by Olga Werby
“Where are Doc and friends meeting us?” Ghost asks Pixie. Good boy.
“I’m not sure,” Pixie says, and I believe her. She looks lost out here. It’s not what she was expecting. “I think if we had gone to the black city up on the mountain, we would have had a more…” She struggles for words.
“More ordinary experience?” Ghost helps.
“Something like that,” she agrees. “But this is good.” She actually sounds enthusiastic now. She is into this. And she is game to play this world differently. That makes me think that she is probably not in cahoots with Doc and all. All the better.
Ghost jumps down from my back and onto the crystal sand.
What are you doing? I ask.
“Before we do anything rash,” he says to both of us, “let’s explore a bit. For example,” he bends down and sniffs the sand, “notice the little discarded crystal shells in the sand. I have never seen anything like it. Like little diamonds, they are.”
I make my wings brush the sand around me. Ten pairs of snake eyes examine the sand. Sure enough, there are thousands of tiny transparent crystal conch shells littering the beach. And the sand is also strange—it’s not smooth and rounded like the sand on the shores of a real lake. Here, each crystal particle is a collection of sharp, jagged edges. It’s sharp sand, the kind that would hurt to walk on barefoot if one were human. I look down at my powerful, green, shiny, lizardy, clawed, dragon feet. I can’t feel the sharp edges—my scales protect me. And they gleam like the backs of iridescent green beetles. Gorgeous.
“They do look like gems,” Pixie says.
For a moment, I think she is referring to my dragon skin, but she stoops down and picks up a handful of sand, pulling out one perfect shell specimen. I bend my neck to look into her hand. She lets me. I feel guilty for treating her so poorly earlier. Well, water under the bridge—or the lake.
“None of them are alive,” she says, extending her hand for me to examine the shell. “These are discards.”
“Do the snails all live in the lake?” Ghost walks to the water’s edge and then jumps back, fur puffed out, back arched—a typical freaked out cat.
“What?” What? Pixie and I react at the same time.
“Don’t look in the water, Jude,” Ghost says, his voice laced with hysteria.
Now I have to look. And so does Pixie. She edges up to the water and looks. I stretch my neck without moving closer.
In the deep waters of the lake, I see myself as a little kid walking with my dad, wearing my pink tutu, holding his hand. I smile inwardly at the memory and continue to watch. Slowly—so slowly that I don’t catch it at first—my dad changes. He hunches over a bit, becomes shorter and slightly thinner. His hair turns white and the top of his head shines through the diminishing strands. I see his skin wrinkle and thin incredibly, looking almost parchment-like. Dark age spots pop out all over his face, hands, and even his bald spot. His eyes dim and his lips turn colorless and thin. He is aging fast now, almost a skeleton. I’m still the little girl wearing her pink tutu, the same color as Pixie’s armor. Then Dad turns and looks into my eyes—my dragon eyes—and smiles. It’s a goodbye, I just know it. And then I walk alone, still the same: untouched, unchanged.
Dad! I scream in my head.
Jude! Look away. Look away! Ghost calls to me. But I’m stuck in the white crystal sand, unable to move. I feel him jump on my back. Close your eyes and back away, he tells me. At some point, I went right up to the water’s edge. I do not remember. I close all my eyes and back up. It’s easier when I can’t see the reflections in the water.
What was that, Ghost? What was that? I am nearly panicking.
It’s nothing. It’s one of the tests this world generates for its visitors, he tells me.
Some test. I hate this lake. My eel heads spit fire at it, but none of my eyes look into its mirrored waters again.
Once I am a safe distance from the water, I open my eyes again. The lake is still as glass, reflecting the tanzanite clouds above as if nothing ever happened. The butterflies are still flying over its surface, gently touching the water. Pixie has a grim expression on her face. I wonder what she saw in the prescient waters. But I don’t want to ask; I have no way to ask except through Ghost. He saw something too, judging by his reaction.
We stand there, next to the edge of the clearing, as far from the lake as we can get. The beach is narrow, just a dozen feet or so between the forest and the water. I see my deep footprints in the sand; they are full of water now. Little dinosaur shaped mirrors. I won’t look into those either. Evil waters. Evil lake.
“How are we going to get there?” Pixie gestures at the castle. Obviously, I will fly us there.
“We just won’t look down,” Ghost says.
“There’s no place to stand on the other side,” she points out. “We’ll have to land directly on it. Or hover over it. Can you do that, Jude?”
I bray in reply. Of course I can hover. Flying is easy if one has powerful wings and a little rhythm app. But not looking down will be hard. I have a lot of eyes to keep from looking at the waters below. That might be a problem. When I flap my wings, my snake eyes are watching in every direction, including down; we wouldn’t want to accidentally hit the ground. My snakies have excellent vision. I will just have to make them close their eyes and fly blind. They disagree and hiss. But I am the dominant intelligence here. What I say goes, right? I hope they will listen to me. My beasties haven’t always been very cooperative. But I don’t want to see my dad die again. Never again.
“Look at the castle,” Ghost says. And we all look—Pixie and my whole menagerie.
My eels see quite well close up but are completely myopic at a distance of just a few feet. And my snakes see clearly but only in black and white. Whoever designed my little enhancements apparently felt compelled to stay true to nature, real nature. Well, I do have all those eye options… I haven’t used anything yet in my dragon form, but why would it not work? I am still me. I pull up the vision options menu. Fireballs might really be useful, but I have nothing like BinocularVision or SuperFarSight. If I was designing eye options, I would have totally made eyes to see close, like a microscope, and eyes that could see in the far distance. What was Doc thinking? This is a bad omission.
“Jude, are you looking?” Ghost pulls me back into the present. “Focus on the places where the flying buttresses meet the tower.” I look. “See it?”
I look and look, then I notice something like a fine powder falling down from the edges.
What’s that? I ask.
“I think the tower is disintegrating,” says Ghost.
Pixie bends down and grabs another handful of sand. “This must be the glass castle dust.”
What? I don’t have a cat’s vision, so I am at a disadvantage again.
“If all of this sand is made from the detritus of that castle, then it has some way of regenerating again,” Ghost observes.
“That’s why it’s so sharp,” says Pixie. I bray my confusion, and she clarifies. “The sand never has a chance to weather and smooth over. This is fresh from the walls.”
“How does it get rebuilt?” Ghost asks.
I want to know, too.
“We’ll find out when we get there.” Pixie seems ready to go.
Wait! I call to Ghost. If it is so fragile, I can’t just land on it. I would crush it, right?
Good point, Ghost tells me and says out loud, “Jude won’t be able to land on that.”
“Obviously,” Pixie says. “But she can get us there. That’s all we need for now. You ready, Jude?”
I am not sure this is a good idea. Why do we need to go to that stupid castle in this stupid lake? What’s the point of it? I’m not sure I’m liking this experience.
“Just get us there, Jude,” Pixie implores. It’s not like she can swim there in her pink metal armor. It’s me or nothing. “We’ll take a look and see if it’s important. You can wait for us here and we’ll signal you when
we’re done. We’ll be fast. Promise.” I can see how much she wants to go. I wonder again what she saw in the lake.
Please, Jude, Ghost says. Well, if he puts it that way.
Get on, I tell him. He jumps back to a spot between my shoulder blades.
Pixie turns to me. “You’re taking me too, right?”
I spread my wings, bend down, and let her climb onto my back. I can feel her relief. She doesn’t want to hang in my claws, facing the waters below. I can’t do that to her; she doesn’t deserve it. Once Pixie is comfortably situated, I leap into the air.
I close my eyes and just use the eels’ vision to navigate—they give me the basic lay of the land, but none of the detail. My snakes try not to look, but once in a while I catch my little girl reflection walking hand-in-hand with her dad. I can’t tell you how much it bothers me, and I don’t even know why. It’s like the lake knows how to press my buttons. I use one of my eel heads to look back and check on Ghost and Pixie. It would be bad if they fell off into the water. Of course my eels like Ghost too much to let him fall. Pixie, on the other hand… They both have their eyes shut tight. What freaked them out? What are their buttons?
Hang on tight, I admonish Ghost but can’t do the same for Pixie. But she is a big girl…boy…knight in shining armor. And she has fingers; Ghost has only cat paws. I feel his claws dig under my scales, but it doesn’t bother me…much.
As we get close, I dare to open my eyes—my main eyes. The walls of the glass castle are semi-translucent except at the corners and ledges where there is a lot of decay. The crumbling dust gathers and makes the glass building blocks opaque in those places. But that is not all I see. On the crumbling walls, there are masses of crystal snails, which explain the shells we found in the sand. The castle is teeming with them. In fact, I can see squiggly snail trails all over the walls. The castle would truly be transparent, like clear glass, without them.
Ghost? I think the snails are rebuilding the glass castle at the same rate it is being eroded, I say. The eel head that monitors my riders notes that Ghost opens his eyes and inspects the wall in front of us.
“Pixie, look at the walls,” he says. “They set the rate of decay at equilibrium with regrowth.” Well, that’s one way to say it, but I liked my way just fine. I just don’t know what it means. And I bet Ghost doesn’t either, despite the fancy language.
“Jude?” Pixie gets my attention. “Can you get us up to that window at the top?”
I fly up, circling the tower at an ever-higher altitude. I spot little protuberances on the walls. They are like little buds that turn into baby windows. The higher we fly, the more developed the windows. It’s as if we are seeing windows from conception, through various maturation states, to fully formed adult windows. All the window “fetuses”—proto windows—are surrounded by snails. I assume the snails are the architects.
“I think the edges are crumbling because the tower is growing taller,” Pixie says. Sure enough, I can see the creeping movement of the wall, now that she pointed it out.
“It must erode at the top too, or we would have seen that the tower is getting taller even from the shore,” Ghost says. He is obviously right, for there’s a fine dusting of powder snowing down around us—the crystal dust.
“So, it’s perpetually regenerating,” Pixie agrees. “But what does that mean? What’s the allegory? I don’t remember anything in the Sleeping Beauty storyline that does this. Do you?”
The only version I’d ever seen was the interactive Disney fantasy that Dad read to me as part of our bedtime routine. There was something about good fairies and bad ones. Or was it just one bad one? And the whole kingdom sank into sleep. The prince saved the day, of course. I hated that part. The princess might have been perfectly happy to dream for eternity, to never die. Who asked him to interfere? Something about this narrative itches my brain, but I can’t grab hold of what it is.
We are now all the way at the top, in front of the open oriel.
What’s the plan? Do you get off here? I ask Ghost. I hate it that I can’t communicate with both of them. I have no negotiating power. Well, I’ll just do what I want.
“I can jump from here,” Pixie says. That seems like a dangerous move. It is a long fall to the lake below. “Are you coming, Ghost?”
“No,” he says.
“No?” She is as shocked as I am.
Why aren’t you going with Pixie?
“I’ll stay with Jude. You go. I’ll follow, if you need me. But there’s no reason for both of us to go in yet.” I wonder why Ghost feels like he needs to babysit me. He doesn’t control me even if he is riding me.
“Be that way,” Pixie says, and then to me: “can you get me any closer?”
I fly as close to the glass tower as I dare. I don’t want to accidentally hit the walls with my wings. They seem so fragile already, I might knock this whole thing out of its regenerative equilibrium or whatever Ghost called it. Pixie crawls along one of my eel necks. I stay as stable as I can, but there’s some turbulence up here. In the end, I try to poke my whole head inside the structure and let Pixie climb through the window. As soon as she is in, I back out. In those few seconds, I catch sight of a glass sarcophagus. Shivers go down my spine.
You’ll be fine, Jude, I hear Ghost in my head. Just back away and let Pixie do her job. She’ll tell us what’s up as soon as she figures it out. But I wonder about that. Something about all of this seems awfully familiar.
Instead of backing away, I fly higher, to the top of the conical roof. Here, it is easy to see how the tower grows. The tiles of the roof are continuously transported, by no mechanism that I can discern, ever higher. It’s like a tile escalator. Once at the apex of the trigonal—the triangular pyramid—the tiles from three sides collide and crumble down, and the next set moves up to take their place for a few brief moments. Down at the base of the roof, a ring of fat crystal-shelled conch snails excretes new tiles. The snail-made tiles are shiny and perfect, but by the time they reach the top, they are all weathered and brittle.
Having scoped out how this works, I fly to where the snails work at the bottom of the roof.
What are you doing, Jude? Ghost asks me. But I don’t bother to respond. Using my eel heads, I brush the hard-working snails off the tower. They rain down like little diamonds. One side, and another, and the third. I sweep all of them off the roof foundation. The process of rejuvenation stops.
“What have you done?” Ghost screams. He is horrified when the roof stops growing and starts to dissolve from the top down. It happens surprisingly fast, faster than I would have guessed.
I fly back up and watch a giant triangular hole opening up at the top. I will not be missing out on what’s going on inside. This is my adventure—they all told me so. When the opening gets big enough for me fly through, I do.
There’s no partition between the trigonal roof and the chamber with the sarcophagus. I fly in and land on the floor beside it. Pixie is not there, but there’s a set of glass stairs leading down the tower. I guess she went down. I approach the sarcophagus.
“Don’t look, Jude,” Ghost implores me from my back.
I have to know, I tell him. But before I can see the face of the girl inside, he jumps down and covers it with his body.
“It’s just an adventure, Jude. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Then why are you trying to protect me?
“I’m worried you won’t understand.”
I’m tired of his games. In the body of a dragon, I am much bigger than he is. I use one of my legs to push him aside. I view the sleeping girl with all my heads, all my eyes, even those on the tips of my wings. It’s me. I knew it would be, but to see me as I am in the real world is very disconcerting. I look dead. I feel like I was struck though the heart with saudade—that desperate longing for me as that real girl and fear that she may no longer exist.
I roar with all of my heads. My eels spew lightning and my snakes hiss, helping me express my feelin
gs. The walls of the glass castle tremble and fracture around me. I feel the floor quiver under my feet.
“Jude!” Ghost screams. He jumps up and grabs my true head in his paws, transforming into a teenage boy midflight. “Jude!” he yells into my face, holding onto me with both hands, looking into my deranged dragon eyes.
Something about his desperation stops me. I am frightened, realizing I might have incinerated him, had one of my other eye options been switched on. I could have killed him! I stop and lower my head, so his feet reach the floor.
“Jude,” he says again. “It’s just a game. A game. Pixie is below. You can’t rip this place apart without hurting her for real. Okay?” I am not sure I’m getting all of this. Game? What game? “Jude? Okay?”
That’s me in there, I say and tilt my head toward the dead girl.
“You are here with me,” Ghost insists. “That’s just part of the storyline of this adventure. Remember?”
I don’t like this game. Adventure. Whatever. I don’t like it. But I’m calm now. I won’t wreak any more havoc on this place, even if I want to, very much.
There’s pounding on the stairs, and Pixie bursts in.
“What? What happened?” she asks breathlessly. I can’t answer and bray in frustration. Pixie turns to Ghost.
“Jude had the great idea of taking down the roof,” Ghost tells her. Pixie’s eyebrows inch up, almost disappearing into her helmet. “But then we saw that they used Jude’s image for the zombie princess in the glass sarcophagus. It was a bit disturbing.”
“Uh-huh,” Pixie says. She looks around. Blocks of shattered glass and broken crystal litter the floor around us. The roof and most of the walls are gone. The sarcophagus is slowly sliding towards the hole in the wall, just moments from falling into the dark lake below. Good riddance. This place would never be the same.
