It was a bright, crisp morning with the sun’s rays not yet begun to burn the dewdrops when Yolgyi took up her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard.
It was best to leave early. The road was long, and the meteor was due at noon.
***
Down from the uplands through the mist-shrouded redwoods and the tumbled grey stone went Yolgyi, plucking insects and berries and a particularly slow and fat little furry thing for her breakfast. Out into the wide green meadows she went, chewing and nippy at juicy young shoots yet to grow hardened and horned with cellulose, sipping quickly and furtively from a small pond she strained through a little slip of fern-woven cloth. Down to the sea, the sea, the great shallow sea that roiled over sunken squashed sullen continental crust and split the continent from groin to gullet, where she dropped her pack by a tangle of innocuous driftwood and seaweed, put together a fine and functional raft in no time at all, and set out, propelled by a paddle from her pack and a good solid meal.
Towards the single island in sight from this little inlet on this small stretch of coast, towards the single landmark that rose from the modest hill that broke a scant copse of trees. Towards the tower of the dinosaur wizard.
The waves were slight, for it was a pleasant day and the breeze small and more concerned with preventing heat rather than inflicting chill. Yolgyi concerned herself with other things than seamanship. Speed, spawned from the smoothness and force of a stroke. Efficiency, from the angle and shape of that same stroke. Stealth, from hurling oneself flat onto the raft and cowering beneath the web of beach-sludge she had brought along for just that purpose until an eye attached to a wing attached to a beak longer than her body moved on. Silence, from shipping her paddle and barely moving enough to breathe until a shadow with flippers wider than her raft grew bored of nudging it with its snout.
By such means and methods did Yolgyi travel until the correct kind of corals spun by underneath her raft and she threw herself into headless frenzy, whaling away on her paddle until she leapt from stone to stone to shore and hit the soft sandy beach already running in midair, sprinting through the little salt-sprayed cycads that whispered warnings she ignored, dancing from foot to foot through the obsidian shards planted in the sand that droned of deep and profound pains to befall trespassers, and up to the very door of the tower, where she redoubled her speed and began to hum and sing and whistle in such a way that the very loud and horrible spell that was meant to instantly decapitate intruders instead clipped her pack free from her back just as she jumped, hurling both it and herself through the gate of the tower just as it slammed shut behind her.
There, Yolgyi permitted herself a breath, and then another, and a third. But she rummaged in her severed backpack for her tools while she did it, because it was not far until noon, and the tower of the dinosaur wizard stretched far above and below her, formed from a ring of three mighty gingko that had been induced to cleave together into one titanic hollowed spiral with a central space that plunged deep into the roots below as far as it soared up to the crown above.
Great and mighty glyphscapes flowed over the walls of corals, of shells, of teeth – all taken from the tides and used to render down the concrete reality of a global ecology into a representation simple enough to be conceptualized and true enough to crack the door of reality a little wider than it normally rested. Every cracked ammonite whorl; every broken Xiphactinus tooth; every desiccated and windstripped bird carcass; every shark egg case; every mammal skull; every sliver of bark and dab of algae and wave-tossed pebble; each and every one standing for so much more than they were and all the implication of all that had made them and would make more. All of them and all of that all fit just precisely so that it might fit just precisely right.
Yolgyi set her eyes on the most beautifully and sublimely perfect of the pieces, the fragments that most eloquently suggested and supported the whole, and began to assail them with her small and crude but very sturdy pick. In this matter she worked her way up the slow and winding path of branches towards the tower’s apex. She ran and searched and with every fifth step and every second dart of her eyes she skipped closer to the wall and SWUNG and an irreplaceable and unfathomable segment of the world would go crunch.
The sun was almost overhead, singing down through the crown of the tower. Yolgyi ran faster and swung harder. Some of the swings of her pick went crack or chip or clank rather than crunch. It’d have to be good enough. Her lungs were on fire and her legs were swamps of lactic misery. It’d have to be good enough.
And then she burst through into full sunlight.
Above her was the noonday sun, which made her squint. Above her was a great shadow, which made her snarl. And above that, between her and the sunlight, towering and fiercely indifferent, stood the dinosaur wizard.
The dinosaur wizard was fifty feet long and over a dozen feet tall and had a big solemnly duck-faced skull filled with dental batteries composed of hundreds of tiny little teeth that could grind the most stubborn plant matter down to mere calories and a long hand-gnawed staff clutched between their forelegs absolutely crawling with hidden mysteries. They were singing. The song was audible everywhere, but it was only this close that you could tell it was happening, feel it as it shook its way into your bones and sunk down into your molecules and took every atom gently into its grasp and settled there, turning itself into connective tissue between Everything and Everywhere and Everywhen.
Yolgyi hurled her pick at the dinosaur wizard’s nearest foot, which didn’t go crunch or crack or chip or clank or even thud really, just thump. But she did this because she was getting a good solid grip on her blade. And while she did that she ran even faster, and while she did that she leapt still higher, and with all her speed and her weight and her force and her fury she came down blade-first on the left hindfoot of the dinosaur wizard and sunk it hilt-deep in their flesh.
The song didn’t change.
“Fuck,” said Yolgyi without much heat. And above them both was the meteor, a glimmer barely calculable, and it came down in all its speed and violence and met the song and
***
It was dark out, too early for even the most bright-eyed of the morning chorus to be up and singing. But Yolgyi was awake, and she was thinking. And as she thought she filled her pack; tightened it here, loosened it there. She sharpened her blade; filed it down here, serrated it there. She planned and replanned the exact motions she would make to lash seaweed and driftwood; to deface spell and destroy shell. She thought of bone and sinew and muscle and where and how to cut. And when the last of the night’s predators had slunk to their sleep and passed by the entrance to the tumbledown rockheap of her home, when it was a bright, crisp morning with the sun’s rays not yet begun to burn the dewdrops, Yolgyi took up her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard.
This time she drank too long at the pool and was eaten by an alligator.
***
Paddled too swiftly and was devoured by a mosasaur.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Tripped on one of the obsidian shards and was blasted out of time by its outraged cries.
***
Slipped on the edge of the tower and fell off.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Stabbed the dinosaur wizard and didn’t stop them.
***
Didn’t bother to get up. Yolgyi let herself do that every once in a while. At first she’d lied to herself, told herself it was to go over her plan from first principles and make large changes.
Now she admitted the truth. She did this because now and then she wanted some sleep.
She couldn’t. The song was in her bones, the same as it was in everything else, and she couldn’t hear it and that made it so she couldn’t ignore it. So she laid in bed all morning coiled and tired and restless and counting down the seconds until noon with the precision of a revolving planet until it was dark out again and she was still awake.
***
Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten.
***
Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten.
***
Tried to raft before sunup and became lost in the dark, hit a reef, and was eaten by a shark.
***
Tried to leave before sunup and was caught and eaten.
***
Tried to raft before sunup and became lost in the dark, drifted out to sea, and ran out of time.
***
Stepped on an obsidian shard in the hazy dawn-light and was blasted out of time by its enraged cries.
***
It had been a long time since Yolgyi had felt that little stir of something changing. Maybe since she’d first gotten really reliably good at making the raft? Or since she’d properly mastered how many calories she needed to move as quick as she had to, down to the mouthful.
She’d have to redo that part too now. She was in the tower and she had time to spare. She could take her time wrecking things. She could try to see how much more damage she could do to the song from down here. She could try to see how much more damage she could do to the dinosaur wizard from up there.
***
The
***
Answer
***
Was
***
Not
***
Enough
***
After Yolgyi found that out, she slept in again. This time she actually slept, too. For how long she wasn’t certain at all. It wasn’t a worthwhile concept right then.
When she woke up, she left her pack and ventured forth to see the dinosaur wizard.
Crept through the terrors of the night.
Ate what she needed for energy.
Built the raft she needed to cross the waves.
Walked up the beach slowly, steering far and away clear of each and every obsidian shard.
Ducked and rolled under the trapped gate.
And climbed the tower slowly, so slowly, tracing the pattern of the world with her eyes and her touch.
Until at last Yolgyi stood under the nigh-noon sun, in the shadow of the dinosaur wizard, and she asked: “What’s the point?”
“To buy time,” said the dinosaur wizard’s staff.
“I didn’t ask you, stick.”
“My master’s voice is busy singing the song that keeps this world from its grave,” said the dinosaur wizard’s staff in the smug voice of a stick that knew it was being obstructive. “I speak for them in all ways and meanings intelligible to the unwizardly.”
“Then I ask them: buying time for what?”
“For the other great wizards, of course. As we twist on the gyre of the universe by my master’s voice, they may learn and think and plan and secure a more permanent future.”
“And what if they can’t?”
“They are great wizards and you aren’t,” said the staff. “Of course they shall.”
“And they’ll do this and tell your master before they undo it all again?”
“Of course they shall.”
“And they haven’t done it by now for very good reasons?”
“Of course they haven’t.”
“And you’re certain they’ll fix things soon?”
“Of course they will. A mere meteor is nothing before the assembled strength of all of dinosaur wizardkind.”
“Did one of you bring it here?”
“Of course not,” said the staff indignantly.
“Do you know who did it?”
“Probably that fuck-o from Appalachia, he’s always been too into celestial mechanics for his own good and he’s pretty bad at cosmathematics. Anyways, it’ll be easy to fix this. My master has given us all the time in the universe to work with.”
“Your master,” said Yolgyi, “has given me enough time to travel down to the coast, sail over here on a raft, and try to kill them. If I rush. This is a very simple thing to do compared to what you’re saying your master’s peers are trying to do. If they’re trying to do it.”
“Pish posh,’ said the staff. “Leave matters of wizardry to the wizards and go back to whatever it is you do. Play with rocks or something.”
The meteor fell. The song rose. And it was dark out.
Yolgyi stared into the dark, took the fern cloth out of her pack, and began to unravel and reweave it.
***
She spent
***
A long time
***
Practicing it
***
Then when she got to the island, it took
***
A few tries
***
To get the swing of
***
It
***
But at last she walked carefully, so very carefully, all the way up the tower, tiptoeing, tiptoeing, net slung over her shoulder, as the song began to hum all with itself in her bones and in her brains. And as she stepped up onto the crown of the tower with the sun almost right overhead, she felt the contents of her net begin to sing and cry and grumble along with it, such that the eyes of the dinosaur wizard widened and it spun – slowly, haltingly, like a twisting, toppling tree – to face her, staff raised.
“What are you DOING?!” demanded the staff.
“Playing with rocks,” said Yolgyi. And she spun the net above her head and hurled it spinning wide, sending a load of very loud and angry obsidian shards hurtling directly at the dinosaur wizard’s face.
There was a brief, complicated moment where a being that had all the time in the universe tried to decide between being blasted out of time and interrupting the song they were singing. They had to think quickly.
This did not happen.
The song fell. And a second or two later, so did the meteor.
***
It was dark out in the south, and growing darker fast. Huge clouds of smoke and ash and vapour roiling up at speeds too quick to look like anything but slower than molasses. The world was on fire or about to burn.
Yolgyi stopped picking the last few fragments of obsidian and dinosaur wizard bone out of her side and sat down for a rest. And insofar as she had the energy to think of anything at all, as the meteor’s spray raced forwards towards the tower, it was this:
If anybody lives through this, they’d better not be dumb enough to think wizards are a good idea.