Dale's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Dale wanted a mate more than he wanted anything, and he owned a den that would send one running. He was a fat blue dragon with a mullet, no teeth, and a grin that made hatchlings laugh. None of that scared him. The house did. It leaned over the lake on rotting stilts. The timbers sagged. The walls peeled. Wind slid through gaps and turned every night cold. No dragon would stay one hour in a place like this. So Dale decided to fix it. He counted his problems on his claws. The broken door. The bare floor. The hole in the roof that dripped on his bed. He had no gold and no help. He had only the swamp around him and a stubborn heart. He pried loose boards off the collapsed porch and dragged them inside. He hammered them over the door with a flat stone. His gums ached from holding nails, since he had no teeth to grip them. By noon the door stood straight. He stepped back, proud. Then the roof gave way. A whole corner of it slid off and splashed into the lake. Now the hole was three times bigger. Rain would fill the den. Dale sat in the mud below his ruined home and pressed his face into his paws. Fixing one thing had broken a worse thing. He was further from a warm den than when he started. Something soft bumped his elbow. A very fat purple cat had waddled out of the reeds. It pushed its round body against his leg and purred like a small engine. Dale scratched its ears. "You picked a sad spot to visit," he said. The cat trotted toward a stand of tall grass and looked back at him. Dale followed. There, half sunk in the shallows, sat a small boxy shelter someone had left behind. It was teal and yellow, with sturdy panels and a tight door. It smelled of nothing but pond water. Its walls were whole. Its roof did not leak. Dale ran his claw down the solid side. An idea grew. He could not save the whole den today. But he could make one room warm, one room dry, one room worthy of a guest. He worked until dark. He hauled the little shelter onto the bank beside his door. He wedged it against the wall so the two shared a corner. He stuffed the gaps with moss and dry grass. Inside, out of the wind, it was snug. The cat curled up and fell asleep at once. Dale looked at his strange new home. Half wreck, half tiny box, held together with mud and hope. It was small. But it was warm, and it would hold. He smiled his toothless smile. Now he had one dry corner to offer. The trouble was, no dragon would ever come this far into the rotting swamp to see it.