Mandrake

Bayed’abid erupted into chuckles like knives scraping on stone.

“All alone,” he heaved out between guffaws. “Nothing there with it. Gobbling up leaves—I’m pretty certain even the grown ones don’t eat leaves.”

“Not to my knowledge,” replied Xalatzcatl, rubbing a languid palm, “and if anyone would know, it’s me.”

The dragon’s laughter subsided as he pushed up and back onto his catlike haunches, whip of a tail snapping through the air. His serpent’s neck twisted skyward as he gazed down at the woodkin. He towered over Xalatzcatl, who continued to examine her nails with ennui.

“A true babe in the woods,” declared the dragon. “Do you know what I did next?”

“That can’t be comfortable,” commented the woodkin, glancing up. “My neck aches just looking at you—and my neck is made of trees.”

“Never mind my neck! Do you know what I did, Xala?” he egged her on, forked tongue darting from betwixt his curled lips.

“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me,” sighed Xalatzcatl.

“Mhmm.” Bayed’abid nodded vehemently, undulating his entire spine. He corkscrewed down from the forest canopy, sidewinding his body around Xalatzcatl. She stared at him blankly.

“I coiled around the little thing.”

“You have a flair for the dramatic, Bayed’abid.”

He laid his head upside down at her feet. Xala frowned.

“Doesn’t that hurt your horns? Or your…comb…crest…thing, whatever it is?”

Still grinning, he flicked his talons at the ground, sending a flurry of leaves into the breeze.

“I flung the child into the air…and lay in wait.”

“Bayed,” Xalatzcatl intoned softly, hollowly; the furrows in her brow vanished. “Tell me you didn’t.”

“That’s the thing!” squealed Bayed’abid. “I barely did anything! I just opened up my jaws and—”

“Oh no. No, no, no.”

“—swallowed it whole. Didn’t even have to chew.” He pawed at the ground and tilted his head. “Probably should’ve, though. Hurt my tummy afterward.”

“You didn’t just eat a child, you are a child,” she growled. “Explains why I put up with you at the very least.”

She reached up and took hold of the sakhua branch above her head, breathing deeply. The tree merged with her flesh briefly, the woody texture of her skin grafting to the rough bark of the branch. As she breathed in, eyes closed, the leaves and fine branches of her hair stirred as though by a zephyr, growing richer, browner, greener in color. A cluster of buds burst forth from her temple, vibrant green opening into six-pointed stars of creamy white. Loosing her grasp on the branch, trunk of a forearm reshaping into fingers, hand, wrist, Xalatzcatl plucked the protruding twig, wincing slightly, and whispered into the newborn blossoms, compelling them to rotate and twirl. Fluttering a hand over the flowers, she blew into them softly, sending them bobbing into the rising heat of the afternoon sun. She watched them fade out of view before turning her gaze to the fruitless twig pinched in her fingers.

“Come back to me,” commanded Xalatzcatl, her voice as much a clattering of branches as a concatenation of syllables; and slowly, the twig fell into her wooden skin as though into quicksand.

“How come I’ve never seen you do all that before?” asked Bayed’abid, wiggling and scratching his back against the dirt and foliage.

“You’ve never killed a child before,” replied Xalatzcatl flatly. “Their spirits have to find their way back to me somehow.”

Xalatzcatl pressed her hands together and straightened her back, looking again into the distance.

“I would ask you if you're really foolish enough to devour a child, but I know you are. I was holding onto the hope that you’d merely used this child as some sort of bait to scare the life out of its family or to lure in the townsfolk, but this…this is something else.

“Bayed’abid, I want you to think back on the child, and think hard—this is important. Was there anything you noticed about it? Anything unusual, anything that stood out?”

“It….” Bayed’abid frowned, tilting his head; the scales on his neck caught the sunlight and flashed peacock green and blue. “It was a human child. Isn’t one the same as the next?”

“I said, ‘THINK.’”

In an instant, Xalatzcatl’s legs extended into earth-splitting roots. The trees around her swelled and swayed with a snapping groan as their leaves grew longer, sharper, and darkened the sky. In as brief a moment, Xalatzcatl stood on two feet once more. Clouds and azure expanse peeked once more through the trees. Bayed’abid’s tail stopped swishing and instead wrapped around his chest, the tip resting on his lips; he chewed it fervently.

“There was a mark, I think, maybe—I don’t know,” he stammered.

Her voice quieted. “What kind of mark, Bayed?”

He closed his eyes of gold and black. “It was…strange. Red-brown dots arranged in a flattened circle. On the child’s belly—around that spot where the flesh dips in.”

“The navel,” affirmed Xalatzcatl. “Sounds like they’re learning.”

Bayed’abid blinked. “Learning what?”

“Hard to say exactly,” she answered. “These things tend to defy scrutiny. Regardless, it can’t be good. Bayed’abid, there was a man who passed through the village some days ago, a man who smelled of mugwort and thyme. Do you remember? Round, bejeweled, clad in silver robes?”

“Yes,” muttered Bayed’abid, nodding slowly. “Yes, I remember him.”

“What did the baby smell of?”

“Normal human smells, with a….” Bayed’abid gulped.

“Go on,” Xalatzcatl urged. “What else?”

Bayed’abid looked down at the dirt. “A hint of mugwort and thyme.”

He hid in the western caves beyond the stream for the first week; the second, he ventured out only at night, picking birds off branches as they slept. He plucked their feathers away with fastidious talons, bit by bit, watching the blood well up, and gnawed feverishly at each shaft. His eyes glazed over as he brought his trembling jaws to the prickled skin. The hornbills he favored especially; the massive orange bills and fleshy casques atop their heads gave him something at which to worry away for hours on end. Once, he managed to swipe a myna bird from its perch, though that one he let go after it began to utter a litany of verse in human tongues.

The third week, his slender belly swelled and gurgled, and he slunk over to the outskirts of the village in spite of the flagrant daylight. There he found a water buffalo tied to a fig tree, lowing and tugging at its bindings as he approached. He dispatched it quickly with a jolt of lightning from his nostrils, blinking as it fell, legs spasming upon the shallow grass. His eyes darted to the sod-and-thatch houses and fields of sorghum before returning to his quarry. His unsteady jaws closed around the hulking, smoldering carcass, and, severing its cord, he leapt away into the trees. Once hidden in the underbrush, he devoured his prey in slavering chomps, barely leaving bones behind. Yawning, his stomach silent, he trotted off to the stream, rolling back and forth in the gently rushing current, watching as the gore floated away, the water running red and then clear once more. Bayed’abid basked a moment in the warmth of a nearby clearing, letting sunrays turn the trickling water on his scales to steam, snout jutting up toward the threadbare clouds. Stretching his legs, whipping his tail, he returned to the cave and drifted off to sleep.

Each morning the pattern would repeat; each morning his belly hung lower and groaned louder. The third day, he dipped his claws and snout into the stream perfunctorily, flicking the beads of water from his scales; by the fourth, he had forgone washing entirely, inviting a crown of flies to hover about him and feast upon the viscera which had settled into dragonflesh—black upon maroon within teal. Sometime after the second kill, he clutched his talons about his head, clawing at his crest and horns, bellowing, ramming himself into trees and boulders before collapsing into a gasping heap. The frenetic violence subsided with time; the pounding in his skull did not.

Not until the fifth night did Bayed'abid realize that he had been plagued by dreams. The chaotic jumble of images and half-uttered half-meaning had evaporated upon waking, quaffed up by the sun as dewdrops from a leaf. As he started awake, looking about him in a frenzy and firing off lightning at the mouth of the cave, an image returned to him, a billowing of translucent silver, a grin upon a round face studded with jewels.

"Get out of my head!" screamed the dragon, words ricocheting off the earthen walls. "GET OUT!!!"

He fell onto one side and dug his talons into his flesh, drawing black blood, eyes wild. The flies, having fled his raucous waking, alit once more on their host, siphoning up the fresh blood with alacrity. His crest quavered and drooped to one side, his limp body succumbing to fatigue.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, Xalatzcatl approached Bayed'abid, coming upon him as he sank his teeth into yet another buffalo.

"Hello Bayed," greeted Xala softly.

He wheeled on her, snapping and clicking his jaws. She held up both hands, eyes wide.

"Bayed'abid, it's me!" yelled the woodkin to the dragon, her voice breaking. "It's Xala."

He let out a low growl. "Xala."

He looked her up and down, eyes of shattered gold and black unchanging.

"I'm eating," he stated blandly, returning to the buffalo meat, snapping ribs from vertebrae.

"I see that," agreed Xala. "At least you're staying well-fed. Have the townsfolk found out it's you who's been eating their livestock?"

"I—" he started. His eyes narrowed.

"Have you been watching me?"

"I told you I'd keep an eye on you," she replied simply. "Easy to keep a low profile when you can turn into a tree."

"And I told you I didn't need help," he snarled in retort. "I'm doing fine. For what it's worth, no, the people of the village don't seem to know that I'm taking their buffalo. They leave them tied up by the treeline, fat and ready for the kill. Might as well serve them to me with onions and cinnamon."

Xala frowned. "They're humans, but…well, they're not that foolish, Bayed."

"Careless, then," he dismissed. "Whatever they are, it doesn't matter. I'm so HUNGRY, Xala. I eat and I eat and I eat and the hunger doesn't go anywhere. It's still in me, still wreaking havoc on my body, my mind. It calms a little when I eat, yet it goes back to its screaming fit every time I wake up. I don't want to know whence the food comes. All I know, all I care to know, is that something can dull the din."

With that, he buried his face in the belly of the felled beast, snapping up liver, heart, lungs. The crown of flies, more numerous than before, had begun to dance around his horns, waiting for him to rest before landing for a meal. In its dizzy, hobbling way, one of their number detached from the flurry, floating over to Xalatzcatl. She watched as it approached, willing petals of salmon and white to blossom from her palm, and held an arm outstretched. The fly landed; Xala marveled.

Its body had elongated dramatically into the shape of a mantis, while its legs had thickened with muscle. The minute antennae atop its head had thickened as well, hardening and curving into a cruel shape; its thousand eyes had taken on a gold sheen along with the red. The iridescence of its dark body shone green and blue as it snuffled over the flower on Xala's palm, the flashing color divided into myriad tiny scales. Its proboscis extended delicately into the heart of the bloom and drew forth its nectar. Xalatzcatl smiled down at it, the leaves of her hair fluttering.

It withdrew its mouthparts suddenly and whipped its head around, a crest atop its head snapping upright. It took off with a buzz of stained-glass wings and fired a zigzag of lightning through the air, striking a moth in flight, and captured the sinking vermin in its miniature talons before returning to the dragon.

"Well, you've proven me wrong," remarked Xalatzcatl wryly. "I told you once that you were too bold and reckless to ever have children of your own. It appears I was mistaken."

"What on earth are you…."

The what-once-was-fly returned to its host and began to feast on its prey.

"Oh." Bayed'abid's forked tongue flitted into the air. "Well, a dragon’s magical: so is a dragon's blood. A creature who drinks it would take on some of that magic, I suppose. It's odd—I barely noticed them sucking it up."

"Blood?" questioned Xala, stepping forward. "Are you hurt?"

"It's…it's nothing," he mumbled, turning back to the buffalo.

"A wound to draw dragon's blood is hardly nothing, Bayed," she reproached. "I can help. That's why I came here to see you after all. Please, let me see."

He chewed slowly, ruminating. With a harrumph, he unfurled his slouched body and turned to face her. She pressed a hand to the scales of his cheek, causing him to wince.

"It's hard to see beneath the bits of buffalo and the clotting," she commented, "but…oh. Oh, what's…." She pulled back a moment. "Bayed, these cuts are deep."

"Deep, shallow," he murmured. "Help, don't help. Makes no difference to me."

Xalatzcatl sighed, the sound of wind rattling dry leaves, and clapped her hands together, incanting softly. When she pulled them apart, a viscous mass spanned between them, and she stretched the tacky strands over the deepest laceration. She repeated the process again and again, tirelessly, leaving his head a patchwork of turquoise scales and ecru salve. Bayed'abid exhaled deeply and closed his eyes.

As she continued around to heal his shoulder, Xalatzcatl glanced down at the buffalo. She froze a moment before clapping her palms back together; the balm vanished. She knelt before its remains.

"Bayed'abid," called Xalatzcatl deliberately. "What am I looking at?"

"Mmm?" Bayed'abid emerged as though from a sunny daze and turned to her.

"It's a buffalo, Xala," he quipped. "I don't take your meaning."

Xalatzcatl glared at him. "I'm aware that it's a buffalo, you goat." She lifted up a flap of ragged hide. "What's this, Bayed?"

There, stippled in dots of brown and red, a flattened ring encircled the navel of the beast.

Ungodly wails pierced the blackness of the twenty-first night. The cries of the dragon twisted and bowed off the rough walls of his den, the scream cast past the mouth of the cave as a shadow at dusk, stretched and distorted into a caricature of its original form. He thrashed and gasped and cursed the village, the earth, the very gods for laying before him poison masquerading as manna. The groaning in his distended, swollen belly mingled and tousled with the gargling shouts in his throat.

Lightning erupted in a volley as vomit from his maw, carving wide swaths from the rock as he tossed his head, crackling and rumbling through the damp air of the cave. He watched, gasping, as it dissipated into the depths behind him. Scrambling at first, his feet failing to gain purchase on the rock, he dragged his immense weight slowly up and out into the light of the half moon.

Bayed'abid trundled his painstaking way to the clearing where sunlight had once caressed his scales. He returned, shivering, to a circle of grass amidst the trees, the vibrance of the forest flora consumed by night. The wood lay still apart from his grunts of laborious effort—even the chapping of geckos and the trilling of nightjars barely breached the border between grass and tree.

The dragon looked skyward once more, the retinue of not-quite-flies whirling about him. He gazed at the half moon as heavy, oily tears welled in his marbled eyes. A wayward tail-tip, now little more than bone, curled past his lips once more. He chewed what was left of the raw sinew at his body’s end and began to weep. The smell of creosote wafted into his nose as the whole of him heaved with sobs. Stars freckled the sky, shying from a moon halved into pearlescence and void.

Sound vanished; motion stilled; even the no-longer-flies quit their buzzing. The dragon sat as a statue under the gray light of the moon. His lament ceased.

He threw his head back, eyes tightly shut, as the tail buried itself in his gullet. More tears oozed and trickled from his eyes as the tail forced itself down his throat, emesis in reverse. As the tail pushed itself deeper into his belly, it expanded to two, three, four times its original size; but for a soft gurgling of saliva, the dragon made no movement, no sound. The bloat took hold of his chest, his belly, his head, until the whole of him became as one round thing, one ovoid appendage indistinguishable from another. He sank his chin into his collar, arms shrinking away, as his horns and crest finally dissolved into the mass of scales stretched thin.

The same oil of his tears streaked down the sides of the oblong shape the dragon had left behind, zigzagging from the tapered, domed top down to the grass and soil. Finally, the not-flies settled into the stony curves of the tapered sphere, glinting as they melted into the distorted flesh, red-gold eyes peeking out like embedded jewels from the ellipse. The scales let out a sound like a boulder sliding over loose rock before settling into silence.

The moon assumed its course across the sky. The night-beasts resumed their chorus. For hours, the dragon orb sat ponderously, a pupil staring out from the eye of the clearing.

The cracking of lightning gave way to the cracking of the shell. One after another, the ruby-topaz eyes erupted into sparks which cascaded and collided into a web of flickering blue-white over the orb. The light faded and receded into jagged fault lines along the shining scales; for a moment, the thing simply stood, the cracked-glass patterns glowing faintly in the thin, chill air before the breaking of dawn. The fragments of sphere protruded slowly from the slivers of light like books being pulled from a shelf; then, in a flashing of rose-colored fire, they vanished.

A towering, slender creature stood in their stead, in the center of the clearing and in the wake of the orb. It clutched its golden, mostly human arms tight about its golden, mostly human torso, the blue-green stripes on its flesh rising and falling with the deep breaths of slumber. Its eyes remained shut as it smelled the coldness of mist and the wetness of grass through a nose that was not quite a snout, lips parting to show teeth that were not quite fangs. The long, whipping tail kept time with in-breath, out-breath: in, out; back, forth.

Slowly, quietly, Xalatzcatl stepped out from the trunk of a banyan as though emerging from water, wooden feet falling softly on the grass.

“You’d been waiting there for some time, hadn’t you?” observed the creature, eyes still closed.

The woodkin paused before nodding slowly. “I had. I like to keep an eye on things.”

“And on me.”

“That depends on who ‘me’ is.”

“I…don’t know that I could tell you,” replied the creature, looking at her quizzically. “Your friend…Bayed. Bayed’abid?”

Xala nodded again.

“He’s in here,” it muttered in a faraway voice, tapping its temple with a clawed finger. “But he’s not the only one.”

“I can’t say that I’m surprised,” remarked Xala. “The outside looks like more than a dragon or a human—it stands to reason that the inside should match.”

“I made sure of that,” cut in a third voice, deeper than the others.

A soft jangling of metal marked the stranger’s approach, his hooded purple cloak swishing about him as he strode in from the wood, carrying with him the scent of wormwood and tulsi. The creature blinked at him; with each blink, its eyes flashed from gold to black, black to gold.

“You, on the other hand…you kept your distance,” stated the creature silkily.

“Those in my profession tend to exercise an abundance of caution,” replied the stranger. “Those who do not either learn from their imprudence, or…well, magic is a demanding mistress. She has her ways of winnowing the chaff from the grain.”

Doffing his hood with a many-ringed hand, he revealed a round, black face bedecked with silver and sapphires, platinum and amethyst.

“You,” whispered Xala, eyes wide. “I almost didn’t recognize you—changing scents to cover up your tracks?”

He regarded the woodkin with a smirk. “Different herbs, different functions. On my way into the village, I needed to bolster my talents, to ensure that the chrysalis would take hold; without, I need only safeguard my passage into the next realm.

“And what of you, woodkin?” he posed, eyebrow cocked, arms folded. “I’ve no quarrel with you if you’ve none with me.”

She gazed hard at the stranger before looking up at the creature. “You didn’t kill him then?”

“The wyrm?” He shrugged. “For the purposes of the village, the dragon is gone; such was my charge, so it has been made. The means by which this has transpired, however—that needn’t be known. Magic abides by the laws of the natural world; to this, a magician is also bound. The taking of life demands the giving of life. I killed the threat of the dragon, but not the spirit.”

Xala stuck her tongue in her cheek, nodding. “So you did. I was never overly fond of Bayed’abid; all the same, it was my duty to protect him. I’m not particularly pleased with your methods, but as long as my friend lives on in some form, I seek no retribution, no price to be paid. The way he acted, I’d assumed some sort of punishment was inevitable—just not this.

“You. Creature,” she called up to the figure looming before them. It turned its hairless, horned head to her, blinking again its color-shifting eyes.

“Aye,” it affirmed.

“You said that your mind wasn’t just Bayed’s, not just a dragon’s. Who else is in there?”

It paused, cocking its head. On muscular, feline legs, it began to sweep its way around the clearing; the edges of its shoulders, the small crest atop its head opalesced as they caught the light of the fading moon. As it turned its back to the woodkin and the wizard, twin lines ran shimmering down the length of its spine: pairs of frosted, stained-glass plates, anchored in place by red-gold knots. They rang softly as the creature sauntered forth.

“No presence is as strong as his, so I can’t rightly say—they slip away from me when I go to reach for them. Flashes of memory appear here and there: small hands—human hands—held by larger hands, squalling in distress, suckling at a breast, struggling to find footing. There are myriad tinier impulses—not memories, not exactly. Hovering, following scents, feeling the air around me shift, responding to hunger. Still mistier is something that feels like…the opposite of memory—intuition? People, places that I don’t know; yet they feel familiar, like I’ve dreamt them before.”

Xalatzcatl marveled at the creature before turning to the mage. “You fused them? You took the predator and prey and made them one?”

“I did,” he replied coolly.

“For slaying the calf, you doom the jackal to share his skin?” she scoffed. “Do you truly think that wise, magic man?”

“I think it necessary,” declared the stranger. “The jackal does not know the suffering of the calf, cannot know it. We beings of a higher calling…we possess the faculties to know the pain we cause. Some simply turn away from it with greater ease than others. Now, your friend can no more turn away from it than he can turn his heart from beating.”

Xalatzcatl sighed. “Are the villagers safe? Are you and I safe?”

“Only time will tell. I’ve yet to see a chimera turn to its old ways, though it never hurts to inquire.

“That Which Once Was Dragon,” he called, turning to the creature.

“Magician Who Once Was Human,” it responded.

The wizard flinched for but an instant before continuing on. “Do you feel the same hunger as before? The draconic desire to hunt for human prey and feast on their agony as well as their flesh?”

The creature pawed at the ground with its clawed feet. “It’s quiet, but it’s there. It feels more like something I might do, rather than something I must.”

“Mmm,” puzzled the magician. “You’ll need help keeping that at bay.”

“That’s where I come in,” announced Xalatzcatl, stepping forward. “Part of me is human, if only my shape; I can show it what I know, lead it along the right path. Besides, my charge is children taken before their time. By whatever wretched logic you’ve foisted on us, this…chimera, as you called it, still applies.”

Nodding slowly, the magician concurred. “So mote it be.”

Together, the woodkin and the chimera watched as the wizard inscribed triangular sigils of smoke into the air. The silver embroidery of his garment cast a dappled light as his hands danced through the steps of spellcraft, revealing a pattern of circles like ripples in a pond. With a grunt, he yanked at one of the ropes of smoke, rending the air asunder. Through the tear in the clearing, as though through a window, cerulean waves lapped at a sandy beach at high noon. The stranger stepped from moonlit forest onto sunlit beach, his heavy cloak fluttering into gossamer white robes as his feet touched the sand.

“Magic man,” the creature called after him.

He turned to it. “Chimera.”

“Don’t come back.”

The magician smiled.

“I never do.”

The portal closed.