Daphne

A sound squealed around the inside Sifentir’s skull like a drunk mosquito. Ignoring it as best he could, the dragon exhaled a cloud into calm afternoon skies. Teasing the puff with his wings, he shaped it into a castle fit for a countess with plenty of skeletons in her closets. Sif had four wings, like a butterfly. Unlike a butterfly, his stretched twenty yards to either side. With another exhalation (and several twirls of his long tail), Sif wrapped the castle in fairy bridges – and connected them to a drifting, magical city. Leaning beams of sunlight dusted everything salmon orange. After many moments admiring his work, Sif identified the right spot to exhale a cathedral. He drew in a breath.

The tiny squealing noise broke his concentration. Sifentir looked down.

He hated looking down.

Down was the direction of duty and obligation. Beneath the dragon’s wings, shadows stretched across an actual city. Its towers and monuments were not fabricated from puffs of mist, but from a mixture of ceramics and rare metals found nowhere else in the world. The city’s foundations ran so deep (and were so thoroughly carved into monuments, palaces, water works, and opera houses of their own), nothing remained of the natural rock that once supported them.

No scholar could agree, however, on exactly when the city was built. It was too old to have a pronounceable name. Sif understood (through some instinctive mechanism which he did not) that it had been called X’dwn-Yll by the “Nibelungs” who built it. Despite his age, the dragon had never seen a Nibelung. Should it ever come to pass he did see one, that mechanism which he could not explain recommended he eat it. Sif wondered how he would recognize an instance of some pernicious species no entity, living or dead, had encountered. His instinctive mechanism beyond understanding insisted he would know a Nibelung when he saw one.

An anonymous celestial force with a low opinion of Nibelungs compelled the dragon to guard X’dwyn-Yll against the return of its builders for all eternity. Eternity was a long time and X'dwn-Yll was huge. Industrious to a fault, the Nibelungs carved their metropolis from (and deeply into) the concentric rings of an impact crater several hundred miles in diameter. No matter how high Sif flew (and he didn’t require air to either breathe or float), it was hard for the dragon to get a good look at it.

The formation was definitely an impact crater, though, and certainly resembled the eye of some cyclopean monstrosity. The central pupil, or iris, or whichever metaphor fit the dragon’s purpose best, was thirty-eight miles across. The top of its highest tower (which was the grandest of the city’s grand opera houses) rose almost seven miles above encircling seas. Thin air, indeed, for any diva's aria. The central blob's foundations plunged four miles beneath the ocean surface. Sif wasn’t obsessed with measuring things, particularly, but guarding a cursed city for multiples of ten thousand years left him bitter.

The dragon preened. Whenever he felt like having words with anonymous celestial forces about open ended time commitments that wasted his talents, Sifentir found indulging in his own magnificence soothing. A work of art in his own right, the dragon was a long, sinuous creature. His scales were malachite swirled with amber. They rippled over his muscles in an appealing fashion. His languidly beating wings were not required for lift generation, but did help him twirl and flutter with supernatural elegance.

The tiny squealing noise interrupted even self indulgence.

Inconceivable. The sound was nothing the dragon hadn’t heard a thousand times. Ten thousand times. His senses went beyond supernatural. If anything in X’dwn-Yll could sense an event, Sif could sense it too. His subconscious filtered out what didn’t matter. A crying human infant would stop crying, for whatever reason, and the world would go on. It therefore didn’t matter. He therefore shouldn’t hear it.

Was there a glitch in his system?

Sif refused to be called an unsentimental creature.

The first time he heard a crying baby, some multiple of ten thousand years ago, he investigated. He investigated the second, and so on. He made efforts to return crying babies to whichever species issued them. Reuniting babies with their own kind wasn’t part of his portfolio, however, and eventually he decided to let Nature do her thing.

The anonymous celestial force gave Sif broad discretion in determining what was a secret and what constituted theft. As an application of executive prerogative, Sif had determined that screaming infants weren’t going to steal any secrets of an industrious race of sorcerers who vanished when the world itself was a screaming infant.

More generally, Sif routinely declined to act on inconsequential trespasses in the city’s outermost rings. Occasionally, the dragon even made deals with inconsequential trespassers to take care of other trespassers on his behalf in exchange for not being eaten.

The consummate deal maker tapped one side of his head with a wing to remind his subconscious that crying babies were someone else’s problem. The noise refused to go away. Sif’s long, sinuous tail twitched.

Inelegantly.

Unacceptable!

Forcing himself into a state of practiced calm, the dragon visualized the squealing epicenter. It was in the northeast quadrant of the outermost ring – a place familiar with tragedy.

Whatever fell out of the sky a long time ago had smashed into a peninsula snaking between two continents. Except it was called an isthmus, not a peninsula. Whatever. The northeastern continent was colder and more primal than the one to the southwest.

The Nibelungs showed little interest in crater rings where they intersected continental shelves, focusing instead on the central blob (along with some islands formed in surrounding seas). Sif suspected the central blob was a remnant of the impactor. He further believed no one had seen a Nibelung because the sorcerers were on whatever hit the planet. Elements of their civilization “survived” long enough to remodel, but the Nibelungs themselves got vaporized.

Like the vaporized sorcerers, Sif also preferred to focus on the center. Even for an immortal entity, effective time management turned on prioritization. If a dwarf wandered into an outer ring, the dragon would eat it. Dwarven wanderers were always those disenfranchised, bitter males (everybody knew the type) looking for someplace to dig a hole and call it an ancient kingdom.

Sif had nothing against the bitter and disenfranchised.

He felt their pain.

Digging in X’dwn-Yll was prohibited, however. Strictly. Several dozen humans couldn’t dig half as deep as a bitter dwarf looking to rediscover the kingdom that by divine right belonged to him, so Sif was willing to be flexible with humans. In his experience, disenfranchised members of that humble species were more interested in scurrying across the surface of the world looking for “hookups” than digging holes. In that respect, they were like spiders (that didn’t dig). This helped explain why there were more humans than dwarves.

As long as they scurried quickly, the dragon tolerated human caravans on his periphery. Besides, humans tasted terrible. Absolutely foul. That helped explain why the world’s apex predators failed to keep human numbers down. It was going to become a problem. Dwarves, on the other hand, tasted delicious.

Sif chuckled. Maybe he should raise a clan for….

That accursed noise returned. Fine! Sif sifted through his recently ignored memories. Yes. A lot of shouting had taken place in the mosquito’s location. Weapons had clanged. There were even a few bangs from those little bang sticks. Muskets. Or was that a rabbit? Barbeque fuel? It was certainly curious. Sif’s subconscious ordinarily paid more attention to bangs. Why hadn’t it alerted him?

In defense of his subconscious, the northeast quadrant was familiar with meaningless tragedy. The only thing bitter disenfranchised humans loved more than shooting little balls of iron was shooting big balls that made new bangs when they hit something solid. Dwarves made the real killings, however, by selling banging sticks and booming balls at exorbitant markups.

To hear dwarves tell it, they couldn’t in good conscience lower prices, because then they would sell too many banging balls – and all their customers would end up dead. In fact, the dwarves were just doing their part to properly manage the human population.

Their diabolical cleverness was another reason to eat any dwarf who wandered close. Occasionally, dwarves protested that Nibelungs were their ancestors and that X’dwn-Yll therefore belonged to them by divine right. Dwarves who protested loudest tasted best – so maybe there was something to the claim.

Sif flicked a diaphanous wing.

He had traveled from every part of X’dwn-Yll to every other part so many times, over the course of tens of thousands of years, he had worn ruts in the aetherial currents and could be a hundred miles away in two blinks. The sky remained salmon orange when he arrived in the quadrant of meaningless tragedy. The streets below had long since dissolved into darkness.

Nibelungs carved everything, including their own carvings, in a recursive reduction to one divided by infinity. X’dwn-Yll’s streets were honeycomb ravines lined by balustraded balconies, gratuitous arches, pretentious buttresses, and pornographic statues stacked up, up, hundreds of feet up (or down, down, down from Sif’s descending perspective) on every side. The dragon liked a little coco in his rococo.

Nibelung rococo fell beyond the pale of even the poorest taste.

While nothing natural of the natural rock bed remained, Nature had a way of taking back what once belonged to her. Cascades of fern, ivy, moss, lichen, and all manner of trees grew into and through the honeycomb ravines. The ceramic metal mix employed by those vaporized sorcerers resisted Nature’s assaults heroically. An incomprehensible amount of time had passed, however, and in many places the carved ceramic metals had succumbed to crumbling.

Refusing to give up, X’dwn-Yll had a way of maintaining the shape its makers gave it. Even in victory, vegetation conformed to the architectural paradigms established by the city’s builders. As a consequence of leeching energies from cursed building blocks, the plants had developed eldritch glows. They weren’t enough to read by, but darkness meant nothing to Sif. His eyes were metaphors. He didn’t “see” the world so much as render it within the framework of his vast and dazzling intellect.

Inconveniently, his non-metaphorical length became problematic in a decrepit back alley. The dragon shrank to the size of a tiger and quickly spotted the caravan. It was no longer scurrying. All the humans had been shot and chopped to pieces.

The caravan came from the northeastern continent. Its attackers hailed from the southwest. That required them to cross treacherous seas (and risk death by dragon) just to shoot some horse traders to pieces with overpriced balls. It was a very human thing to do, but still a bit surprising. Perhaps the southwesterners came in one of their upside-down floating ziggurats.

Ridiculous things.

The horse traders had less gold, and therefore fewer bang sticks, but were ferocious. Both sides had wiped one another out. Almost. The buzzing in Sif’s skull reminded him one human survived. The dragon’s senses honed in on it. There. He pulled a wagon apart delicately. The source of his trouble was a tiny thing (if large for a human baby). Her hair was jet black. When she opened her eyes, they glistened nearly as dark. Upon seeing the dragon she stopped crying. One of the other humans had bundled her up and wedged her into a nook.

That must have been a difficult decision for the human involved.

Sif faced his own difficult decision.

Over millennia, his subconscious ignored too many crying babies to count. There was no fixing all the world’s tragedies. But consciously presented with this tiny thing, whose dark eyes smiled at him, the dragon had no idea what to do. He couldn’t leave her here to be eaten by wererats.

Could he?

Past interventions had firmly established the dragon possessed no capacity for raising babies. When not eating trespassers in obeisance to celestial compulsions, Sif chewed on mystical boulders every once in a few months – and washed them down with sea water. Babies ate goo, and drank water with low salt content.

Sif could find fresh water. X’dwn-Yll overflowed with pornographic fountains perpetually spilling water into bottomless crevasses which somehow purified and recirculated everything. Finding baby goo posed a bigger problem. Sif could take any external shape he wanted, but internal glands did not necessarily follow.

Rats were mammals. Of course!

The rats could raise her. The rat queen knew how to be reasonable. It wasn’t like one baby would make a difference between the survival or starvation of her entire species. Sif’s imagination ran rabid inventing antics a girl raised by rats might get up to.

The dragon’s subconscious shook his head. A girl raised by rats in the most decrepit suburb of the most cursed city in the world was undeniably compelling, but an even better option lay just over yonder. The image of a short, bouncy woman living her fullest, most carefree life loomed large in Sif’s inner eye.

The witch Maudelynne Verdanti was a trespasser with whom he had previously made a deal. The dragon held in his first chuckle. His second escaped and grew loud. A bubble of force formed around the black haired girl with dark eyes and the nascent build of a steppes horse trader.

Baby and bubble lifted into the air. Sif tapped on the barrier with sincere tenderness. He was absolutely not an unsentimental creature. With two flicks of his wings and a blur through aetherial currents, the dragon and his charge appeared above rocky islands in the ring city’s fashionable southeastern quadrant.

“Sifentir,” the dragon told himself, “I’d call you a genius – but that would be selling you short.”