Lady Dragon
Time Heals Meets the Players
by
JJ Leander
A Note from Little Time Heals
Some
of you think you know me, but I bet you are only half right. Others will be surprised to hear from me at
all. You may have heard that I died, and
that would be correct, too.
Mostly.
If
you are waiting to be entertained by Josephine Lindorm, the Commander of the
Second Militia of Hamlet, you may have a very long wait. She died a few thousand years ago.
She
died near the end of the Great Cataclysm, just as the world ice cover was
beginning to thaw, and the bare land started to turn blue and green.
Incidentally,
those are my favorite colors.
If
you are waiting to follow the further adventures of Time Heals, then you are in
luck. Time Heals is very much alive and
living in a cozy cave just outside of Hamlet.
My
mother has a huge, nicely clean room in this cave. It is where she sometimes comes to get away
from the hustle-bustle of the militia.
My sisters and I were hatched here, as were many, many other generations
of dragon chicks. We are happy in our
quiet home.
After
all, outside, our mother is constantly bombarded by Dragonish, our
communication method, coming in from all sides when Hamlet is awake and
functioning. Especially if anyone has
seen her flying around the base. I am,
too, but since physically I am so young, it is filtered by my immature
receptors. In fact, I have to listen
very carefully to pick up anything other than my mother’s thoughts and those of
my sister hatchlings.
Because
I am an old soul, I am a very fast learner.
Still, the effort quickly tires me out; my young body and brain need a
lot of rest after such exertion.
Just
as human babies spend a lot of time sleeping, so do we. When our mother is nearby, we sleep a lot
because our bodies are growing so much.
We also tend to drop off right after feeding. Our mother chews and partially digests our
food, because the animals we eat have hard shells that need to be broken into
smaller pieces.
My
mother often tells us about eating arthropods with irradiant chitons. Those are
fancy human words for shiny, colorful shells.
I definitely want to eat those when I can properly crunch them with my
own teeth. They will make my scales
sparkly, just like hers.
Crab-like
animals with irradiant chitons are found very deep in the bottom of our cave,
where they reflect what little light there is.
Mom tells us there are creatures in the waters of the deepest levels
that actually light up on their own! We
can someday use their light to find our irradiant chitons, since the
reflections will help separate the irradiants from the other crustaceans.
We
will not be allowed to eat those bioluminescent, or light-emitting, creatures
that are mostly fish and salamanders and slugs.
They are very rare, even rarer than our chitinous arthropods, and we
don’t want to cause an extinction.
My
mother is especially sensitive about endangered species, because she can detect
their inner being, their souls. She says
she tends to souls, and protects them whenever she can, or sends them on when
she must.
Souls
are what we all share as denizens of this Planet. Since they keep us alive, it is very
important that we feed our souls, more so than our bodies. Our souls will live long after our bodies
die, and they will leave us if we no longer need them.
Staying
alive is very complicated. If you need
proof, just look at nearly any neonatal animal.
Newborns are barely alive; it is said that human babies can easily lose
their souls and die in their sleep. The
same seems to be the case with most of the very aged of many species.
Very
few organisms die suddenly while awake.
They can be killed by outside influences, but it is rare to simply drop
dead, seemingly of nothing. On the other hand, humans and many animals are
subject to tiny enemies that can kill them from inside.
Some
humans have very strong souls that resist dying. Josephine Lindorm was like that; she learned
it from us dragons.
We
dragons do not die from illnesses. In
fact, most dragons do not seem to die at all, and live just about forever, like
my mother.
My
mother remembers when there were no humans, and very few animals that were not
reptiles or fish. But Josephine was
snookered into believing that she was only 350 years old. Mom was just teasing her; she thought of
Josephine as a pet who didn’t need to know the truth.
Just
like today’s humans, dragons would sometimes adopt an animal as a pet. We were lonely for companionship and had only
ourselves as friends.
Fortunately,
dragons are extremely prolific, and spawn many offspring. The Planet was full of us at different times,
but there were mass extinctions that destroyed nearly all life. There were times when we fled overwhelming
danger, to later return to our Planet and watch as animals began to emerge and
develop again.
I
don’t know how many times this happened, but each time, we dragons went off the
Planet to escape death. That is when we
began to learn to follow nexuses, those important times and places that we
often visit.
It
may sound self-contradictory, but I am old enough in my soul to remember some
of those nexuses, but too young in my body to go there.
At
least until I am an adult.
Right
now, I cannot fly, and my mother won’t let me return to the old nexuses, where
I might be killed by predators.
A
dragon chick makes a tasty snack for some large killers, such as flying
raptors, dogs and great cats, sharks and some whales, crocodiles and
humans. Baby dragons cannot get away
fast enough to evade most of those predators.
We are still hard to kill but nonhuman predators are very tenacious destroyers,
especially when they are starving.
I
will be bigger soon, because my old soul will allow me to grow fast. Then I want to go back to each nexus where I
made friends.
I
want to show them my new body!
