Below the Sewers

The Forbiddance is so old it is not even a magic anymore. And the danger of such a thing is that one can learn to take it for granted, to assume that what has been before will always remain. We should know better. Our history is made of knowing better. But we forget. In this, we are like the humans. We also can forget, can choose to remember memories over facts. Sometimes there are holes, gaps caused by our comings and goings. The humans have stories of us, of course. Some have seen our city, and call it civilization.

It is nothing. Far under the earth, in caverns of evermoss and the old waters, made of trees and stones and sands. It is large, larger than the vast city that hums above us, but it is all that is left. Once the surface was ours. They say other worlds, too, sometimes, in the very old stories. The ones that contain only the truth that is myth. Once the world was ours, or nearly so. No one agrees about what changed. But one day the world turned against us, and none of our magics could stop the future. We turned inward. Fled to one point. Built our city far under the earth.

We were safe, until the humans came. We killed them, at first, but each death put a hole in the Forbiddance. Allowed them entry into our city. After the first place, we fell back. Rebuilt the old magic. Became stories that never quite dwindled into legend. Cultivated our freedom at the expense of many things. It is more important to be safe than to be free. Safety was survival. Still, some came, with curiosity deep enough to push through the Forbiddance. Some we left live. Others we drove out or tricked.

And still more humans came. The land above us became a city, the weight of it a promise. But we were not forever. They will not be forever. We can wait, until the world forgives us. Until we can reclaim what was lost. We cultivate detachment. We discover respect. We try to become a deeper part of the is that is the world.

The boy. The boy comes walking down one of the old tunnels. He is belting out a human song at the top of his lungs as if the darkness was never a thing to be feared, as though he was not lost far beyond the lands he knows. I move closer, blending into shadow and stone. There are tricks and snares to force him away. I slow. He is eleven. I do not know how I know this, or why it matters.

He stops. Smiles, showing mammal teeth, but it is even so a smile. “Hi! I’m Jay!”

“I am Hkri,” I say, and only after realize he has spoken in our tongue. No human knows the tongue of the People. It is not taught.

“I’m having an adventure and maybe got lost, but that’s an important part of adventures.” He holds up a human contraption in one hand. “I brought a flashlight,” he says proudly, and his pride is as old as any scale I have known. I think, sometimes, that we are the source of their stories about dragons, but Jay’s pride would put a dragon to shame.

“You should not be here.”

“But if I only went where I should be, I wouldn’t have adventures! And did you know I’ve never met a lizard person before?”

“I did not. We’ve never met,” I add, though it seems absurd.

“Oh! But we just did, and we’re friends,” he says, and I would swear the saying makes it so.

There is power here that goes deeper than any I know. “It is dangerous to our magic if you remain.”

Jay scratches his head. “I don’t think so? It had lots of holes and I fixed those bindings like a jayboss does.”

I still a moment, as if under the sun or before a kill. I sing a fragment of the old Work, and listen to the Forbiddance. It is clear, whole in a way so deep I did not known it was broken until now. “What are you?” I ask, and I’m so shocked I speak in a human tongue.

“I’m Jay,” he says, as if that was an explanation enough. “Also! I have some friends who might want to meet you and I bet if you cultivate jaysome then it will be okay!”

I have no idea what he means.

I find myself saying yes.

Some things, there is no detachment from, and his smile of joy is one of those.