city apothecary. In case of an emergency, perhaps Aka would have been able to save her, but Aka is so small, no bigger than an Akita, that I fear for Baachan every time, even though I know the end.
The island is like nothing in the city. The trees are tall as skyscrapers and every path ends on a hill and opens up to valleys and lakes and the nest of a three-meter-long red dragon with three babies that aren't bigger than a house cat. Baachan says the green we have in the city, the winter gardens in every floor of every building, the parks stretching throughout every community and the ferns that hang from penthouses, weaving around structures like braids, are nothing like the natural world. There, she found forests that have been growing for longer than there have been humans on earth, w
ith trees on top of fallen trees and the spirit of oldness you get when you find a sugi that has been around since before your parents were born.
When Baachan finally got to the island, she prepared camp in a clearing close to the bridge, in case she had to make a run for it. The only dragons she had met until then were pets, cute creatures that only got aggressive when they were hungry. After a night spent wide awake underneath a giant tree with giant leaves, suddenly realising that going there might turn out to be the biggest mistake of her life, Baachan left with Aka to explore the island in search of blue scales.
For two days she walked the island, through red plastered paths where dragons had feasted and under flocks of yellow birds that, upon closer look, proved to be the smallest dragons she had ever seen, with sharp teeth that playfully bit at her ankles and pulled at her hair with the strength of a newborn. They lead her to the edge of a hill that opened up to a valley where dragons of every colour of the rainbow slept and ate and played, resting on grass and drinking from a large lake with—she could see even from above—fish red as blood.
Yet as beautiful as it was, as cute as the tiny dragons flying in flocks above her were, there was still a thin veil of confusion over everything. The lake was resplendent, but it wasn't filled to the edge; the grass was vast, but it was impossible not to notice the yellow undertones beneath its green.
The Dragon of Kou was nowhere to be found, and the city wasn't the only one suffering from it.
Baachan left soon after, unmotivated and unbearably sad. The green of the vines that made the bridge were no longer bright and scary, but just silly nature that had given her hope when there was none. She wouldn't go home yet, though. She couldn't. She would persist until there was nowhere else to look, nothing else to find but desperation.
That's just the sort of person she is.
Technology then wasn't what it is today. Phone coverage was much smaller, and she couldn't get a signal to check on her fathers and see how the situation was. She was standing by the edge of the city, wondering if she should try to talk to someone before heading west, when something flickered on the horizon.
She looked up.
Down south, there was a mountain. It now goes by the name Mount Hou-ou, but Baachan says it simply was a mountain in her days, too far away to bother the city. It probably had a scientific name, something geologists called it when making maps, but it wasn't known.
It was a mountain, and there was a cloud above it.
To many, it probably wouldn't seem like much. Even Baachan hesitated. A cloud is a cloud, and it was small enough to be an illusion fed by desperation.
Baachan hiked there anyway.
It took her two days to get to the mountain, swimming through a river with water warm enough to double as a bath and crawling underneath a formation of rocks in the shape of a wave. She was almost at the edge of the mountain when night fell again, and she slept by a tree laden with pink flowers, sweat accumulating on the back of her neck just below where she'd last shaved her hair in a short cut.
She woke to endless heat and the sound of thunder.
Sitting up straight, Baachan looked above and saw the cloud had returned, smaller than before but flickering with lightning, beautiful and dangerous. It was so mesmerising it took her a moment to see the flames eating the top of the mountain or to notice that Aka was nowhere to be found.
She called for him, but received no answer. Gathering up her things, she turned her back to the burning mountain and ventured through the trees, yelling Aka's name while looking for orange scales or rotten tomatoes fallen from high, impossible trees that had never grown tomatoes before.
She found him hiding behind a rock, shivering and aggressive as he'd never been. When she approached, he tried to bite her, then breathed fire on her hand when she touched his back. It didn't burn, but it passed the message.
Baachan stood there, silent, powerless, as her dragon hid from something so terrifying it made him hurt his own master.
To her left, she could still see the burning mountain, though the cloud had disappeared again. To her right, there was the depression of a lake, though there was almost no water left. She knew, certain as death, that she should never have gone there.
That was, of course, when he appeared.
Taller than most men and with skin the colour of ochre, like the mellow-brown light that bathed the surroundings, he stood in the shadows, making himself smaller behind a tree. His hair was the unnatural colour of seawater and his eyes, she would later find out, were indeed green, but they saw, farther and better than anyone else's.
Baachan calls him Ryu.
The Dragon of Kou is a shapeshifter, though nobody knows it. He turns into a boy, no older than eighteen in appearance, though he is believed to be older than humanity. He doesn't wear clothes, as he's never learned the use of them, and he speaks with the aged accent of the elderly. He only eats fish and lives in a cave by the sea where no one goes, because no one knows it exists.
Baachan never told anyone but us, because he asked her not to.
That day Baachan had almost run, scared of the strange, naked boy who was watching her from the shadows. Aka still wasn't moving though, behind the rock but looking at the boy as well, anger coming from his nostrils in dark grey smoke. To her left, the mountain burned, and Baachan knew the boy was afraid of it.
She had just opened her mouth to say something when another creature appeared on the horizon, orange as sunrise and big as an eagle, burning like a bonfire. It flew over them without a second look—it was blind, Baachan would later discover—but the boy had disappeared the second the creature was in their view, like a rat scared of a cat that doesn't even know it is there.
The legends say phoenixes and dragons have always been eternal enemies or passionate lovers, depending on the version, but they all agree on one thing: phoenixes were extinct centuries ago, before the age of greenhouses and energy made from the earth without damage, when its feathers were used for rituals and its meat was promised to give the eater special powers.
“I never told anyone about her either,” Baachan says in the same tone she will tell us, later, “Don't repeat what you have heard. Guard it safe inside of you, and share only with those worthy of knowing.”
Baachan went after the boy. She doesn't know how to explain why she did, why she didn't force Aka to follow her and runaway, except that she somehow knew what she had seen, and that she wouldn't be able to live with herself without knowing more.
The almost empty lake that had been between them was a large oval, so she had to run around its edge to finally get to the woods and then follow the path she assumed the boy had taken. Eventually the earth gave way to sand, and the trees gave way to air, and ahead of her, endless as the universe, the Pacific Ocean stretched with water blue-green like the boy's hair.
Baachan had been to the beach before, on the other side of the country, but she hadn't known there was a beach so close. It was just at the edge of the mountain, hidden from humanity in a way that today's technology doesn't allow.
She found the boy inside a cave just at the corner of the beach, before sand became rocks and air became earth and trees from the mountain. He was at the deep end of the cave, so far away she wouldn't have seen him if it weren't for the almost fluorescent glow of his skin, that now sported some blue undertones beneath the brown colour. Even though he looked very much human, the way he was curved on himself, hugging his knees to his body, was so similar to the way Aka had been hiding behind that rock that Baachan felt nothing but empathy, the fear from before giving way to curiosity.
“'I'm not going to hurt you,' I said,” Baachan tells us, then laughs. “Such a stupid thing to say, isn't it? Why would he believe me? Why would he even care?”
It made the boy at least look at her, so it wasn't for nothing. Some encouraging words from Baachan later, they were sitting one in front of the other in the cave, the boy still naked, Baachan very aware of the white top and loose trousers
she was wearing.
Baachan never tells us what they talked about. I think it is too personal to share, something she wants to keep to herself, but I know they stayed there the whole day, that she didn't mention she knew he was the Dragon of Kou although he had been fascinated by her prosthetic arm, asking question after question, marvelling at what we had created.
When the sun finally set, he said it was safe to go out and they went back to the beach. Baachan says we have a pretty night view, especially now that the artificial lights we use do not darken the sky, but nothing had ever compared to the night on that beach, in every shade of dark blue and covered by so many stars it was almost as bright as day under a weak winter sun. It was still too hot, sweat pooling underneath her arms and on the small of her back, but she didn't feel it, too busy watching the Dragon of Kou as he entered the sea, bathed briefly and returned with renewed energy, his hair now matching the colour of the sky.
“He was fascinated by our cities,” Baachan says, looking outside the big windows we are sitting in front of. “The way we mixed nature with technology, the way we used him and other dragons to achieve balance.”
The Dragon of Kou wasn't a he. Neither a she, but he didn't mind the way we perceived him. He told Baachan we might have achieved much in making the planet the sustainable haven our ancestors wanted it to be, but that we still had a long way to go when it came to understanding our own humanity.
“I believe,” Baachan says, “Ryu was the first non-binary person I ever met. He would have liked where we are now. He would have liked you, dear.” This is directed at me, and I smile at her, because I really, really would like to meet him. Maybe not in the way Baachan did, but maybe just to talk the whole night, like they did, until they were joined by Aka who had gotten over his fear and dropped himself over Baachan when he finally found her. That was before he stopped and actually bowed—“I have never seen him do it again,” Baachan says—at the sight of the Dragon of Kou.
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