It wasn't too late. Byam could fix the cloud. Tomorrow it would try again—
"Ah," said the pirate captain, looking up from the business of slaughter. "An imugi! It's good luck after all. One last push, men! They can't hold out for long!"
It would have been easier if Byam could tell itself the humans had sabotaged it out of spite. But it knew they hadn't. As Byam tumbled out of the sky, it was the impartiality of their judgment that stung the most.
The third thousand years
Dragons enjoyed sharing advice about how they’d gotten where they were. They said it helped to visualise the success you desired.
"Envision yourself with those horns, those whiskers, three claws and a thumb, basking in the glow of your own cintamani," urged the Dragon King of the East Sea in his popular memoir Sixty Thousand Records of a Floating Life. "Close your eyes. You are the master of the elements! A twitch of your whisker and the skies open. At your command, blessings – or vengeance – pour forth upon all creatures under heaven! Just imagine!"
When Byam was low at heart, it imagined.
It got fed up of the sea: turtles kept chasing it around, and whale song disrupted its sleep. It moved inland, and found a quiet cave where it could study the Way undisturbed. The cave didn't smell great, but it meant Byam never had to go far for food, so long as it didn't mind bat. (Byam came to mind bat.)
Byam focused on the future.
This time, there would be no messing around with dragon-clouds. Byam had learned from its mistakes. There was no tricking heaven. This time it would present itself at the gates with its record of honest toil, and hope to be deemed worthy of admission.
It should have been nervous, but in fact it was calm as it prepared for what it hoped would be its final attempt. Certainty glowed in its stomach like a swallowed ember.
It had been a long time since Byam had left its cave, which it had chosen because it was up among the mountains, far from any human settlement. Still, Byam intended to minimise any chance of disaster. It was going to shoot straight for the skies, making sure it was exposed to the judgment of the world for as brief a time as possible.
But the brightness outside took it aback. Its eyes weren't used to the sun's glare anymore. When Byam raised its head, it got caught in a sort of horrible basket, full of whispering voices. A storm of ticklish green scraps whirled around it.
It reared back, hissing, before it recognised what had attacked it. Byam had forgotten about trees.
It leapt into the air, shaken. To have forgotten trees… Byam had not realised it had been so long.
Its unease faded as it rose ever higher. The crisp airs of heaven blew away disquiet. Ahead, the clouds glowed as though they reflected the light of the Way.
§
Leslie almost missed it.
She never usually did this kind of thing. She was indoorsy the way some people were outdoorsy, as attached to her sofa as others were to endorphins and bragging about their marathon times. She'd never thought of herself as someone who hiked.
But she hadn't thought of herself as someone who'd fail her PhD, or get dumped by her boyfriend for her best friend. The past year had blown the bottom out of her ideas about herself.
She paused to drink some water and heave for breath. The view was spectacular. It seemed meaningless.
She was higher up than she'd thought. What if she took the wrong step? Would it hurt much to fall? Everyone would think it was an accident…
She shook herself, horrified. She wouldn't do anything stupid, Leslie told herself. To distract herself, she took out her phone, but that proved a bad idea: this was the point at which she would have texted Jung-wook before.
She could take a selfie. That's what people did when they went hiking, right? Posted proof they'd done it. She raised her phone, switching the camera to front-facing mode.
She saw a flash in the corner of the screen. It was sunlight glinting off scales.
Leslie's mouth fell open. It wasn't—it couldn't be. She hadn't even known they were found in America.
The camera went off. Leslie whirled around, but the sky was empty. It was nowhere to be seen.
But someone up there was looking out for Leslie after all, because when she looked back at her phone, she saw that she'd caught it. It was there. It had happened. There was Leslie, looking dopey with her red face and her hair a mess and her mouth half-open—and in the background, arced across the sky like a rainbow, was her miracle. Her own personal sign from heaven that things were going to be OK.
§
leshangry Nature is amazing! #imugi #이무기 #sighting #blessed #여행스타그램 #자연 #등산 #nature #hiking #wanderlust #gooutside #snakesofinstagram
The turning of the worm
"Dr. Han?" said the novice. "Yeah, her office is just through there."
Sure enough, the name was inscribed on the door in the new script the humans used now: Dr Leslie Han. Byam's nemesis.
Its most recent nemesis. If it had been only one offence, Byam wouldn't even be here. It was the whole of Byam's long miserable history with humans that had brought it to this point.
It made itself invisible and passed through the door.
The monk was sitting at a desk, frowning over a text. Byam was not good at distinguishing one human from another, but this particular human's face was branded in its memory.
It felt a surge of relief.
Even with the supernatural powers accumulated in the course of three millennia of studying the Way, it had taken Byam a while to figure out how to shapeshift. The legs had been the most difficult part. Byam kept giving itself tiger feet, the kind dragons had.
It could have concealed the feet under its skirts, since no
