Chapter one of Lady Dragon

Lady Dragon

 Book One: The Draconic Assembly

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!