Endangered Ch. 12

***

A bitter chill had taken residence in the dark depths of his new house. Chris' breath steamed powerfully in the harsh light of his LED work lamp. His exposed fingertips were just starting to feel puffy, but the cold had never bothered him overmuch. Even back on the alpine flat-land Jethy called home, Chris had always been made of stern stuff.

Before him, hovering in perfect array, tiny black Ether-constructs shed long, neat shadows as he worked. Despite the task, his mind absently pondered the logic of his tolerance to the winter's chill.

Shouldn't a reptilian, dragon or otherwise, be extra sensitive to the cold? Shouldn't he feel sluggish and want nothing more than curl up in front of a roaring fire to wait out the bitter season?

Prideful, the dragon within him reared its indignant head, lecturing Chris even as he ran his magical touch briefly over every hovering sphere.

Apparently, dragons had the fire of magic, the very stuff of creation itself burning within them. They were not so limited, so primitive as to require hours of sunbathing merely to move about or digest a meal. Comparison with common lizards was unflattering, Chris should have known.

The young man smiled wryly, pointing out to the preening beast that it had been dozing lazily moments ago. His eye for spotting hypocrisy wasn't appreciated, and he was urged, rather sullenly, to get back to work on their mate's nest. The draconic thought patterns slowed again, lulled by thoughts of curling up beside his mates in this very room.

It was a tempting notion. For a moment, Chris was drawn into the dragon's contented fugue, imagining Petra's warm scales against his back, hearing soft breath by his ear, the quiet little hitch she sometimes made as her lungs swelled full. He could smell Claire nearby and imagined the flickering light the little firebox would shed through its grate.

It lasted only a single, sweet moment, before reality exerted itself. He was back fumbling about in the cold and dark, alone.

In its current state, the grotto wasn't nearly the welcoming sight he hoped to present to Claire and Petra in a few days. It should be warm, softly lit with the small fireplace crackling, not cold and by the harsh tones of his portable lamp. Certainly not until he had a nest of jewels and gold fit for his queens.

Each of the hovering globes before him was tasked to rectify this oversight. There were exactly a thousand of them now, little balls of astounding pressure and temperature held stable by his iron grip on the very fabric of that unseen dimension.

His power over the Ether continued to astonish. Exploring, tinkering, he'd grown ever bolder and more confident since his little extraterrestrial adventure with Hailey. More than anything else, the scale of his manipulations had grown by leaps. He was finally putting his gifts to practical use. If that first use was a little dragon-minded or becoming a touch overused, who was he to naysay?

Eyes closed, Chris reached out, his awareness brushing against orb after tiny orb. He could sense them all abstractly if he concentrated, a neat array of glowing, writhing dots. Sometimes he envisioned them as disruptions, ripple-points in an otherwise placid sea of grey immaterial fabric. Daily his skill at sensing out into the Ether improved under his practice. In his mind's eye, his orbs were as lighthouse beacons compared even to living, breathing things. It was a subtle art, 'dabbling a toe' as Arvil liked to put it.

Every sphere, every one of his Ether manipulations big or small, was connected to him. He felt them all, lurking unobtrusively in the background of his awareness until he paid them direct attention. It was as if he were a fat spider, fingers on every strand of a nascent, interdimensional web. As crazy as that sounded, the network grew every other day as he or Hailey thought up an ever-expanding list of potentially useful experiments. His confidence grew too, his manipulations spreading in secluded places around the country and further afield.

At his mental imperative, three of the dimensional pockets before him rose above the others, traversing effortlessly through thin air to hover over a chipped mug set on the floor nearby. Then as one, all thousand of them opened momentarily, releasing the one element they were otherwise ordered to imprison in solar heat and crushing pressure. Out of each sphere, a tiny, scalding-hot blob of carbon fell into the icy Denver air. They pattered pleasingly, rolling down the growing pile of their siblings that occupied the central depression of the grotto. His dragonesses would soon sleep atop a sea of gold, with diamond-sand shores. Or perhaps he could combine the properties of both somehow.

Chris tracked one gem as it raced down the twinkling mound, skittering to a smouldering stop on the reddish stone just before the toe of his boot. He squatted down, poking curiously with a fingernail until the nasty scent of burning keratin dissuaded him. This batch was just over three millimetres across, nicely smoothed, and contained perhaps the tiniest hint of a yellow tone.

He would have to wait to confirm that after they cooled, but for now he dialled back the temperature inside his little diamond factories by a small mental increment, and then set them back to work.

The three singled-out ones flew back to their positions empty. The mug was a quarter full of reject diamond slivers, glasslike and sharp enough to easily cut his smaller scales. Sometimes they just grew like that, he hadn't figured out why, and he might never. It was sort of comforting, little mysteries like that popping up every now and then to confound him. Whatever the reason, those sharp gems wouldn't do at all for the sort of activity he envisioned.

For a few more moments, he was still, sensing out to the orbs as they set back to work. He received an intimate sense of something trickling in. He knew it was fresh carbon dioxide, but the spheres didn't tell him so in words. That was his own knowledge, instilled by Hailey's lessons. Every CO2 molecule that struck the dark, semi-permeable membranes of their curved surfaces sank through and was trapped. Others, nitrogen, oxygen, and a thousand traces or particulates bounced off like water on a waxed bumper. There wasn't much going in second by second, but over time he would get another batch. If he waited a while, he might feel the temperature-liberated oxygen start to escape the orbs, but he didn't have the time or patience for that.

Content with his creations, Chris sat back on his ever denim-clad behind and began to gather his focus. Mental clarity was vital to his magic, and discipline was key on this scale.

One intense moment of visualisation, a flash of power, and Chris was gone from the grotto, racing through the Ether at the subatomic level. It was time to tend the larger cousins of his little diamond garden.

He hadn't come up with the bed of diamonds on his own; indeed, the notion was a spinoff of one of Hailey's projects. The real project turned out to be one of the easiest and by far the largest, boldest use of his magic that they were getting away with to date.

Arctic wind wrapped freezing fingers around him the instant he phased back, tugging at his clothes, putting Denver to shame. Disorientation and fatigue greeted him too, as it tended to on long jumps. Chris squatted, looking heavenward to breathe deeply of the fresh, icy air. The discomfort passed as his sense of awareness and self re-aligned. A few moments of incorporeality would do that to you. Actually, it was a small price to pay, considering a fundamental breakdown and reassembly by magic and willpower alone.

Overhead, sullen grey skies issued tiny wisps of ice that the wind maliciously flung about to sting his eyes. He took another steadying breath and got cautiously to his feet. Short, robust greenery crunched with soggy snow under his boots. It was just a few cautious steps up to the edge of the majestic bluff, but an extended tumble down to the desolate, rocky shoreline and crashing waves below. He had no intention of ever making the second part of that journey, though once or twice a treacherous dragon-thought revelled in soaring the impressive updraft.

No one with common sense would swim near that jagged, deadly shore. Dark, pounding surf heaved itself endlessly at the stone. The thick, cold smell of it carried to him up the cliff. Out on the choppy swell of the Labrador Sea, a strong current lurked in an uncomfortably close drop-off.

It was a bleak little tip of land overall, and one of thousands just like it. Jagged coast stretched beyond the sea-spray horizon on either side, umpteen miles of it. All narrow islands or twisting fjord. Greenland was a strange, starkly beautiful place. It was the perfect backdrop for a dragon's magical laboratory, and fitting too, at least this particular experiment. What Hailey told him about lagging sea-level changes scared the shit out of him just thinking about. Behind him on the vast landmass, a frighteningly large ice cube was starting to rapidly adjust to the new atmospheric situation.

Arms spread wide, Chris reached out into the Ether, caressing the orbs that hovered near-invisibly over foaming whitecaps. This time at his command, tonnes of beyond-scalding diamonds dropped seaward, seemingly out of thin air. Twenty or more, each the size of small cars, ker-thunked a deep, resounding tone as they hit.

White trails of steam sizzled instantly into existence, bursting skyward with fluffy spray. Despite the violence of the performance, it all was over in moments, and the extraordinary disposal went mostly unremarked.

A stray seabird riding the brisk updraft off the bluffs ruffled a feather in annoyance, circling closer to the disturbance in faint hopes of discovering an easy morsel.

Much later, in the pitch black of the seafloor, a pair of squabbling crustaceans were nearly crushed as one of the wonky carbon lumps rumbled to rest on the muddy bottom. Surrounded by titanic pressure and a slowly settling marine snow, it finally lay still, oblivious to its incarceration. Locked away from the bustle of atmospheric dynamics, with any luck it would stay imprisoned for a few thousand years, perhaps much longer.

Despite the savage beauty of the scene, Chris didn't intend to linger in elements even fouler than what was on offer back home. This was his fourth visit now, the novelty was wearing off. There was just one last orb to check, and it lurked far offshore in the strongest part of the Atlantic-bound current.

This one was a vast sphere, deep underwater and complicated to boot. Chris had to put a lot of thought into how to plan and phrase his conditions. Submarines and their crew aside, there were a host of sea creatures he didn't want to hurt or disrupt in the satisfaction of his lust for gold. But with Hailey reminding him, not to mention the effect new treasures had upon his dragonesses, the opportunity proved tempting.

He'd heard somewhere in the past that the world's oceans contain a vast quantity of dissolved gold. A little research turned up that the figures he'd heard were exaggerated, to say the least. Under normal rules, the trace amounts of gold in seawater were far from economic to extract. In this respect, Chris had some advantages, and so the rulebook was thrown away.

Seawater passed through this orb by the hundred thousand gallons, got mugged of every unbound gold ion, and was kicked back into the current all the poorer. As Chris sensed remotely through his connection to the giant Ether orb, he thought he could finally feel something there. It was faint, but the contents of his largest Ether meddling felt slightly warm to his mental touch, almost comforting in a way that frigid seawater alone most certainly should not. It was working, he'd built an impossibly huge gold-gillnet.

Buoyed by the success, Chris was now keen to get back and see what Stephen was up to with the electricity off. The house had been decidedly warmer and lighter when he'd left yesterday. The goblin trio had promised that the bathroom fixtures and carpeting were nearly done and he wanted to check out how they looked.

Moments later, he was back in the grotto, steadying himself against the domed mural-wall with one outstretched hand. Back to back like that, two long jumps really took it out of him for a few hours, magically speaking. Too much of that would give him a cracking headache.

Leaning near the door as his senses cleared, Chris marked down the morning's events in the spreadsheet program Hailey had shared with his phone. According to his patient, wonderfully endowed instructor, though his actions were just a drop in the bucket on a global scale, it was still good scientific form to keep track of such things.

"And to be clear, Mr. Sibon," the dragon murmured stupidly to himself, smiling as he tapped away at the screen. "I was, of course, referring to your daughter's wonderful gift of intelligence, what else?"

Magical chores ticked off for the morning, Chris collected the lamp and started back through the narrow corridor into his bedroom and busier parts of his new house. He was excited to reveal his work to the brood. Yet, so much expectation had grown around this project now that anxiety swelled in his chest too.

He found Stephen, feet poking out from underneath a shelf in the utility room. Near the end of one long hallway, the room was host to much of the house's plumbing and circulation infrastructure, including a series of tanks containing several days worth of reserve water.

"This HVAC stuff really isn't my forte," the werebison explained as he emerged, only a little bedraggled, to greet Chris. "Yesterday I figured I must have miswired one of the sensors when the damn thing kept turning on and off like that. Couldn't tell which one though, so I'm reconnecting the lot. That's why the power's still out."

"Better you than me," Chris acknowledged his obliviousness to the intricate worlds of circuitry, thermal comfort, and indoor air quality. He'd never imagined how much air movement was healthy for a building this size, nor did he really care to, he was just trying to control the mounting emotion curling inside him. Today might finally be the day, but he still wanted to play it cool in front of Stephen. "Hey, did you hear anything back about the panels for the new fridge?"

"They're speeding their way here on the back of a truck. As fast as money can buy," Stephen grinned at Chris' palpable enthusiasm, his attempts at appearing nonchalant given away as he rocked on the balls of his feet. Clapping a friendly hand on his shoulder, Stephen decided to set the poor lad free and force the issue. "If they arrive today, it will be late."

"Damn. So ... tomorrow?"

"Not necessarily," Stephen added, only a little slyly. "It's basically finished, Chris. Apart from the last of the magical systems, and this crazy walk-in fridge, we're done. The goblins are putting the finishing touches on the bolt-hole as we speak. You could have sprung your big reveal any day this week as far as I'm concerned. The place isn't furnished, so what does a half-installed fridge-room matter?"

"You've met Annabel, haven't you?"

"Heck, I know she wouldn't care less. Don't put it off for that, do it this evening. If the panels arrive, I'll stay late to work on it. It'll give me an excuse to be here when they all see."

"Today?! Are you sure?" Chris frowned, in a way it had been a relief to hear that he could put it off until tomorrow, cowardly as that seemed. "I don't know if I'm ready."

Stephen smirked at the dragon's change of tune, some of the youngster's nerves coming to the surface.

"What's the matter? I'll have this cantankerous thing licked by then." He rapped loudly on the ventilation duct that brought a supply of fresh, pre-filtered air down from the surface. "If I don't, we've got bigger problems anyway."

"I think I'm freaking out a little bit," Chris admitted, taking a purposeful breath as he marshalled an explanation. "I've been looking forward to it for what feels like forever, but if it's done then I have to.... What if they don't like it, Stephen?"

"Then you build another one!" the werebison laughed, turning Chris and starting to lead him back down the hallway. "But look at it all. Think about all the work and time and effort we've put in. All those loads of rock you carted away."

"Please don't remind me," Chris groaned, sticking his head behind the bookshelf in the diamond-shaped-geode-room as he was gently strong-armed by. He could hear goblins up there somewhere in the twisting, narrow stairwell they were carving. It was supposed to be a secret escape hatch, but he was going to have to crab-step the whole way up the damn thing if he ever had to get out that way.

They walked up the protective drop-cloth road, through the expansive living room, straight by the kitchen, headed for the front door. In the entrance room, the burly pair passed the goblin's latest work of exquisite sculpture. Most of the arresting effect was lost because they were headed in the wrong direction, but Chris thought that it might just be his favourite yet.

"My point is," Stephen continued. "There's been a lot of thought, effort, and money put in to accomplishing this. It shows, for anyone who cares to think further than the lack of windows, or perhaps a few of the cheaper fittings. This is a wonderful first home for your strange family, Chris, I'm sure they'll all agree."

"Okay," Chris bobbed his head, still unsure why Stephan was guiding him out. "Thanks, I needed that."

"You're welcome. Now go on, off to your fancy office job and get out of my hair," the werebison laughed. "I don't want to see you again before you show up with the ladies."

"Wha ... when?"

"How about seven? I'll pick up some champagne and bring a few glasses from home. You don't mind if my Better Half tags along?"

"Of course not," Chris was left in a bit of a daze, heart thumping with trepidation and mostly, thankfully, anticipation. "Today? Really?"

"Yes! Now go. Have fun, drag my daughter out of a book. Find a snowman someone else made and take credit for it on the internet. Post a hundred pictures of yourself with it, or whatever it is you kids do for fun these days."

The bank-vault-esque outer door clicked softly locked, and so it was that Chris found himself expelled, temporarily at least, from his own home.

He puttered around upstairs in the warehouse for a while, cleaning and tidying. What the heck were they supposed to do with all that unheated space?

At the very far corner of his property, the escape hatch exit warranted his final inspection before it was covered over amongst the last mounds of magically carved rock. So disguised, and awaiting magical security mechanisms, it should go unnoticed to all but the most determined invaders.

Chris couldn't help looking at the surviving evidence of his toils fondly now. The last few piles of crushed rock created a triangle of neat little mountains in his gravel yard. Without them, who would remember the weeks of back-straining lugging, hours spent damp with sweat and short of breath? Those memories seemed something of the ancient past for him now, other events in his life moving as quickly as they were. Fatherhood especially was never far from his thoughts these days. Susan's dilemma occupied him too, though he distracted himself from confronting it head-on.

Claire had dominated his attention recently, perhaps unfairly, but he just couldn't get over the fact of her remarkable pregnancy. Scientifically, Chris knew that he had nothing to do with making the twins. It was all down to freak chance, a rare and sometimes disastrous occurrence. But a dragon's ego was not an entirely rational thing, and now the propitiously early sundering of those precious cell clusters was being attributed to his draconic advantages. Regardless, all the time spent with his mate let him know her better, and now Chris wanted her even more because of it.