***
If you poke a sleeping dragon
they don’t wake.
Why do I know?
Cuz Sliptide poked her lover
fifty times
in her sleep
the first night
I was there.
So I left the den,
realizing otherwise
I might accidentally
wake up
under Sliptide’s cutting tail.
Then every night
after that
I slept out in the clearing,
under some rocks
or in a pile of moss;
I didn’t know
anyone could twitch that much
in their sleep
but one night
curled in a hollow log
with runes on it
to keep the cold and
worse things out,
I started wondering
if I twitched that much in my sleep too
so I started mapping out the ingredients
I’d have to gather
to make a seeing eye
to watch myself while asleep
and what
I’d need to gather
so when I woke up
and touched it
I could replay what the seeing eye saw,
but I wasn’t familiar enough with
Realm of Green Dragons
to know if they had
anything in the termite moss family
for the memory
but I doubted it
so to figure out what to use in its place
I’d need to light a fire
and summon
some textbooks,
Ingredients of the Known Realms
Volumes Three to Six,
Sorted Under the Void Demon Alphabet
unless “Realm of Green Dragons” got sorted
as “Green Dragons, Realm of” instead,
then I’d need volumes one through two,
but I’d better wait until morning
for the reading light
unless I wanted to shapeshift my eyes
to demon eyes
to better see in the night
but if I did that
I might be able to shapeshift my mind
so half of it could sleep
while the other half observed
if I twitched in my dreams
but somewhere in these thoughts
I got lost
and fell
…sleep–
I knew a witch
who performed a spell
while falling asleep
and the results,
as you know,
were disastrous–
and you know they were
disastrous
cuz otherwise
why would I know this story?
When I was a student
in my thirtieth year or so,
one of the dragonlings,
as the story goes,
put their claws into a pot of
vines
and spoke the words
to breathe a fireball at the plant
since they were jealous
their elven half didn’t let them breathe fire
and their dragon half didn’t let them grow plants,
but they should’ve been in bed hours ago,
so
microsleep
got the better of them.
A syllable slipped
into a mumble
and the fireball
became a kangaroo
with flaming kicks.
The animal
knocked over the dragonling’s
pots of vines
and they spread over the floor
into the boards–
then the kangaroo
knocked out the dragonling
and the vines spread over them too
and the ‘roo escaped out the door
through the school’s high-arched dorms,
leaving flaming footprints
(which didn’t burn anything,
since the school was built by
demons who did that),
but the thumping
woke
the sleeping occupants
and we gathered
to stare at the vines
crawling from someone’s room
until half the hall’s
floorboards collapsed.
Then we witches killed the vines
no problem
but the dragonling had to be shipped home
to rest silent in the loam
and the hallway had a hole in it for years after that
and no one caught the kangaroo
so it might’ve gotten out
and bred with the locals.
So
in that tree hollow
in the Realm of Green Dragons
I didn’t do a spell while falling asleep.
But when I woke
I scared myself
with how close I’d come–
but my next thought was,
how do you get to an astral plane
without casting a spell
while on the verge of losing consciousness?
Does the spell not take hold
until you finish speaking it?
And does the spell
contain the parameters
for your return?
Can you cast magic
in the astral plane?
So I summoned my books
ignoring all six indexes
of ingredients
for the only tome I owned
about psychic projections
and read
it twice
until Sliptide quit twitching in her sleep
and came crawling out of her den
muttering about breakfast
and I said
I was going to
visit her lover
and I think she misheard me
because she said,
“No, fish for breakfast”
and took off in a flutter
and came back
with saltwater
streaming from her talons
and a beaked fish
twice my size
in her mouth
and she dropped it
in the dirt
and asked
if I liked
warkorel
and I said I’d never tried it
but maybe
I’d try
to enter the astral plane
and she said
going there would break my mind
but I said
maybe
I didn’t mind.
Jordyn Saelor 