Floriography

REVELATION IS NEVER SAFE.

CHAPTER ONE: A DRAGON AND HER GROCERIES

Once upon a time, dragons weren’t real. Then they were, and the whole world went bonkers.

Out here in the middle of nowhere, dragons didn’t seem believable. Recordings of dragons fighting in the sky over New Delhi couldn’t be real. Deep fakes had existed for years, wielded with equal irresponsibility in the hands of misanthropic teens and greedy corporations, and the fact that governments all over the world took dragons as truth didn’t shake disbelief. 

Where were the studies? Who stood to gain from this nonsense? Why would the whole damn worldbe in on it?

Then the studies came out, and the whole damn world was in on it because it was true. 

Magic was real. Dragons were real. And elves. Monsters. Things nobody had words for. Creatures that lived in dreams, spirits of water and sky and tree…

It just wasn’t fair, Sarah thought as she scrolled today’s doom. What could humans have done if they’d had magic? If they’d been able to fight back against the greed of corporations, or the cruelty of despotic governments? It wasn’t right that in a world of constant war and waning privacy, where people starved and oligarchs thrived, humans could not do magic, and all the other sapient creatures could.

Maybe this whole news story was just a distraction. Maybe none of it was real. If it was, though—if it turned out recorded human history had been that wrong about so much—then someone sure as heck would be eating crow. 

Which was why when Sarah (39, of Lakeview, Colorado, which had never had a lake to view) looked up from her station at the Deli counter to see a dragon in the parking lot, her first thought was to wonder what roasted crow tasted like.

Nobody else had seen it yet. Maybe she was hallucinating? No; she’d never hallucinated in her life, and the details were too… too…

She wouldn’t have considered moss-like textures over the thing’s scales, or the way its bRanching antlers dripped with strings of pink flowers, or the way it carefully navigated through the parking lot as though determined not to harm a single car. 

Its feet (Paws? Claws?) were too large to do that with ease. It froze, wide fingers (claw-tipped… digits?) spread between EVs and pickups, and then it seemed to change its mind. The dragon shimmered. Light raced along its form like fiber optics, beautiful and strange, and the thing just… shrank. Its edges wavered like reflections in water, and suddenly, it seemed almost human.

Too large to be human, though, this being, this woman, like some Greek statue. She was the same moss-green her scales had been, and flowering horns rose from her head. Pink blossoms dangled from them, framing her face. She wore a sort of drapey-looking toga (which probably wasn’t actually a toga, but Sarah only knew enough to know there were different kinds). 

The dragon looked like some kind of goddess. Or a character from one of Noah’s games. She was also headed right for them. Sarah shook her head, rubbing her eyes. Surely she hadn’t been the only person to see this.

She hadn’t.

Darren from Bakery leaned on her counter, staring over his shoulder, then looked at her with horse-panicked eyes. “Did you see?” he said, his voice low and hoarse.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Fuck me,” said Darren, pulled out his phone to dial 911.

* * *

Maybe calling the cops had been premature.

Diana (just figured she’d have a name like that, evoking goddesses and wonder) was perfectly civil, and did not react poorly when police showed up armed. She smiled, somehow got them laughing, and then claimed two as her honor-guard while she walked the aisles.

Rumors trickled in, tossed over the Deli counter by wandering onlookers, and Sarah gathered them all with need. Diana was an American citizen by birth? Diana’s family had lived on this continent for centuries? (Though for some reason, she’d emphasized this came after al-Khwarizmi invented Algebra.) Diana was very excited to get to know the community now that she’d moved in? Really?

Why would this place be exciting, compared to what she must consider normal?

Also… moved in where? There had been no news of new people. Lakeview was too far to commute to any major city, and only had about a thousand residents. New people would have gotten everyone’s attention.

“She bought the Dyson Ranch,” said stock boy Jim, walking by. 

The Dyson Ranch, on the outskirts of town. So someone had finally claimed that old place, and that someone was not human. Sarah sliced meat for pick-up lunch orders and swallowed around the lump in her throat.

This was not a town that did well with different. This was not a town that appreciated new.

Diana was easy to keep track of. Her head and horns (antlers?) showed above the aisles, moving thoughtfully behind cereal boxes, elevating ordinary paper towels to something fairies might use. Maybe it was magic, or maybe it was her beautiful smile, or that she was just human enough to seem relatable, or that the police were walking with her, but no one seemed to be freaking out. Yet. 

They would, though. Sarah knew they would.

She watched from behind the deli counter. Someone had shut the store’s music off, and everyone held up their phones, recording as the dragon inspected cantaloupe. Diana didn’t seem to mind. In spite of the moss, in spite of her size, she laughed lightly, and touched no one, and even though she towered over everybody by at least a head—even Matt the manager, who’d gone all-state for basketball forty years prior—no one around her seemed diminished.

Those flowering horns were what finally carried Sarah through fear and into awe.

She’d never imagined anything like them, twisting like an antelope’s, beautiful and symmetrical, and the pink flowers dangling from them looked real. Like dragons, in fact. Definitely and indisputably. This was no deep fake, and if that was makeup, neither she nor the police could see through it. 

Sarah’s heart fluttered. She suspected her ex-brother-in-law Ned would still believe it was some kind of “psyop” (she wasn’t sure what a psyop was, but Ned saw them everywhere), but in her heart, she knew what she was seeing was real.

Shit. Diana was coming this way. Sarah stood tall and wiped down her apron, smoothed her hair, and tried not to look panicked. 

Dipping to make eye-contact without sending the Deli sign swinging, Diana smiled. She really did have a beautiful smile. “Hi,” said Diana, who had no accent Sarah could discern. “I’m sorry to have caused such a fuss today.”

“Well, we…” Sarah had no idea what she was going to say. “It’s not a problem, ma’am, not at all. We just don’t get a lot of new people here.”

“That’s one of the reasons I came,” said Diana. “I like the quiet life, without all the fuss of major cities. Among the Mythos, I am of the Sun, dragon, called Diana. And you are?” 

Among the what? Sun? What? “Uh. Sarah. Just a plain old boring human.” She shook the hand offered her and found it warm, softer than moss, slim and strong and pleasing.

Oh, Sarah thought.

Diana smiled. “I have yet to meet any living being who was genuinely boring. Could I get some of the roast beef please? About six pounds should do, if you have it.”

Dragons have big appetites, I guess, Sarah considered as she set up the slicer. She couldn’t help glancing back again and again, though her focus really needed to be on what she was doing.

“You can ask me anything, you know,” said Diana with that beautiful smile. “Now that we’re neighbors, I’m expecting pushback and questions.”

“No pushback from me,” said Sarah quickly. “Whatever you do is your legal and moral right.”

Diana laughed lightly “Well, you’re welcome to come by and visit. I’ve made it clear anyone is, as long as they stand at the gate and announce themselves first.”

“Gate?” said Sarah, who recalled no gate at the Ranch.

“Yes. You can’t miss it.” 

Flashbacks of hateful graffiti on her parents’ garage door made her shudder. “Um. Are you sure you want to… just make an open invite like that?” 

A softer smile this time. “I’m just a person, like you. The best way to show that is not to hide anything, and I have nothing to hide.”

There was plenty to hide. Sarah knew that well. And besides, if Ned was right, that was exactly what people with things to hide would say, anyway. Then again, wouldn’t people with nothing to hide say that, too? “Here you go,” Sarah said, offering several neatly-wrapped packages of protein.

“Thank you,” said Diana, placing it in the ordinary shopping basket on her arm, where it sat, heavy and meaty, beside a simple grocery-store bouquet of white roses.

Sarah couldn’t help herself. “Those are lovely flowers.”

Diana smiled with such joy at being asked that she took Sarah’s breath away. “They’re symbolic,” she said. “White roses are for new beginnings. Have a wonderful day, Sarah.” And she walked away.

It seemed wise in the wake of that to pull out the small stool she kept under the counter and have herself a sit-down. Her heart pounded, rocking her whole body with tension. “Is she crazy?” she asked herself.

“No,” said Matt, walking up to lean on her glass counter. “That’s a lady who knows she has an uphill battle. I think she’s trying to get ahead of the problems.”

“What problems?” said Darren.

Sarah looked at him. “Darren, how many people in our town are black?”

He stared at her. “I don’t know?”

“Less than a dozen. We have one Chinese family. We have two Native American families. That’s it. Now, we have a dragon.”

Darren,  who was white, nominally good looking, and had never faced harder opposition than a high school basketball team, stared at her. “So?”

Sarah sighed. “So she’s going to face challenges.”

“What challenges?” said Darren.

Matt shook his head. “Let’s just hope everyone is understanding.”

Sarah knew better than to assume that would happen.

Connected book Half-Shell Prophecies

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