The Pilot - Published Nov 19th, 2020.
And now, time for that review response to Pt35:
We can't just brush over the 'I am terrible with emotions thing', I need to develop a better way to handle these things as a serious writer. At the same time, I don't know what I would do myself in that situation (make excuses to not stick around, probably). As for Riptide, I think he'd confront the problem head-on. Running away isn't something you do often when you're young and stupid.
On to the chapter, I suppose. The next reviewer gets a victory cookie, (::)
If ever a Seawing had suffered from wasting disease it was this one. His chest was slender; his arms were too long for his body, and his massive, webbed talons were forever being discovered in and extricated from pocket-sized holes and crannies. His scales were not the conventional diamond overlapping plates, but each asymmetrical and dissimilar, and crooked, dark blue in appearance, perhaps with a hint of green if I had squinted. He was a fever dream about the Seawing archetype.
His arm clung to his ribs tightly on his right side, where I'd kicked him. Perhaps I'd broken a bone. That was what dragons got if they tried to sneak up on Riptide.
Instead of his talon he offered his left arm; no claw-shake, but perhaps an arm-wrestle. I greeted him likewise, and there was a battle of grappling before suddenly he took my winning limb and shoved it back to neutral. He was stronger than me, then, and self-controlled enough to know when to use that strength. Wonderful.
In hindsight the belief that there was nobody in the dark stronger than me was absurd and arrogant.
Satisfied at having greeted each other, we proceeded to introduce ourselves by flashing our names and repeating them after one another till we had no more idea of what we were talking about than before (in my book he was speaking of dogs and currents). There was not yet a way to ask why he'd snuck up on me in the dark, or better yet, 'could you show me the way out, please?'
By gestures in the clear water (mostly pointing at me and then up) I communicated my wish to get to the surface; he shook his head and motioned down, then started off in a seemingly arbitrary direction. In a secondary portion of my mind I plotted options to kill him, which I should've done from the start.
His throat? - my mind asked as I followed him. Too slender. Sweeping him away with a tail strike and scratching out his gills would serve me better. But failing to kill my host and then living – or dying – with the aftermath was conducive to ill health, so I followed along, wondering if his blood was the usual blue color or some kind of green. It didn't matter; everything down here looked blue anyway.
As we presumably went deeper the water became warmer and warmer, which was counterintuitive. Now a hint of sulfur made my scales tingle like the vapor of Rainwing acid. Luckily my thermometer had survived the descent (though – how stupid of me! - I had not thought to get a baseline reading).
The mercury read forty-five point three; warmer than that on the ridge by a few degrees at least. A warm current? But if so, where from? The sulfur said volcanic activity. I wrote down on the scroll, 45.3 at unknown depth.
Ripples of luminence shimmered and disappeared on my host; he was again saying something, though I knew not what. It would've been better if I'd had Fin along. There was only so much a lone person could think of himself, a limited number of ideas he could come up with. If there were two… the empty waters would seem less foreboding (was that a hint of fear, Riptide?) and I could begin to make sense of the strange language pouring from the dragon before me.
As I was studying him, he was studying me. His body would be at odds with the direction he was swimming, so he looked like he was forever sideslipping to the right in the water, against his bad side. This allowed him to look over his shoulder at me, and gauge my reactions, probably better than I realized, for if he had been watching the fisher-dragons at work during his forays he had at least an idea of how the Seawing face worked, where I had none. If he was annoyed, or happy, or calm, I had no idea.
Probably he was in some not-inconsiderable pain. Ha.
There was a different pang in me, the emptiness left behind by a lost compatriot. I had to get to Fin somehow; either find him on the bottom (if he had been brave enough to venture after me) or go back to the Ridge (if he had been prudent enough to stay behind). But despite being a prince Fin was the intrepid sort. He might be on some part of the deep ocean floor right now.
And the idea of him being down there alone, around these peculiar and horrid-looking fish composed mostly of jaw and hanging light, was anathema. One of these things floated by me; perhaps it was red, but it looked blue to me, only a darker sort of blue which was not quite navy, and suggested the color was an other sort instead of the one I was accustomed to. My host didn't seem to mind. He was looking back at me, to see my expression when I saw the swimming mouth.
I took the opportunity to point at myself and hold up two talons. My host did as well. A peculiar thought entered my head. Did he now think there were two of me, and that Seawings were clones of each other?
Hilarious. But it was impossible to know what he was thinking. If I had Moonwatcher down here, and some magical artifact to give her air, I would've been more or less reassured (though it would've been prudent to keep some skyfire handy, there were only five of those rocks in the world, and Turtle never thought it would be a good idea to give some to me).
About fifteen minutes later I remembered my thermometer, and looked at the reading and immediately wrote down 45.8, at somewhat deeper than last time. Half a degree; no change to scoff at.
I was getting bored of the journey, and these temperature readings provided something to do. The heat increased gradually as we went downwards, and there was a substantial draw going along with us now, as if there was an upwelling somewhere nearby. This was good news; it meant there must be some exit to the cave which the water was permeating, and thus a way out. But finding it in this visibility would be a difficult job.
High-pitched clicks and whines met my ears, like those of bats, ephemeral and near the boundary of what I could possibly hear, like bats' squeaks. The noise echoed in the grotto, patterned and purposed, no animal's squeal, but speech of some sort. My host answered. As it appeared there were more of him, I decided it was time to give him a name.
How about Shady? Yes; that sounded right for someone of his character; a guy who rudely snuck up on people like that.
Perhaps he'd thought I'd known he was there, and simply hadn't turned to look at him.
Nah.
Shady quickened his pace, parting the waters with his sharp nose and then darting through the space between, while behind I plodded along. No longer were we keeping near to the seafloor, but passing some hundred feet above it, as if taking a shortcut.
Shortly after Shady made contact with more of his people (his duplicates, I decided; no one would be eccentric enough to live down here but his duplicates), a pyramid came into view, only with vertical sides irregular and inwardly bent. Organic? The water grew even hotter here, and ahead it bubbled. Wisely my host skirted the area.
It was a sea vent! I had never seen one of them before; they were purely hypothetical in nature, and yet here was one standing – no, growing before me. There were all sorts of colorful organisms growing on it, dyed fish swimming around it, painted coral thriving in a ring about the place – blue, navy blue, and dark teal. It was a sorry arrangement that qualified for a plentiful palette down here, and yet it was so interesting to me for a moment I merely took measurements on my thermometer, and forgot about the more urgent situation such as my friend, my family in the bay and where on Pyrrhia this guy was taking me.
Not far, it turned out. Teal blurs in the distance grew until they phased into three more dragons, long and slender, their feet too big and their tails too long and flat on the sides instead of the common-sense stumpy and round physiology which served for the majority of Seawings. There were differences between them – one had a more hooked snout, one had longer hocks, one had bigger gills than the other two – but until I became accustomed to their forms it would be hard to tell the difference.
Hopefully I wouldn't be here long enough to memorize this. I was getting one of those peculiar sinking feelings, though there was hopefully nowhere deeper to sink to from here (hey, a dragon can dream). My hosts had a lively conversation amongst themselves, then escorted me onward, to towering lodges of stone built in much the same way the sea vents were; tall and curving inwards from a pure diagonal at the macro-scale; rough and choppy in outline once I looked closer.
Shady led me into rhe closest one of them and secreted me in the corner with some fish I suppose I could tentatively call food, while off to the side he and his three compatriots waved and flailed and did a lot of talking which made no sense to me. Presently they all left and we were stuck playing the name game for a while, till one by one the others filtered in plus their friends, and their friends' friends, and so on and so forth. In thirty minutes time there was a general throng, all discussing between themselves for the most part, peering at me so often while Shady stood by me in a defensive posture, herding away the over-curious.
I liked to think I was many things, but conversation piece was not one of them.
They reminded me of when I was young and what the older dragonesses deemed 'cute'. They were harmless cheek-pinchers, if annoying. These ones, though, there was no telling from their eyes what was going on in their heads, or vice versa. They could be discussing murdering me or they could be my classmates plotting how best to ingratiate me to the fraternity (even if this was an extremely elaborate hazing I knew one or two guys who would do it) or they were conniving at a method of getting me in the fraternity, then killing me. There were token attempts to communicate, but as the only representative of the crown down here and a model for all Seawings, I exuded coolness and implacable patience, and an inability and unwillingness to talk that would've frustrated Stonemover.
It was on the inside, however, that fear had taken my guts in its icy grip.
The chance of me making it out alive was diminishing faster than was ideal. I suppose it's not frightening for you as you are now, sitting as you are in your study sipping tea and reading accounts which you think are fictional, but I invite you to come down here and spend time in a corner a mile beneath the waves with ghastly, gnarled ghouls of Seawings blocking the exit and tell me to my face your heart-rate didn't just double.
So I was understandably afraid as I awaited what might have been a judge's ruling to have me disposed of for encroaching on their territory, or seeing too much, or whatever other excuse they needed to imprison me and make sure I never saw the golden light of rising day.
Thankfully, they were not murder-y folk (as I am sure Peril or Sunny would've put it), or not yet aroused to anger. It was not my appearance or existence as such which interested these people, it was my reaction to them. They knew too much for me to be comfortable. How long had they been watching us? Were they our descendants? Were we their descendants? Were we two different tribes, created for separate habitats? I scribbled my speculations on a piece of scroll, and all the while they politely quarreled. At long last they must have decided to take me on a tour, for two came along each side and politely ushered me out the stone arch of the watery home.
I still had very little idea of where I was, or the oceanography, except for readings taken with my thermometer, which would've been more use if Shady hadn't stolen it. I say stolen, but I gave it to him since he held open his gnarled talon and wanted it, and I didn't want to anger my hosts by not giving it to him. He took the silver instrument and passed it to one of his compatriots, who worried over it, and examined it, and made a great fuss about it while they were traveling. More structures came into view, spanning picturesque valleys with piles of rock.
To me it was random at first, but when I looked again after watching one of the strange dragons drop my thermometer, to see if it floated. It didn't, and I am glad it didn't break. But when I looked back at these lodgings I saw clearly the regular colonnades which supported beams of cut stone, designed into the structure of the buildings to support them, and create interior space. The architecture was cubic and geometrical; where there were curves they were constant and inorganic; if they were interrupted by a random chunk of rock there was still a mathematical outline behind the outcropping. Dragons teemed within these buildings, which were all clustered around the volcanic sea vents I had noticed on the way down.
I pointed at a sea vent, then at my mouth, then made a chewy face. Shady nodded.
Named the dragon I first met Shady. Species name Deepwings until further notice. Shady wants to talk to me but can't because of language barrier. Currently communicating with sign language. Also they are playing with my thermometer.
It was at this time that Shady nicked one of his fellows with a talon, then slipped the silver instrument into mine. Thankfully it was undamaged, and I slipped it into my pack with a smile of gratitude. Shady pointed at the scroll. I flashed the name of the item. Did he want it? I let him look at it, though I kept my claw on the tough parchment, in case he wanted to take that, too. He was merely interested in the stuff, running his claw-tips along the little lines which made the characters which made the words. He looked at it sideways. I could almost hear his wonder. It was so thin! And the stranger was writing words on it.
What did they have in terms of the written word?
Shady led me to one of the multifarious entrances of a rectangular lodge. Stone tablets. They had stone tablets. If they had too little organic material to make parchment out of, this was understandable, but still, there was a pang of disappointment in my heart. I peered at the language, casting a glow with the luminent scales beneath my eyes. It too was strange, yet there were enough commonalities with our writing for me to make a guess.
"Owned/possessed gibberish gibberish, high mount/Pinnacle."
There was a subscript beneath that, but it was written in cursive, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it, which was close enough for government work. I could have patted myself on the back for the translation, yet there was still much to do, ere Fin reported me dead and left, and so brought the chances of me regaining contact with him to nil.
In the background a small hideous fish wriggled up to a larger, more hideous fish, doubled its mouth size and ate the bigger creature with a gulp. What was a Seawing to a larger version of one of those?
I'd thought I was so great. Tsunami disillusioned summer dreams of love. Fin made me aspire to know as much as he did, even now. And my trips down here had ended any delusions of personal strength and superiority. What glass self-image was about to be shattered next?
My pulse went dot and carry one when Shady pulled me into the structure, which passed for homey to me in the same way Skywings appreciated a Mudwing hut; not at all, or fantastically little. I moved as slowly as I dared, for I was short of breath, and the water here was ill with me, perhaps containing less of the ether which I so exigently required down here.
Then I was blinking, adjusting to the light, and none too soon. A building which was decent-sized from the outside possessed a cavernous interior, so large that the clear water faded to blue haze before the other side came to view, or the end of the ceiling, or the floor. This was an advanced form of visual trickery. There were Deepwings moving about, dozens of them, scales bright compared to the unknowable darkness which made up the oceans in these parts. All of them chanced much interest at me.
My ego, which so recently had been squashed, now began to inflate again.
If they wanted a piece of jolly Riptide, well, they could try. It did not escape me that I was surrounded by them, but it was so easy to lose that tidbit of knowledge when I was so patently the center of attention that my self-importance ballooned.
We passed through the dense crowd (hardly ever have I seen so many Seawings in one place), between a quartet of black-clad guards, brushed a pair of heavy doors, and entered the chambers of power. It was hard to put into words what gave it that aura. The languorous currents of richness were one thing; the glow-fish which swam in steel cages shaped like candle-flames indicated this, gilded bands at the bases of the things. It was the large scale model of their domain standing on a table of stone (so I assumed), a cutaway of an ancient volcano, made of porous rock which appeared deepest black except at the edges, where the light caused the smallest glimmer of purple.
The fish glowed white: there was white light coming from those lanterns. For the first time in days I could see color, and for a minute or two I simply looked around, mind-boggled, taking in the elaborate furnishings; the soft bubble fountain near the curved walls, which I realized formed an exact circle. Then there were the other senses; the water scented pure, without sulfur; it brushed against my scales on its way out the door, as if it were at a higher pressure here. And the floor beneath me was warm, surprisingly so. I reached for my thermometer, but Shady stopped me.
I had failed to notice the other dragon.
Call him arrogant, call him smug, call him whatever one wanted, but the thing was that here was a dragon who held power, and from his rigid stance, he was concealing his true thoughts. Doing so, however, was useless; I couldn't have read him anyway. Perhaps the display was for Shady. Perhaps it meant an emotion I had no way to pick up at all. He was as twisted in shape as the rest of them, but there was more beyond the form, no doubt. His eyes looked at me and through me and to what was beyond, and his deep blue scales gnarled up into sharp knobs running down his shoulders, with rectangular glow-scales between them, purple and enchanting. His gaze bored into me and opened a crack to my soul. I hope he liked what he saw.
There went another unconsciously held concept. No more judging books by their covers.
Unfortunately, there was no way to discern his contents. Not without speaking to him, and that would be difficult.
Shady's tail touched mine. He was shivering, and it wasn't the cold; the water here was the warmest I'd been since I'd slept in the lagoon and almost been buried in sand. This was a dragon who pushed his way through the crowd as if it were water. I returned my attention to the stranger with caution in my heart. I had half a mind to swim for the door if he tried anything macabre.
If they had spent so much time observing our doings, why couldn't they have learned my language before talking to me? The burden of effort was on them, for I had never known they existed up till about twelve hours ago, or however long ago it was when I saw Shady behind me and kicked myself into the roaring current.
The dragon – whose name might have been Pinnacle or similar, according to the plaque before the entrance – Pinnacle waved his talon and bade me come closer to the table and the cutaway of the mountain.
To my chagrin, this placed me farther away from the door. I pretended to make no notice of this, however, and leaned in to study the model, though far enough away I could still see Shady and Pinnacle around me, and react in time if they came at me from behind.
Shady wouldn't too quick to try the technique again. The jerk of pain whenever he tried to swim right was evidence of that.
The details of the model were excellent. There were tiny buildings and sea vents, the rock chipped and carved by the best of masons. They were colored, too, mostly the auburn yellow of gold (which the traces well might be), or deep blue instead of grey. Though the atmosphere was dark, it brightened with the varied trim. Most interesting were the tunnels. They were multitudinous, a few falling away and going to the bottom of the model, which was deep indeed, guessing the scale of the rendition to be several thousand to one. Most, however, went upwards and towards the center of the mountain, which cone shape became similar to what the Nightwings said a volcano looked like, now that I thought about it. The corridors joined, one by one and each large one to another, pitching upwards as I traced my talon along them till they became shafts, terminating at the highest point of the model, presumably where the top of the mountain met the bottom of the sea.
My warm talons suddenly burned with threatening power. I knew all too well what had happened to the last tribe to live in a dead volcano. Only a fool could mistake the warmth of the stone floor as anything other than the pent-up heat of magma far beneath. Against that, I reminded myself, Pinnacle was nothing.
The named dragon reached in with his talon and tapped a small speck on the bottom of one of the circular tunnels – lava tubes, most likely. Perhaps he wanted to let me know where I was. We were on one of the more horizontal sections, and based on the size of the thing I couldn't have traveled more than a talon-length with Shady since I'd woken up, which begged the question of how deep I'd fallen and how many miles the current had swept me. Too far and too far, that was how I felt about it.
Based on the size of this place – and the number of Deepwings I'd seen here – there could be ten thousand dragons living in this place, or more, easily more, living off the byproducts of the sulfurous sea vents, which would explain their appearance. Perhaps they were just old. Perhaps I was looking at one of my ancestors.
A shiver coursed my sides.
The threat to the Kingdom was massive. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand dragons down here nobody knew about, and what happened to the rest of my people depended on me and my reaction to them, given the way they watched me owlishly.
I was, for all intents and purposes, the only representative of Coral. I could play it up for my own gain, as so many faux-diplomats had done in the varied past of this world… or I could act reasonably and sensibly.
A self-styled emissary of the Queen… the idea was attractive.
Pinnacle appeared to be asking me a question. Either that or he was making an oddly worded statement. There were certain scales on Seawings which were flashed before statements, commands or interrogatives. I could understand their written language, if slightly. If their version of Aquatic differed mostly in the geometry of their scales, and the rearrangement of which one said what.
It would've been rude to stare at Pinnacle, so I cast sidelong glances at Shady while giving the model enough attention to keep from looking suspicious – especially since I was genuinely interested in the product. The lava tubes were intricate, and also huge.
Yes, Pinnacle was asking a question. It was impossible to determine what at the moment, or why, or fill the rest of those nagging blanks which were swimming around in the back of my mind, but at least this was progress.
Shady replied with another question – no, a statement, no, a command – I was getting good at this. Sarcasm aside, my two hosts were talking quickly and quietly, though at a look from me they slowed down, which gave me a better chance to work things out. So the luminant patch which on a Seawing would be on the left side of the neck was actually relocated to there, and the cluster which indicated sentence type had been moved over here, and the direction of the distortion gave me a clue of where else to look.
I had experience with this, teaching Tsunami to not say embarrassing things in front of important people like Whirlpool and her mother of all things. When the queen's daughter unexpectedly told me I was a walking disaster, that the sky was red, and also that she felt she had no feelings toward me, I was a little surprised.
All the same, I wished I hadn't fallen asleep in grammar class at Jade, when at last I had had the opportunity to learn instead of run for my life and field hostile dragons calling me a traitor. It would've been better if I was a legalistic language freak like Whirlpool, but I wasn't, and if that dragon's unpleasant personality traits came with the Aquatic understanding I didn't want any extra insight.
At any rate, there was a bump at the door, and I turned to look. If they were closing it on me – but no. A dragon had run headlong into the shoulder of the entrance to the chamber, his head obscured by an armful of pentagonal slates, each corner the same angle as the next. These guys liked their geometry.
Pinnacle flashed a directive to the newcomer, and with his talon bade me trot closer. I had no idea where to start, but the other dragon did by a hair, so we puzzled over the tablets for a bit before he set to pointing at pictographs and then the writing next to them and then flashed the particular name of whatever it was in their form of Aquatic.
It was like being a dragonet all over again, except this time I had the mental capacity to think about the relation between the language I already knew and the language which was being given to me. Nouns were easy. Adjectives less so. The other words – the nitty gritty mechanisms of speech – would've been impossible for a non-Seawing, or at the least impossible for a dragon who'd spent less than a year with our kind.
It was impossible to reckon the time down here. A minute counted out mentally stretched to an hour when I wasn't pinning down the seconds with all the attention I could bring to bear. Who knew what an hour seemed to be?
While the two of us worked on elementary concepts, Shady and Pinnacle discussed goings-on near the table, Shady leaning against it for support and Pinnacle occasionally giving input, hovering above the floor in a way that landlubbers would've found disturbing. I lent half a mind to their talk as I worked, learning and listening at the same time. This meant this, but it also meant that, and often it would take a minute of mental fiddling to understand what the implications of a new concept were, or how the word would look on a Seawing versus a Deepwing, now that I had a decent idea how to go about it.
The shoulder clusters were so many and so varied that most of them were impossible, if I'd been trying to solve the problem by guesswork. But by figuring at the distortions caused by the Deepwing's features, I was getting a good idea of what was being said, and about who. Much of the conversation was about me, as Shady was glowing the befuddling pattern he did when trying to pronounce my name, but a portion was about Shady, and still more had to do with Pinnacle's affairs and a plank, which after a minute of puzzling (and much frustration from the linguist in front of me) I deciphered as a board.
It had to do with their government, then. The spotlight had shifted away from me and was now on another, more shadowy group. Beyond my speculations, however, and observations on the gilt furnishings, most of what happened in that room was drudgery in detail, working through as much as I could and still butting up against key tenets of the dialect I could not yet understand. While the teacher was patient, I was getting tired of the exercise, and so was he, by dint of mental exertion.
When both of us had had enough of it I was ushered out by Shady, between the quartet of black-clad guards again, which only now did I take time to examine, as I had been busy thinking on the way in. While they were wearing armor, it was mostly ceremonial; it was black, eye-swallowingly so, with pads of it on the front and back of their legs and shoulders above and beneath the joints, so that the wearer could articulate more easily. This smoothed their scales, too, and would have let them cut through the water if not for the extra weight (I suspected the material was metal, and not any animal material, though I'm not willing to bet on that). It also had the effect of blanking all the glow-scales except those which were beneath their eyes, giving the dark and queer gate an atmosphere even more gloomy and mysterious.
Shady showed me a room, at any rate; this one was a perfect square, though small; fifteen paces on each side, with the doorway inset to the wall by a talon's width on each side. There was a current in the room, emanating from cracks in the stone, which replaced musty, used up water with fresh stuff pleasant to breathe. The builders of this place were talented.
It was in that place, remarking on the finer details of the architecture and how my tribe might have done it better – it was there that I fell asleep.
It is here, fortunately or unfortunately, that the prewritten section of this story ends. This means that I won't be delivering updates as regularly as I have been for the last two months, but it also means that I'm free to incorporate reviewers' suggestions, if you write out compelling reasons for what you want to see. Rest assured, there is a plot, and given a few chapters of adventure it will soon thicken. You can check out my profile for more stories to read in the meantime.
Catch you soon,
Signed, Black.