Episode 11: Scrog Encounter (Acheron)

Maelvish services were basically torture. Ach always wanted to curl up in a corner and avoid all the people who crowded to the palace temple to worship…his dad.

Not his dad dad, but the guy who sacrificed himself in battle so the kingdom could thrive. The guy Esh called his sperm donor, because Esh was gross, but when it came down to it she wasn’t wrong. He had died when Ach was still a toddler. There weren’t even really any pictures of him around except the giant painting of him that hid a secret tunnel in the palace.

Ach knew his own pale skin and white hair that stood straight up had come from his dad.

Normally he started his day out with a dragon ride, and watching the sun come up over the edge of the rift. He always sat in the same spot, an inexplicable disc of obsidian in the middle of the rift floor. It was his special place, and as far as he knew no one else had discovered it yet.

Today, even though it was his birthday and he would rather be anywhere else, he had endured the sunrise church service and breakfast, like he did every week.

His dad came up behind him at the end of church and put his hand on Ach’s shoulder. “Happy birthday,” he said.

He blushed, embarrassed at the contact. “Thanks,” he said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to teach?” his dad asked. They watched the last of the worshippers exit the hall. His dad handed him a spray bottle, a bag, and a roll of paper towels and together they started the work of wiping down the temple dining tables to ready them for next week.

“I can teach,” Ach defended. Teaching could be kind of fun, if it was the right subject. Way better than diplomacy, or ending up as Talise’s advisor. “Who told you I didn’t want to?”

“You never brought it up,” his dad said as he wiped a large swath of the table. “You’d make a good teacher.”

Ach could have been drowning in liquid mercury and he wouldn’t have brought it up to his dad. He would’ve just floundered, choking on toxic metal, and insisted he was fine.

“Yeah,” he agreed, with the ‘good teacher’ bit anyway. “Maybe literature or…how to organize a library when you’re done using it so other people can find what they need. I can try that. If it’s okay.” He started to bring his hands together so he could work his anxiety out through them, but he didn’t want his dad to see.

He could be strong, he just wasn’t good at it yet.

“Either or both. I’d love a functioning library too. If you decide to teach, you can always fix it and hire a librarian you like.”

All those books in the library, his mom’s personal shrine to his sperm donor. He could teach a class on any of them. He had a bad feeling he’d be expected to teach the Maelchor stuff instead. It was the most boring book he’d ever read.

“Do I…” he started, and then blushed.

It was his own biological dad they worshipped. How could he possibly admit he hated the religion?
He set the paper towels and spray bottle on a table. “I have to go,” he said, aware that his face was the same crimson as his dragon’s scales. Heat rolled off his body in waves.

His dad stopped him with a hand on his shoulder blade. “Do you what?” he asked, soft.

“I.” His face got impossibly more red. “Think the book about Maelchor is dumb,” he said in a rush. “I know it’s supposed to be my…Drey.” He wrung his hands together. Sparks passed between them in his misery. “But I want to teach real literature. From other realms.”

There. He’d admitted it. His real passion.

“We’ll add a class,” his dad promised. “We have books from everywhere. There are lessons that can be taught by someone who has a passion for it. You can create the entire curriculum.”

The entire curriculum, up to him? He smiled at the thought.

Smiled. He actually smiled at his dad.

“Yeah, okay. Thanks!”

His Uncle Nell approached the table and Ach kept smiling. They were supposed to go fix a hole in the scrog enclosure wall, which was equal parts terrifying and exciting. Terrifying, because scrogs regarded people as food. Exciting because…

“Happy birthday, Ach,” Uncle Nell told him as they walked to the barn. He handed him a present, a book wrapped in a brown and baby blue houndstooth paper.

“Oh, thanks,” Ach said. He let their bodies brush together comfortably as they walked. He opened the present – a novel called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – and tucked it onto a safe shelf in the barn. “I don’t have this one yet,” he said, happy. It was probably the best present he’d get today. He hugged Uncle Nell. “Thank you.”

Vermillion, his red, came out of the stall and fanned his wings. Behind him, Dancer – the big red dragon that should have been Drey’s if he’d survived, but which was kind of just the spare dragon anyone could use – huffed and rippled his own wings.

Acheron pressed his face to Vermillion’s. “Happy birthday,” he whispered.

Talise and Niels had the kids for the morning because Spence was graduating from high school in Sylem. This meant he had the whole morning off to hang out with Uncle Nell. He would have loved to go to graduation, but Uncle Nell needed his help.

With a leg on Vermillion’s wing base, he swung himself up onto the dragon’s back, close. The etched outlines of the dragon’s scales pressed into the skin of his legs.

Uncle Nell flapped his own wings and settled gently on Dancer’s back. Both dragons walked out of the barn with a noble, purposeful gait, before they leapt into the air and soared a few hundred feet.

The palace land fanned out below them, a sprinkled array of orchards and farms and outbuildings, that eventually opened onto fields and pastures.

According to the stories, this area had been all brown desert, nearly lifeless, a source of starvation and war, before his dad Drey killed the last king and ended that war. His mom, and his stepdad Meldrick, who was really just his dad because he’d known him all his life, had fixed the kingdom together, along with help from Uncle Nell and Uncle Konrad, and now a place of darkness and death had become a place of life.

All it had cost was one life, the life they now worshipped in church.

It was asinine. Acheron wasn’t the son of a god. His dad was just some guy who’d seen a problem and fixed it. And now Ach would spend the rest of his life feeling inferior because there was no way he’d sacrifice himself like that. He wasn’t that kind of brave.

Even this work, fixing the scrog fencing, scared him. He could get eaten. He could actually, really, die. Except that Uncle Nell was there, keeping the scrogs away. Uncle Nell could tame any animal.

They landed on the outside, where Uncle Nell had left a steel plate and some softer welding metal. Ach jumped off Vermillion, tripped and landed in the dirt, and dusted his hands off as he stood. “I should fix that thing,” he said, blushing.

One of the scrogs must have hooked one of its horrible claws through the wall somehow. Ach ran his finger along the jagged edge and tried not to imagine the sharpness of the claw that had done this.

He called on his fire, from the molten pool inside him, and brought heat to his fingertips to soften the metal around the hole.

“So,” Uncle Nell chatted, “Did you know your dad and I were together once?”

Ach dropped the steel plate on his foot.

“Ow!” He lifted his foot and hopped on the other.

After a minute, he stood straight again and picked up the plate. “You?” he asked. “Then why was he my dad?”

He couldn’t picture the same person being into his mom and Uncle Nell. They looked different, they acted different, they cared about different things…

“Responsibility,” Uncle Nell told him. He looked out toward the fields behind Ach’s back. “He may have been happier without acknowledging it.”

He may have been alive without acknowledging it too.

But then Ach wouldn’t exist. He liked existing. Maybe it made him a bad person, but if he had to choose between existing and his dad being alive, he picked himself.
While he fixed the steel plate in place, he looked at Uncle Nell again and wondered about acknowledging responsibility. A couple of years ago, Uncle Nell had admitted he was the missing pixie king. He’d gone home and had a kid with the queen, and there was some kind of complicated marriage between him and the queen and Uncle Konrad. It had resulted in Uncle Konrad getting wings, which Ach thought was really unfair. He wanted wings. Not enough to marry a pixie girl though, or to ever leave Spence for.

He wondered if Uncle Nell regretted the changes, outside of Uncle Konrad getting wings.

Then again, Uncle Nell’s kids, Einin and Eiron, had come out of that experience. Ach didn’t think Uncle Nell was the type to regret having a kid.

“I couldn’t ever with a girl,” Ach admitted with a shudder. Somehow, his dad dad and Uncle Nell had both managed it.

Uncle Nell laughed.

Once the plate was fixed in place, Ach stepped away from the wall.

It was time to know, even if the answer hurt.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked.

“Only because it’s your birthday.”

Ach grinned.

No wonder Uncle Nell was always there for him, no matter what. No wonder they felt so close. In a way, Uncle Nell was his dad. He was probably the dad his dad dad wanted him to have anyway.

He got serious after a second, because of what he was about to ask. “There’s this place in the woods in the rift…it’s just this circle of black glass.”

Uncle Nell drew in a breath through puffed lips. That told Ach more than any words could have, although Uncle Nell did say, “It’s where the war ended.”

Where the war ended. So he was right.

His dad, the king, Drey, had stood there on the slope in the middle of a raging battle, and burned his own father, the evil king, to death, killing himself in the process. The magic in the old lore required a sacrifice with a rebellion, and his dad had been a willing sacrifice.

It was the rules to rebellion in the realm; a rebel who wanted to rule couldn’t, by definition, be a rebel who won. It had to be someone who put the kingdom first.

So the story went, anyway. Watching Uncle Nell now, Ach suspected there was more to it than he’d ever heard. Even with all the stories Uncle Nell had told him growing up, Ach was sure the decision around the sacrifice hadn’t been as cut-and-dry as the books made it seem.

“Wow,” was all he could think to say.

That explained why he was drawn to the place.

He leaned against Uncle Nell a little. His dad had loved this man at least as much as Ach did, even if it was in a different way. All the little pieces – Uncle Nell’s attentiveness, the stories about his dad, the trips out of realm – came together.

Uncle Nell had been quietly parenting him all his life, because he was his dad’s son. That was love. Ach hoped he’d never have to do that for Spence, but he decided in that moment that he would if it ever came up. Spence and Talise, he’d do anything for.

He stepped from the plate just as he saw the corners of Uncle Nell’s mouth lift in a smile.

An instant later, a scrog had grabbed him by one of its tail teeth and whipped him into the air over the wall of the enclosure.

He tried not to panic. It was okay. He could survive three puncture wounds, even if one was gushing spray all over the scrog.

It stuffed him in its toothless, three-tongued mouth. The textured tongues pulsed and undulated as they tried to get him past the gaping hole at their base.

Ach vomited all over the scrog tongues, which thrashed around and sent him skyward in a geyser of scrog bile.

Happy birthday, Acheron.

He spat the taste of it out of his mouth and wrung his clothes out before he looked around. The scrog was a few dozen feet away. The wall was closer, but he’d never make it running.

The scrog charged toward him and whipped one of its tongues out. It hooked around him and jerked him back into its mouth.

He didn’t want to hurt it. He knew Uncle Nell could keep the scrogs away, which meant he’d chosen not to, which meant he was letting this happen. For a reason.

He experimented with tickling the scrog’s tongue to see what would happen. All three of the scrog’s tongues went rigid and released him, which was great except it dropped him straight down the scrog’s gullet and into the stomach.

The stench of acid was stronger down here. Ach surfaced, choking, and sloshed around in the acid for a minute. Even with his dragon healing powers, it wouldn’t take him long to be digested. Unlike most deaths, digestion would be permanent.

He thought about choices. Uncle Nell wouldn’t let him die, so he must know there was a way out. Uncle Nell also wouldn’t want him to kill or injure the scrog, so he must know there was a way out that would be harmless.

He tried tickling the stomach. While he did so, he called Vermillion to be ready in the sky. If the scrog erupted vomit everywhere again, Ach wanted to be caught before he even hit the ground.

The scrog’s stomach began to roil, and in another minute of tickling Ach found himself in the air again, and then he was falling, and then he was safely ensconced in Vermillion’s claws. Together they soared over the enclosure wall, where Vermillion dropped him on the ground next to Uncle Nell.

Dirt clung to his clothes, glued in place by scrog disgusting.

He stood. “That was gross,” he complained.

“Are you okay?” Uncle Nell asked. He dusted a clump of something off Ach’s shoulder, something else the scrog must have eaten.

Was he okay? Except for smelling like a scrog’s stomach, he seemed to be. He looked down at the wound in his thigh, which had stopped bleeding finally. “I think so?”

“Your dad and I used to find wild animals together,” Uncle Nell told him.

Of course. Ach knew that from the stories. That was why Uncle Nell let the scrog eat him; he was sharing. Ach’s fire welled beneath the surface of his skin, as affection for Uncle Nell made him warm. He was the best not-quite-dad Ach could have ever asked for.

“Thank you,” Ach grunted. He clambered gracelessly onto Vermillion’s back.

“Anytime, Ach.” Uncle Nell leaned forward on Dancer, ready for the dragon to launch itself into the sky.

Ach leaned forward to, but when he moved he caught the scent of dried-on scrog guts and coughed. “I smell awful,” he said.

“Have you smelled me an hour before supper?” Uncle Nell joked back. “This is nothing.”

Ach wrinkled his nose. “I try not to smell people most of the time,” he admitted.

Uncle Nell laughed again and looked at Ach. His voice got soft. “Your dad would be proud of you. And I’m sure your dad here is too.”

Ach blushed, pleased with the idea that somewhere out there, somewhere between the obsidian and wherever dead people went, there was someone who would be proud of him just for being him. He got the feeling maybe a lot of people were and he’d never noticed it before now.

The teaching job offer from his dad made him feel proud of himself. Someone saw him as capable of sharing priceless stories from other realms, and of fixing the chaos that was the library. He straightened his shoulders, ready to fly.

“Do you want to fly around the Lower Dell?” Uncle Nell asked.

“Why?”

“Spence is busy with an interview and wanted me to keep you busy.”

Ach couldn’t tell if Uncle Nell was joking or not, but it didn’t change the electrical energy he seemed to have pulsing all over his body at the idea of seeing Spence again after days apart.

When Uncle Nell said fly around the Lower Dell, he somehow meant that they were going to fly really low to the ground, skimming the top of the crops, in relay patterns, back and forth across the same fields, over the same villages. It took hours. By the end of it, Ach was hot and sticky and the bile had heated and dried to his skin in a layer that peeled off like crisp wafers.

Twice, Uncle Nell landed Dancer – telling Ach to stay in the air on Vermillion – and investigated holes in the middle of fields. Both times, he came back out with a tight expression and remounted Dancer in silence.

It must be something for Uncle Konrad, who ran security.

When they finished and landed in the barn, Uncle Nell nodded toward Dancer’s stall that he shared with his mom’s dragon, Apa. “Do you mind cleaning that out before you do yours?” he asked.

He should. His mom was always busy, and Dancer was his dad’s dragon. If Ach didn’t do it, who would?

He bet his dad was meticulous like he was and probably would have kept Dancer’s stall spotless if he were alive.

“Sure,” he said. He put on mucking boots – dragon muck wasn’t just gross, it also irritated his skin – and grabbed a shovel.
That was another half hour of time away from Spence, while Apa shooed him away from her dragon eggs and Dancer huffed terrifyingly down his neck. When the stall was clean, he crossed the barn towards Vermillion’s stall.

Uncle Nell followed him and leaned against the gate. “Vermillion’s stall is a bit overcrowded,” he commented. “He needs to move.”

Vermillion hadn’t gotten fat or anything. Ach wasn’t sure dragons could even get fat. “What do you mean?”

“Look at it,” Uncle Nell suggested.

He did. He walked into the murky shadows and peered around behind Vermillion’s tail. There, in the back, studying him with an even gaze, was an inky blue-black dragon the color of a lake in the moonlight.

Ach couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. Two years ago, when Talise and Niels had done the elixir, Niels’ dragon Regnbue had joined their family of dragons, and every time they had kids Regnbue and Talise’s dragon Alojiza laid eggs that hatched the day the babies were born.

Ach had burned with a secret envy. When Spence and Talise were married, Spence got Loew, a dragon who was mated to Talise’s Paillette. Then when Talise met Niels she got a new dragon, Alojiza, just so Niels could have a mated dragon, Regnbue.

Ach’s Vermillion hadn’t made a mated dragon for Spence until now, after two years of dating and living together.

“She’s a gorgeous dragon,” Uncle Nell said. “Maybe you’ll have kids.”

Ach blushed at the idea. Kids, with Spence. Spence was a great dad. He was calm and direct and conscientious and attentive. His kids with Talise adored him. He was a gentle, steady parent and Ach loved watching him around other people’s kids.

“Maybe,” he said, because he didn’t want to admit how much he would love that. He ran his hand down the blue dragon’s snout. “She’s all shadow and midnight,” he commented.

“She’s been here for a few weeks. But she was only a few inches big for a bit.”

Vermillion, for the past few months, had started greeting Ach in the barn rather than waiting for him in his stall. Now he knew why.

Spence had a dragon. Spence had a dragon.

“We can fly?” he realized, looking at Uncle Nell. “I need to hurry and finish.”

Uncle Nell laughed. “You can. Go ahead.”

Ach hugged him one last time and got back to work. Spence had to be here, somewhere. When the stalls were clean, Ach would shower, and he’d find him, and they’d fly together. He let the permanence of the new dragon settle on him.

Spence was forever.

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