Aerglou

Name meaning: Play on the word ‘airglow’, a natural glow of the night sky from the reactions that take place in the upper atmosphere of the Earth. Pretty fitting for an astronomer.

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The birth of a child was normally a joyous affair, in the clan that shunned the sun. Not so for Aerglou. When he burst out of his egg, the air was taut — not with anticipation, but tension. It was not a comfortable time.

His parents leaned towards him. Beyond them, a handful of other dragons were scattered round the cavern. They spared the hatchling but the briefest glances before giving his parents long, cool stares.

“Your child has arrived,” droned the head of the assembly. “We welcome your child.”

“Welcome,” droned the other dragons, and— “May the Darkness shield this hatchling.”

They said it with peculiar emphasis. The mother Pearlcatcher ignored them and bent forward, picking bits of eggshell from her child. He leaned into her forepaws, and she stroked his wings, his tail.

Behind her, the father stood tall, outnumbered but unbowed. There was a battle ongoing — but of course, the hatchling didn’t know what it was about. “What is this child’s name?” inquired the elder. He stepped forward as he spoke, and the large curved talons on his feet snick-snicked sharply, almost menacingly, against the floor. When the Pearlcatcher father responded, “Aerglou” and quietly spelled it, the elder snorted. One of the other dragons wrote down the name and then scuttled away.

The silence grew more tense and palpable, until even the hatchling began to squirm. Something was happening here....He didn’t know what, but he could feel it. This place he had been born into — it was...

The underling came back and murmured to the elder. The old Wildclaw snorted and tossed his head, but his wings slumped in defeat. He turned to address the Pearlcatchers again.

“The Clan Leader, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to extend his pardon to your son’s name. You are permitted to call him Aerglou.”

“Aerglou,” the other dragons growled, and suddenly the air seemed redolent of openness and soft, warm light....

The hatchling craned his neck eagerly as the elder opened a box. Deep inside, it glowed....But the glow was blue-green, sickly, as weak as a dying candle. The elder removed sprigs of phosphorescent fungi and shook them over the child, murmuring reverently as he did so. Around them, the other dragons bowed their heads and chanted praises to the Darkness, their Shield.

The ceremony was soon over. Aerglou sneezed and brushed glowing spores off his wings, marveling at the way they pulsed against his claws. But all too soon the light started to fade. As his mother carried him out the door, he heard the Wildclaw elder growl to his father, “You are fortunate to receive such amnesty from us, upstarts.”
~ ~ ~
It was almost like a surname: “Those are the upstarts.” “That’s the upstart family.” “That’s where the upstarts live.” As Aerglou grew, he learned his family had been branded “upstarts”, shunned by the rest of the clan and forced to the edges of the cavern for their different beliefs.

He first learned of his family’s differences as a student. The other children similarly avoided him, but Aerglou was a diligent pupil, keen and eager to learn. He listened to his teachers’ lectures and, whatever their initial misgivings of him, they soon came to appreciate his efforts and earnest work.

It was one of them who first opened his eyes to his family’s challenge, though she hadn’t meant it that way: “Excellent work as always, Aerglou!” she complimented his homework. And then, in an idle murmur, “Not a rebel like your parents at all.”

“What’s a rebel?” Aerglou asked. Realizing she’d said too much, the lecturer gave him a wan smile. “Someone who doesn’t understand rules well, child. But you are obedient, very obedient. You are a good boy.”

When Aerglou went home, he presented his homework to his parents. His father smiled after reading the essay. “You did a great job, son. This is really good.”

“Thanks. My teacher said so, too.” Aerglou blinked up at him. “What’s a rebel?”

His father’s smile faded. Aerglou continued, “Teacher said I’m not a rebel like you. Is that good or...bad? I want to be like you, Papa. You’re strong. You like to explore the forests and streams near our home. Are you...looking for something?”

“Yes...You might say that.” It was almost a sigh. Aerglou’s father nodded slowly, his tail coiling around his pearl. “A rebel is...one who looks for something. Something that’s not here....”

“Teacher said it’s someone who doesn’t understand rules.” Aerglou stared up at his father in awe. His dreaming, soft-spoken father, a rulebreaker? (And somewhere in his memory, other dragons muttered, “Upstart, upstart...”)

“Oh, your teacher! Has she been going on about rules?” Aerglou’s father shook his head. Suddenly he looked stern. “Yes, it’s time you got to the rest of your homework, Aerglou. Go get your books.”

“Yes, Papa.” Homework was a part of daily life, and he slipped back into the routine without a second thought. For the next few hours, they were mostly quiet, and when they did speak, it was about mathematics and grammar. It was only later, when he was preparing for bed, that Aerglou realized his father hadn’t actually answered the questions.
~ ~ ~
As he grew up, he began to learn other things from his teachers. In school, they regularly chanted and praised the Darkness, but now he began to hear of its great adversary: the Sun.

His teachers painted a terrible picture of it: “It prowls over the land, greedily dipping its scorching claws into all the spaces it can find. Even the tiniest crevices — it knows them; it smells what’s hiding inside, and it siphons them out.”

“Has anyone ever tried fighting it?” one of Aerglou’s classmates asked. The lecturer snorted. “It’s futile, for anyone who gazes upon the Sun goes blind in an instant, and is then at its mercy! No, child...Only a fool challenges the Sun.”

“A fool — or an upstart,” Aerglou thought. By then, he knew what had made the clan reject his family: His parents had asked, “What if the Sun could be challenged and slain?”

Or maybe even... “What if there wasn’t any Sun, any Adversary, at all?”

Other dragons had painted rather different pictures of the Sun: “It’s a great fire that consumes everything.” “It’s a vengeful god that’s too easy to slight.” “It’s a brilliant being that’s jealous of color, all color; that’s why it leeches it from the world.” But wouldn’t a fire have burnt itself out by now? Wouldn’t a god be pacified by worship or offerings? And the dragons were so drab and dull; surely even they would escape this jealous entity’s ire?

Aerglou’s father explored the wilds just outside the lair because he was looking for clues, paths to the land of the Sun. He already had some notes written down. Although Aerglou himself was quiet and retiring, when he considered the possibilities his parents spoke of, he felt something fluttering deep within him. It whispered, “Adventure, adventure.”

It sounded like something Kaasni would say. Aerglou did have some friends, but Kaasni had stayed the longest, and she was also the truest. An adventure — doubtless she’d readily agree to that. But Aerglou’s parents had impressed upon him the importance of not challenging the rules, not anymore, and he had to respect that. It was important to follow the rules and keep their heads down — if they wanted the support of the clan, if they wanted a permanent place to live....

Perhaps in the future, they would change their minds. Perhaps Aerglou still had an adventure in store.

When he got home, he snuck into his father’s study, extracted a sheaf of notes. They probably wouldn’t be around much longer — his father had caught him last time and had growled about burning those manuscripts. But for now, Aerglou did his best to commit them to memory. He could show some of these trails to Kaasni, see what she thought. There was a good one near his home, one that ran through a grove of glowing fungi trees. He used it as a shortcut sometimes.

The papers rustled as he put them back into their box. “Adventure, adventure,” they seemed to whisper. Aerglou looked out the window, but of course, there was only darkness....Such impenetrable monotony. The mind raced to imagine what else lay beyond. To him, the darkness was like curtains waiting to be raised above a stage. Would he see a story about brave dragons going on adventures to faraway lands? Perhaps they would meet their ends in the jaws of a great bright beast. Or perhaps, as in all the best fairy tales, they would arrive somewhere new and beautiful, and they would live happily ever after.

~ ~ ~
“Let’s take a shortcut home,” Aerglou said. After a hard day of hunting lessons, Kaasni readily agreed. She followed her friend along the outskirts of the city, off the beaten paths. They bustled through fields of lichen bushes and groves where great trees of fungi grew. These trees were watered by a stream that was always icy-cold, and Kaasni and Aerglou tried to avoid it if they could.

And there they saw him: the Stranger. A dim shape sprawled on the stream bank, his limbs twitching feebly.

“Somebody’s there,” Kaasni gasped. At this, the Stranger managed to lift his head. His eyes were large and luminous...pale green eyes. Kaasni and Aerglou were momentarily dumbstruck, for they’d never seen eyes like that before. All who dwelled beneath the darkness had eyes like shadows, purple and deep.

“Please...help...” the Spiral whispered, and then his head sank down again. Kaasni and Aerglou then realized that his clothes were so dark because they were smeared with his blood. He was badly injured.

They ran to Aerglou’s home. Aerglou’s father returned to the stream with them; he lifted the Spiral and bore the injured dragon back to his den. There, they treated his wounds and put him to bed. His eyes were closed now, though he was shivering badly.

“A stranger, a stranger! Papa, did you see his eyes?” While Aerglou chattered to his parents, Kaasni examined the Spiral’s belongings. His bloody clothes were now piled on the floor beside a large, heavy bag. “What’s inside?” Kaasni wondered aloud.

The satchel was filled with books: tomes of plants and animals, meticulously drawn and described — and like nothing Kaasni and Aerglou had ever seen. “An alien...” Aerglou sucked in a breath. “He’s from another world!”

“No, he’s not.” Kaasni shook her head. She had opened one book, and she was looking down at it dumbfoundedly. It was an illustration of many dragons in a town square, a gathering such as she might see in her own clan. Except the dome that stretched above them was brilliant blue, lit by a soft yellow orb. The Sun.

~ ~ ~
“In the distant past, we lived under the sky, in the open air,” some clan elders sighed. “The world was filled with music and color. It was beautiful — and so the Sun took umbrage. ‘No one and nothing else shall be as brilliant as I!’ it proclaimed, and it sent its dreadful fire to scorch all color from existence. And so everything that fire touches turns to ash, dull and black, and thus it will be for us if we are struck by the light of the Sun....”

Even as a child, Kaasni had sensed that something was wrong. Hadn’t the Clan Leader said that the sun was a great beast that devoured shadows? Why did this tale call it a splendid being that envied the colors of the world?

To the Stranger, it was neither. When he regained consciousness, Aerglou held a book in front of him. “Mister, tell me about this place! Is this bright thing the Sun?”

“The sun...yes. It’s dark....Why is it so dark?” the Spiral whispered. His luminous eyes were feverish, unable to focus. His mind was flying away.

“My friend and I found you in the stream. Where did you come from? Did you get swept away?”

“Swept away...” The Spiral gasped. His eyes went wide, which Aerglou hadn’t thought was possible; they were huge enough already.

“I fell,” the Stranger choked out. “I’m a biologist....That means I study living things. Animals. Plants. I was working in the mountains. It was...It was raining.”

Aerglou sat down. He blinked curiously. “Raining?”

“It’s water that falls from the sky.”

“Oh. You were under a waterfall?”

“No, I wasn’t!” It came out as a shout. Aerglou flinched back, but the Spiral didn’t notice; his eyes were glazed again.

“Cold, so cold...It washed me away.” He was shivering, waves of memory coursing through his body. “Pulled me under. I whispered the Windsinger’s spell. I prayed to my god.”

Aerglou stared at him. What was a god? There was only the Darkness....Wasn’t there?

“So I could breathe...and I came here. But where is here?” The Stranger seemed to notice the room for the first time. “Why is it so dark? Days and days and days going past....I can see out your window. Why is it so dark?!”

He was getting hysterical. Aerglou scrambled away, the book clutched to his chest. “Papa...Papa!”

The Stranger did not recover. He had probably struck his head several times during his nightmarish journey through the darkness, and as the days passed, he deteriorated further. Screaming about wanting to go home, struggling through water in search of a sky. “It’s too dark!” he wailed. Aerglou and his parents attempted to shush him, but his screams rang through the cavern, and other dragons heard. “I want to go back....Let me go back! The sun, I need to see it — please, it’s too dark!”

When he finally succumbed to his injuries, the clan guards were waiting by the door. They entered Aerglou’s home and roughly searched the place, confiscating the Stranger’s clothing, satchel, and books. As for the Stranger himself, they put him in a bag, tightly zipped so that no one would see his bright green eyes. And then they took him away.

Aerglou and his family were forbidden to speak about the Stranger. The clan was encouraged to forget that they had ever heard someone crying out to a different god, pleading to see the Sun again. But Aerglou didn’t forget, and neither did Kaasni.

For on the day that the Stranger had erupted into hysterics, he’d tried to grab the book from Aerglou. His parents had wrestled the patient back into bed, but Aerglou, still fearful, had run to Kaasni’s home. “Keep this,” he’d panted, his eyes wide with anxiety as he shoved the book at her. “He’s after it. He goes crazy whenever he sees it!”

And so Kaasni had kept the book, even after the Stranger had gone. She hid it, and from time to time she opened it, wondering at those illustrations of a colorful, bright-lit world. She often lingered on the page with the town square, staring at that small yellow sun.

~ ~ ~
Life in the Darkness was hard. Dragons grew weak, languishing despite the abundance of food. When pestilence came, many of them were ill-prepared, and the clan lost several of its members. Aerglou’s parents were among them.

By then, he and Kaasni were grown. But the death of one’s parents is a great tragedy, and so for some weeks after, Kaasni visited him, ensuring that he was eating right and not getting sick. As the days slogged past, he slowly began to perk up again. Kaasni knew he would be all right the day he was able to talk about his parents without weeping.

Kaasni had lost her own parents long ago and didn’t often speak of them. Aerglou was the opposite: Reminiscing about his family made them come alive again, and he and his friend exchanged stories of their childhood days, of meals in the kitchen and pranks played at school.

One day, Kaasni asked him, “Do you remember...the Stranger?”

Aerglou’s smile faded. Slowly, he nodded to her. “I never forgot the Stranger,” he answered. He spoke quietly, as if afraid someone else would hear. Just like that long-ago time, when the guards had arrived to bear the Spiral’s corpse away.

Kaasni leaned forward. “Aerglou, the Stranger...He wouldn’t have spoken so fervently if none of that stuff was real.”

“The guards told us he was mad,” Aerglou protested — but he didn’t sound so sure.

“I think they’re wrong,” Kaasni told him. Suddenly it was like a dam had burst inside her; she couldn’t seem to stop talking. So many conflicting accounts from their childhood: The Sun was a beast, a pestilence, a god wreaking havoc upon the world. But had anyone ever seen it? No! They cowered before the words of an old drake none of them really knew. Had the Stranger been mad? How could they be sure their own leader wasn’t mad? The Stranger had been young and fit before his accident, and a dragon of learning besides. Their clan leader had an obviously feeble body; wasn’t it possible that his mind was feeble as well? He was probably more senile than the concussed Stranger had ever been.

“I feel the same way,” Aerglou said at last. His voice was very soft, but the words spoke to the doubt brewing inside Kaasni, and so she heard him loud and clear. He continued, “Mama and Papa also questioned the clan leader. It was why the clan called us ‘upstarts’, made us move to the edges of the lair. My parents knew better than to talk about it in public after that — but sometimes, they whispered to me...”

“Did they ever want to leave?”

Aerglou smiled wanly. “Eventually, they probably decided it was just a fairy tale.”

“I don’t think it is,” Kaasni told him. She opened her bag, produced a well-worn tome, and opened it to a familiar page. Dragons gathered in a town square, their hides blazing with color, their eyes shining like a hundred rainbow gemstones. And hovering benevolently over it all: the Sun. Not a beast that devoured everything, but a light that pushed the darkness away — not to swallow it whole, but to reveal the beauty, the color, that had lain concealed for so long.

~ ~ ~
They planned their escape carefully. Kaasni claimed that Aerglou was still weak, that she needed to help him hunt and forage. In reality, they were scouting farther and farther afield, looking for ways back to the Stranger’s land. Back to where the sun was.

The stream had dragged him down. So it was reasonable to assume that if they found a trail — any trail — that went up, they would find that other world....

After long months of exploration, they decided they had enough information and supplies. One night, as the whole clan slept, Kaasni and Aerglou left the lair they’d been born in. They followed their rudimentary maps and the sketches from the Stranger’s tome. And they disappeared into the darkness.

It was not as total as they’d been taught. Beyond the lair, luminous plants flourished, and small, shining creatures darted around their feet. Kaasni gasped in delight as she recognized them from the Stranger’s book: glow mushrooms, subterranean clover, and duskrats, among others. If the Stranger had been familiar with them, then perhaps they were a lot closer to his land than they’d thought....

Finally, after some days of cold and weary slogging, as they climbed a steep, nearly-vertical trail, Kaasni felt something: a breeze. She called a warning down to Aerglou, and then she lifted the mattock she’d been using as a walking stick. And she began to dig.

Earth showered down. Then a large chunk of it fell, admitting something...a ray of light. In spite of herself, Kaasni let out a small scream.

“What is it? Is it burning you?!” Aerglou asked frantically. Kaasni took a deep breath. She looked at her arm, where the light was shining....

“No,” she gasped. “It isn’t burning....” She dug again, with more vigor than before.

When she and Aerglou broke through the soil, it was all they could do to keep from crying out in terror. Instead of the roof of the Darkness, overhead was a vast, empty blue void.

And the Sun! It was no gentle yellow spot, but a fiercely bright orb that sent spots and stripes dancing through their eyes. Aerglou looked at it and howled, clapping his paws over his face. “It hurts! Kaasni, my eyes!”

“Don’t look directly at it, dummy!” she scolded him. “It’s just like the lanterns back home. That’s all it is!”

“Really?” He let her peel his forepaws off his face. “Some lantern.”

Kaasni stared at him for a long moment. He started to smile, and she grinned back. Soon the two of them were laughing — in relief, exhilaration, and most of all in wonder.

The colors! So much vibrancy everywhere; the plants around them were such a rich, deep green! And they had flowers, fruits...None of them glowed, but they didn’t need to; the Sun revealed everything with its pure light. And it was so warm, and then...A cool breeze pressed against them. Kaasni stood up straighter, closed her eyes. Her elders’ voices creaked within her mind: “In the distant past, we lived under the sky, in the open air. The world was filled with music and color....”

“Kaasni.” Aerglou was tugging on her arm, pointing down into a nearby valley. Kaasni caught her breath again as she turned around.

The greenery that surrounded them paled against the splendid mountains. Great spires and crags of crystal blazing against the sky...They were festooned with trees, but these were luminous, shining with a light of their own. “Like stars,” Kaasni realized, and she couldn’t say how she knew. It was almost as if the sky itself was whispering the word to her. It felt right.

And most exciting of all: bright-colored shapes moving among the trees, crisscrossing the heavens. Dragons with colorful apparel and gemstone-like eyes.

“There are others here. What should we do?” Aerglou looked anxiously at her.

“We go and meet them.”

“What? Just like that?” He blinked. “And then...?”

“We make friends with them. It’s a whole new world, Aerglou.” Kaasni inhaled, smelled the fresh air, the sweet scent of grass and trees. The wind carried a new sound: the distant music of the valley-dwellers. The sang to each other as they worked, and Kaasni’s heart felt lighter. She knew she had made the right choice.

“No more secrets, Aerglou.”

“No more hiding,” he agreed, and now he looked as determined as she did. The two of them started down the hillside towards the nearest road. A passing dragon looked up; he was clearly confused about where they had come from, but still he waved in greeting.

Kaasni and Aerglou waved back. With that simple gesture, they said hello to the new world. And from that day onward, it was theirs to explore.

~written by Disillusionist (254672)
all edits by other users