I had no idea how long I spent down there, reading; time has no meaning beneath the earth. Around and around each column I went, spiraling outward as I eagerly devoured what was evidently the history of my Ancestors. As it was with both man and dragon it began in mythology, speaking of titanic beings doing battle with the icy blackness of the universe, setting the stars alight with their flaming breath, creating worlds and setting them on their courses, gifting them with fiery hearts of their own. Then it became vague legends, stories passed down from one generation to the next. Eons rose and fell within those stories, entire species came and went. Civilization began, knowledge grew, the story became more detailed. Triumphs, wars, disasters, all were here, again and again. The Lung endured, their civilization endured. Coastlines changed shape, continents drifted, and still the Lung endured.
Then the writing seemed to pause. It resumed after a time unguessable, but now leaner in style, more terse. It spoke of a Thing, a great Stone that came roaring and flaming from the heavens like one of the titans of old. It struck the world, and everything the Lung knew went up in flames. Darkness fell, and the world began to die. By the time the darkness receded at last, most of what had once lived upon the face of the earth was gone, including most of the Lung.
They rebuilt their civilization, but it never again attained the heights it had known before, and as the eons rolled by it began to fail once again. The Lung were old, so very old now, and tired. With every passing generation their numbers grew less. At one point they noted the appearance of a new, strange kind of being, in many ways like the Lung, but possessing a third pair of limbs. The Lung treated with them for a short time, but soon concluded that though they were large in frame, they were small in spirit, and for the most part avoided them.
The Lung had other things on their plate, anyway. The Stone had changed things in the world; the climate was no longer stable, and threatened to spiral out of control until nothing would be left of the world but bare, scorched rock. They sought to stabilize it, setting up a network of nodes, or places of stewardship, each one with its guardian, and an artifact whose purpose was to keep the world alive.
The network held for a time, but the Lung continued to die out, and their power was crumbling. For lack of maintenance the network started to fail; vast areas of scorching sand and naked ice began to spread across the globe like a disease. A series of near-collapses sent vast sheets of ice crushing and grinding their way across the battered face of the world before the remaining Lung could set things aright.
The Lung were fading, and they knew it. But they didn't want the world to die with them, and began to search for a successor, someone whom they could trust to take up the maintenance of the world. The strange six-limbed ones were considered briefly, then quickly disqualified when it was realized to what use the strange ones would probably put the Lung's instruments of Power in their interminable squabbles among themselves.
Then attention was turned to a small, short-lived biped that was beginning to spread from the continent of its birth. Helpless and fragile-seeming at first, the Lung grew increasingly impressed by their tenacity, their determination to survive in the face of an unswervingly hostile world. They were savage and ignorant, but unlike the others, the Lung felt they could be taught. The Lung set out to do so, only to see their work destroyed when the others launched a war of extermination against the little bipeds, a war that ended badly, not only for those who started it, but also for the Lung. In much of the world, anything that resembled a dragon was now a demon in the eyes of the little ones, and so the Lung had to start again, in far lands that the war had not touched.
They were so few, so very few now; but still they tried. I was on the last scribed column; all the columns beyond this one were smooth, and I suspected I already knew the end of the story. Painstakingly, the Lung helped build a vast, stable human civilization on one of the world's continents, one in which service to the whole, and reverence to the experience of one's elders was paramount (and what was more elder than the Lung?).
But it was not to be, for the Lung were now too few to maintain control. Wars flared between the highly competitive humans, with the victories going all-too often not to the wisest, but to the strongest. Eventually the civilization was consolidated beneath the iron-fisted rule of a single emperor, and the Lung retreated, horrified at the bloodshed their meddling had triggered. That civilization itself soon fell, the victim of powers arising from lands which the Lung had departed long ago. Finally, a dictator stood astride the land, and sought to expunge anything that could be the remotest threat to his absolute power. By then the Lung were little more than legend, but he ferreted them out. In the end, those whom the Lung had striven to teach turned upon them and slew them.
I stared at the final set of glyphs, scratched hurriedly into the stone.
. . . .And now, in despair, we die--
Beyond that last set of symbols there was nothing but blank silence. I gazed at the smooth surface of the unmarked stone, my mind equally empty. Finally, I reached up and removed the sphere from my jaws, then slowly rose to my feet and returned to the center chamber. I felt light-headed, and had to lean against a column once or twice for a moment when my sense of balance failed me. Reaching the center at last, I padded over to the sphere that still held station above its little reflecting pool, and gazed into its serenely swirling depths for a length of time I could not later measure.
It isn't a history, whispered the wraith, speaking at last.
My eyes dropped, and I turned away to shuffle over to where the water tank sat, paused to return my sphere to its place between my jaws, then gathered up the tank and asked the sphere to take me back to the ranch.
Snap.
The barn was empty when I returned to it. Carefully I set Deeb's creation back down in its original spot, returned the sphere of the Lung to its home beneath a distant sandstone cliff. I then trudged back to the ranch house, my size dwindling as I went. I pushed open the makeshift front door, and went over to quietly coil myself next to my children's little nest, my head upon my forepaws, my eyes staring sightlessly at the floor. Pasqual had lifted her own head when I came in and had silently watched as I laid down, a look of concern growing in her eyes.
"Well! And just where the hell have you been?"
I lifted my gaze to see Fields standing in a doorway, his fists on his hips. He half-glared, half-grinned at me for a moment, then turned his head to call into the other room. "Hey! Deebs! Guess who's back?"
There was the sound of boots approaching, then Deebs came around the corner. "Max! Where the hell have you been!?" he exploded "We were thinking you gone and drowned! Dithra and Stefan are going crazy! Damn it, Max, do you have any idea how long you've been gone?"
"No," I sighed.
"Two and a half days, mister! Why the hell didn't you check back?"
"Sorry," I mumbled "I lost track of time."
Deebs paused, looking at me with some concern. "You all right?"
"Yes."
Deebs exchanged a worried glance with Fields. "Um, did you figure out what those marks were?"
. . . .It isn't a history. . . .
I looked at him for a moment, then closed my eyes as the burning in them finally spilled over. "Yes. They are an epitaph."