Creak forward, creak back. Rain pounded like steel bullets on the slate roof as wind clawed, bit, and chewed at the bowed walls.

How deafeningly silent it was.

Creak forward, creak back. He held a bundle of blankets in his arms, a bundle that should have been something else. Something living and crying and cooing.

How deafeningly silent it was.

Creak forward, creak back. From the rocking chair, he looked at the cradle by the fireplace. Still. Empty. He, in his melancholy, imagined a beautiful woman leaning over it. He saw her shake her pinky until it was clasped in a tiny, wrinkly fist. “Look how strong this little man thinks he is,” she said.

How deafeningly silent it was.

The creaking stopped. The man closed his eyes to his happy imagination and sat still in the rocking chair. The fireplace crackled and sputtered, but it could not warm him. He felt like nothing could warm him, then.

The silence broke. It broke with a cry. High-pitched and small, but belting like it was the first hardship the little body had faced.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. The house was so far into the jungle, and surrounded by a neglected pepper farm. It was a hallucination, and the man was busy.

Busy trying to not exist.

Thunder cracked, and the cry screamed.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. What a terrible trick, a trick no doubt played by an apathetic jinni. Let me mourn, he thought to himself, though he had not the strength to say it aloud.

The cry gurgled out, and then came back to life, sputtering and weak, but still fighting for air.

Real or not, trying to not exist or not, the man stood up against his will. Pure instinct gripped his greying brain and forced him to sprint out the door in search of the cry.

The cry was louder, as was the rain and wind, but it seemed behind and below him.

Instantly, he knew where the cry originated, and what a nasty, nasty, trick. It came from under the house, where the people of Tys were traditionally buried. Where his still-born son and wife laid for eternity.

Cold, heavy rain made a waterfall of him and raged a flood up to his calves. Flashes of light in the clouds threatened the man with smiting.

But he did not listen. He stared at the entry to the crawlspace and listened to the waterlogged, desperate cries of a child that never was. It was a trick of a terrible spirit. He knew that. And yet for all the bellowing of the thunder above and all the whirling of the water below, it was the only thing he could hear. His heart grew talons that desperately clawed at his ribcage.

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And, like the fool he always was, he got down so that the water rushed under his belly as he crawled into the vast dark of the flooding crawlspace.

The cries got louder. The water got higher.

The cries sputtered and coughed. The man had his head fully against the floor of the home to keep his mouth above the water.

The cries silenced, and the water rose to his eyes.

What a terrible, nasty trick.

He dove fully into the dark, cold water and he dug his hands into the volcanic soil below. He dug. Like a dog, he dug with nothing but his nails and failing oxygen. He dug, and he dug, and then, he felt a tiny, uncomfortably room temperature arm.

The water swirled and the body rose against the man’s chest. So small. So dead.

He turned and swam. By miracle, he found his way out of the crawlspace, and air filled his lungs. His cotton clothes heavy with water, he hoisted the weight of a life and a death up to his feet. The things he carried, not fully tangible, were brought back into the cold warmth of his home.

He collapsed then before the light of the fickle fire and used its light to gaze upon his son.

There was no crying. No breathing. No color in the dark grey skin. So still. So unlike sleep, but what a wonderful thought, sleeping. That’s all the man wanted to do. Not die. Just go to sleep and never wake up.

It was then the fire spoke. “It was not your baby’s cries you heard.”

The man unsteadily lifted his mournful gaze. The fire danced in a most unnatural fashion. Nearly forming a shape. Never quite. Flickering embers and brilliant streaks of light came and went.

“It was my own. It is by my ash your peppers grow, and it is my lava that provides the warmth of the island. I have always produced fruit, but your kind have grown so many that I have grown twice as fertile. I cannot bring the dead back, no jinni can, but I have come full term with new life. Please, allow me to use the body of your never-was son for the vessel.”

The man looked down at the baby in his arms. It hurt him to think about, giving away the body, but what else was he to do? He sighed and reached in.

The fire did not burn his hands as he rested the child on a bed of timber. The baby’s skin did not sear, nor the hair spark. As if breathed into by the fire, color returned to the babe. Dark grey became brown. Brown became red. Leather became scale.

The man retracted his hands and his tears stopped as he watched. The black hair bleached white. Little black nubs of horn broke the skin of the forehead. The tiny fingernails sharpened and thickened, and a spade-ended tail sprouted violently from the spine.

The baby stirred. As it changed from male to female, it kicked its legs and the ankles lengthened. Soft, frustrated coos beeped out of its sharp-toothed mouth. The tail whipped and the face scrunched. Then, it opened its eyes. Gold whites. Red rim around a gold iris, and slit red pupils.

 The strange eyes focused on the man and stole his heart as the baby stared with the wonderment and terror of having burst into existence.

The man felt warmth he had never known rise in his belly. The tears flowed again, this time less salty, and again the rain and wind made no noise at all. He didn’t even notice as a magical, scaly robe materialized onto him. A robe enchanted with the same fire resistance as an obsidian dragon.

The little jinni child mumbled nonsense and steadied herself on her little reptilian feet. Then, with a laugh and a leap, she jumped into the man’s lap and tried to wrap her little arms around him. Even with her scaly cheek pressed fully into his chest, her arms didn’t even reach his sides.

“My daughter,” the man sighed. He put a hand on her back and closed his eyes. “I will love you with the love I saved for my son and my wife. I will make you the most loved woman in all of Tys.”

The baby did not understand. She babbled and fell down into his lap before playfully trying to explore.

“I will name you Pyreborn.”