People

I stayed in the temple before another palace could arrive. It took Bubbles what felt like three weeks for her to find a building she thought was fitting. The first one landed halfway in the river, so Bubbles needed to find a second. The other half of the failed palace was carefully taken apart for stone and wood. Mr. Brick and Mr. Sky tried making a new bridge, but they abandoned that project quickly. They found that the wood could stay intact, floating on the acid for a couple hours. It could support a person.

We all watched as Mr. Brick tied a raft together. He made a rudimentary oar and slowly paddled across the bridge. The idea was to bring the people stranded there across one by one. He came back alone. Not enough food or water had fallen on that side. He found their bodies within the old palace. They were intact, except one, reduced mostly to bone. He struggled to get out the words, “He was on the upper floor.”

I asked Bubbles, “Did you know they had…”

“It’s hypocritical, isn’t it?” She grumbled, “They chide me, but when they are desperate, they are just the same. They’re worse, even. I don’t lie about what I am.”

Two houses that had been too close to the river had to be torn down and shoddily rebuilt further away. The materials for the first were already too worn and collapsed within a day. The wreck was just outside my new palace. This one was a small crystalline building from the outskirts of Farhaven. It had three floors that grew narrower toward the top. I set my bed beside the window.

I gave the entire second floor to Lady Hen and Falcon, something I regretted when he spent hours and hours crying. He was hardly stronger than he was weeks before. When this palace was given to me, there were things left inside of it. There journal with some person’s ramblings in the first pages. The rest were blank, so I tore out the used pages, folded them into little squares, and carefully set them down in the river. There was a quill and ink, and there was a little ivory figurine. It looked like a dragon, and I had Madame Piff adjust my tiara such that the figurine replaced one of its gems. The ivory dragon rested fiercely over my forehead, her wings outspread and the horns over the top of her head curving toward each other.

For her help, I offered the removed jewel to Madame Piff. Instead, she fashioned it into a brooch and pinned it to Lady Hen’s shirt. “Sell this when you are both free,” she whispered, “something like this will buy you food for years.”

“Years?” Bubbles later asked. Her voice was chirpy and light, “Humans can buy years of food for a shiny stone?”

“Gems are rare and difficult to mine. They’re like gold or silver,” I almost swooned at the thought of them, “I used to have platinum rings laid with topaz.”

“Have you ever wished you could be me?”

“I don’t know,” I held my breath, “you must never feel anything but strong.”

“It’s taken me thousands of years to do this right…” She said, “It’s almost done now, you know?”

“Aren’t there many months left? I haven’t quite counted four months passing.”

“Four? It’s been ten. Didn’t I tell you it was the start of Summer before? Now it’s almost Autumn. We met just before the Winter.”

“Oh…” The word dropped out of my mouth. I was disappointed, “I thought it had been later than that. Was it really before my birthday?”

“Birthday?” She muttered, “Daisy asked when hers was some time ago. She was sad that I told her it must have already passed. You all get on fine without celebrating birthdays, so it really came as a surprise that she was crying about it.”

“It’s important.”

“I don’t even know what my birthday is,” she yawned, “I guess it was in the Fall. Dragons always hatch in Autumn. And, I’ve hibernated at least ten times, fifteen? That’s always for a thousand years.”

“Didn’t your parents tell you when it was?” I asked.

“I never knew them. They laid a clutch of eggs, then left. My siblings and I all took care of each other until our first hibernation, and I’ve never seen them since. You remind me of one of my sisters, sometimes.”

“Do you suppose they’re still out there?”

“No,” she shook the ground, “they should be awake and asleep at the same times as me. I’ve searched the whole world for them. I haven’t even seen another dragon in the past four thousand years. I like Dragontown. There are people here with siblings or friends who are far, far away now. And, they have companions anyway. It makes me wish I was human sometimes.”

I cautiously pressed my hand against the ground, “Can you count down the days from now on? I don’t want to lose track of time again.”

“I’ll try and remember to,” Bubbles giggled, “for all of my friends here. You know, if you all weren’t my food, I’d still want to get to know you.”

“I… That means a lot.”

“Fawn, my breakfast, my best friend. Mr. Sky and Mr. Brick, they gamble with each other, and I feel like I’m betting with them. Mack is trying to make problems for me, and sometimes I wonder if I want him to. I give Daisy all of her food, she feels like my own daughter. I hope she sees me the same way as her late mother. Everyone else.”

I walked back toward the palace and I opened the journal. I wrote down that it was near the middle of September. I used some of my ink to sketch a little, falling leaf. I couldn’t get its sharp, red color on the page with only black ink. I wrote a single tally mark beside it. I would write another tomorrow, and the day after. As the ink on the first tally settled, I just stared at it and sighed. I wondered what kind of tree the little leaf would have come from. I imagined how the Late Summer flowers must have smelled in the humid winds. Humidity, at least, I didn’t have to dream about that.