The Finder

There weren’t always dragons in the valley, so how long ago did this one die?

That was Medwin’s initial thought, after she identified the bones.

Medwin had felt a compulsion to explore the cave for several weeks—she just knew there was something in there she was meant to find—but it took till this afternoon before she’d finally put both the time and necessary equipment together. It had been pitch dark since she entered, with a blackness she could almost feel. She’d been moving gingerly forward, holding her flashlight with both hands, peering desperately through the feeble light. When she tripped on something uneven on the floor, she looked down, gasped and almost dropped her flashlight.

It was a skeleton, but not a human one this time, thank God. She crouched down, played her flashlight over the bones, and identified it as a dragon, resting in eternal sleep. The bones formed a shape about the size of a wolf, but they were as thin, as delicate, as a bird’s, curiously light for the size, but far too large to be an eagle or any modern bird.

She wanted to take one of the wing bones home with her--but it seemed a desecration. There was something magical about dragons. So she crouched beside the skeleton with some thought of drawing its contours, until she remembered her smart phone.

Easy peasy!

She snapped a photo of the skeleton, and then took a brief video of the surrounding area for context. It was there; close by, but not directly beside the dragon, that she found the little shoes. She stooped, picked them up. Cracked and scarred leather, originally red, they were soft soled, with no heel—more a slipper than a shoe—about the right size to fit a three year old. She searched the rest of the area, but there was nothing else. Had the dragon snatched and devoured a child, clothing and all?

The human artifact proved that this dragon, at least, had died more recently than the Jurassic period. A queasiness roiled in her guts. Were there other dragons, still alive? Close by?

It’s time to go home.

She slid the little shoes into her backpack, turned her back on the dragon bones, and made her way through the bleak darkness of the cave to the shining beacon of the entrance.

Even six months ago, she would have joyfully hurried to the kitchen of her family home, showing off her pictures and the slippers. She’d always loved finding things, loved sharing her finds with her family. And she still might have done so, if all she’d found was the dragon’s skeleton. But the tiny shoes made the find macabre, and particularly difficult since the political fallout of her last major find.

She went to her room, shrugging off her backpack, and pulled out the tiny slippers to examine them more closely in the light. They’d definitely been made with red dyed leather. She put them to her nose, and found a hint of smoke, likely part of the tanning process. These shoes weren’t all that old; perhaps a year or two. Here was evidence of a missing child; she needed to take it to the police, although she was no longer a favorite…

There was a brief knock, then before she could reply, Liz, her younger sister, a cute fifteen year old strawberry blond with a big smile and freckles, danced into the room. “Did you find anything?”

Medwin glared at her. “You’re supposed to wait till I say, ‘Come in.”

She shrugged. “Whatev. You always say it…”

“Yes, but I could have been changing or something.”

“I’ve seen you naked before,” she said airily. “—what’s that ‘or something’? You getting it on with Mitch?”

“We’re just friends.”

“That’s what you always say…”

“Because it’s true.”

But Liz had seen the slippers. She snatched them out of Medwin’s hands. “What’s this?”

“Give them back.”

“They’re too small for you.”

“They might be evidence,” Medwin said.

“Oh, no.” Liz put her hands on her hips, and glared at her. “Not again. We’re not going through any more crap with your ‘finds’.”

Everyone in Medwin’s family had some kind of knack; a hang-over from the ancient magic that had once imbued the world.

Dad could light, or extinguish, a tiny flame with a snap of his fingers. He’d thought, for a time, of becoming a fire-fighter, but his little knack was just a hang-over; not enough to form an entire career. Back in the days of major magic, Dad might have been a soldier, able to set afire the troops of the enemy. But instead of a firefighter, he’d become a salesman for a pharmaceutical company. In this generation, his knack was a parlor trick, useful for camping and not much else.

Mom could cook like a dream and never needed a written recipe; she instinctively knew which ingredients were meant to marry together, and how much of each one. It was a useful skill for her family, but her knack didn’t make her a master chef.

Timotheus, Medwin’s older brother, loved numbers. To him, the world was populated with numbers and he saw them instinctively in context. By the time he was four, everyone knew he was destined to be a mathematician; in the old days, he would have been trained as a magician. There’d been no magicians— or at least no legal magicians—since the devastation of the Great War.

Liz was a minor telekinetic; when she’d grabbed the slippers, she’d done it with her mind. But she couldn’t hold anything heavier than about a pound—the little slippers were the top end of her range.

Medwin was a finder. From before she could speak, when a family member couldn’t locate something, Medwin instantly had a picture in her mind. One of her earliest memories was grabbing her daddy’s big hand and dragging him over to the closet where his keys had fallen out of his coat pocket. Her knack had been both loved and appreciated--celebrated by family and friends alike.

Twenty year old Medwin had been in training to become a police officer--her life perfectly aligned--until that dark day, five months previous, when she’d received the mental pictures and locations of four bodies. She’d gone to her supervisor on the police force; they’d learned, like her family, to take her findings seriously. After the police obtained a warrant, they had indeed found the bodies--just as she’d seen them--in the mayor’s backyard.