I sat beside the river of my own nature, the one that climbed up the mountain in whose heart the dreamer slept. The tendrils of water clambered up the stone like amoebas searching for a grip, and, once in a while, it changed its course without warning. I pondered upon the nature of us both. After all, I am the imperfect memory of a person, just as this was the corrupted memory of a river.

I sat up and walked around. The trees real were painted with a thick coat of lies that close to Ludlun, pinecones made by the gods hung next to the ones made by the delusions of Cirruin. I grabbed one of my substance, crushed it in my hand until both pinecone and my flesh became one. It was like observing a piece of ice dissolve upon a burning forehead.

Beasts unseen and barely heard called in the distance. That’s all they would ever do, beckon from afar. Or, put otherwise, only their sounds existed, carried by the wind but born from no throat, even if sometimes, a distant shadow accompanied.

I looked for a vantage point from which to behold Ludlum. From there I remembered the days where my only role in life was to be and burn. And now, a week of being unable to see my friends presented me with this unquenchable boredom.

The world was big enough, however, so I began walking to places I had never gone before. Dropping from boulders, kicking around bushes, striding along an old cobblestone path I got carried away from the valley.

Round the waterfall, past the small lake inhabited by colorful carps, into plains that seemed to extend forever. Came the cows and sheep and alpacas and, in the distance, the house of they who raised them. Through fields of golden wheat I approached a dusty, old settlement. It was smaller than Zenvo, and lacked a proper wall. Nobody stood guard at the hole in the broken, decayed palisade. I trudged in, passed by a bull that grassed while still attached to the cart he hauled around. The taciturn ox looked at me and blew through his nose. I had only seen them up close on books, bulls and cows, so I crouched in front of him to admire the details better. The comma shaped nostrils expanding and contracting. The small stubbly hairs covering the snout. The differential wear of the horns. In person, a mundane ox was way more entrancing than in books.

It soon became evident that the bovine didn’t mind my peering, not to an extent greater than he minded the fleas he mindlessly tried once and again to swat with his tail.

A tall, bulky man approached me and started speaking in a dialect I didn’t know.

“Pardon me, but I do not speak your tongue, kind stranger.”

The man resorted to pointing at the bull, and then at himself. Afterwards, he gestured again at the bull, and finished it all by placing his left palm upwards and tapping on it twice with the middle and index fingers of the right.

“I am sorry, I don’t intend to buy the bull.” I said, again, in the tongue of Zenvo and Ludlun, because I didn’t know the one of this place.

The tanned man held a stare and pointed at me, then at the ground. He did this twice, and then uttered a single word. By the tone of it, it was a question.

I pointed at myself, and then at the ground at my feet. I nodded. The man gave a nod in return and then rushed away, down the main, bare dirt street. I assumed he was going to bring in a person capable of understanding me, and waited there.

The ox exhaled roughly, pronged me with his nose whilst inspecting this weird man that had sat before him. It bit my hair, and I had to shift it out of his mouth so he didn’t keep ruminating on it.

The sun of the afternoon bathed us both and extended a shadow from the ox, but I wasn’t allotted the same mercy. I stared horrified at this realization. Nothing was mine. Not my existence, not my face, not even my shadow.

“Grant me a shadow to carry with me wherever I may go, Cirruin.” I mumbled in the tongue of dragons. But my wish didn’t come true. There was nothing I could ask the dreamer so directly and expect an answer to.

I had no time to sleep and dream a shadow for myself. To build with my simulated mind a faux humanity.

I stared directly at the sun and stood, as if to be closer to it. “Harm my eyes! Grant me your shadow. Acknowledge me, accursed torch! I am! I am! I am!” I saw scales appearing on my hand, and willed them away. “I am a dragon masquerading as a man. But I am not the whole dragon, nor I do a good job of imitating a man. This is why, deaf and blinding orb, I ask for naught but a shadow! Pay me with an illusion of the darkness that trails behind the children to whom flesh you granted.”

The dream of fire burned inside my throat, but I wouldn’t let it roam freely across the town. Dreamed fire can beget real fire, in the same way a dreamed sword inflicts a real wound. Only for destruction are we dragon dreams loaned the spark of true creation. “I am Terus, decrepit limelight. Grant me the shadow you once granted him.”

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I checked behind me and I still projected no shadow. It was an exercise in futility. The dreamt had no business telling the created what to do.

I was powerless to create, powerless to do naught but be the fire that burned Ludlun and now hungered for more. I wondered if, in this anger, I could use a dragon’s curse on the sun. Cirruin would hate me for it, so I quickly disposed of the idea. Risking my existence for a passing grudge with an indifferent heavenly fire would not aid me neither in the short nor the long run.

The tall man returned, and an old woman using an ornamental cane for support followed. She was a small thing with a rounded silhouette when seen from a side. Her green eyes remained opened wide as her wrinkly face bobbed up and down while examining me.

“Stranger, speak the tongue of Zenvo?” She asked. She had not mastered the tongue, but it was plain to see that her level would suffice to strike a simple conversation.

“I do.”

“Express interest in male cow. Want buy it?” she asked eagerly.

“No, I was just admiring the animal.”

The woman then relayed the information to the bull’s owner, and he answered with a tone whose intention I could not make out.

“Male cow is… good animal, we agree. Need a place to be in the night?”

“No, good woman, no. I am just passing by. I don’t sleep often.”

Once again, she conversed a bit with the tall man. “You speak dragon words. Your shadow doesn’t walk behind you, stranger. Haven’t told Herku, here,” She gestured towards the man. “But will appreciate if you come into home mine. Then, discuss why you are here.”

“I’ll… gladly do. Lead the way.”

We walked down the street for barely one or two minutes, passing by homes built out of wood and stone, and finally arrived to an old hut whose cobblestone walls were covered by vines, and the columns of the porch fostered bines. It was like entering an ancient temple of a forgotten deity.

The old woman patted every corner of her clothes to find the keyring, and after what seemed like minutes of looking for the right key, she looked to the sides to make sure nobody was within earshot, and spoke in the tongue of dragons.

“If I let you step in my home, I may die in my sleep. If I don’t, fate will find a way to dispose of me nonetheless. What do you think, man dreamed by a dragon, is seeing another dawn worth angering destiny itself?” She asked, and then opened the door anyway. “what silly questions I ask, right? It’s the age, darling, just the age.

I reluctantly followed her, to find ourselves traversing through a hallway of mirrors that faced each other. When I stepped between the first pair, she turned to look at me, and then at the reflections. As my shape repeated towards the infinite, man features were gradually replaced with those of a dragon, while her reflection just replicated perfectly each and every time, endlessly. I took a step back without saying anything.

“I see. You are the one then. Come in, darling, if there is something I don’t have much of, that is time right now.”

“But… why? No offense, but this feels like a trap,” I said meekly, shrugging.

“The mirrors were just to make sure the prophecy would be fulfilled. If I am going to part, I want to know exactly when and not suffer false alarms. Don’t you think you would do the same?

“And, regarding the trap thing, what could you fear, dragon’s dream? Nothing can harm you, nothing can kill you. No walls or metal bars can contain you. A trap to accomplish what, exactly?”

Granting her the solidity of her argument, I tailed the old woman as she hobbled deeper into her house. At the end of the hallway, she pushed one of the mirrors, revealing that it was actually a door.

“Pardon the clutter, I am old and I get tired easily. It gets dirty faster than I can clean.” She said, dedicating a sad stare at the room with the lone armchair, a little table, a pair of small windows and a wide, bookshelf with only two shelves, occupied with books. Furniture arranged perfectly for her height and age.

“I take you have no family,” I observed.

“I outlived them all. I have been an old grandma most of my life. Cursed by the gift of clairvoyance by one of your kind, for refusing to give him my firstborn. I will be honest with you, I hate one dragon in particular, but I don’t know its name, and, in time, I have come to consider that if there are good and bad men, there ought to be good and bad dragons all the same.”

“Ought to be…” I muttered. “Did you study our tongue searching for a way to lift the curse?”

She struggled, but managed to sit on her armchair and take a comfortable position, never letting the cane go. “Indeed.” Then, the old lady’s vitreous eyes examined the horizon for a few instants. “Take whatever you want from the home, dear, I won’t need it come tomorrow,” her face reflected her inner sadness. “I bought everything I needed for the week yesterday. I... I never thought it would end. I… I will never see Dunuria again, she went to visit her daughter a few towns from here. She makes the best tea in the town, you should pay her a visit when she returns.” She made another bitter pause “But what do I say? Can you even drink, sweetie?”

“I can, but I won’t. It would just fall through eventually. What’s your name, if I may know? The dragon calls me Terus.”

“You may look for the grave dedicated to Solimute by the latter half of the week, I suppose.”

“Kind Solimute, would my absence have extended your life?”

She lowered her head and moved it from side to side with the slowness of one who is tired of living.

“Time elapsed, life gone. This encounter was fated, kind Terus.” She smiled, showing her decayed teeth. “I am happy I can finally talk to a dragon. How is my pronunciation?”

“Better than most dragons would expect from a human.”

“First cursed with a life too long, then by your faint praise, there are no good dragons I see.” she joked —and It took a second for me to register it was a joke— and then giggled a bit. “It’s time to go… I can’t believe it’s time to go.”

“Would you be happier if you weren’t going to die?”

She didn’t answer, just stared at me pensively.

“Can you make me tea, as a last favor? Put the kettle over the fire, grab the tea from the jar in the kitchen counter. I… I don’t care if it’s perfect, I just want to enjoy tea once more.”

“It would be my pleasure…” then I realized a little issue. “I have never brewed tea before. I have no idea how it is done.”

“Oh, put the kettle full of water over the hearth fire. There are water bottles in the kitchen. You know how to use bottles, right?”

“That… yes.”