Aurelia

Aurelia yawned as she crossed the main chamber of the lair, walking along the wall so as to not get stepped on by larger, unobservant dragons. The woven carpet underneath her claws felt plush and soothing after her night’s work in the shroom patch. Who had made the rug? It was pretty old, wasn’t it? Was the creator still with the clan, or had they moved on? Aurelia couldn’t recall . . .

“Aurelia!”

She blinked, lurching to a stop as she realized her name had been called twice already. “Sorry,” she laughed, turning to face the chamber and oscillating her wings in greeting. “Head’s in the boughs, apparently.”

Being just after sun-up, there were few dragons in the chamber, a couple cooks and a courier who must have arrived yesterday and slept overnight to get an early start. Maybe they were a regular messenger, since neither Prince nor Princess had come out to see them safely off, but Aurelia wasn’t one to know; she didn’t track the mail comings and goings.

“Understandable, seeing how late it is for you,” Rett, a cook, grinned. “Long night in the patch?”

Aurelia sucked in a considering breath and blew it out, nodding. “Had to wrangle with weeds, more than a few. Otherwise, just a lovely time.”

“That’s good to hear. Hey, beetle soup is on the menu for midday meal. Do you want me to set a bowl aside for you?”

“Ooooh, yes please! And if you could—”

“Make it two bowls,” Rett finished her request. “Will do.”

Aurelia grinned back. “You know me too well.”

“And what a delight it is. Have a good day’s sleep!”

“Thanks, you too! I mean—” Aurelia shook her head at herself and they all laughed together. Then she continued on, nodding politely to the courier and flicking her tail in farewell to her clanmates as she exited the chamber and stepped into the corridors leading deeper into the lair.

She wandered unhurriedly down the passage that led to her den, admiring the way softly-shed light from the mushrooms clinging to the ceiling (she hadn’t germinated those ones, but they had a nice regular growth pattern nonetheless) threw blue-hued shadows against the twisting figures of dragons, pines, and moons carved around the entrances to each den she passed. No paneling was the same, depicting varying scenes and characters, though certain iconography held in common for much of them. Aurelia had once listed out each individual dragon on a scrap of parchment, scribbling a tiny icon to differentiate them, and even came up with nicknames—no clanmate she’d talked to knew if they already had names—and now sometimes when she squinted, the figures looked different than how she remembered them. But shadows could play funny tricks.

No matter how she’d tried to puzzle the scenes together, none fit past three panels. There was no cohesive story—not a singular one, at least. Not one that Aurelia could find.

Maybe she’d go looking again sometime. Not today however, she thought dreamily, reaching her den and pawing aside the hanging curtain of braided sweetgrass. Another yawn stretched her jaws wide, briefly making her eyes water as she padded blindly across her room to the small alcove with a stream of cold water trickling down a crack in the wall. She wet a comb and pulled it through her mane, and splashed (most of) the dust off her scales, then gave her teeth a quick scrape and gurgled some water before climbing up into her hanging nest and flopping down.

It crinkled. Aurelia froze in the middle of snuggling into her cushions, puzzled by the sound and feel, before her sluggish brain clicked and told her: Parchment. She sat up, digging underneath herself, and pulled out a now-crumpled envelope. Oh! The courier. A clanmate must’ve put it here. But the only time Aurelia got mail was when—

Oh. Right.

Her heart had already sunk down in her chest. Aurelia swallowed, wishing she didn’t have to feel so sick as she turned the envelope over. She stared down at the printed address, lingering on the curves and slants of the sender’s name. Her exhaustion settled deep into the hollow cores of her bones, and Aurelia was very tired indeed.

She slid her claw underneath the envelope’s glued flap, then hesitated. Tomorrow, her body cried. Just deal with it tomorrow. Weary, she leaned her head against a rope of the net that held her nest, letting the letter drop to her lap.

If you’re not going to open it, at least go to nest, she told herself reasonably. No sense in depriving herself of sleep having done . . . nothing.

Yet it was slowly, with stiff limbs, that Aurelia finally picked up the letter again. She rotated it around her claws, brushing over the wrinkles in the paper, then forced herself to toss it to the side, out of her nest and onto her desk. It landed teetering on a stack of pots, slid off sideways, and joined a spill of spore packets, slightly askew.

“Tomorrow,” she convinced, and settled into her blankets. She closed her eyes and turned her head away, but was all too aware of the envelope’s presence at her back as she faded fitfully into slumber.

She kept turning over, and twitching awake every time a dragon passed her den in the corridor, but could never fully drag herself into consciousness either. So she wrestled with and gnashed at half-dreams and uncertain memories until the sunset brought solace at last.

Solace. Aurelia forgot the letter—she’d forgotten it!—when she woke, with a stretch and yawn that sent her spilling from her nest to land in a plop on the floor. Her eyes strayed across her room and—there it was. Bliss erased, and she was tireder than ever before.

There was no avoiding it. Aurelia set the letter on the corner of her desk, wedging it beneath a basket of digging tools so it didn’t fall off, and got started on her night. She tapped the mushroom set over her desk, which blinked a few times before emitting a steady violet glow—she’d trained it to do that, just to twist her trainer’s tail in a knot—and continued where she’d left off the night before, testing soil samples from a potential area for a new shroom patch. The subspecies Aurelia was trying to establish was very particular about its environment, but she was hopeful about this plot . . .

Eventually she couldn’t pretend any longer, and reluctantly gathered her supplies into a bucket, tucking the envelope in very last. Two hours had passed, long enough for most members of the clan to have retired or be otherwise occupied with their own business—Aurelia guiltily remembered Rett saving her soup she hadn’t retrieved—so she didn’t pass anybody as she trekked out of the lair and down a path into the woods to her shroom patch. She did her rounds, measuring growth, pest damage, moisture levels.

Her clusters grew in almost concentric circles, except for paths she cleared at different intervals to allow her access to the inner rings, resulting in a maze-like structure consisting of mushrooms that increased in size and light intensity the closer to the center one became. Aurelia was particularly proud of the small cluster of orange-glowing shrooms she’d coaxed into a steady population in the southwestern quadrant of the patch. Tonight, however, she wound through the well-beaten paths formed by hours of her own tracking back and forth, and emerged into the middle of the maze.

Here, a shroom the size of a pearlcatcher and glowing a brilliant red-violet, sat brooding and proud over its clutch of smaller pinkish shrooms that grew nestled beneath the Sovereign’s wide frilled cap. Aurelia set her bucket down and took out the letter, then crossed the ring of pink mushrooms to gratefully slump down at the base of the enormous shroom. She nuzzled up close, laying her cheek against its spongy skin; a mushroom of this size, one could feel the tiny vibrating magics buzzing throughout the organism.

“You are magnificent,” Aurelia murmured. “Good evening.”

She paused for a response, then carried on, “I’m not doing so well tonight. I would’ve been, but last morning I got a letter. Yeah. Of course it’s from her.” No one else wrote Aurelia. She sniffled, and pressed closer to the Sovereign.

Sighed, “You know how Mother is.”

But it didn’t. Whether fungi had the structural functions for sound and if they could (or would) process Draconic in any meaningful way was still a heated debate in plague and shadow academia. Though talking aloud to them helped, it couldn’t accomplish anything. Only one thing would.

Grimacing, Aurelia picked up the envelope and pried it apart, withdrawing the paper folded inside. Her heartbeat picked up, and she read the letter fast, skimming and jumping to lines that stuck out in particular. Her second read, she ostensibly slowed down, but her eyes glazed over and she was stuck reading the same passage over and over, the words dissolving into meaningless jumbles of lines on the page, until she gave up and lurched ahead to the next paragraph, just for the process to repeat.

Usually it helped to read Mother’s letters in her patch. Not tonight.

I don’t deserve to be here, she thought guiltily, shrinking down beneath the powerful glow of her mushrooms. Why her, and not them? And wasn’t she selfish, to keep it to herself, rather than return and face the same trials as her family, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of them and know the true meaning of perseverance, dignity, and strength. Not fool around in the shadow realm with all its pranks and laughter.

“Will I leave?” she asked the Sovereign. She moved her head back and forth, feeling the strands of her mane stick and slide against the shroom in that odd manner it did, almost like static charge. “Should I?”

It didn’t reply, of course, but Aurelia already knew the answer. She curled her body around the mushroom, leaning against it. She loved it here, loved being here, working and growing and laughing with her clanmates here.

Clanmates, her mother sneered. Not true family.

How could she be so selfish? How could she be so cruel?

But life was different in the Wood than the Wasteland. Mischief was encouraged, rewarded. What could Mother know, who had never cultivated shrooms as magical as these? What could she know . . . Except she had raised Aurelia. The debt must be paid, and paid, and paid. That was family.

Aurelia got out parchment, quill, and inkwell. She wrote:

Here is the treasure you need. Give Narceen my greeting.

She almost scratched the second sentence out. But maybe this time Mother would listen. She signed, Love, your daughter Aurelia, and rolled it quickly into a scroll so she didn’t have to look at it anymore. She got up, dusted herself off, and looped the bag of coin around her shoulder. By the moons’ positions, she had time yet, to catch up to the courier, or at least reach the nearest post office, and arrange for delivery of her package. An imperfect system, she was aware, but it beat putting her post in the clan’s collective mail bag every few moons and inviting curiosity from well-meaning clanmates.

Maybe she knew the mail routes better than she thought.