Here Be Dragons: Book 1 of the Emergence Series

Pryce squinted at the blurry shape in the distance that was Fathom, who seemed to be flapping more intensely than normal, as if he were carrying something. Pryce thought about getting the binoculars, but decided to just wait and see just what the dragon was bringing in his talons.

As the dragon approached Pryce could see a sandy brown thing in his jaws, it seemed quite large compared to a human, though it seemed a little toylike in the dragon’s maw. The animal was a mess of limbs and what looked like wings, and soon Pryce realized this must be a Gryphon.

He stepped back inside the cargo hold to wait out the sandstorm that was generated each time Fathom landed or took off. He’d learned this lesson after getting sand in his ears, this was a much better idea than standing there covering his face.

“Good morning,” Pryce said, stepping out of the ship and squinting through the last bits of fine sand in the air.

“Good, morning,” Fathom said, somehow speaking clearly through the gryphon in his mouth as he spat the stiff carcass onto the beach, exuding such a self-satisfied air that he reminded Pryce of an oversized cat. He noticed that the dragon seemed quite winded from carrying this large creature, though Pryce quickly diverted his attention to inspect the gryphon.

“This is Gryphon, yes?” Pryce asked, inspecting the animal. It was roughly four-and-a-half meters long, and on all fours it likely would have stood at or above his own height. Its tail was not catlike or doglike at all, but seemed like a long, stretched out avian tail. The tail was quite stiff like the rest of the body, but Pryce assumed it normally functioned much like a rudder or a third wing.

“Yes,” Fathom confirmed. “I hunt this gryphon yesterday, it is old and has wound,” the dragon said, pointing at what looked like a several-day old injury on the gryphon’s left foreleg.

“Good, I’m…glad that you did not kill a young healthy gryphon for me,” Pryce said with a little uncertainly. It wasn’t that bad to have killed this animal, ethically speaking, as it was already old and wounded, but it was strange to be given a carcass so casually. “What do you want to trade for the gryphon?” Pryce asked, remembering that dragons preferred to trade rather than to give freely.

Fathom stopped his preening and looked a little uncomfortable, he glanced a little off to the side and said, “You give me many things, I give you Gryphon.”

“I give you many shiny things, and you only give me Gryphon?” Pryce teased, unable to resist the opportunity. “I’m joking,” he reassured as the dragon stammered a reply. “Thank you, I like gryphon very much, though next time ask me before you get something for me, I maybe not like it.”

Fathom seemed to relax when he realized the human wasn’t serious, though he also flicked his nictitating eyelids irritably. “If you not like gryphon, I eat it,” he said pragmatically, adding, “And I know you want to see gryphon.”

“Still, tell me next time you do this,” Pryce said offhandedly, already inspecting the feathery carcass again. The strange feathers did not look anything like the ones he knew, they were pliable but stiff, and did not have a rachis – the stiff core of a feather. It almost seemed more similar to a thin, elongated scale than a feather. He also took note of the strange structure of the legs; the upper thigh would not have looked out of place on other four-legged predators, but the ankles and talons were more bird-like. Even the calves of the foreclaws had feathers along the sides like winged…boots? It was as if a four-winged avian had adapted into the niche of a large land-dwelling carnivore, strange as that was.

“How long ago you kill this gryphon?” Rigor mortis took a few hours to set in, so the dragon had probably killed it last night.

“Last night, after I go away from here,” Fathom said, confirming his suspicion.

“How did you kill it?” Pryce asked as he palpated the neck; it was bent at a fatal angle.

“I throw rock at gryphon.” The dragon flexed his talons demonstrably.

“You…what?” Pryce looked up upon hearing this unexpected answer. “You did not use your talons? Or teeth?”

“No, gryphon too fast, change direction very fast too. I fly down with rock, throw rocks, some rock hit and kill gryphon,” Fathom said simply.

“If it works, it works,” Pryce shrugged, bemused. He couldn’t tell if it was an elegant way of hunting or a graceless one…but perhaps the two were not mutually exclusive. Pryce stood, finished with his cursory observations. “I’m going to get my tools to dissect this gryphon, I’ll be back in a minute.”

Fathom’s head laid on the floor of the cargo hold as his neck and body sat outside of the ship, watching as Pryce rigged up the gryphon to the hanging scale. The dragon had helped him move the corpse through the hatch and into the cargo hold, and was now peering with interest as Pryce finished setting up the pulley. The dragon watched and seemed mildly surprised when the Gryphon began to lift off the ground.

“Why you need help to move gryphon if you can make gryphon go up?” Fathom asked, watching the trussed-up gryphon slowly spin back and forth as it was slowly hoisted up.

“This is pulley,” Pryce said, gesturing to the setup. “It makes it easier to lift things, I can lift things eight times heavier than I can with this.”

“That makes no sense,” Fathom snorted. “Where strength come from?”

“Good question,” Pryce said. “Pulleys don’t add strength, pulleys…change strength. If I pull up eight meters, this pulley pulls up one meter. This is slower, but easier.”

Fathom chuffed a puff of air through his nostrils, mildly vexed but not surprised by the strange things human devices could do.

“I can explain more later,” Pryce said, checking the scale; 250.7 kg. They were very light compared to the mammals on the mainland, but they were actually a bit heavier for their length when compared to raptors. He knew this was not an ideal substitute for density, as a raptor’s tails made up more than half their body length, while a gryphon’s tails were comparatively stubby at around a tenth of their body length. Perhaps he should measure the volume of the body by seeing how much water it displaced?

Regardless, he scribbled this measurement down with the rest.

Gryphon Specimen #1:

Standing height: ~1.8 meters.

Length: ~4.5 meters from nose to tail-tip

Wingspan: ~3.5 meters

Mass: 250.7 kg

…

“You do this with raptors?” Fathom asked, inspecting the shiny surgical tools. He had helped Pryce move the heavy animal back out of the ship, and watched as Pryce set up his workstation.

“Yes, don’t touch the tools, they are very sharp and can hurt you,” Pryce warned, not looking up from his clipboard as he double checked his list of equipment. He’d worn a full set of protective equipment and had already set up what he could before getting his hands dirty since he was the only one here – well, the only human here. He doubted Fathom could be of much assistance in the dissection.

“How far away was this gryphon?” Pryce asked as he worked, making an incision down the torso to extract and preserve the organs.

“Gryphon was more far from here than my home, but not very far,” Fathom said.

“So they could attack me?”

“Maybe, but I do not see gryphons near beaches. Gryphons live in places with tall grass and not many trees,” the dragon said, flicking his tongue out as the tantalizing organs were exposed to the air.

“Tell me about what animals that might try to kill me.”

Pryce heard Fathom hum, and he took a rather concerning amount of time to think about how to best answer this request.

“Why are you taking so much time?” Pryce asked, placing the liver into a jar as Fathom sat outside of his field of view, gazing longingly at the rich organ.

“I am thinking,” Fathom said, not lying. “Few things can hurt dragon, hard to think of what can hurt human, many animals will not fight me but can kill you.”

“Makes sense,” Pryce said, removing the lungs. “Take your time, I need to know what to look out for here.”

“Mmm…sometimes I see animal that look like gorillas,” Fathom said, mentioning the extinct animals that only existed in drawings or low-quality photographs.

“Do they have six limbs?” Pryce asked.

“Yes, they walk on two legs and four arms, they use two arms as legs most times.”

“Great,” Pryce sighed, “How big are they?”

“Shorter than human, maybe one and a half meters.”

“Oh, that’s not so bad,” Pryce said, breathing a sigh of relief and immediately regretting it as he got a good whiff of the gryphon’s internal organs.

“Gorillas have more mass than they look, heavier than this gryphon. Maybe one and a half gryphons of mass.”

“That’s…around three hundred kilograms? That is a lot of mass,” Pryce said, his head partway inside the chest cavity as he examined something.

“Yes, they are also…hard.”

“Hard?” Pryce asked, depositing the stomach into an empty jar.

“Yes, they have…thing that feel like scales, but are not. I do not have words for it,” the dragon said, dissatisfied.

“That’s not a big deal, I just need to know about them. Do they live in groups?”

“Yes, sometimes many gorillas together. They like to live on top of…very small mountains.”

“Those are called ‘hills’.”

“They like to live on top of hills. If predator come, then they become like globe, spin down hill.”

“What?” Pryce suppressed a chuckle at the ridiculous image. He supposed it would be pretty terrifying to see 300-kilogram spheres rolling down a hill towards you, but it was also completely absurd, he’d never heard anything like it. He vaguely recalled a spider that tossed itself off of sand dunes to roll down hill, but that was to escape predators, not an offensive maneuver.

“Yes, they are strange. They like to live on hills close to but not in forest, so if you are in forest you maybe not see them. They mostly eat fruit, so they maybe not try to eat you,” the dragon added, as though he meant this to be reassuring.

“That’s…good, I guess,” Pryce said, mentally labeling them as a moderate threat below the raptors, but not above the gryphons. “I’ll call them…” he chuckled at ‘gorolla’, but felt that he should probably name them something more serious. Asura was fitting for a humanoid with 6 limbs, but it didn’t seem fitting. “…Armorilla,” he decided. “Maybe I change this name later,” he added. It felt a little silly.

“What does Armorilla mean? Sound is like Gorilla,” Fathom noted.

“Armor is something humans wear to protect ourselves, like scales made of metal. You said gorillas are hard, it sounds like they have armor, so I name them armorilla.”

“Dragon have similar thing, make two words sound like one to name thing that is like the two words,” he hummed.

“Makes sense. Any other interesting animals I should know about?”

“One animal that does not have danger is one that look like turtle, but is very big. Maybe 4 or 7 meters, old turtles much bigger than young turtles.”

“If it’s on land, then it’s a tortoise,” Pryce said, having difficulty imagining the bulk of such a creature. Most animals he’d seen so far – including dragons – were long and sleek. Sure Fathom was a jaw-dropping 13.5 meters in length, but a creature 7 meters in diameter with a thick shell was nothing to scoff at either. “Let me guess, 6 legs?” He guessed, clumsily drawing out the seemingly endless loops of lower intestines. He actually didn’t have a jar big enough, he realized too late.

“Yes,” Fathom said, looking longingly at the intestines like they were noodles.

“You want to eat these?” Pryce offered, and Fathom snapped them up so quickly he had to check if his fingers were all still attached. He glared at the dragon’s stunt, but Fathom was too busy slurping up his treat to pay him any mind.

“Tortoise is black, has things like…horns on shell, but in many directions,” Fathom said once he had mostly finished his snack. He gestured a sort of fan-shape with his talons to carry his point.

“Interesting species, I’ll name them black tortoises,” Pryce said. “They sound hard to hunt.”

“Many animals try to hunt black tortoise, but black tortoise shell too strong. Only dragons can hunt them. Taste very good,” he said proudly as he licked his chops.

“How do you hunt them if their shell is so strong and horn…has horns?” Pryce asked, catching himself at the last second. “Wait, let me guess; you throw rocks at them.”

“Yes.”

Pryce felt a brief pang of sympathy for these poor animals that had to compete with rock-throwing fire-breathing dragons. They never stood a chance. Then again, perhaps it was better for an animal to live here than on the mainland; one thousand dragons could only eat so much compared to 50 million humans.

Pryce tried to extract the kidneys, but accidently poked a hole in a sac that ran along the back of the gryphon’s torso, near the spine. It somewhat resembled a fish’s air bladder, and made a high-pitched wheezing sound as it deflated. He suspected it stored either hydrogen or oxygen.

“I wonder what that sac was for,” he muttered as he returned his attention to the other organs.

“That was hydrogen,” Fathom said helpfully.

Pryce froze mid-cut. “What?”

“That gas that come out. Is hydrogen,” the dragon reiterated plainly.

“How do you know that?” Pryce asked incredulously. He was going to run some tests on it to confirm his suspicions, like burning what gas was left in the sac. Once he removed it, of course, he didn’t want to blow up the carcass – especially not with him practically inside of it.

“I can smell hydrogen, you cannot?”

“No I can’t smell hydrogen,” Pryce said drily, realizing it would be useful for a dragon to be able to smell hydrogen. It would mean the presence of another dragon, or at least some other hydrogen-producing creature. If they expelled some of that gas inside of a cave it could stay trapped against the ceilings for some time. “Can gryphons make fire?” Pryce asked while he cut out the large heart; it was disproportionately large, and he could tell it had the double aortic arch like a raptor did. Perhaps he should create a classification for the species that shared this…diaortic trait.

“Small fire, they use to make fire with grass to hunt,” Fathom explained, surprising Pryce with this application. It must be very dangerous, so they probably had interesting strategies for that. Either that or they simply preyed upon the animals that were killed or incapacitated by the wildfire.

“Gryphons hunt together?”

“Yes, but not with large groups.”

“Do you think they’re smart? Or have language?” Pryce asked, conflicted between feeling excited at so many intelligent species and frustrated at how difficult it would be to reach out to any of them. He doubted any would be interested to sit down and chat like Fathom had been unless they also liked shiny things.

“I do not know,” Fathom said, shrugging his wings. “Gryphon maybe smart, maybe not. They make noises at other gryphons, but I not sure if this is language.”

“Let’s not kill any more things that maybe have language,” Pryce said, glancing at Fathom to see how he would take this.

“Why?” The dragon blinked, sounding curious but not defensive.

“Because…” Pryce shrugged, unsure how to explain why one should not kill. “Do dragons kill dragons?”

“Yes, but this is very rare. Most dragons fight and loser goes away.”

“Why do dragons usually not kill dragons?”

This time it was Fathom’s turn to struggle to justify what he had evidently thought was obvious. “When dragon die, then we need to…be in group,” Fathom said, tossing his head in irritation. “What is English for people to be near other people, but not in group?”

“That is a meeting,” Pryce answered, curious to see where Fathom was going with this.

“When dragon die, we have meeting, think who have egg. We see who is best at flying, or best at hunting, or best at singing, or strongest, things like that. If dragons often kill dragons then it is…” he trailed off, making a vague motion with his talons.

“Complicated?” Pryce asked, and Fathom bobbed his head in response. “Do all dragons come to this meeting?” Pryce was doubtful this was the case, especially given that this island was about 3300 kilometers from tip to tip. If this meeting took place in the middle, then a dragon might have to fly 1650 kilometers, close to the distance a dragon could cover in a day and a half of flying…which was coincidentally how far Fathom had said he could fly, so perhaps –

“No,” Fathom said emphatically, invalidating Pryce’s hypothesis with a single word. “This island have five…areas. Dragon in one area meet dragon in same area.”

“Like provinces,” Pryce said in realization, it was sort of an obvious solution in retrospect.

“From south of island, provinces have around 300 dragons, 250 dragons, 200 dragons, 150 dragons, 100 dragons.”

“You only need to say ‘From south of the island, provinces have around 300, 250, 200, 150, and 100 dragons,” Pryce corrected.

“Understand.”

“Why so few dragons in the north of the island?” Pryce asked, wondering if the provinces were smaller or if the population was just less dense.

“North have storms, remember? Less dragons want to be there,” Fathom said.

“So north has more territory, less dragons, but more storms,” Pryce summarized, finally freeing the gryphon’s heart. He had finished removing the major internal organs and now began examining the muscles and bones.

“Yes,” Fathom confirmed with a bob of his head.

“Very interesting,” Pryce noted, referring to both dragon society and the muscles he was examining. There were inflated sacs in the muscles, but for what purpose Pryce could not tell. “Thing that holds liquid or gas like this is a ‘sac’, do you know what these sacs are used for?”

“Sac is like…muscle.”

“What?” Pryce asked, baffled by this explanation.

“Gas move in sac, can make wings move,” Fathom said, demonstrating as he flapped his wings, his chest muscles rippled and flexed. He even seemed to flex his forelegs, oddly enough, and Pryce noticed how the muscles – and apparently gas sacs – in the lower body worked to power the wings.

“Your body uses…pneumatics?!” He stammered in disbelief.

“What is that?” Fathom of course did not understand what Pryce was so amazed by.

“You…push gas to do things,” Pryce explained faintly. “Humans make machines that push gas to do work, called pneumatics. If machines push liquid to do work, it is hydraulics.” He considered several explanations as he spoke; perhaps the gas sacs just acted as extra oxygen reserves for the muscles, or they were hydrogen reserves, or they acted as shock absorbers rather than muscles, and some of these ideas weren’t mutually exclusive either.

“Strange,” Fathom shrugged lightly, evidently accepting this topic was beyond his grasp for now.

There was one thing Pryce could do to test his hypothesis; the gryphon’s wings were in an awkwardly raised position, which had struck Pryce as odd, but he assumed that rigor mortis was responsible for it. To test this, he cut several sacs on the left side of the chest and watched the wingtip stiffly lowering as it lost pressure.

Pryce blew out an exasperated sigh, though a smile crept across his face. “Animals on this island are very strange.”

“Animals from your island are not strange…but not strange is strange for me,” Fathom mused with a shrug.

“Yes, but the animals here still seem to be…more,” Pryce said vaguely.

“I know one animal that is not like any you show me,” Fathom said, sounding excited at the chance to be the one doing the shocking.

“Tell me,” Pryce said, sitting down for a break.

“This animal is 4 or 5 meters long, 2 or 3 meters tall, grey, have four legs, two arms, one big horn on head.”

Pryce blinked. “Can you tell me more…?”

Fathom paused to think for a few seconds before shrugging helplessly, giving up on words to to sketch something into the sand.

“I…have no idea what this is supposed to look like,” Pryce said, trying and failing to imagine such a creature. “Are those it’s arms? Why are it’s arms so much longer than it’s legs?”

“Maybe arms are…not longer than leg,” Fathom said, scratching his neck. “I did not look very much,” he added defensively.

“Uh-huh,” Pryce said. “Where does this thing live? Do I need to worry about it?”

“This animal is not here much, they use arms to eat leafs and fruits. And they are too big to be in places with many trees.”

“Okay, that’s good to know. Oh, I forgot to ask; how many raptors are here?”

“I don’t know, some groups there, some groups there. I hunt them and they disappear, then many days later more raptors come,” Fathom rumbled balefully as he mentioned the loathsome creatures, who were apparently a sort of vermin to dragons.

“So if I go into forest, will raptors find me?”

“Yes, you probably die,” Fathom said bluntly.

“But you hunted them not long ago, yes?”

“Yes, I hunt many raptors, but never no raptors near here,” Fathom grumbled peevishly.

“Okay, no going into the forest then.” Pryce sighed. He thought as much, but he still would’ve liked to explore.

“There are also many bugs in forest, some drink blood,” Fathom said, adding sympathetically, “You…do not have scales…”

“Yeah, we have those too, they’re called mosquitos, maybe one centimeter long. How big are they here?”

“Maybe…five centimeters?”

Pryce felt himself pale a little.

“Why haven’t I seen any yet?” He asked, confused but grateful that he had not yet had that displeasure.

“They not here, and not near my home, but forests sometimes have many mosquitos. I do not know why.”

“Wait, how do you know mosquitoes drink blood? You have scales everywhere.”

Fathom flicked his webbed spines in annoyance and shifted his wings pointedly.

“Ah, right, stupid question.” Pryce rubbed his neck sheepishly. “What other bugs might attack me?”

“There are many insects. There are insects that are one-half-meter long that can fly, and sometimes I see half-meter long spiders that jump from tree to eat birds.”

And just like that, Pryce no longer had any urge to explore the forest.

“I forgot, some birds smaller than vermillion birds hunt small animals like you,” Fathom said as Pryce examined the gryphon’s beak, trying to find the organ that ignited the gas.

“Okay, how big are these birds?” Pryce asked, speaking into the gryphon’s fanged beak.

“Some are maybe half meter long, largest is orange and red bird, like sunset. This bird is maybe 4 meters long, 6 meters wide. Smaller than vermillion bird.”

“Alright, I’ll call this one a phoenix. It’s the name of a mythical bird,” Pryce answered before Fathom could ask.

“More mythical animals?” Fathom tossed his head in a manner that made Pryce feel as though the dragon had rolled his eyes.

“Yes,” Pryce muttered. He couldn’t find anything inside of the beak that looked like it could generate a spark, so how did these animals do it?

“Hey, how do you light your fires? You make a snap sound, right?” He asked, approximating the sound with a finger snap.

“You mean this?” The dragon asked, making the electrical snapping noise.

“Yes, that, you called it small lightning, right?” Pryce had forgotten the name until just now.

“Yes, this is how we light fire.”

“Where do you make the spark in your mouth? Can I see it?” Fathom had begun to bring a talon to his mouth, but he stopped upon hearing Pryce’s second question and shied away, bringing his head a little closer to his body in a nervous manner.

“What?” Pryce asked, then realized he was holding a scalpel. “I won’t hurt you,” he said reassuringly as he hastily put down the tool. “I just want to see what makes spark.”

“Hmm…okay…” The dragon said warily, and opened his mouth for inspection.

“Can you point at the thing that makes spark?” Pryce asked, and Fathom’s tongue flicked out of its fleshy sheath to point at the middle of his upper lip and lower lip. Pryce looked closer, wincing a little – the dragon’s breath didn’t smell great.

There was an oddly colored spot on the rim of the lips, but aside from that fact it did not seem like anything special. “If I touch it, can you make it spark?”

“No touch,” Fathom grumbled, perfectly clearly despite his mouth still open. His voice only sounded different, not unintelligible like it would be if a human tried it.

“How are you talking with your mouth open?” Pryce asked, remembering he also talked quite well with the gryphon in his mouth too.

“Why do you need to open and close your mouth to talk?” Fathom returned, drawing his head away now.

“But…then why did you open and close your mouth to talk when we first met?” Stammered Pryce, unable to make sense of this.

“I thought it was like thumbs up,” Fathom shrugged.

“Oh…well, you’d make one hell of a ventriloquist,” Pryce muttered.

“I do not understand those words.”

“Sorry, not important,” Pryce said, shaking his head. He’d finally finished dissecting all of the gryphon’s major organs and limbs, though his examinations had been surface-level at best. There was simply no time or reason to dive deep into their biology right now.

However, he did plan to conduct some tests tomorrow, specifically to determine the makeup of the bones; they were much less dense than normal bones, and had an odd grey tint to them.

“So, I go to your home the day after tomorrow, right?”

“Yes, what are we going to do tomorrow?”

Pryce smiled, “I have an idea to measure your mass.”

[JOURNAL ENTRY]

Day 38,

After extensive discussions today, I have come to the conclusion that life on this island is insane.

I have no idea why the organisms here seem so…extra.

The simple answer is more competition, but why? What makes this island different from ours? The climate is significantly warmer and temperature, maybe that has something to do with it.

A more baffling question is why aren’t there more hexapedal animals on the mainland? We have hexapedal aquatic animals, but only a handful of them live on land. Perhaps some tetrapodal creature established a population there first, and outcompeted any incoming hexapedal populations? But that doesn’t really make sense...

One possible explanation is that the lower temperature climate means less energy in the biosphere, which could mean that the advantage of an extra set of limbs is mitigated by the cost to grow them… Which would explain why only a few species are able to survive.

As for a lack of large predators, perhaps the lack of a large prey species meant there was no reason for the predators on our island to grow any larger.

I’m not satisfied with these answers, but it’s not like this is a case of simple cause and effect either.

An organism consists of countless molecules

A species consists of countless organisms

An ecosystem consists of countless species

A climate consists of countless more molecules stimulated by the Sun, Earth, Moon, and even the stars.

That is what a biosphere is – the interplay of all of these factors at once, working in tandem to become something more than the sum of its parts.

That is what we seek to understand.

Perhaps one day, someone will.

Wound progress update: The wound appears to have nearly completed the healing process; the scab is in the process of falling off.