It's been four days since Eeri, Azazor and Kickan left Fort Beacon towards the Oflovak's Halt. Four carefree days, following the road crossing the Sea of Wood without a hitch. Travelling with a Ranger who knows the way well is of great help. And if it is not the fatigue due to the walk and especially to the environment which seems to absorb their energy, the crossing has for the moment nothing to do with what the two Fyros lived the last time. Tonight, the three homins built a fire, the first one since they left the Beacon. In front of this saving fire, this fire that warms the soul and the body, Azazor is pensive. Since their departure, he has hardly spoken, remaining mute. Also, when he begins to speak that evening, the two other homins look at him, incredulous.
"Hmm, Kickan..."
"Yes Azazor?"
The fyros pauses for a moment, as if he had trouble asking his question. This one seems to set his mind and eyes on fire, unless it is the reflection of the flames of the fire before them. Then, with a sigh, the question finally came out, like a crackling ember.
"Do you believe in the Great Dragon?"
Eeri, who until now had been stirring the embers with a stick, pauses and glances at Kickan, waiting for his answer.
"Like every homin, I have heard of this story. The Dragon who comes to Atys, Jena who pushes him away with her light and sends him into the depths. It's something everyone knows."
"And you believe that?"
"You know here, we don't have too much time to look into that kind of thing. Where you're from, I can see how we might think about the foundations of myths, but here, we mostly think about survival."
Eeri lets out a sigh as she drops her stick into the fire and turns to Azazor.
"Aza, I have a question about your Fyrak tooth..."
"It's not a tooth, it's a chip of a tooth."
"Yeah, well, whatever. Why didn't you show it when you first told us your story?"
"I'm not Husyrech. I wanted you to believe me without proof, to test your faith."
Eeri has a start of laughter which she refrains at once. If she wants to get the Fyros to talk, it's best not to rush him right away.
"And then, seeing that it was not sufficient, I considered showing it to you. But in the meantime, I had noticed something."
He let a silence pass, as if he was waiting to be asked the question. Far away in the mist, an armadai utters a plaintive bellow. In the absence of any question, the former legionnaire goes on.
"The tooth chip seems to be made of the same material as the Karavan machines."
Eeri smiles. She too had noticed it. Azazor pulls out the sliver of tooth from a pocket in his armor and makes it glow in front of the fire.
"When I saw Fyrak, he opened his mouth and..."
"And you threw a spear in his teeth, I know, you've told it before."
"ney, and that's when a shard of tooth must have embedded itself in my armor, because once the Kamis teleported me away from the Dragon, I noticed the piece of tooth, stuck into my breastplate."
Kickan, a slight smile on his lips, murmurs a suggestion:
"Couldn't it simply be a hallucination?"
Azazor then looks at him intensely, as if trying to pierce the intent in the Tryker's words. Then he turns to Eeri and asks her:
"You, what do you think?"
"If it's a hallucination?"
"ney"
"Well... I'm not questioning your good faith, but I don't think you went down deep enough to run into Fyrak. Let alone survive it."
"What about the tooth?"
"I don't know."
Azazor mumbles something unintelligible, then adds:
"Do you want to know the bottom of my thoughts?"
"Is that wise?" tries Eeri, with an amused look on her face. In front of the Fyros' one, she immediately regrets. However, his answer surprises her.
"You are right Eeri, it is illogical that I could have met Fyrak."
He lets pass a new silence then adds:
"But there is the tooth chip. I think that this one is a piece of a machine from the Karavan. Same material, so probably same source. So one of two things. Either Fyrak is a Karavan creation. A kind of... ship. Which wouldn't be stupid. I had already come to the same conclusion in my volume 4 of the symbology.
"Symbo what?" the Tryker wonders.
"Symbology, the science of symbols. Have you read it Eeri?"
"Yep, but from there to giving you an abstract, now, at the drop of a hat..."
"Never mind. In this tome, I hypothesize that the Karavan came to Atys on the back of the Dragon. cak fyr kam pyr lik, that is 'earth heat sap water plant'. Our planet, Atys, is posterior to the heat of the Dragon. Then came the sap of the Kamis, water and plant life."
The Tryker looks at Eeri dumbfounded. You can feel that he is holding back from laughing. But Eeri becomes strangely more serious.
"Anyway, first hypothesis, Fyrak is a material creation of the Karavan. His vessel in a way. The other hypothesis is more daring."
A gust of wind makes the flames of the campfire flicker, before it resumes its burning.
"Whoa, the fire will eventually go out with all this wind," Kickan worries.
"Wind is to fire what absence is to love. It extinguishes the little one and lights up the big one."
"Well, instead of playing the two-dapper poet, tell us: what's your other hypothesis?" insists Eeri.
"Poetry is to life what fire is to wood. It emanates from it and transforms it," Azazor says, with an amused gaze.
"Aza!"
This one looks at his listeners. He takes great pleasure in seeing them in the waiting, especially Eeri. So this is what the teachers at the Imperial Academy feel like, when they talk to their captivated students? Clearing his throat, he resumes:
"The other hypothesis I was saying, well, I've just never seen Fyrak. Not even a machine."
Eeri takes a deep breath, as if about to say something, but the Fyros follows up.
"My seeing Fyrak would be some kind of hallucination. Or a dream. Maybe even a dream sent by the Kamis. I have read many accounts of homins who have traveled to Primes Roots and returned alive. But how did they get down there? How did they survive the kitins that swarm below? The simplest solution to this puzzle is that they simply never made the journey they describe. That it's all a dream. As if they were paused by the Kamis for a time, living an adventure in a dream as they lay in a corner of a rift or a tunnel in the Prime Roots."
"Would the Kamis be capable of that kind of thing?" asks Kickan, intrigued.
"I don't know. But the most pious Zorais talk about a journey. They say that when they reach kami age, they become one with the Kamis. This is called Enlightenment. So it doesn't seem unlikely to me, quite the contrary. Except that there is a snag."
The two homins raise an eyebrow at the same time. Their synchronization is comical. These two have found each other. Azazor doesn't even notice it, too obsessed with explaining his vision of things.
"The snag is the tooth shard. That said, maybe I got it through other ways without realizing it. For example, by banging a Karavan artifact in the depths, the kind of artifact you sometimes see in the Lands of Umbra, all in a half-awake state. A dream where you move anyway."
"Or a facetious Kami slipped it into your pocket while you were sleeping," Kickan suggests.
The Tryker, unable to hold it any longer, bursts out laughing, too happy with his joke. Eeri also starts to laugh mechanically, but one feels that she tries to control herself, not wanting to block the discussion when it becomes interesting. The Fyros remains impassive, waiting for the giggles to pass. Since he came back from his trip underground, he is used to being laughed at. It changes him from the jokes about his belly. Kickan wipes his tears while looking at Eeri with laughing eyes. This one returns him his smile and turns again his head towards Azazor who continues to explain.
"Nothing is impossible. Still, the most probable hypothesis is indeed the dream. The question then arises as to why."
Taking the voice of an old sage, Kickan murmurs :
"And yes, why, that is the question..."
Eeri refrains from bursting into laughter again. She would like, strangely, to hear nevertheless the end of the story. She then bites her tongue to hold back.
"Why do we believe in the Great Dragon? How is it that a large part of the homins, wherever they come from, no matter what their religion, believe in its existence? This myth of the Great Dragon is almost as persistent as that of Jena. Even among Kamists, faith in Jena is still strong among many."
"Jenaist Kamism," Eeri points out.
"ney, and it took all the strength of a Hoi-Cho for this to be gradually replaced by Kamism of Revelations."
"And according to you, where does this myth of the Great Dragon come from?"
Azazor closes his eyes, as if he was concentrating. Then he whispers in a mournful voice:
"The ashes of the Dragon, in the depths, open the way to the Truth..."
Eeri and Kickan express themselves in chorus:
"What??"
"That is a sentence I've had in my head since I returned from the depths. A kind of mantra. I don't know where it comes from. But I think I understood what it meant."
Eeri thinks that the more time passes, the more Azazor grows crazy. From a grouchy but nevertheless valiant legionary, he has become some kind of old fool rambling unintelligible stuff. So this is what it means to become old? Yet she is hardly younger than he is. It doesn't make you want to get old. Or maybe it's spending too much time in the Imperial Library.
"I believe that the Kamis, in sending me this dream and introducing me to this 'Dragon's tooth' intended to send me a message. This tooth fragment is a piece of some Karavan machine. But it was all a dream, except for this artifact. Perhaps then the Dragon..."
He lets his sentence die out and glances at Eeri, who is getting annoyed.
"What the hell? What?"
"Perhaps the Dragon of Myth is also a dream. A dream sent by the Karavan."
Suddenly there is silence, only disturbed by the roar of an armadai in the distance.
"You mean Fyrak wouldn't exist? But you're crazy!" enraged Eeri.
"I don't really know. But it doesn't seem so crazy to me."
"You, Azazor, Fyros from head to your filthy toes, did you just say that you don't believe in Fyrak?"
"I didn't say that, I said it was a hypothesis."
"Because you had a dream about a dragon and found a piece of a Karavan ship as a tooth?"
"When you put it like that, it's a weak demonstration. But there are other reasons to think so."
"Like what?"
"Who forbids us to descend into the depths? The Karavan. Because of what? The Dragon. Not the kitins. That they didn't use the kitins to scare us off suggests that the Karavan didn't even know their existence. So... In this case, the myth of the Dragon may have been by them made up. It's very convenient, so the Karavan looks like a good person, who defeated him, and no one is eager to go down to the very depths.
"And fwhat's in the Karavan's interest if we don't go down?"
"Preventing us to find things like that," answers Azazor, pointing to the 'tooth'. I am sure that the depths are full of this kind of artifact. There is this strange artifact mentioned by Pylos Cetheus in the book sel ûr atalbem ûr selak, and of course those that can be found in the Prime Roots accessible from the New Lands. As I once mentioned in a book about the drills, there is also a rumor that these were bringing up artifacts from underground and that was why they had been stopped in 2494."
"A kind of Big Bad to scare people," Eeri murmured.
"ney, but what the Karavan hadn't thought of was that the Fyros would like fire. So a huge beast spitting fire could only arouse their curiosity.
He lets a silence hover again, the time for them to digest the information, then resumes :
"Given the incendiary content of this hypothesis, you understand Eeri why I didn't even dare to broach the subject in the New Lands. The Karavan has ears... You Eeri, a Trytonist, can understand..."
"What... WHAT? But I'm not a Tr..."
Seeing Azazor's smile, she stops. The bastard, he plays with her nerves. A point for him. The Fyros continues:
"'The ashes of the Dragon, in the depths, open the way to the Truth.', this is a metaphor.
"I won't give a shit about metaphors," grumbles Eeri.
"A meta what?" asks Kickan.
"A metaphor, an image. The Dragon's quest, in short, is the quest for the Truth."
Kickan massages his temples while blowing.
"I don't know if it's the Sea of Wood or what you're saying, but I'm getting a headache."
"Yeah, the claim of Fyrak not existing, that's too much for me tonight. I'm going to go sleeping," adds Eeri.
While saying so, she throws an angry glance towards Azazor. How can he know what her deepest beliefs are? Is it that obvious? The Fyros doesn't look at her and put his 'tooth' back into his breastplate, keeping his eyes fixed on the fire.
"ney, that's a lot for tonight. It is indeed time to go to sleep."
The two Fyros and the Tryker each snuggle into their animal hide. The nights are cool down here. On the desolate plain, an armadai is mooing to call for a mate.
"Hmm, Kickan..."
"Yes Azazor?"
The fyros pauses for a moment, as if he had trouble asking his question. This one seems to set his mind and eyes on fire, unless it is the reflection of the flames of the fire before them. Then, with a sigh, the question finally came out, like a crackling ember.
"Do you believe in the Great Dragon?"
Eeri, who until now had been stirring the embers with a stick, pauses and glances at Kickan, waiting for his answer.
"Like every homin, I have heard of this story. The Dragon who comes to Atys, Jena who pushes him away with her light and sends him into the depths. It's something everyone knows."
"And you believe that?"
"You know here, we don't have too much time to look into that kind of thing. Where you're from, I can see how we might think about the foundations of myths, but here, we mostly think about survival."
Eeri lets out a sigh as she drops her stick into the fire and turns to Azazor.
"Aza, I have a question about your Fyrak tooth..."
"It's not a tooth, it's a chip of a tooth."
"Yeah, well, whatever. Why didn't you show it when you first told us your story?"
"I'm not Husyrech. I wanted you to believe me without proof, to test your faith."
Eeri has a start of laughter which she refrains at once. If she wants to get the Fyros to talk, it's best not to rush him right away.
"And then, seeing that it was not sufficient, I considered showing it to you. But in the meantime, I had noticed something."
He let a silence pass, as if he was waiting to be asked the question. Far away in the mist, an armadai utters a plaintive bellow. In the absence of any question, the former legionnaire goes on.
"The tooth chip seems to be made of the same material as the Karavan machines."
Eeri smiles. She too had noticed it. Azazor pulls out the sliver of tooth from a pocket in his armor and makes it glow in front of the fire.
"When I saw Fyrak, he opened his mouth and..."
"And you threw a spear in his teeth, I know, you've told it before."
"ney, and that's when a shard of tooth must have embedded itself in my armor, because once the Kamis teleported me away from the Dragon, I noticed the piece of tooth, stuck into my breastplate."
Kickan, a slight smile on his lips, murmurs a suggestion:
"Couldn't it simply be a hallucination?"
Azazor then looks at him intensely, as if trying to pierce the intent in the Tryker's words. Then he turns to Eeri and asks her:
"You, what do you think?"
"If it's a hallucination?"
"ney"
"Well... I'm not questioning your good faith, but I don't think you went down deep enough to run into Fyrak. Let alone survive it."
"What about the tooth?"
"I don't know."
Azazor mumbles something unintelligible, then adds:
"Do you want to know the bottom of my thoughts?"
"Is that wise?" tries Eeri, with an amused look on her face. In front of the Fyros' one, she immediately regrets. However, his answer surprises her.
"You are right Eeri, it is illogical that I could have met Fyrak."
He lets pass a new silence then adds:
"But there is the tooth chip. I think that this one is a piece of a machine from the Karavan. Same material, so probably same source. So one of two things. Either Fyrak is a Karavan creation. A kind of... ship. Which wouldn't be stupid. I had already come to the same conclusion in my volume 4 of the symbology.
"Symbo what?" the Tryker wonders.
"Symbology, the science of symbols. Have you read it Eeri?"
"Yep, but from there to giving you an abstract, now, at the drop of a hat..."
"Never mind. In this tome, I hypothesize that the Karavan came to Atys on the back of the Dragon. cak fyr kam pyr lik, that is 'earth heat sap water plant'. Our planet, Atys, is posterior to the heat of the Dragon. Then came the sap of the Kamis, water and plant life."
The Tryker looks at Eeri dumbfounded. You can feel that he is holding back from laughing. But Eeri becomes strangely more serious.
"Anyway, first hypothesis, Fyrak is a material creation of the Karavan. His vessel in a way. The other hypothesis is more daring."
A gust of wind makes the flames of the campfire flicker, before it resumes its burning.
"Whoa, the fire will eventually go out with all this wind," Kickan worries.
"Wind is to fire what absence is to love. It extinguishes the little one and lights up the big one."
"Well, instead of playing the two-dapper poet, tell us: what's your other hypothesis?" insists Eeri.
"Poetry is to life what fire is to wood. It emanates from it and transforms it," Azazor says, with an amused gaze.
"Aza!"
This one looks at his listeners. He takes great pleasure in seeing them in the waiting, especially Eeri. So this is what the teachers at the Imperial Academy feel like, when they talk to their captivated students? Clearing his throat, he resumes:
"The other hypothesis I was saying, well, I've just never seen Fyrak. Not even a machine."
Eeri takes a deep breath, as if about to say something, but the Fyros follows up.
"My seeing Fyrak would be some kind of hallucination. Or a dream. Maybe even a dream sent by the Kamis. I have read many accounts of homins who have traveled to Primes Roots and returned alive. But how did they get down there? How did they survive the kitins that swarm below? The simplest solution to this puzzle is that they simply never made the journey they describe. That it's all a dream. As if they were paused by the Kamis for a time, living an adventure in a dream as they lay in a corner of a rift or a tunnel in the Prime Roots."
"Would the Kamis be capable of that kind of thing?" asks Kickan, intrigued.
"I don't know. But the most pious Zorais talk about a journey. They say that when they reach kami age, they become one with the Kamis. This is called Enlightenment. So it doesn't seem unlikely to me, quite the contrary. Except that there is a snag."
The two homins raise an eyebrow at the same time. Their synchronization is comical. These two have found each other. Azazor doesn't even notice it, too obsessed with explaining his vision of things.
"The snag is the tooth shard. That said, maybe I got it through other ways without realizing it. For example, by banging a Karavan artifact in the depths, the kind of artifact you sometimes see in the Lands of Umbra, all in a half-awake state. A dream where you move anyway."
"Or a facetious Kami slipped it into your pocket while you were sleeping," Kickan suggests.
The Tryker, unable to hold it any longer, bursts out laughing, too happy with his joke. Eeri also starts to laugh mechanically, but one feels that she tries to control herself, not wanting to block the discussion when it becomes interesting. The Fyros remains impassive, waiting for the giggles to pass. Since he came back from his trip underground, he is used to being laughed at. It changes him from the jokes about his belly. Kickan wipes his tears while looking at Eeri with laughing eyes. This one returns him his smile and turns again his head towards Azazor who continues to explain.
"Nothing is impossible. Still, the most probable hypothesis is indeed the dream. The question then arises as to why."
Taking the voice of an old sage, Kickan murmurs :
"And yes, why, that is the question..."
Eeri refrains from bursting into laughter again. She would like, strangely, to hear nevertheless the end of the story. She then bites her tongue to hold back.
"Why do we believe in the Great Dragon? How is it that a large part of the homins, wherever they come from, no matter what their religion, believe in its existence? This myth of the Great Dragon is almost as persistent as that of Jena. Even among Kamists, faith in Jena is still strong among many."
"Jenaist Kamism," Eeri points out.
"ney, and it took all the strength of a Hoi-Cho for this to be gradually replaced by Kamism of Revelations."
"And according to you, where does this myth of the Great Dragon come from?"
Azazor closes his eyes, as if he was concentrating. Then he whispers in a mournful voice:
"The ashes of the Dragon, in the depths, open the way to the Truth..."
Eeri and Kickan express themselves in chorus:
"What??"
"That is a sentence I've had in my head since I returned from the depths. A kind of mantra. I don't know where it comes from. But I think I understood what it meant."
Eeri thinks that the more time passes, the more Azazor grows crazy. From a grouchy but nevertheless valiant legionary, he has become some kind of old fool rambling unintelligible stuff. So this is what it means to become old? Yet she is hardly younger than he is. It doesn't make you want to get old. Or maybe it's spending too much time in the Imperial Library.
"I believe that the Kamis, in sending me this dream and introducing me to this 'Dragon's tooth' intended to send me a message. This tooth fragment is a piece of some Karavan machine. But it was all a dream, except for this artifact. Perhaps then the Dragon..."
He lets his sentence die out and glances at Eeri, who is getting annoyed.
"What the hell? What?"
"Perhaps the Dragon of Myth is also a dream. A dream sent by the Karavan."
Suddenly there is silence, only disturbed by the roar of an armadai in the distance.
"You mean Fyrak wouldn't exist? But you're crazy!" enraged Eeri.
"I don't really know. But it doesn't seem so crazy to me."
"You, Azazor, Fyros from head to your filthy toes, did you just say that you don't believe in Fyrak?"
"I didn't say that, I said it was a hypothesis."
"Because you had a dream about a dragon and found a piece of a Karavan ship as a tooth?"
"When you put it like that, it's a weak demonstration. But there are other reasons to think so."
"Like what?"
"Who forbids us to descend into the depths? The Karavan. Because of what? The Dragon. Not the kitins. That they didn't use the kitins to scare us off suggests that the Karavan didn't even know their existence. So... In this case, the myth of the Dragon may have been by them made up. It's very convenient, so the Karavan looks like a good person, who defeated him, and no one is eager to go down to the very depths.
"And fwhat's in the Karavan's interest if we don't go down?"
"Preventing us to find things like that," answers Azazor, pointing to the 'tooth'. I am sure that the depths are full of this kind of artifact. There is this strange artifact mentioned by Pylos Cetheus in the book sel ûr atalbem ûr selak, and of course those that can be found in the Prime Roots accessible from the New Lands. As I once mentioned in a book about the drills, there is also a rumor that these were bringing up artifacts from underground and that was why they had been stopped in 2494."
"A kind of Big Bad to scare people," Eeri murmured.
"ney, but what the Karavan hadn't thought of was that the Fyros would like fire. So a huge beast spitting fire could only arouse their curiosity.
He lets a silence hover again, the time for them to digest the information, then resumes :
"Given the incendiary content of this hypothesis, you understand Eeri why I didn't even dare to broach the subject in the New Lands. The Karavan has ears... You Eeri, a Trytonist, can understand..."
"What... WHAT? But I'm not a Tr..."
Seeing Azazor's smile, she stops. The bastard, he plays with her nerves. A point for him. The Fyros continues:
"'The ashes of the Dragon, in the depths, open the way to the Truth.', this is a metaphor.
"I won't give a shit about metaphors," grumbles Eeri.
"A meta what?" asks Kickan.
"A metaphor, an image. The Dragon's quest, in short, is the quest for the Truth."
Kickan massages his temples while blowing.
"I don't know if it's the Sea of Wood or what you're saying, but I'm getting a headache."
"Yeah, the claim of Fyrak not existing, that's too much for me tonight. I'm going to go sleeping," adds Eeri.
While saying so, she throws an angry glance towards Azazor. How can he know what her deepest beliefs are? Is it that obvious? The Fyros doesn't look at her and put his 'tooth' back into his breastplate, keeping his eyes fixed on the fire.
"ney, that's a lot for tonight. It is indeed time to go to sleep."
The two Fyros and the Tryker each snuggle into their animal hide. The nights are cool down here. On the desolate plain, an armadai is mooing to call for a mate.