It took me two weeks to return to the house of the couple, and at nights I wandered the library, purloining information to trade with Mardhaka. I’d treat the books with care avoiding the rounds of the guard and trying to act in absolute silence. Despite this, the old man began speaking about a ghost shuffling pages at night, in the corners of the library where light didn’t reach. I hate to think I gave him more than a scare back in the day.
The day prior to visiting my friends again I made my way to the mountainside, I inserted myself into Mardhaka’s nest, and waited. I sat in her chamber, beside the hoard of feathers, examining its contents. Long or short, rectrices or remiges, fly feathers composed most of her haul. Down and contour feathers were also represented, if only as a minority. I learned to identify them all by the books of men, even if I could not make out the kind of bird most of them came from.
Why, I wondered why. Why was I doing something while I waited? In Ludlun I had spent whole days sitting immobile on a corner of my room, I don’t even know if thinking or not. When all there was to do was to act a bit so Cirruin would be happy in his dreams, when pleasing the dragon was my only obligation. I wasn’t exactly happy, but it was a feeling of… void. A comfortable void. A void made of cotton and petals. I think people may feel something similar the second after they wake up, before they remember the struggles of their life.
For the first time, I found myself wondering if I was better off now that I knew more about men, if this path I was following would lead to elation or to destruction. It was no sad wonder, no gloomy rumination. It was my simple curiosity playing around with things it shouldn’t.
When Mardhaka arrived, I took a few moments to notice she was there at all.
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“Well, what do you bring me today.”
I saluted with a haughty stare: a dragon recognizing another.
“I have been reading about crows and ravens. Birds of the most beautiful and solid black coats. There are accounts of them serving men and bringing them shiny things in exchange for food. I reckon this information could be useful to you.”
“What sorts of ‘shiny things’?” She asked, tilting her head. I had picked her interest.
“That depends on the bird. But you have the time Mardhaka, you have the ages to seek and raise an army of crows that fetches you feathers. The lifespan of the birds would be your sole issue: in captivity, under the best care men are able to grant them, crows and ravens live only a few decades. Two, three, sometimes four. But I think… I think you could teach them what to fetch in a considerably shorter amount of time.”
“I will archive that in my memory, Terus. One day, when I am old and gray, I may remember the words of a dream long gone. You have earned my company for today, save further lessons for our next meeting. Tell me more about this domestication of crows then, if you can, will you.”
I made a bow and Mardhaka groaned.
“Don’t insult me, Roach. Your humbleness feels tainting now that I have granted you my time, that I regarded you as one I could come to consider worthy of it.”
I sighed and let my body fall upon the bed of feathers.
“Mardhaka, in your opinion, is there some way for me to find the grave of the man I was? Ludlun fell so long ago, in human time, that I do not know how to find it. the books on the history section of the library are mostly about Zenvo, not about small towns that got destroyed by a dragon.”
“You were never a man. You are at best a memory of one, imperfect, contaminated by my father’s opinion of said man. You, Terus, were never a man. In spite of that, this is what I can tell you…” And so an exchange began with Mardhaka, and it made me feel a little bit better, a little bit closer to a whole as we discussed why, in the end, it would not matter if I met, or not, the grave of the Terus of flesh and bone.