The Exile from the Kingdom of the Jinn

“There weren't always dragons in the Valley,” Cana said. He paused to lick his arm and bathe himself with his paw. “The humans who lived there before them might have built roads through it.”

Seth looked at the flying thing, a small splotch of moving color against the cloudy sky, like an

airplane

Instead, Seth looked down. A makeshift dirt trail led down to a clearing below, but he could not make out any signs of buildings or highways.

“And you’re sure we have no choice?”

Cana shook his head. “I double-checked the scrying mirror while you were sleeping. There’s no way to get around the Valley without crossing into either the territories of Sultan Murabiad or into some nearby muddlelands.” Cana eyed him with that expression of his that he clearly thought Seth was too stupid a human to interpret. “You…do remember what muddlelands are, don’t you? I ask because…”

“Of course I remember. Why…why do you ask?”

Cana ignored the question and peered down over the cliff. “We might as well get this over with. When we get to the end of the trail, we’ll get from the clearing to those trees over there. The dragons aren’t supposed to be particularly dangerous, but no point in tempting Empress Death.”

They climbed down the trail mostly in silence. Brief as it was, something about the conversation unnerved him. He was having these thoughts that disappeared from his head as soon as he thought them, but still they felt wrong somehow. Just when they were about to reach flat land, Seth let the words stumble out: “Is there something wrong with me?”

Cana didn’t try to catch the words but rather left them hanging for a little too long. “Nothing more than usual for a human, I suppose. What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” Seth admitted. “It’s just there are moments I feel like I’m…”

Suddenly, there was a loud, sharp cry.

“Run!” Cana hissed and already with the full speed his feline body allowed him he had made for a nearby forest. Seth rushed as fast behind him as his clumsy human flesh could go.

As quietly as possible, Seth found his way up to Cana, who was hiding behind a bush and some trees. Cana pointed with his paw. Beyond the trees and drinking from a creek that ran through the forest ground was a ten-foot-tall bird-like thing, with brightly colored plumage around its head and neck and muddy brown feathers covering the rest of its body. Most importantly for Seth and Cana and anyone in their situation, they also noticed it has talons as sharp and as disinviting as an assassin’s dagger.

Cana was already gesturing with his head and a leg that they should keep moving and find a way around the creature, but Seth’s eyes were drawn back to it. He was sure he had never been in the presence of a being like it before, yet he had seen it once, somehow. Vaguely he felt he had seen it in a picture through some kind of window. It wasn’t a dragon. It was a

dinosaur

The word alone, a word he felt down to his soul that he shouldn’t know, caused his head to flare with a spark of white-hot pain. The stab of agony was so much that Seth tumbled backward into some foliage. The crack of branches and the rustling of leaves were more than enough to draw the attention of the creature. It turned and approached cautiously with its murderous talons at the ready.

But even that was the least of Seth’s concerns. Consciousness was betraying him, leaving him. Usually so quiet even when he ran, he could hear Cana pounding against the ground and hissing in impotent anger. “Shit! Of all the times, not now! Seth! Please!”

Cana’s words were fading. Instead, piercing through the darkness was the rhythmic, sharp yelping of a dog…

***

The first sensation was the feeling of cooled drool on his pillow. Seth reached over to the other side of his body, mumbling something about the weird dream he had. He was talking to Eli, but Eli was not there. He had broken up with him about a month and two weeks ago, hadn’t he?

Sighing as awareness settled in, Seth sat up. He looked at his alarm clock. A brief wave of panic washed over him, but then he realized it was Saturday, wasn’t it?

There was another wave of yelps. It was the upstairs neighbors’ dogs, once again. Seth belted out his customary “Shut up!” Shockingly, it actually seemed to work most of the time, as if they had some kind of rapport now. As he got dressed and moved into the kitchen, he looked out the window that overlooked their tiny, gravel-filled parking lot. There was no sign of the neighbors’ car. He chided himself. After all, he should feel sorry for the two neurotic poodle-labrador mutants sealed upstairs. They probably got more human interaction from his screams for silence than they ever did from their own supposed human companions.

He went through the usual ritual of making coffee and eating a hearty breakfast of either cereal or a protein bar while watching some junk video on the Internet through his laptop. It was a silly little video about UFOs in Reformation-era Europe by someone who was, at best, a quasi-legitimate scholar. The failed academic in Seth sometimes flinched while watching things like this. However, he would confess even without torture that he could not stop watching them.

As he finished eating, he remembered there was a dream, wasn’t there? Something about a cat and a bird? Maybe it was displaced yearning. Since he turned 30, Seth had been having what his sister charmingly called “baby rabies”, only for a cat. But he didn’t want to subject an innocent cat to the unpredictable bawling from the beasts upstairs. He could barely stand it himself.

Once the video was done, Seth had decided. The May heat was too much for his wheezing air conditioning unit and the dogs were clearly going to be restless today. Yes, his script for the graphic novel Lysistrata 2002—a retelling of Aristophanes’ play but it’s American women withholding sex to stop President George W. Bush from declaring war on Iraq—would be sitting neglected on his laptop. It wasn’t like he’d found an artist to replace Mel after she decided to drop out. Anyway, he couldn’t stand spending another uncomfortable, meandering day in that duplex he’d come to resent.

As he left the apartment, he stumbled across his neighbors, Amy and Adam. He noticed they both had dyed their hair a matching dirty blonde and had to choke down a laugh. He gave them an insincerely friendly nod. They both made a stiff gesture with their heads that could charitably be described as reciprocal gestures. Seth thought to himself sarcastically on how well he was bucking the trend of people in the United States not getting to know their neighbors.

He had already decided that the itinerary would be no different than the usual: go read or watch videos on his phone at the nearby campus he worked at, grab a meal somewhere, and then whittle away the evening at the Last Bar on the Left. However, he decided it was a good day to travel the longest ways possible while blasting music. As usually happened when he felt like driving around, he took the meandering rural road, Smith’s Hill Road. Because it passed through a deep forest and over a railroad that was rarely used and past a couple of houses who had left their glory days behind sometime during the Johnson administration, Seth had grown up with rumors that the road was haunted and the area home to a cult. He no longer believed the old stories, cribbed as they were from half-remembered horror movies. Still, as much as he told himself he just found the area the road snaked through beautiful, some deep part of him still viewed the road with something an archaeologist could accurately describe as spiritual reverence.

Like he always did, Seth slowed his old, dented, green Hyundai Elantra down at the point where the railroad intersected with the road. Just as the road ascended upward away from the scattered, ancient houses toward the woods, the railroad ran straight across the road toward a bridge overlooking a chasm crowned with trees and ivy. Instinctively, Seth slowed. He was about to speed up again when he was startled to see a crow, a good candidate for the largest he’d ever seen, hopping across the road. Only it wasn’t quite moving like a bird should. It was wrong. It stepped over the pavement in a way that was deliberate and oddly human, its wings draped around its body like he was carrying arms. Seth came to a complete stop and watched the crow as it made its way to a cement turn-off. Suddenly, the crow abruptly turned and seemed to look Seth directly in his eyes. It titled its head, turned away from Seth’s direction, and then started hopping randomly as a bird would. Then, with a shrill caw, it took off in the direction of the chasm. Seth put his foot on the accelerator and sped the rest of the way home.

This was the sort of incident that, according to some of the shows he’d watched or listened to, would perhaps get described as “high strangeness.” It was some little thing he could bring up with his friends Jan or Chris and get a good laugh or two. Yet it discomforted him for the rest of the day. It didn’t feel like just some small intrusion of the strange into his mundane, pointless life. Rather, it felt like a bad omen. Or like he just caught sight of something that had been at the fringes of his life for longer than he’d ever want to know.