It was a mollymawk that roused the dragon. 

The big grey and white seabird, each wing as long as a man’s arm, came flapping into the great hall through one of the many narrow spaces where stained glass windows used to soar. The hall was a huge room: the biggest in the ruined palace, the biggest on this island, certainly, or perhaps even in all the world. So wide that a hundred men could stand abreast, at arms’-length, across it. So long that a hundred times that number could stand in long rows from the front of the hall to the back. A whole army could stand at attention in this hall. And perhaps, once upon a long time ago, it had. 

The mollymawk looked around, not dropping a blade of the deep green seagrass in its yellow bill. The high, vaulted ceiling was white marble streaked with green and blue and red and black veins. It was held up by hundreds of ancient, stone columns stained green by years upon years of lichens sprouting, spreading, fading, sprouting again. Here and there, orange-yellow beams of sunlight were finding the holes in the ceiling. 

In the nearby shadows, the dragon scowled.

The mollymawk waddled about: like the rest of his kind, it was clumsy on land. Its orange, webbed feet flapped ptt, ptt, ptt on the tiny tiles, each no bigger than a man’s thumb, that covered the floor. There were hundreds of thousands of tiles here, and they formed pictures in mosaic. But much of the floor was covered in puddles of rainwater and many of the pictures were stained by white splotches from birds that had nested here before. And it had been a very long time since any person had come to see those pictures. 

Certainly, no one had come while the dragon lived here. 

The mollymawk’s head twitched back and forth and its round, black eyes darted here and there. Flapping furiously, stubby legs pumping, it heaved itself into the air and lighted on the carved curlicues near the top of a column. With its bill, it spread out the seagrass, then tamped it flat with its feet. It leapt off the top of the column and, with two flaps of its great wings, flew off through a nearby hole in the ceiling.

The dragon crept out from under the crumbling stone dais at the end of the room. Her scales were milky green and she was no bigger than a housecat. She had no wings, and her eyes were tiny and round and all white, with no visible pupils.

She stretched and yawned, revealing tiny, needle-like teeth. She slunk—nails going going tkk tkk tkk tkk on the tiles—to a nearby puddle and lapped up rainwater with her slim pink tongue. Scratched her chin with a claw. Then crept—her thin tail, as long as the rest of her, swinging back and forth—to the nearest window and clambered up into the space where the glass used to be, many years ago.

An orange sun was slowly climbing into the sky. Grey and white seabirds—hundreds of them—swooped and soared and circled above the ruined palace. The dragon scrambled down from the window, into the courtyard, weeds growing between the square stones that had once been smooth and white, but were now—most of them, anyway—furry green with moss. Another mollymawk, grown thin after its long voyage, flapped down nearby, a bit of shell in its beak. The dragon hissed at it and the bird hurriedly hopped away, wings spread wide. 

The dragon crept through the courtyard, staying close to the palace walls. She slunk into the thorny thicket near the east end of the courtyard and squeezed through a narrow, twisting, wet hole at the bottom of the wall. 

She came out at the top of the cliff. Below her, the waves tumbled against the rocks at the edge of the shore before fading with a gentle psssh against the white sand higher up the beach. Thousands more mollymawks were wheeling in the air or floating in the shallows or squabbling for nesting space on the sand. They screeched and squawked and cawed, louder even then the surf. The dragon leaned into the wind that—for now—was coming off the ocean. 

Hardy green shrubs, some of them with delicate white blooms, grew from the stony soil of the cliff-face. Slowly, the dragon picked her way, head-first, her front and back claws gripping rocks and roots as she followed a thin, worn path that she had used for years. More birds were making their nests on the cliff, and she went around them. She reached the bottom and ambled slowly across the sand, several of the birds warily watching her. One raised its wings and awwwwwkked out a warning, but she paid it no mind. The sun—yellow, now—had finished floating out of the sea, and it was time for the dragon to feed.

She waded into the chilly surf and wriggled through the water, long neck out, limbs at her side, tail trashing. At first, at the water’s edge, she could see nothing but shreds of seaweed and bits of brown sand suspended in the waves. Then she went farther out, and the water cleared. At the surface were the feathery bellies and the dangling webbed feet of the floating mollymawks. Below them, small schools—no more than two or three dozen at a time—of leering, silver wraithfish darted here and there. Brown, oval-shaped gobfish, each as big as the dragon, slowly wafted along, alone or in pairs. White needlecrabs, with their long, thin pincers, skittered amongst the smooth stones and pebbles on the sandy bottom. 

The dragon wriggled up to the surface, dipped her snout into the air, plugged her nostrils shut again, and dove. A tiny octopus, speckled brown and gray, froze against the bottom, almost invisible. The dragon gently pawed the sand, feeling for the octopus. Her claw touched its rubbery skin and it vanished, a cloud of blue-black ink left in its place as it jetted into a high patch of waving seagrass. The dragon searched her empty paws. Surfaced. Snorted. Then dove again. 

The bottom began to drop away as she swam further out. A fat henchu fish sculled by on its long fins, but the dragon ignored it. She gobbled two dun-colored lash shrimps loitering near a sea fan, but they did not fill her. 

She swam left for a while, then further out, then left again, then turned back. And then she found a cloud of fat white jellyfish floating just below the surface, their long tentacles trailing beneath them. She surfaced, blew out her air, sucked in more, ducked under the water again. Tail thrashing, she sped into a jellyfish, claws grabbing and twisting tentacles as if they were ropes. She hauled the jellyfish to the surface, sunk her needle teeth into its bag-like body, and noisily sucked out its innards. Floating in the swell, she chomped off the tentacles and let them drift away, then greedily grabbed another jellyfish and devoured it in the same way. And then a third. And then a fourth. And then a fifth. 

Her spine ached as the cold seeped deeper into her; her mouth and paws tingled from the jellyfish venom. She let the waves push her back to shore, then clambered onto a large, smooth stone near the water’s edge. She lay, limbs spread, soaking up the sun’s warmth. 

After awhile, she was warm again and her belly was not so tight. A few feet away, two mollymawks gathered long strands of brown seagrass and shiny stones and bits of shells and scraps of seaweed. They arranged them with their bills and wings and feet, and finally, the female settled down in the middle of a nest. An old mollymawk, with ragged feathers and missing an eye, waddled by, neck craned to perhaps snatch a pebble. The young male screeched and snapped its bill and shook its wings until the intruder departed.

Yesterday, the dragon had been alone. Overnight, the mollimawks had returned to Imbyrria, as they did every year at this time. Which meant that winter was gone. 

She sat back on her haunch and peered out over the water. Nothing but endless waves. 

A breeze began to swirl the sand around the rock where the dragon sat. Slowly, she floated into the air. A few inches at first, then a foot, then three feet, then ten. The two mollymawks nesting nearby paid no attention.

Twenty feet, thirty, fifty, more than a hundred. Faster and faster, straight up. The beach shrank beneath her and the cliff face raced by. She rose above the ruined palace, with its crumbling walls and six broken towers. Higher and higher, and the ancient forest that covered the rest of the island became a swaying green sea. Higher, still higher, and the island itself became a green blot on a painting of blue-gray.

The dragon stopped. The air was cold, much colder than the sea had been, and her chest heaved as she sucked in the thin air. No birds circled about—even the mollymawks could not fly this high. Above her, the blue was marred with thin scuffs of white. Before her, at the farthest edge of her sight, was a dark haze at the end of the world. East, where the sun had come from. 

Slowly, the dragon drifted down, down, down. Down to where the air was warmer and easier to breathe. Down to where she could see the birds and the white spray of the waves. Down where she could see the forest of green trees, and the grey, ruined palace which had been her only home. 

Down, down—and then no further down. With an ocean wind howling about her, the dragon flew off, faster and faster, going east, where the sun had come from. Where the dark haze lay at the end of the sea. 
 
 

Evening came to ancient Imbyrria, the sun disappearing behind the forest and the last of its rays receding from the great hall the dragon had left hours earlier. Two moons rose, both full, flooding the hall with their silver light. 

The mollymawk with the missing eye flapped inside the hall and landed, stumbling, on the tiled floor. In their nests atop the columns, a few of the hundreds of birds there stirred, then settled again. 

The old mollymawk stumped about, its remaining eye peering here and there, trying to find a treasure suitable for a mate. Bending over, it pecked at something dull red in the moonlight: a tile. The tile did not move. The bird pecked again. The tile stayed put. The bird hopped, flapped, kept pecking. 

Directly above, another mollymawk awwwwwwkked its annoyance at the noise. The old fellow looked up. Looked around. Moved on. 

Above, the miffed mollymawk watched the one-eyed bird waddle off. It glanced down at what the other bird had been pecking, then looked away, paying it no mind, of course. 

The tile was part of a mosaic picture, one of the red jewels in the crown of a heavy-lidded man with a short white beard and a long, quilted robe. The man sat on a throne. In one hand, the man held a jeweled scepter. In the other, a green, wingless dragon, no larger than a cat, with round white eyes that had no pupils. 

Eyes like pearls. 
 
 

© Kenton Kilgore, October 2006