The Battle of Bel-Gazou

Roch did not know that the Realists had landed upon Bel-Gazou the same day he found the child on the city’s outskirts, swaddled in dandelion roots. When he took the child into his arms and saw the entire world in her eyes, a secret storm brewed elsewhere, out of sight.

“She is quite beautiful, but this world does not suit her at all,” he warned the others when he returned to Bel-Gazou, before unswaddling the child and placing her on a glass dish as big as a table for the elders to see. Around them, the city gathered at its center to see an oddity, a miracle without an explanation yet. She had eyes, it seemed, above a nose, above a mouth. But what did this really prove?

There were no secrets in Bel-Gazou, a world that lived inside another like the smallest Russian nesting doll. It was born of the mind of a woman, but contained no women or men at all. Like everyone inside it, Bel-Gazou was blue. Ultramarine colored dragons were raised by a thousand Dragonite parents instead of two, homes and roads were blown of glass.

“It is too well-behaved to bypass suspicion,” Grinspoon said, watching the child who laid on it’s back wriggle and jerk more gracefully than any newborn thing should, with unblemished skin that was the stuff of extraterrestrial stories, smooth and pale, and eyes which took in everything and gave nothing in return. Grinspoon was not only older than Roch, he was the oldest Dragon in Bel-Gazou, with a sharp, sinuous face and yellow eyes that sunk deep into it. He had lived through war, he had fought the Realists and won.

“Be less wary, Grinspoon. It is impossible for a helpless thing to arrive somewhere so far from where she belongs of her own volition,” Roch said.

“That is what I am wary of. In other times we could afford to be less careful. You are young and there is still little to be wary about, and for this, I envy you. Listen when I say that you must dispose of this thing.”

“Thing! Are all things that look different from us objects? Call her what she is, alive.”

“And you think this is good? You believe you are treasure hunting but you are only inviting danger inside when you scour these outskirts. Why when you live in a palace blown of glass do you feel the need to go into the wilderness? You’ve never known anything uglier than the home you have and so you need to search for ugliness? Put this thing back and never return there.”

“She will die!”

“Then she will die.”

•

Roch promised Grinspoon that he would dispose of the child, but strongly suspected that the child had been placed there for him alone to find. He was the only one who ventured into the outskirts each morning for collection, and what did Grinspoon have to do with anything anyway?

The child was too different and too alone for Roch to abandon. He had never seen a Realist with his own eyes, but the child did not look like the beasts that Grinspoon spoke of, and no one had ever told stories about the form angels take. He blew sheets of glass as strong as iron and boarded the windows of his crystalline palace shut. Then he named her Gracelle and wove her a tiny bed of dandelion stems, which stood right next to his.

•

It’s said to have been a jealous heart that started the war between the Realists and Bel-Gazou. Years ago, there was a powerful and wealthy Realist who controlled the Real world through science, tricks and money. The more space he came to control, the more control he needed to feel satisfied by his conquests. Until finally, reality was not enough. It was the worlds inside other Realist’s minds he wanted, and science had recently found a way for him to enter them. His name was Dr. Leonard Imi and no one had access to this technology besides him, because no one else had $186 billion dollars.

While Dr. Imi had the ability to enter, occupy and steal from countless minds, he was only interested in the blue world of Bel-Gazou. It was the fantasy that had been invented by the only woman he ever loved, the mother of his child, and the first woman to ever leave him, despite his wealth and power. He had spent countless nights trying to infiltrate her brain, to gain control of Bel-Gazou. Colonizing this piece of her mind was the last frontier, life’s one uncontrollable conquest; the way we love and are loved in return.

But the woman was powerful, and so were her fantasies. She would not let them die, like a child refusing to grow old, protecting Bel-Gazou and every blue thing in it at any cost. She could not live without her fantasies, and she knew that Imi’s occupation would kill her, as it almost had before. Anytime he had gotten close, the Realists surrendered in the end, before the tension started all over again.

The next morning, Roch woke early for his morning scour, to search the outskirts of Bel-Gazou for any scraps that had fallen from other worlds. There was a new heap every morning of food, not always edible, unwanted garbage, and sometimes in the shambles, something precious. He kept what he needed and sold what he could. The danger in scouring was slipping, falling or being pulled over the border. Almost no other dragon in Bel-Gazou cared to come within a miles radius of the border, but Roch had always felt unlike the others, more curious and eager about something, though he did not know what.

It was unsaid what was on the other side of the fuzzy border, which changed shape every day, but Roch knew that the Realists were there. He knew from the discarded literature, the empty prescription bottles, and the purchasing statements they had forgotten to shred, that it was an awful place.

Today the air was thick, the border was dulling like a cloud released from a container. Roch moved towards it warily, and soon something moved back at him. First it appeared to be one thing, then it clarified into a thousand little things moving as one and looking the way he imagined angels would. Except now the angels were angry and he saw that they were Realists.

Roch took flight back towards the city to warn Grinspoon. The cloud of Realist’s proceeded close behind on foot. He looked down onto Bel-Gazou and saw his lucent home, whose windows had been shattered as if by an isolated natural disaster, a storm that attacked his home alone. He knew something had broken in or something had broken out, and that it had already moved on.

At city center, Roch was met with nothingness. The city was quiet and empty. He let out an enormous roar, a question to anyone willing to answer. The answer came, or rather slithered quietly into sight to reveal her familiar eyes. She took the form of a serpent ten times Roch’s size. Between her teeth, Grinspoon.

“Gracelle?” he asked, but in his heart he knew. She did not speak, instead she assesed him closely until there was a shift in her. The army of Realists were audibly close now. Gracelle turned away from Roch, and he watched Grinspoon’s body slide through her silhouette as she swallowed him and left.

The day the Realists took Bel-Gazou, Roch was the only fantastical figment to survive. After Gracelle left him in the city’s center, he took shelter in a blue wisteria between the city and the outskirts to watch the city burn. Only Gracelle knew he had been spared, and Imi would turn her back into a Real child again soon, too young to form any memory of being the serpent who took Bel-Gazou.

One day years later, Gracelle and Roch would meet again under the blue wisteria that he had been exiled to. Gracelle, now a young woman, would feel a sense of unexplainable closeness, like deja vu, or a small dose of love at first sight when she looked into Roch’s yellow eyes. But it would not be strong enough for her to put a finger on, and she would report the beast to Fantasy Enforcement at once.

This would be the day that the last surviving fantasy inside of Dr. Imi’s lover was defeated, the day she transformed from a child to an adult. Something deep had been stirred inside her but it was too far down to see or explain. This made it simplest to blame destiny when she found herself back at Dr. Imi’s door, the great love of her life, to say, "My heart and mind are yours."