Three Arcs

A short story by Willow Beaudet

The First Night

When Dolicker sat by the fire with me and dropped a burning twig into the ceremonial plate, the air grew lush with spice. The whole trip he had been telling stories, he and his pikemen retelling fables up even the steepest climbs. It had been four whole days of tales and gossip, Dolicker himself identifying plants and pointing out cloud formations, this man or that telling the stories of their scars. I had seen the passion in their eyes, the eager jump at a chance to share their knowledge, talk up their trophies, count out the times they were near death: the kinds of stories that benefited greatly when someone new was there to listen. When the wick, fatted with rich incense, laid thick with herbs, was lit, those boastful stories seemed much more real against the soft and dying embers.

The rest of the men were abed. Scrying for the hunt was the job of the diviner. And I was there to learn. He was crooning now, moaning out the words we had memorized on the journey. The cool air of these high alpine fields was ragged in my throat, raw from the smoke and the hard climbing. Even so, I joined in. The herbs popped and crackled as the wick took up flame. Dolicker had his eyes closed and was swaying, long and unkempt hair tossed in the breeze: I could have sworn it was picking up only now. The moon shone bright and nearly full. It threw our shadows into the rocks beside us. I kept at the recitation and he slowly opened his eyes, checking the ritual plate, nodding at my form, and offering a word of encouragement. It was then that he first told me what we were doing. 

“Do you know, Sensha, of what dragons are made?”

I stopped weaving the words and began to hum, then echoed back to him, “dragons are made.” 

He was humming too when I spoke, and so we passed the telling back and forth between us. The cold, clear air was flush with language sounds and music sounds playing together. He continued. 

“There were once many dragons. A mountain empire of them. Like the spring rivers, flooded dunn with glacial mud, they came crashing along into seabound lands, the slot lands, the marshes and the great forests. In those days we forestfolk were but children. Still in the tutelage of the other earth things, and the plants and animals spoke much to us. We rose from the ground together and so shared in our language, and were even learning the language of sea things. That is the story of Hermaeus and Excelphate you know from your own house, of the fishers and the weavers.” 

“the fishers and the weavers,” I nodded. 

“But when the dragons came down from their high places, we could not understand them. They spoke in signs, or they spoke not at all and took their fill of us. It was as the winter snows, a season for hiding and cowering, when the dragons stepped down from the mountains. It was the head of my line—the seer Sulliver, who first walked into the footprints of the great dragons and found herself growing lighter—who resolved to find the secrets of the dragons.”

“The secrets of the dragons.” 

Perhaps it was my practical family background, or my tiresome way of pretending I was too cool-headed for most situations, but I had always thought of the rituals of the diviners as largely faff. During festival days, in the warmth of summer, I rolled my eyes to the beating of drums and vaporous incenses that accompanied what had always seemed to me more of the main event, the socializing and drinking. I'm sure as a child I was carefree enough to be wide eyed and wandering with the other revelers, pointing out constellations in the sky and dancing to the ethereal beat. But for a long time it took actual effort, visualization, meditation, real attempts and failures, to feel anything more than frustration when surrounded by the chanting and smoking of the seers. Even now the first part of any ritual felt almost awkwardly genuine to me. I forget in my daily life how much of an animal I am. 

There is always a moment now, as the smoke surrounds me, as the light casts flickering worlds into my closed eyelids, as the diviner and I speak music, when the ritual becomes real to me. I shed my human skin. My vocabulary grows, not with the artificial language of human concerns, but the true language of the earth. It reminds me of why I bound myself to the seers: why I left the fishing and weaving for the mountains. That night it was this utterance that struck me. The ‘secrets of the dragons’ blossomed an almost euphoric curiosity into my core. I felt a buzzing intensity behind my eyes and I matched that buzz to the hum passing across my lips as Dolicker went on.

“Sulliver left. She climbed the mountainsides. She rose to meet the dragons in their own empire and learn their language. The dragons recognized her, for all her trials gaining access to these risen plains, for all her desperation to speak. Everywhere she went she asked the dragons why they came to uproot the trees and wash away the fish. Everywhere she went the dragons held their claws to their teeth. They stared in silence.” 

“Stared in silence,” I echoed. At this point I was rapt, I had opened my eyes and was staring into the ceremonial plate, far away.

“After many days and nights she sat upon the banks of the river we know today as the Horliechaut. On a boulder we will come across should our hunt take us to the far side of the southern Sister. And she wept. Sulliver wept for her people and the silence of the dragons. She stared long into a still pool, sobbing into the night. Behind her watched a dragon, wondering at her cries. She was unaware at first, seeing only her teardrops striking the pool, sending ripples across the sky. Then she saw greater ripples and looked up. The dragon too was crying. Its great halo shone like an upturned cup. Its tears black as the night, in each a whole constellation of stars. Sulliver was not frightened, she was only very sad. And could see the dragon filling with her own sadness as they wept together.”

“They wept together,” this of course was new to me. The deepest stories of the seers were a secret passed down on the hunt. I was captivated, and later realized that I had begun to cry. 

“She looked into the dragon’s eyes and she knew. Seeing there the bows of the moon, encircled as if it were a cold evening on the verge of snow, with many pronged arcs radiating from it running and returning. With each tear mingling into the still pool she saw those same halos around each star, same as the halo of the dragon, cold and changing light, as it shifted from the upturned cup to the full circle, and again to the downturned hand, ringed with feathers. Their tears turned to laughter, and they lay together.” 

“They lay together.” 

“Sulliver knew then why the earth things could not understand the dragons. For as the earth things babbled and cooed, the stars above stayed silent, watching. She knew also why the dragons rampaged through the lands, and yet sobbed and laughed softly with her by the river. For the earth came first from the stars, Sensha. The stars hold our fates, as you know, but they hold all else beside. The stars are the upturned cup, and the downturned hand: they are the mover and the medium through which all things move. The earth was only an empty vessel until starlight filled it. We must sit with this congruity as Sulliver sat with the dragon: crying, laughing. Sulliver saw ripples and curves of starlight on the great beast beside her, and reached out her hand to touch its forehead. She was wrapped up in it and pulled into the air. She lost track of where her form ended and the dragon began. She felt the strength of the beast in her own chest.” 

“In her own chest,” I was overwhelmed, still crying, confused. Dolicker’s words conjured in me the same emotions as that ancient seer. I felt as if I could feel the roughness of the rock, the thinness of the air, the coursing warmth of a vast beast against my skin. 

“It was a terrible directionless power, no more at fault than the wind storms and the snow. She was filled with rage and the dragon was filled with rage. She was filled with sadness and the dragon was filled with sadness. She was filled with joy and the dragon was dancing with her in the showers of starlight far above the world. In the end she was filled with nothing, and the nothing was filled with her.” 

I stopped humming then. I couldn’t repeat the words. I was shaking. Dolicker shifted and set his rough hand on my back. He adjusted the plate and I noticed how the flame was buffeting now, sputtering black smoke into the quiet. He hushed me, and I thought of silent stars. 

“There now, there, it’s alright. There are some things that are too big to know all at once. You did well.” He sat back on his heels next to me and brushed a hand on my face politely, to pull my gaze back to the burning offering.

“There is still one thing we must do tonight to begin the hunt. You see this fire? The way it plays and the smoke rises? The wick is wide like this so we can see how the smoke rises. The smoke rising is the body of a dragon. If we are to hunt rightly we must recognize the shapes made by the smoke, so that when the dragon is before us we know the body of the dragon.” 

“How,” I began, but he shushed me again. 

“You will know when. You will see three puffs of smoke. One after another. I will sit with you until it happens, just watch.” 

I stared at the herbs and fatted wick. I shivered in the cold. He was right of course: hours later, when it happened, I knew. The images jumbled into my brain with great force and discomfort. In the warm light of the embers, three sputters of flame shocked my system like a dip in frozen water. I had feverish goosebumps and chills. I wanted to vomit. I knew that something terrible would happen, and I watched it happen, and I was powerless. 

The first puff of smoke curved upwards in an arc like a waiting goblet. I saw past the firelight and the ash, and in my eyes I saw the writhing starlike flesh of a horrible animal. It curved upwards, insubstantial, wafting in the air with impossible certainty. 

The second curved sideways like a waning moon, the open cup of it seemed to pulse with blood. I was too close to see the whole of it, only a single ichorous bend, weeping with liquid as reflective as a mirror turned skyward in the dark. I saw my own face reflected. There was no background to place me on any mountainside, only endless stars. 

The third flare of the flame set off smoke that arced downward, like a low hill silhouetted. Sound rushed around me, a mournfully deep keening that slowly increased in volume and pitch until I wanted to pull the sound from my skin. It clung to me. I thrashed out. 

The ceremonial plate was scattered some ways from me, turned over. Herbs spilled into the fire pit, crackling. Dolicker’s hands were on my shoulders and my breath was hard and painful. One of the pikemen was standing over us both. 

He was a kind man, and checked in on us and called us “loves,” though the seer was more than twice his age. I realized I had been making the sound myself, and brushed drool from my lips trying apologize for waking him. Language wasn’t making much sense to me then. I’m sure there was more that they wanted from me. But I was as useless as one of the drummers or ritual dancers after a festival. My body ached. 

All that I recalled of our first proper night of the hunt. Certainly there had been hard travel and climbing. Certainly there was much to carry and to gather as we crested the first ridges and made our way into alpine fields. But here is where I know the hunt began. I slept hard that night, and Dolicker and I were late in waking. That first night I did not dream. 

The Second Night

Weather blew in from the northwest on the next day. It was a dense, cold cloud layer. Everyone expected snow as we climbed. Dolicker and I missed dawn but the pikemen were in good spirits and talked about the supposedly fortuitous way that it had broken. By midmorning the sunlight, though diffuse, was strong enough to strike the cloud layer into a pure and luminous fog. We climbed a grassy mountainside into this heavenly realm and I thought more and more of the dragon’s empire. 

All the rocks here seemed new. They were damp from the cloud and sharp as blades. Most tumbled from the screefields above, or broke off enormous boulders we came across from time to time. Little streams burbled around us filled with the clearest water I had ever seen. We picked through the boulders and hopped over the streams. The pikemen used the long hafts of their weapons to steady themselves and push over the water. It was slow going. All morning we could barely see the head of our little group, the seven of us filing along in the fog. 

We sat in the wet moss to eat an early lunch. Dolicker, who had been quiet and focused all morning, stared intently at some of the mossflowers, tiny butter-yellow blooms with beads of dew encrusting them like gems. He brushed his finger along one of the flowers and it curled back up into the moss in a little spiral, the dew coalescing and dripping down its stem. The curve made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I thought about my visions. I crouched beside him. 

“Did you want to talk about last night?” 

He didn’t look at me at first, “What about?” 

“Oh c’mon you know what I mean. The smoke.” 

There was a pause just long enough to make me wonder if he was going to respond. I sat down next to him on the moss, crushing a few of the flowers in frustration. The wool of our travel clothes was already so sodden that wet moss was no bother. But he started to speak again, and stood up as I sat.  

“There are two kinds of knowing, Sensha,” he brushed dirt off his hands. He was always wringing his hands in the most matter-of-fact manner possible while saying the kinds of things that would leave even other old diviners befuddled. 

“You could certainly tell me your visions. You could relay the way it made you feel and give me all the details. And I would spend the rest of the trip hawkishly watching to see if something fit any of those details, reading your face to see if you were feeling something similar. I would second guess myself. I would doubt. We may call this kind of knowledge ‘understanding’. I would never know it the way you know it, not until it happens.” 

He reached out then to pull me up. Dolicker never relished speaking down to someone, rather walking as he taught his pupils. The laps I did around those sacred groves as a student myself… well it certainly didn’t hurt when preparing to climb all the way to the dragons. Especially for a child who was more accustomed to rocky beaches than the stupendous incline ahead of us. Still, I was frustrated at the obliqueness of his answer. More so, given he had continued and folded my arm into his, dragging me off on a short walk around our site. I think, I know really, I would have been frustrated with any answer he gave me then. I’m sure I protested. But he went on. 

“You won’t doubt yourself when you see what you foretold. You saw it, true. And will see it again. In that lies real knowing. Epiphany is hammerscale struck from stars on the anvil of creation, and complete only in itself.”

“But I could tell you, so you would know too and perhaps help me actually understand,” I must have been red in the face. 

He laughed, “you may break it into little chunks for me. But who am I to know if the seeds of a strawberry are in the fruit, or on the skin, after you have chewed it and spit it out to see? In the process of teaching me there will be two translations. You will take apart your vision and tell me what you think is meaningful, and no matter how perfect of a teacher you or I will ever be, we will make assumptions about those meanings. Likewise when we listen, we make assumptions again about what we are taught. In the telling, the tale changes twice.”

“Is the story we wove together last night not the same? How am I to know anything then? Or communicate with anyone at all?” My breath was short and huffy. His was slow. I knew I had to synchronize more completely to have a level headed discussion, but I didn’t want to. Every time I knew I should be doing this or that, but decided against it, Dolicker was there to point it out. 

“Sometimes understanding becomes knowing. Sometimes knowing is translatable in a way that guides others to knowing it themselves over time. Here,” we stopped, and he loosed me from his scholarly grip and tapped me on the chest, “you are breathing without realizing, take a deep breath in for me.” 

I did so. 

“And now out. And do it again.” 

I breathed long and deep, begrudgingly at first, but a moment later I felt the cool, wet air alighting in my lungs like little bees. I could feel my shoulders rest despite the heavy pack I had been carrying all morning. 

“When you breathe in, you are gathering a spark of knowing. The cold in the air, ah you can feel it running straight through you,” he paused. For anyone else it would be for dramatic effect, but for Dolicker it seemed it was just to enjoy the act of breathing. I will always admire him for that. 

“When you breathe out, you are understanding, ordering the world. And there are quiet moments between in and out that are both and neither.” 

I listened for a moment to the sounds of my breath. I was still bewildered from the night before. Dolicker had spent much of this trip talking about practical things, which herbs to gather, which route to take. Now that we were climbing into cloud he seemed more abstract.  

“And, last night, did your ancestor really lay with a dragon? Why on earth are we here hunting them when an accord was made? If it’s how you say, the dragons aren’t at fault for any of this.”

He laughed again, sadly. More of a slightly choked chortle that ended in a cough. He cleared his throat, “do you think that when the rivers flood, we should not evacuate their banks?” 

“There hasn’t been any dragonsign in the forest for years, Dolicker.”

“Then may this hunt be like the last, a futile endeavor, and we’ll all be back home for tea and a smoke in a few days.”

“And I wouldn’t fuck the river.” 

There was another chuckle, but the conversation was over. We turned to gather up the men and get back to the climb. I was still wondering at his argument for translation. Wondering what I missed in our chat, either from his own mediation of thought, or from my translation of the ideas into thought myself. It was the kind of thing that made one wish to claw one’s brain out and examine it. What connections had I neglected in the past simply due to an inability to truly know someone from speech? How long did you have to know a person, before you could be even remotely confident you understood them?  

I wished I could rationalize away the gut feeling that Dolicker was wrong about the hunt. I don't think even he truly believed when he said it would be futile. Some things you just knew. And I had seen in the smoke the body of a dragon. If I hadn't been preoccupied with understanding every part of it I would have marvelled at the sight of the creature. The visions had come excruciatingly slowly, each flash of understanding sinking through syrup as I watched the shapes form. That feverish slowness gave time to appreciate the delicate insubstantiality of the dragon's form: each massive curve set with feather-fine scales, blending and overlapping to reflect the night sky. 

We had the steepest section of climbing left for the rest of the afternoon. The mossy fields gave way to wind-swept rocks, and then again to screefields. Just an hour after lunch we broke out of the lowest cloud layer and into a blustery world of blinding light. 

Dolicker waited for each of us as we stepped out of the fog, silently directing our gaze back into it. I gasped when I saw there my own shadow, haloed with ghostly rainbows. I thought for a moment that the dragon had come upon us already, the shimmering form of its own halo looked so like the rainbow emanating from me. Even at its center our shadows were warped and strange, long limbed and eerie in the sunlight, startling as it was after so long in the fog. The rainbows stacked ceaselessly from our shadows, repeating and playing together with those from my neighbors. We were still for a long moment. The pikemen whispered prayers under their breath. Dolicker looked at me pointedly, and I knew it was yet another thing we wouldn’t be talking about in great detail but that I should internalize. I did know well enough, even then, that this was a sign. Later, I knew the sign for what it signified. 

I had felt then what I would learn to call a quiver. A little premonition as the brain rushes ahead in recognition to tease threads from the future. You know the feeling well yourself no doubt. You don’t have to be a seer to recognize those moments where what you see or smell or feel informs you beyond your present reckoning. It was as if I had been there before, watching the rainbow streams pour from my head and outstretched hands on that canvas of mist. I felt illuminated, from above of course, though the sun was low in the sky, so late the season was. But also from below, with the light reflected there. The third light stood above both of these, transcendent. Only here in this empire of dragons was my inner illumination revealed. And so I stood there, quivering, hair on the back of my neck standing on end, collecting dewdrops from the fog like a field of grass. I trembled slightly. Then it was over. 

The clouds around us spread out as far as we could see in all directions. The peaks themselves were struck into glimmering detail: larger than life and towering over us. Most of the path ahead was dashed with snow from the recent weather, standing out crisply amidst the unsettlingly large rockfaces. But it was far from greys and whites alone. Each cliff was a new color, even in the harshness of early afternoon sun. The rocks were every shade of peach and soil, shining in muted greens and earthy yellows. Where water slicked their surfaces they stood black and shining, or blue in their reflections of the sky. Columns of ice, frozen waterfalls and rivers, jagged coulees filled with snow and glacier: all contrasted with the soft rainbow of the rocks. It was a treasure of light after so long in the mist this morning. 

The scramble across scree was a large part of the afternoon, and I got to speaking with the pikeman who brought up the rear behind me. It was that same man as had been woken by us the night before. Despite the hard walking, picking delicately over the rocks and making sure not to loose any stones, I was still in a mood from the conversation at lunch. Seeing my specter in the fog did little to alleviate my frustration. If anything it added to the annoyance, yet another experience that words would not describe in fullness. Dolicker's advice wasn't particularly helpful to understanding my visions, or so I thought at the time. At the time I was feeling unmoored, adrift in discomfort. It was terrible to think that only I could see the future. That no matter what I tried I couldn't disgorge these images from my head. I made up my mind to try and communicate anyway, and asked the pikeman what I had asked Dolicker earlier, in less spurious language. 

“So, why do you hunt dragons?” 

He immediately got on my nerves when he too gave a dry chuckle, it was like Dolicker's mannerisms had worn off on them all, after so long. Despite the similarity of the laugh, the man behind it couldn't have been more different. He was young, or at least younger than I at somewhere closer to twenty than my thirty, and had cropped red hair that was only visible under his rondel cap as sideburns.

”You mean you still think it’s us doing the hunting?” 

“What? No, I mean of course, aren’t you specifically trained for your whole life to hunt dragons, and anyway…” I almost continued, and I’m pretty sure we’ll be finding one too, but after speaking with Dolicker I suspected these pikemen were likely to be as ambivalent as he about my foresight. 

“I have trained my whole life to kill a dragon. I’m not sure if it’s possible though.” 

“Okay now you have to explain two things,” I was lifting myself up a narrow slot between boulders and almost slipped when he finished his sentence, turning to look at him. He reached out a hand and steadied me with a push to my lower back.  

“Apologies, lady seer.” 

“Your help is dearly appreciated,” I steadied myself, “but now you have to explain both why you think we are the ones being hunted, and why you don’t think a dragon can be killed.” 

“Well, see I have been on five of these hunts now. I have never seen a dragon, but I have seen dragonsign twice. Maybe we didn’t see the dragons, but I think they saw us. There were losses on those two trips too. Friends died.”

“I see the reason to it.” 

“Don’t go talking about reason too much with Dolicker about,” he smiled.

It was nice to see his formal politeness begin to crack. Something about a person who was serious all the time seemed ungenuine. I knew he saw those who spent their lives with the seers and diviners with reverence, all pikemen were trained to, but having come to the path so late in life myself I wished to lay bare the traditions and connect with what resonated with me directly. It never felt right to treat these competent men, hunters of gods, as if they were beneath me. I tried during the hunt to speak with all of them and learn what I could. And here, at the back of our meager column of seven pilgrims, we could both poke fun at Dolicker. 

“I swear,” I contributed, “The old man has made less and less sense as we’ve gained altitude.” 

“Don’t discount him, I’m sure he’ll spot dragon sign any moment now and have us crawling up a chute of ice.” 

“But seriously you don’t think you could even a kill a dragon?” 

“Ah, you don’t want to hear my whole thing about it, you’re a seer, you know more than enough as it is.” 

“I literally do want to hear your whole thing about it.” 

He shifted his pike to below his armpit so he had both hands free to gesture, “so it’s like this, I think, dragons are inevitable right? Like everything around the dragon happens exactly as it wants. If it snows, the dragon did it, if someone is injured, the dragon did that. If they’re out there hunting us, it can pick us off one by one if it wanted…” 

He paused and grounded himself, “well if we killed it, I think it would probably be because it wanted that too.” 

“But it’s still dead right?” 

“Not necessarily,” he was getting excited now, “Dolicker says that dragons are timeless. Now you as a seer might know what that really means, but I think it means that they’ve been around forever, and will be around forever. If we kill it it’s just in another form, I think. Maybe it’s even in us, and we bring the dragon around with us forever in our heads.” 

I was aware that around us the air was getting especially cold. My spine tingled. I stopped in front of him again. 

“Aw I got it wrong I’m sure. What about you, can we kill ‘em you think, miss seer?” 

“No, no I think you might be right. You’ve given me a lot to think about.” 

The climb became difficult, and we pressed on quiet except for our animal grunts and hard breathing. Far above, to the side of the mountain called the southern Sister, lay a high pass into even higher hills deeper into the range. Between us and the craggy split where the pass travelled lay a crisp expanse of white. Here was the source of the many streams we had crossed during the day: a low tongue of the great glacier Bint-al-Queber. Even from below as we were, the scale was striking. This was the largest and lowest altitude of the glaciers that crowned the southern Sister, but there were twenty or more other great rivers of ice visible on the high peak above us. The glacier’s dirty face had veins of pure blue running through it from which glowed a light intense and lunular. Fresh snowfall covered its top, and the snags and ripples of blue were dusted with powdered sugar both gorgeous and deadly. Here and there the face and crown of the ice flow was peppered with boulders. My sense of scale was thrown off at first, leading to a moment of vertigo when I realized just how large those boulders were. It almost made me lose my footing again, but my friendly pikeman was there to brace me with pike’s haft.

We tied ourselves together with wrappings like uncomfortable undergarments and ropes between us all. Dolicker continued to make up the front but had taken out his own long hafted axe and was using it to prod and poke the snow before us. I gripped my comparatively small spear unsteadily. We made slow progress. By now the light was beginning to noticeably lengthen and we couldn’t dally on the glacier. Camping here was a death sentence of cold. The old seer had us on the fastest path across a narrow section of the tongue but even then it was obvious that any obstacle might have us stuck in the dark. 

Though we thanked the sun for being with us on this crossing, it was also a curse. Every sight was painfully white and shining, especially as the sun sank closer to the western horizon towards our low homelands of forest and tide. I felt my skin burn and my eyes tire after the first hour. My brow still has the lines earned that day. My back ached and my thighs numbed. The wind picked up. 

We were almost across the glacier when the first trouble arose. One of the pikemen ahead of me had stumbled. His sudden shift pulled me almost to my knees. I steadied myself in the snow with my speartip but the pikeman ahead dropped his weapon. It began to slide and he stuck out a leg to catch it. Propelled by his clumsy kick the pike spun across the snow and stopped several spans down the mountain from us, teetering at the edge of a crevasse. 

The pikeman, steadying himself, made to step outside the lineup to grab his pike. Dolicker shouted at him firmly and they began to argue. He made to loose himself from the safety of the rope and crouch down towards the crevasse. Dolicker doubled back and raised his voice again. The rest of us watched, a few of the others bunching closer and sitting as the argument drew on. Breaking away from the rope was deadly, holding us up so close from the end of the ice was deadly too. After a good gnashing Dolicker managed to convince the man that the pike was better left on the edge of that precipice, lest we all end up tangled at the bottom of the ice. The man left his pike behind. 

We had lost good time. Sun painted the ice and cloud into a thousand dusty hues of pink and gold. The temperature dropped. My hands had grown numb too. When we came to the edge of the glacier we had to hop over a large crack between it and the rocks. I was close to slipping and saved it by landing hard enough to tweak my ankle. I sat there rubbing it while Dolicker surveyed the cliffs ahead of us in the dying light. There was a path, but a rough one, and we stayed roped together as we scrambled up the cold rocks. Wind tore through us and the lull in weather today broke open with force. The cloud bubbled, jets and plumes of darkening grey reaching up like desperate fingers. Sunlight, below the clouds now, illuminated them with an unearthly glow. I tasted ice in the air. 

I pressed myself into the rocks, feeling my body heat diminish with every contact. We pulled ourselves through chutes in the rock, finding the little natural stairways in boulders and levering up with our arms. In one section, high up near the top of the cliffs, I couldn’t find any hand or footholds at all and had to brace against opposing faces and inch upwards. I sweated despite the cold.

All at once I heard a rumble and a yell. A voice above me shouted but it was quickly drowned out by a sound like the clattering of pebbles on the beach, only much louder. Snow began to fall around me, pouring over the lip of the cliff above. I saw it as a great wave before it enveloped me. I pushed into the rock, still barely staying put by bracing myself with my legs and back. My ankle pinged with pain.. I was lucky that the precarious position left my hands free to cover my face. A stone cracked right above my head, scree dragged along by the falling ice. I tried to breathe but couldn’t, ice choking me, roaring at my ears and tearing my clothes. I began to cough and felt like I had swallowed water. Knives seemed to strike my face and upturned hands. There was more screaming, but it was distant and strange. Something tugged at my waist. 

I remembered a time from my childhood by the sea. My father would go every day out to the cold beach to launch his canoe. I was left to play in the surf and stones, or to return to my mother who wove her great fishing nets at the lodge. Many days I sat by the fire with her, learning her deftness with the netting needle, helping and hindering. As I grew older though I followed my father more and more. I asked to be taken with him on his canoe, but he told me that I was not ready. So I explored the tidepools and arcing cliff bridges, I gathered oysters and barnacles for the lodge, pitted sea slugs and stars against each other in little bouts, and on warmer days I dove into the ocean and swam about the bay in forests of kelp. 

That day started like many others: my father and I trudged to the beach in the light rain. He and I lit a fire there to warm ourselves while he prepared the boat and nets. I asked again to go with him, and while he thought for a moment he again denied me. I was restless and haughty, then and now in my weaker moments, and I refused to tell him goodbye as he pushed out to sea. He waved at me as he slipped out of the bay, and I, in the cruel way that children act when they do not understand mortality, did not wave back. I almost went back to the village but something gave me the idea to jump into the water. I was a competent swimmer, and though it was a colder day than some I resolved to swim out to my father’s canoe. Then he would have to take me with him. 

I ran along the cliffside to a low section that dipped down to the water. Without the caution of experience I didn’t check the wind, I didn’t stop to reconsider. I saw my father paddling away from me and leapt. The first hundred spans or so were calm but as I exited the safety of the bay my stomach sank. Spray blew off the tops of heaving waves in gusts. I made no progress though I kicked and struck the water with all the energy of youth. The water grew colder and deeper. I was not a welcome visitor in this foreign land. 

I screamed, but the sound bounced in the troughs of wave and I looked up to see a vast wall of water bearing down on me. It took me up into its body and spun me around. My breath was pulled from me and the world tumbled. I blinked away the pain and opened my eyes to orient myself, seeing deep blue and green and a shower of silvery bubbles. Only the motion of those bubbles gave me any indication of space, but I was too weak to kick upwards towards them. Another heave of the water spun me again, crushing my ribs. 

I think I was looking downwards then, seeing only the depths, and it was beautiful. Wavering seagrass grew from some deeper reach, glittering fish darted to and fro. The edges of my vision darkened and my chest hurt. A vast shape, larger than any sea rock or tower in the bay, split the grass below me. It turned, lazily, inescapably, and faced me. One enormous eye gazed up at me from its black and white flesh. The eye was dark, ringed with blue like the corona around the moon on a cold night. The body of the beast was sleek and powerful, massive knots of muscle visible despite its unhurried motion. I knew it wished me no harm, thought it could crush me in an instant, and in my weakened state I could only gaze back. I felt seen, through my skin and meat and into my soul, with what little awareness I had then of such things. I wished to be united with this creature; to ride the currents with it instead of fighting against them. I felt myself begin to relax and melt into the water. 

My father pulled me out by the shreds of my shirt. He hoisted me onto the canoe and breathed life into my lungs. I coughed up water. That was the first day I was with him on the boat, though we went back to shore and warmed me in the lodge straight away. When I spoke with him about the beast I had seen, he told me I had been judged. From that day onwards I was allowed to go to sea with him. Later, when he passed I swam obsessively. Deeper and deeper I searched, but I never saw that beast again. 

Here on the mountainside there was no great beast to beckon me into the depths. And my father was long lost to the waves. I was pelted and crushed with rock and snow. My ribs ached to breathe but when I gasped I felt only shards of ice. Then as suddenly as it started, the shattering noise and pressure stopped. I was still lodged in the cliff. I shifted slightly, felt oddly light, and brushed snow from myself. I could hear groaning above and a face peeked over the rock. It was impossible to tell which of the pikeman it was, he was so crusted with snow that the fur of his cap seemed strung with icicles, but he was alive. He helped me lift myself up the rest of the cliff. My back and ankle burned from being stuck in one position for so long. The pilgrims ahead of me had survived. 

It was he who noticed first, as I sat on the crag and massaged feeling back into my limbs. Behind me, my rope was split. Nothing was attached. After my harness only a few spans of rope and then a frayed end. My friendly pikeman, the rear guard of the hunt, was gone. I prayed and looked back over the edge; Dolicker and the others gathered around me. On a ledge below us, half covered with snow and ice, lay his body. Something heavy had hit his head. Blood was pooling, first vibrant, then maroon into the snow. Others yelled down for him, discussing what to do. But I could not bear it. I turned and faced the mountain. 

His name was Hamlin. He was 26 years old. He died there. They were already calling it an act from the dragons. Something about that made me feel sick. Moments ago he was professing his faith in the will of the hunted dragon, hoping to play a part in its slaying even if there was no way to kill one. And here he was killed by an avalanche. A small one too, just a dusting of snow and rock whipped up by the wind. A speck on the mountainside. 

It was perhaps because I was facing the mountains in shock while the others gathered what supplies they could from Hamlin’s corpse, that I was the first to see moonrise. Before I even saw the moon properly, I knew with dreadful clarity what I was seeing. Maybe Hamlin had died because of the dragon after all. 

A rainbow arc, upturned like the receiving goblet, mounted a wide circle that surrounded the moon. It curved part way around the zenith, and from it streamed light that circled the entire sky. The arc was doubled, tripled even, in varying degrees of focus and color. Below this highest set of multicolored arcs sat another, on a smaller circle. This one was pure white and grew horns, but also bent downwards on a great oval that flickered in and out of sight. To either side of the moon on that brighter, smaller circle, veiled in opalescence by high clouds, shining copies of the moon's face exploded into brilliance. The coldness of the light took my breath from me. It was dragonsign. I felt ill. 

While I said nothing, my lack of response prompted Dolicker to come over. He patted my back and gazed with me into the dragon’s ancient language scrawled across the sky. He didn’t say anything, but there was no need. I saw it for what it was, the language of creation. 

We were too exhausted to mourn Hamlin properly. We set up camp haphazardly on the top of the cliffs under an overhang of red rock. All of us took long turns staring at the moon. We wondered if the dragon was going to come tonight, but I did not feel it. I just felt empty and sad. Dolicker stayed out later than the rest, staring upwards. From the angle of my bedroll I could see the faintest glimmer at the point opposite the moon out towards the west. The dragonsign was especially vivid tonight. 

I fell into sleep that I was too tired for. I dreamt of slipping from my father’s hands into the sea. I dreamt of Hamlin slipping from my fingers. I dreamt of the dragon slipping away from its signs in the sky, watching us through the great eye of the moon, ringed with blue. 

The Third Night

I awoke with tears frozen on my pack. My breath clouded into the bitter chill. The light from our meager morning fire, where some of the men were tending to a pot of hot porridge, rose like a pillar into the dawn. No one was talkative this morning. Only Dolicker seemed energized. I wonder if he knew what the day would hold. When faced with the inexorable progress of time towards the dragon he seemed light and focused. I felt lethargic and anxious. My body ached from the day before, and I was covered in scrapes. 

I missed Hamlin. It was odd to see our party diminished. Only a week ago we had left the lowlands and spent days together climbing through the foothills and sycamores, the low peaks and firs. I cursed that my visions did not show me something of his death, so that I could have warned him. Though, as Dolicker would be quick to point out, in the telling the vision would twice change, and the truth of experience would have remained even if the details were translated away. Remembering my conversation with the pikeman left me saddened, and worse, on edge. I felt hunted. Frozen not just from the interminable cold of the morning, but rooted to the spot like prey. 

On that ledge above the cliffs, dawn broke slowly. We saw the shadows of the mountains creep back towards us across the lowlands. Fog pooled like slow water. Far out, towards the sea, the first blush of yellow light shocked the clouds into a pale glow. Today it seemed a sickly color. 

Though it was much colder, the climbing today was simpler. Above us lay the lake and glacier that was the source of Horliechaut. Up in that high valley trees still clung to the sides of the peaks. The river was to the north of us as we climbed, and it flung itself out into dawn’s light in a thousand brilliant shards of ice. We traversed the face of the mountainside next to icy waterfalls and roaring spray that spun to snow in the air. With each step I felt the dread in me grow, and when Dolicker stopped the group on one snowy switchback to point out that morning’s dragonsign, I nearly wretched. 

It was much like the halos around the moon the night prior. Around the sun, just visible now through gaps in the higher peaks, concentric circles glimmered. There were little arcs and triangles that shone brightly above it, and its light seemed to spread through a column rather than a disk. While we rested briefly in the chill, I went to Dolicker and wanted to speak. Whatever it was that I  intended caught in my chest, and I looked with him at the sky. 

“Sensha…,” he began. 

But as I had just then regained my ability to move my mouth I spoke haphazardly over him, “They are all saying it’s the dragon, that killed him.” 

“What do you think?” 

“I think it’s a terrible cold day in the mountains and this kind of thing happens to people who make the mistake of coming out here.” 

Dolicker sighed, “And coming out here is a mistake?”

“Obviously! Obviously if someone dies before we ever even get to the dragon! Nothing was gained in his death. I’m, frankly, I’m starting to think nothing could be gained that would be worth a loss like that. I want to go home,” I was aware I sounded like a petulant child. To some extent I wanted to, or didn’t care that I did. Sometimes I just wanted to be right, or wanted everyone to know I thought I was right, and to feel bad for disagreeing. These little acts of resistance, of slowing down what fate felt like and grinding it into suffering for everyone around me, are some of the many things that I regret. 

“We are here, Sensha. We are here and we are hunting a dragon. Hamlin died on the hunt, as was his calling in life.” 

“I didn’t even see it. All these rituals and visions, and I didn’t even see that he would die. What good are these nightmares, Dolicker? If I’m not even going to be able to help? Where is the good?” I had loosed my tongue and was babbling. All my doubts and insecurities spilling out of me painfully and in such a roundabout way as to hurt those around me. It was unbearable to watch. Some small part of my honest soul was held tormented by the rest of me as I thrashed like a wounded animal. 

“When things, divorced from cause, happen to us, we strive to build for them a place. Your place and my place may be different for these things, but the thing is the same.” 

“Oh don’t give me that entry level bollocks, Dolicker. I am hardly a tender babe. You filled Hamlin’s head with thoughts of dragonkind, no wonder he thought everything that happened up here was tinged with magic. I’m sure he died happy, positively excited to be crushed by an avalanche.” 

“Sensha,” his tone was filled with warning, bushy white eyebrows raised like fighting caterpillars. He made a poor figure, and in my anger I carried on. 

“No, no it’s no wonder that there haven’t been any signs of dragons in the forest for ages. It’s all up here in the mountains with your gallery of young pikeman you’ve convinced to see the dragon in everything. It seems a shit way to treat the people you pretend to care about, old man. I—I can’t… I can’t,” but my steam had run out. I knew I was being mean on purpose, and it seemed too mean for me even in my dour mood. I wanted to apologize already, but that desperate externalization of sorrow stuck my lips together with the same speed that they had opened. . 

He put a hand on my shoulder, and I was sure he could see through my pettiness. Those were his greatest strengths: his sight, and his breath.  I hoped some day I have a fraction of that stillness. 

“One day, when you are me, you will do things differently. That is the way of age, Sensha. Age, and perspective. You are I are accidents of being. Little openings in the lamp. There is a difference in our perceptions, yes, but we are seeing the same thing. Hamlin saw the same thing. And he chose to think of it as the doing of the dragons. I will not begrudge this man his sense of magic. I will not second-guess the world.” 

A breeze blew snow around us. Far off there was a hawk, diving from some clifftop to dart down to richer hunting grounds. Arcs of light curved from the rising sun and seemed to nearly spell some word that burrowed too deeply in my brain to recall. My frustration turned to sadness. 

“Why are we even here, then, Dolicker? Can’t I become a diviner some other way? Why show me these visions when we could all just… die in a bout of snow?” 

“You could die some other way anywhere, young seer. Here, we are hunting a dragon.”

And that was it. I could muster no more protestation. I felt disgust and grief in a small grey way that threatened to disappear along with every other feeling in my body and leave me as cold and numb as the rock. I slipped to the end of our little column and tried not to look back. In my head I cycled through the visions: the upturned cup, the waning crescent, the low hill. That disgusting inevitable itch that accompanied them seemed lessened today, and part of me thought that maybe there really was no dragon at all. I was jealous of Dolicker’s flat acceptance of the world. I was filled with envy and shame and a futile hope that it was all a bad dream. I listened to the rest of the pikeman begin again to chatter as we set off, and wished I was included. While knowing I had nothing to add. And anyway, I would only have made things worse. I felt that I could only see the future when I wished not to know the outcome. 

I was reminded of a girl I had known by the sea. We met in the cool of spring, at the sowing festival Ishtaghast. She brought her candle to the ocean next to me and stared with such longing at the waves that my body knew then and there she would be important in my life. It was in the way she moved, and moved me. I was a fisherwoman then. I wooed her. I brought her fish and sea grass, and spent many months with her, weaving and cooking. She would sing to me, a voice loud and clear like a fountain. I slept in her bed and she loved me in her own way. 

But it was not the way that I loved. She would come home to me, covered in bruises and kisses not mine, and would sing of love with such an ache. I could feel the rawness of it in her, hear the urgency of skin against skin in her voice. But I knew it wasn’t me she was singing about. Some days I covered up my ears and pretended anyway. Those were our best days. 

For a long while I stayed sane that way. But I know now, and with my foresight even then, that this was no sanity at all. With every beautiful thing I saw, every tree and bay, it was her that came to mind. Even when she left. The love I felt was a love of forboding. It was love that was the idea of love. And around every corner it was proved incongruous. I knew the future—I saw the marks on her neck—and I grew more and more afraid to peek around those corners. Until I was afraid of my beaches: my hills and sea towers, my woods, rich and familiar, all left me afraid. When she left me, I left too. I turned from the sea and began the journey to become a seer. This is when I first knew I could see fate, and then, as now, I remained frightened. 

It took the day to climb up to the valley. By the time we made it to the mossy ridge that marked our high point and began descending towards the lake, the sunlight was pooling only in the mountaintops. We were in a cup filled with light. The glacier shone pink, only visible in part through the twists of the valley floor. Behind it lay a pass into even higher mountains. Below that, the lush dark of wood and water.

Trees clung to the lakeside, moss and alpine grasses too: hanging on despite the altitude in the shadow of surrounding peaks. The water was a striking teal. Here and there grey skeletons of dead trees reached from it and I could follow their trunks below the waterline: it was so clear. Near us, below the ridge, the river spilled forth. It followed a winding path over grass and boulders and despite the roaring intensity of its tumble down the mountain, here it seemed tame and pastoral. Patches of snow and ice were everywhere, but everywhere too those ancient groves of dark forest rallied. We could hear birds. Not just the hawks, but small flitting creatures too. 

Dolicker and the pikeman set off to the lake. I stood where I was, soaking in the sunlight before it slipped away. Something nagged at the back of my neck. A tingling sensation spread down through my spine. I felt that I was being watched. I blinked, doubted, willed myself to see more than what was there. Nothing stood out to me. But I had a sense that the first vision, the upturned cup, was sliding inevitably into place. Here by the lake, we sat in the bell of a great goblet and waited. Something seemed ready at any moment to pour from the higher hills and fill us. We could only wait.

And so, we waited in style. As the last streaks of sunlight left the face of the sky above us, we lit a great bonfire. The pikemen had set to the task before I met them at the lake. Dead trees were felled and split, rough shelter erected of branches and fresh boughs, and a pyre the size of a horse pulled together in the span of an hour. The air smelled of sap and smoke. In the sunset we stripped off all our clothes, leaving them steaming on hot stones, and plunged into the icy water. We shouted, answered the calls of the birds, tossed water at each other with abandon. 

At first I was hesitant and cold. I clung to the rocks and was scared to dip my face into the depths, half emerald, half sapphire. The wind whipped: each little stud of water constellating my back and breasts felt like ice on my skin. But one of the pikeman grabbed me bodily and resolved to show me how to howl. Our sounds crashed against each other, finding that hidden beat that lies always within sounds that play together, and we laughed. He told me that knowledge didn’t come cheap, and I had to trade him a sound as well. Soon we were barking like seals, braying, purring, and splashing each other with the rest of the men. Even Dolicker traded his surprisingly accurate elk call and we fell to pieces trying and failing to imitate him. 

Later, by the roaring fire, wrapped in warm furs and wool, we traded stories. I was told of Hamlin’s first hunt, where a young seer died of some rueful malady that left him unable to drink water after their brief encounter with dragonsign. Another man told of a time at the autumn festival Oenaeus, where Hamlin had very politely let down a suitor, but ended up spending the night treating the boy like a prince regardless, and they had remained good friends. Again and again I was taken on a journey through his life and when it was my turn, I shared our conversation from the previous day. How scared it made me to believe the dragon’s work was in all things, and how warm the faith of Hamlin left me. One of the men took me aside to share an herbal smoke that his mother had made for him. It tasted like seaweed, briny and stout. We shared small stories of the ocean together. 

By this time the moon was soon to rise. The clouds had cleared and all above us were stars. The pikeman was visible by his teeth when he smiled, and the way his eyes caught the light. He had two piercings in his left eyebrow, and they shone in the starlight too. When he pulled on the smoke, the little ember illuminated his face, and I thought it was beautiful. The anger of my conversation with Dolicker earlier had passed too, and I felt that maybe there was something to taking the world at face-value. Digging my claws into the ground like an animal, listening to the tales of men with rapt attention rather than critique. It was for that reason that my darting awareness was fixed to the eastern head of the valley, where the high pass lay. I knew the moon would be rising there, and I knew there would be signs to read in the sky again. Even still I was born away by a prey-like panic when the first arc appeared. 

It was my vision. The first arc. The waiting goblet. Not merely similar like the iridescent curves of the previous night’s dragonsign, not painfully bright like this morning’s. It was the very thing. I felt I couldn’t take my eyes off that great rent in the sky, the light pouring through was reaching into me and pulling from me all the anxiety and fear of the last three days. All that was left was reality, the happening itself. I did not know how I warned them, only that Dolicker and his pikeman were by my side in an instant. They had their pikes, including Hamlin’s which had been taken from his body by the man who had dropped his own, at the ready. Their metal helms gleamed, dented and piteously dull in the flickering light. Nothing could compare. Nothing could reach that riotous, incessant purity of the arc. 

As I watched, every pore of my face tingling, every hair standing on end, the moon rose over the mountains. I felt tears on my face again, though I did not know why I was crying. It simply felt as if they were meant to be there. Like a thousand times before I had watched this goddess rising, and a thousand times before I had wept. I quivered with a sick desperation, the slowness of the happening made me nauseous. I willed it to rush, to be over, to show them all what I had seen so I would not be so alone. At the same time every sinew in my body tensed as I begged it to be false. I was dying to live another moment more without this terrible portent revealing itself. 

The moon was surrounded with the full compliment of dragonsign. Every branch of every arc, the tangent, the zenithal, the parry arcs, all resplendent in the sky. And the moon was full. It was huge. It seemed to spill from the sky onto the mountaintops. It was ringed with blue and green and every color beside, dazzling pinks dancing along the lines of those arcs. As we watched it crept upwards, pulling almost fully above the peaks. I sighed, moaned really, a horrible human sound that felt wrong to me after the animal calls in the lake. It was like pulling a knife from my chest, for I knew before it happened, what the next moment would bring. 

The moon stepped from the sky. As it rose above the peaks in its steady dance, it chose a new path with the same steadiness, and pulled away from the stars with a great blink. Silhouetted in the sky, surrounded by its halo of divine language, the maker of the world stepped down into its empire. The dragon was here. 

There are many ways to describe a god. Many ways to see it: each intensely personal, each unique. In my own seeing it was like looking into the soul of a thing before viewing any of its physical parts. The raw light of creation was the only sight I had, burning into my eyes and leaving trailing afterimages somehow brighter than the stars themselves. Even its shadows had dimensionality to them, texture and fractal patterns like feathers of ice. I felt that the smallest glimpse could give me enough to spend a lifetime in contemplation. And I stared. I stared and was stared at with eyes as deep as the glacier, as bright as the shafts of light that spattered in when looking up from the bottom of the sea, as halting as the eyes of a great beast in the woods. It was consuming. 

Its body was half light, half smoke. Scales like tiny shards of empty space stippled its flesh. Strange stars pulsed within the long wormlike body. Stripes of light sprang to a crest at its head. Oh and such a head! Already I could see the dragon’s teeth shining in its own light. The halo arc shifted as it moved towards us; I smelled ozone crackling in the air and it was warm and cool in waves of overwhelming scent that roiled at us as the dragon lazily billowed down the mountain. It moved like a noble animal, there was a shaking weight to it where claws touched earth and sent vibrations up into its lithe muscle. The whole word was filled with humming. My lungs shook. My body revolted and I could not move.  

Already it was upon us. Time stretched around the creature like a cloak, and it was here. The pikemen fanned out around me and Dolicker strode forward. I could read bliss in his face as he passed: bliss and longing beyond any passing love I had known in my life. It was serene. And in the god before us I saw echoed that same serenity. It was like that when the first blows came: a god of total peace amidst rivers of blood. 

A pikeman stabbed forward. The pike darted whistling through the air. I saw then the second vision come to pass. And it was too much, too much to take in and too quickly. The great beast’s long body curved to the side and upwards like the waning moon. It dodged the pike with regal deference, moving before the motion, and after, leaving traces of itself dragging across my vision in dazzling echoes: like I was remembering and living the moment in the same instant. I wanted to cry out, sobbing. I wanted to tell the man—the same man who only minutes ago, minutes or days or lifetimes, was smoking with me under the stars—to abandon his lunge, to turn and run, to save himself. With the same languorous reverberance the dragon’s halo shimmered into life around us. It struck the color from the earth in its brilliance. Up close the light was ornate, not simply the pure shine of the moon. It was like looking at the fog of the Milky Way, infinitely detailed and hypnotic. What had seemed an impartial celestial body became viscerally real, wickedly sharp and deadly. The pikeman was eviscerated by its parhelic circle. One long curve of the halo twitching upwards in the same moment as the dragon’s dodge. From his crown to his navel he was split so thoroughly as to seem like a butchered goose. Blood sprayed about him in a net of rubies. He was dead. His name was Chettam. And he fell to shadow on the ground as the dragon’s flickering halo sucked the air from the world. 

I was screaming then. The humming harmonizing with me in beats. My heart thumped to the drops like rumbling thunder. Somehow I had my spear in my hands and was moving again, ineffectually circling towards the lake in captivated awe. There came a whizzing sound and at the last moment I stepped back. The dragon’s tail had flicked by me, dusting the air with lake water droplets. It pulled my spear from me and spun it off to the side. The force almost wrenched my fingers from my hands. Tumbling, the spear struck hard against the helmet of another pikeman and it too went flying. The man stumbled and all at once he was engulfed. The god’s mouth closed on him with a sickening squelch. His name was Abel, and he was dead. Just an hour ago he told me the story of him and Hamlin at the festival. Limbs slopped from the dragon’s teeth as it rose again into the air, stamping a massive claw print into the rocky shore. 

Heron was the first pikeman to strike the god. He had been the man to teach me the wolf’s howl. And he was the man to show me the first gleam of dragon’s blood. His pike lanced through the creature’s shoulder. In the same instant he too was turned into dust. Some horrible electric static jittered through the air and he was gone. The pike broke in the dragon’s flesh and its head levered out in a jet of diamonds. The dragon's blood was mirrorlike, liquid light so reflective as to show in each drop the whole night sky. Everywhere I looked there was such a fire of detail that my mind burned with each glimpse. I could not cool my eyes. The terror of the dragon was all around me and the air stank of blood and ice. I gagged. 

I remember praying while my friends died, and knowing what I was praying to was there in front of me, killing them. Something shattered in me. This dragon was a blind, idiot god. A dumb animal acting out of instinct and automata. All of its divine halos and language, the exquisite curves of its arcs, signified nothing. Holes carved into the fabric of reality, dripping sweet liquid prophecy, but why? Why flail so, and in the flailing cause such devastation, to mean nothing?

Dolicker, meditating in the midst of battle, was the next to die. He really did look happy while he was eaten. I supposed he earned it, after so many years hunting dragons. The dragon’s light seemed to escape from him, illuminating the skeleton from within his flesh as he was torched. It made the air smell of cooking, and my mouth watered. I wanted to rip my tongue from my head rather than think of him that way: impaled on the teeth of this awful god thing, sizzling, dripping fat. Since his hair burned from the base first it floated away into the night in smoking silver wires. I threw up and was on my knees. How easy it was to die. The dragon was relentless and totalizing. It was death down to the smallest part: the soul set free with violent immediacy. Dolicker was our guide, my mentor, and now he was nothing. 

The last pikeman, the man who had dropped his own weapon the night before and was using Hamlin’s, stabbed forward in a rage. He seemed to have lost all sense. Bright lines streaked across the forequarter of the dragon on its side, and another thrust sent sparks cracking across the dragon’s mouth. Then the weapon failed. He was truly trying, but when his pike broke something broke in him too. The long haft snapped in two, landing nearby, and he fell on one knee, shaking. The god swatted him aside. His body slammed into a boulder with a crunch and left a terrible stain. He too was dead. He was named Shaemi. 

The dragon turned to face me. I was on the ground looking up at the entire night sky in two eyes that pierced me like a spear struck fish. I was rooted to the spot, gazing through tears at the face of god. Its halo flickered again and I was staring at four crosses on the circle around its head. Something seemed stuttering about it, precious blood pouring from wounds in its jaw and body. Even so, my world was filled with regal fire as it flicked itself like shook foil. The final vision jittering into place with an almost orgasmic sense of serendipity. Its enormous body arced downwards, like the silhouette of a low hill, and it came at me with an open mouth. I felt around on the ground, unable to look away. It was like I moved through time as a mote of dust, drifting in some moments as the recognition of prophecy slowed my perception to a crawl, and dancing rapidly in others where the dragon moved with otherworldly speed. 

Up until that moment I could have believed the dragon was partially ethereal: existing only as an exerted force in the world. When its teeth caught me I knew truly how real it was. The weight of a god barreled into my side as its mouth, fully as wide as my chest is tall, clamped down onto my stomach and upper thigh. I was pierced. A thousand daggers scythed into my body and tore me inside and out. Amidst the immediate shock of pain I was kept alert by the frozen breath of the beast itself. I was scraped across the shore, pebbles embedding into my legs and rocks cracking my knees to pulp.

But my hands had found the broken tip of Hamlin’s pike. As the dragon closed its mouth around me I levered the weapon along its throat, With the dragon’s motion the ruined haft stuck in the earth and its head struck true, ripping through scales. It broke my wrist but I held it in place. I cried out some expletive with the my last full breath: some childish rebellion against the gout of meaningless slaughter. As my body was torn to shreds by the weight of the dragon, I was still there to wound its great hide. At least, I thought, it had paid for what it did. But it was like yelling at a storm cloud. I vomited blood. 

With this wound, the dragon pulled back. It left me broken on the bank of the river. My vision fading, I couldn’t see, and didn’t care, where it had gone. All I saw was the faces of my friends. I repeated their names in my head and knew I would be joining them. The visions were a right faff after all, I thought. They didn’t do anything to help us, only showed me my death and the deaths of all of us on our little pilgrimage, or hunting party, whatever it was. What had mattered was us, the people and the journey. As long as I could remember, there was still something of worth here on the mountain. Hamlin, Dolicker, Shaemi, Abel, Heron, Chettam, and Sensha. These were the names of the dead. 

I pulled myself forwards towards the water. Red mist clouded my vision and I got the distinct sensation that something was outside of my body that would much rather have been inside. I dared not to look down at the gaping wound the dragon’s mouth left in my stomach. Shock alone was keeping me conscious, shock and the memory of the dead. Our fight had taken us almost to the edge of the valley, and I, crawling by my one good arm, found myself on a large flat boulder at the side of the stream that would become the Horliechaut, by a still pool. With vast effort I pushed myself roughly upright, my broken legs beneath me. I repeated our names again, though it was now impossible to do so aloud. Pain was beginning to pound at the back of my skull. 

I heard through my gargling breath the touch of footsteps behind me. I knew what it was and this time I was not afraid. I repeated the names at it in my head. The dragon had sunk almost entirely to the ground, dragging itself forward, tenuously moored more to the earth with each step. Where the claws touched earth snow melted and moss grew: butter-yellow flowers unfurled. 

It came upon me and I had no strength left. The god wrapped me in its body. I felt the pressure of its cool coils on my skin. The way the dragon settled in my lap, its curves trailing around the rock and hugging my hips, left its head on my shoulder. It was gentle in the way that it bit me, broken teeth leaving tingling indents in the skin at the cup of my neck and down my back and chest. I knew it would be there that I would die. Torn to pieces, tenderly, in a last act of revenge for its own mortal wound.

 Then the gash rent in its side moved onto me, almost into me. Our wounds pressed tightly together, slick and sensitive. At first it was painful: the edges of raw flesh commingling sent sparks through me from head to toe. It pulsed and spurted gouts of blood like liquid moonlight that wet my groin and broken legs, and my loose entrails drew in and out like some pained instrument. The dragon huffed, breath frosting into the night air between the gaps made by its teeth and my body. It repositioned itself such that the slits in our flesh fit end to end. 

I did not know what to do. I tried repeating the names in my head again but a tremendous itch distracted me. It was an itch that permeated my body from the bottom of my spine to the tips of my fingers. My hands moved over the body of god. I felt a dreadful anticipation. I looked about my lap and found myself in a pool of starlight. The dragon’s body, my body, moving and rocking together in a sea of sky streaked with red. I saw there the constellations of my youth. The heaven and sea heaving upwards to meet at a horizon so distant and beautiful that direction lost all meaning and I floated empty in the void. Our blood mixed and ran across us both like sheets of rain. We were locked together, wound to wound, ache to ache. 

And it was pumping its blood into me. I could feel the icy pressure enter. It moved from my root, to my stomach, to my heart, and though it felt like frigid alpine wind in my veins a great heat erupted from my head. There was the halo, all of its arcs and detail surrounding us both. I read the fate of the world in its curves, seeing there every thread of prophecy from every living thing. It was the cross-like halo of the rising sun, and the lunar corona tinged with every shade of the rainbow and more I could not name. I was thrust into the gash between worlds, and came back shining. 

The dragon’s huge heart, the color of the sky, lay before me under translucent meat. I buried my face in it.  And while it pressed its mouth around me, I pressed my own mouth into it. Blood and fine scales dripped from my teeth. It was cool water down my ragged throat. I did not know whose blood I was tasting. I gorged myself on god’s flesh, one star after another. Each prick of pressure where the dragon’s teeth met my skin rippled across my body until I was shaking. My back arched. I felt filled twice my size; bursting with new life, fecund and pregnant at once. We writhed like mating snakes. 

I took love in the form it was offered and drank deeply. I did not will it into some other shape, or imagine something other, or second guess the world. I read the language of the creation directly. In my mind I saw the visions again, this time as a spilling cup. Upright, filling with sensation, tilting on its side as it is poured forth, and upside down, turned over and emptied fully into me. 

When it ended I did not know. Only sometime early in the dark of morning I saw the moon returned: setting far off to the west. A haze of grey pre-dawn light stretched above the peaks to the east, and I sat cross legged on that boulder beside the stream. I looked down at myself, naked and whole, a filigree of scars knitting my skin together where I had been bitten. I moved my hands, splaying long my fingers and seeing through their tangibility to the graceful bend of talon. Indeed, I saw through every living thing around me. Each dot of life a pinprick through the world into the ocean of light from which all things came. 

I watched the diving birds that flitted about the edges of ice around rocks in the stream as they dove into the water. When they sang, they seemed to sing their name. The exaltation drenched me honey-sweet in their view of the world and I laughed and cried. I saw how the wriggling bugs they pulled from the water sang too, their own little limbs spelling out their selfness as they burst. The air was filled with buzzing and beating, chirping and croaking, calls and responses. The dawn chorus rang out with a fierce affirmation of self. Those little lights merged in their singing. 

I saw far beneath me the net of burrows and trails left by other creatures, glowing with their passing like comet-tails. I saw the roots of trees, and the way their upwards reaching sang too in celebration of the soil and water and sky: a heart the size of the planet beating and pumping and thrusting individuated into each and all of us. The earth was as bright as a star, its own sun of growing things and dying things, and I saw that they were one and the same. Inside of me lay the whole of it: the language of the dragons. 

I watched the sun rise, first through the slow disappearance of stars. I thanked each one as it went out, in its own speech. I greeted the sun like an old friend though it felt as if this sunrise were brand new. Its first appearance was in the deep navy of pre-dawn fading to a pastel world of pink and yellow and blue. Above me the gradient shifted. Then the disk itself drew above the mountains, and the world was filled with color.

I felt the morning coolness on my bare skin lifting as the sun warmed me. Drifting fog clung to the mountaintops and I cried for each furling wisp as it blew by. Off to the west the sea was visible, fading into sky and spotted with islands that grew greener by the minute. I saw through the sea to the great beasts beneath, and I called their names, giggling like a baby. 

I sat in my own body, a fragile thing of meat and blood, holding inside a precious fleck of creation that whorled and spun beyond itself. Inside too were specks from Dolicker’s light, and Hamlin and Shaemi and Abel and Chettam and Heron. They lived still, in the burbling stream, the diving birds, the writhing insects. The dragon too lived, arcing inside of me with every pulse of blood in my veins. I sat and watched the world. I watched myself. And it was the same. The sun rose to meet the world in brilliance and the whole world sparked and flamed. 

After a long while, I stood. I walked down the mountain, and to the sea.