Here Be Dragons: Book 1 of the Emergence Series

“These bones are strange, darker than normal bones,” Pryce observed.

“These bones have color like dragon bones, is normal.”

Pryce raised an eyebrow. “Dragon bone color is like this?” He asked, pointing at the broken vertebrate he had cleaned up for examination.

“Yes, but it become more white if you burn it, I do not know why,” Fathom said, looking at Pryce to see if he could explain this as well.

“It turns whiter…?” Pryce muttered. That was indeed strange; bones would turn black if burnt for long times or high temperatures, at even higher temperatures then the bones would turn to ash. He was assuming the dragon didn’t mean it would turn to ash.

To test this, Pryce made a small wood fire and placed the damaged bone on top of the flame. Sure enough, the bone soon began to lighten. He poked the bone out of the fire to cool it off, but was shocked to see that the bone was actually producing a small aura of flame around it. He watched as the bones continued to lighten, the flames burning out once it had become a shade of sooty white. Using a rag, he wiped away the soot to reveal a bleached white surface.

“Huh,” Pryce said. He wasn’t sure what to think of this. “Why would it turn white…?” Pryce wondered out loud to himself. He sat down as he stared intently at the neck bone, as if that would make it confess it’s secrets. “And this bone is very light, much lighter than normal bones.”

“Gryphon bone is dense like dragon bones,” Fathom supplied.

“Interesting…” Pryce felt like this was a clue to the structure of the bones of dragons and gryphons. They didn’t have the lightly iridescent sheen that raptor bones had, so he assumed they were more closely related to each other than to those animals.

The microscope didn’t help much either; he saw the bones were very porous, but other than that there was not much else he could discern with that device.

The color of the bone lightening seemed like a big hint. Fire was the combination of some carbon-rich molecules with oxygen, hence the term combustion. Carbon was black, and the disappearance of the grey tint in the bones could be explained by the carbon turning into carbon dioxide. Could the grey be indicative of pure carbon?

It couldn’t be graphite, which was theorized to be made up of sheets of pure carbon stacked haphazardly onto each other. These sheets slid off of one another, which was great for making pencils, but not great for the structural integrity of the material.

It couldn’t be diamond either because that was ridiculous; diamond was only hard, and that made it brittle and fragile.

Graphene was a two-dimensional structure of carbon created by researchers a few decades ago using nothing but a block of graphite and cellophane tape, though of course the quantity of the product was too thin to be of actual use. This allotrope of carbon had incredible tensile strength, but could only be produced in quantities far too small to be useful.

And of course, it being two-dimensional made it incredibly weak since it was so thin…but carbon nanotubes were the very same structure wrapped into a cylindrical shape. What if gryphons used some small amount of carbon nanotubes in their bones? Or they might even use it in other parts of their bodies, like muscles or tendons? The tissue in question had been surprisingly difficult to cut in directions opposite to the muscle fibers, even for a razor-sharp obsidian scalpel.

But that was a bit too fantastical, Pryce thought it was more likely that they incorporated some kind of carbon-fiber structure into the matrix of their bones.

“Dragon bones become white when burned like this, yes?” Pryce asked, turning to Fathom for confirmation.

“Yes, I tell you this 5 seconds ago,” Fathom rumbled, proving that dragons were capable of hyperbole.

“Let’s try another test,” Pryce said, picking up a machete and swinging it down upon at a gryphon’s fibula he’d placed atop of wood log. The machete bounced off the relatively thin bone with a sharp crack, sending it flying several meters away. Upon picking up the bone he could only find a small indentation where he had struck it. Pryce swung the machete as hard as he could many more times, adding a few more minor deformations, but the bone refused to chip or break.

"Can you...break this...?" Pryce asked between pants.

The dragon simply picked up the bone between two talons and crunched down on it with his unusually sharp molars, shearing the thin bone in two. “Bigger bones is very strong, I can not break bones like this,” the dragon said, gesturing to the tibia as an example.

“I understand,” Pryce said, glancing warily at the bone that had so easily resisted a machete. He hoped there weren’t any creatures covered in bone-armor like this.

Pryce turned to Fathom. “This is enough tests on bones for today, I need your help for what I want to do.”

“Help? How?” Fathom asked, tilting his head curiously at Pryce’s excitement.

“This is…not look strong,” Fathom said, looking skeptically at the nailed together collection of nine crates that he had just helped push into the ocean.

“Can’t you try landing on it? Or moving onto it from the water?” Pryce coaxed. He was in swimming trunks, and had already cut notches into the crates to mark the waterline without a dragon on top of them. All he needed now was to record the waterline while Fathom was on it, and he could get his first estimate of the dragon’s mass.

Fathom rumbled uncertainly, but waded knee-deep into the water and stuck his head underneath the waves for a few moments, and seemed to check if there was anything in the water.

Pryce quirked an eyebrow, wondering if there could be predators even in the shallow waters that could give dragons pause. “You see anything?” He asked, unsure if the dragon could hear him with his head underwater.

Fathom brought his head back up to ask, “What did you say?”

“Did you see anything underwater?” Pryce asked again.

“I see small fish, some jellyfish, not much else,” the dragon said dismissively.

“Are there any animals that can hurt a dragon in the water?”

The dragon gave an uncertain glance at the open ocean, and replied, “Some dragon fly far over ocean, and do not come back. But many dragon go in ocean near beach and be not hurt,” he added optimistically after this ominous piece of information.

“…Be careful then, see if no big predators around in ocean,” Pryce cautioned, a little worried.

“That is why I move my head under water,” the dragon said obviously, tossing his head.

“Look for details, make sure no predators. I don’t want you to be attacked and hurt,” Pryce said, causing Fathom to huff in exasperation as he stuck his head back underwater.

“No predators,” he said in what Pryce suspected was a playfully mocking tone.

“Good,” he replied seriously. “Please move onto crates now.”

“Please?” The dragon echoed back this unfamiliar word.

“Please is word that you say when you ask someone to do something for you,” Pryce explained.

“Only hatchlings say that” Fathom huffed, but still put a foreclaw on top of the crates to pull himself up. Pryce waded into the water after him with a long-but-sturdy stick and a utility knife; the stick was to help make sure he didn’t step on anything venomous, and the knife was to cut notches into the crates in order to record how far they sunk.

He waited a few meters away in case the dragon fell over or accidently pushed the crates away; he doubted the makeshift floating platform was very stable. Despite the rickety setup, Fathom was able to get himself out of the water by flapping his wings, and he used the same limbs to maintain balance as he perched upon the relatively small three-by-three-meter-wide platform.

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“You okay?” Pryce asked, seeing that the platform had mostly stopped rocking.

“Yes, this is not hard,” Fathom scoffed just as a moderately sized wave caused him to flare his wings as a counterbalance. “…Maybe a little hard,” he amended reluctantly.

“I’m going to measure the crates now, okay?” Pryce asked, continuing on when the dragon gave his assent. He would have ideally preferred to do this experiment in a small lake, but the waves today were about as small as they got, so this was his best chance.

He had tied the crates to a tree using a long rope so that they wouldn’t drift off too far, so it did not take long for him to approach the crates, where the water was about hip-deep.

He stood at a corner of the platform, watching as the waves washed against the crate. He had marked the unloaded waterline on the right faces of the crate when the platform had been unloaded, now he marked the left faces. He hoped that the average between those two points would give a somewhat accurate answer.

“Okay, I measured the water,” Pryce told Fathom, who had his neck craned down to watch Pryce. “Wait until I move away when you go off the crates, you might make crates hit me,” Pryce reminded Fathom.

“Yes, I remember this,” Fathom said, tossing his head in annoyance just as a wave hit the crates, throwing him off balance and causing him to flare open his wings – too late, the dragon fell backwards, his talons digging into the crates which served only to lift the whole platform up above Pryce’s head as he fell.

The water restricted his movement; having nowhere else to go, Pryce ducked beneath the waves.

“That almost killed me, next time, be more careful,” Pryce sighed, stabbing the stick into the ground.

Fathom's spines drooped ashamedly as he helped pull the ragged platform back onto the beach. Pryce was glad he had brought the stick with him; not because it had kept him from stepping on any sharp rocks or venomous animals, but because he was able to stake it into the sandy bed of the beach to block the crates from crashing onto him.

Perhaps he would have been fine lying flat under a meter of water, but the stick had certainly helped his odds.

Once Fathom had pushed the crates back onto the beach, Pryce measured the notches.