Where Dragons Sleep

Brady had not seen Duncan Amen for nearly three months, not since the first snows began to touch the low desert. The man was a rarity around Beowawe, not of any Nevada tribe, but from far north in Canada, where the winters were said to whisper instead of howl.

His presence alone was strange enough to the locals, but what unsettled them most was his quiet, deliberate isolation.

“A man like that doesn’t need company,” old Saul at the pony station had once said. “Company needs him, and that’s the dangerous kind.”

Brady hadn’t meant to think of those words when he packed his kit and headed toward the desolate flats where Amen was last known to camp. But the thought kept returning, scratching like sand against his skull.

He followed the winding trail until it broke into a dirt track, and then followed that until it was no more than a memory between brittle sage and shale. When the wind stilled, he could hear it, the sound of ravens, hundreds of them, crying and clattering in the distance.

The noise grew until it pressed against the world like a storm. Brady stopped, climbed out, and stood listening.

The ravens’ chorus shifted rhythm, a kind of pulse in their noise that made his skin crawl. That was when he noticed the prints.

They were unlike anything that belonged to a bird or a coyote or even the half-mad miners’ tales of desert wolves.

The three-toed impressions, deep and oddly spaced, seemed heavy beyond reason. Brady crouched and traced the edge of one with his finger, the packed earth slick, as if something oily had seeped from the print itself.

He had seen such tracks before.

That memory came unbidden: a late summer night, the same area, and Duncan Amen’s calm voice saying, “You’ll never find peace if you keep looking into the places the earth wants forgotten.”

Now, standing amid the ravens’ racket, Brady felt that same cold bloom of dread. He started forward anyway.

The tracks led him to a low rise overlooking a shallow basin where the remnants of Amen’s camp stood, a wickiup framed in willow and draped with hides. From afar, it looked darker than it should, its surface shimmering faintly, like something breathing beneath the skin.

“Hallo!” Brady called, more to break the silence between the birds’ cries than to announce himself.

A shape moved in the doorway, and then Duncan Amen stepped out, tall and thin, his hair tied back with a strip of sinew.

“Brady,” he said, smiling faintly. “You always were the one to come walking into trouble.”

Brady stopped short. He’d expected wear, sickness, maybe loneliness, not this strange liveliness in the man’s eyes. And the hides stretched over the wickiup weren’t deer or elk. Their texture was unfamiliar, faintly scaled, the color of wet ash.

“You killed them?” Brady asked, his voice more hushed than intended.

Amen chuckled, a sound that didn’t entirely belong to laughter. “Weren’t as quiet as they thought.”

The words seemed to ripple through the air, echoed by the ravens above.

Brady ducked through the low doorway, following Amen inside. The dimness was immediate, but there was a glow, faint, greenish, not from firelight but from the hides themselves, as they pulsed.

The interior was orderly, though strange: bundles of herbs, a circle of white stones, a pot of blackened resin. At the center of it all lay a hollow in the ground, lined with odd feathers.

The scent of metal and decay hung heavy, and beneath it, something older, a mineral tang that reminded Brady of storms underground.

“What is this, Duncan?”

Amen knelt by the hollow. “Something that was buried long before either of us was thought of. It moves still, sometimes. The beasts you saw, they came from it, like bones rising to complain about their graves.”

Brady felt the world tilt a little. “And you killed them?”

“Had to.” Amen touched one of the glowing hides stretched above. “Their flesh burns like cold fire. Keeps the rest from hearing us.”

“The rest?”

The man looked up, and for a moment Brady saw the reflection of the green light in his eyes, two tiny suns flickering in bottomless wells. “Listen.”

At first, all he heard was the ravens. Then, beneath that, another sound, low, resonant, like the hum of earth shifting deep below, which rose and fell in rhythm, almost like breath.

Brady backed toward the doorway. “Duncan…what did you dig up?”

“I didn’t,” Amen said. “It dug itself up. I just told it no.”

The sound grew louder, swelling until the hides began to tremble on their frame. The ravens outside broke into chaos, a single black cloud spiraling into the gray sky.

Brady stumbled out of the wickiup and fell to his knees, staring as the ground around the camp began to shake, slow and wet, like the heartbeat of a buried thing. Amen stood in the doorway, arms raised, chanting words that cracked and shimmered in the air, not English, not any tongue Brady knew.

The glow from the hides brightened, each pulse striking in time with the deep rumble beneath. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the noise ceased.

Silence rolled across the flats. The ravens were gone, and the wind held its breath.

Brady stood, his throat dry as dust. “Duncan?”

The man lowered his arms. “It sleeps again,” he said softly. “But not forever. Nothing that old ever sleeps forever.”

The hides still glowed faintly in the twilight as Brady turned and began walking back toward his Mustang. He didn’t look back.

But as he went, he thought he heard, faintly, from the darkening sky, the soft laughter of ravens, echoing the sound he wished he’d never heard again.