Gilded Ashes-Chapter 326: Temporarily Unavailable

The lizard opened one eye.

It looked at Raizen. Then at his hands on his hips. Then back at his face. The single visible eye - pupil wide and round - contained the specific expression of something that had been asked a question so far beneath it that answering would constitute an act of charity.

"What am I..." it repeated, but not as a question, more like a statement. The way a professor might repeat a student’s answer before explaining why it was wrong.

It lifted its head from the warm stone. Slowly. With the slow pace of something that wanted Raizen to understand that this movement was a gift - that the interruption of its comfort constituted a sacrifice, and that the sacrifice was being made under protest.

"I" the lizard said slowly, dramatizing the moment even further, "...have no idea"

"You have no idea." Raizen bent his eyebrow.

The lizard rolled its eye - its single opened eye.

"I can’t trick you, can I?"

Raizen leaned forward, leaning on both hands on the warm stone seat. His face was right above the lizard. "I’ll ask again. What are you?"

After a short pause, a few moments of silence, the lizard made a hiss that sounded like a sigh.

"I am the residual conscious manifestation of an entity so vast that your entire species has spent its collective existence swimming through the outermost edges of her awareness without once - not once - realizing you were wet."

It paused, letting that land.

Raizen stared at it. "What."

"I am older than your language" the lizard continued. "Older than the trees you’ve nailed your little walkways to. Older than most stuff around here! I have witnessed the birth of systems your finest scholars haven’t discovered yet, I have watched those systems collapse into nothing, and I have watched the nothing be forgotten by your little tiny acorn brains, and I have watched the forgetting be forgotten." It lifted its chin. "I am, in the most literal and least metaphorical sense available to your limited vocabulary, the greatest. The wisest. The most indestructible-"

Another pause.

"Ahem. The greatest. The wisest. The- uh... Theee... I forgot what came after that."

The lizard’s spikes rose - not in alarm, but in emphasis.

Raizen opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"I... didn’t understand a single thing you just said."

"Well that" the lizard said, "is not my problem."

It lowered itself back onto the stone, and pressed its belly flat. The warmth reclaimed it immediately - Raizen could see the tension leave its body, the spikes retracting, the tail curling. Whatever grand speech it had just delivered, the toilet seat was winning.

Raizen rubbed his face with both hands. Took a breath. Tried a different approach.

"Okay. Fine. I don’t need the full history. Can you at least tell me your name?"

The lizard’s eyes were half-closed.

"My name, ha?" it said.

"Yes. Your name. What do I call you?"

Silence.

The lizard’s eyes opened fully. Something shifted behind them - a flicker of something that wasn’t ego or irritation. Something closer to confusion. The kind of confusion that comes from reaching for a thing you’re certain is there and finding the shelf empty.

"I..." it started.

Stopped.

Its head tilted. The tiny spikes twitched - up, down, up. The pupils contracted slightly, then widened again. It was searching. Raizen could see it - the same focused, inward look he’d seen on people trying to remember a word that was on the tip of their tongue.

"It’s temporarily unavailable"

"Your name is temporarily unavailable."

"That is what I said, yes. Do you require a hearing aid?"

"How is "temporarily unavailable" even a name!?"

The lizard’s tail flicked. "I had one. I’m reasonably certain I had one. The specifics are - the specifics have been displaced. Mislocated. Filed incorrectly." Its voice tightened. "This is your fault, incidentally."

"MY fault?"

"You ripped me out of a perfectly stable state of pre-existence and crammed me into a shape the size of a root vegetable. Things were lost in the transition. Important things. Things like names and context and - it’s fine. It’s fine. It will come back."

The lizard pressed itself even more against the stone, somehow flattening itself, not barely thicker than a pen. The conversation was clearly over, as far as it was concerned.

Raizen leaned against the wall. Crossed his arms.

"Alright" he said. "Then I’ll give you one."

The lizard’s eye snapped open.

"You will do no such thing."

"You just said you don’t have one."

"I said it was temporarily unavailable. That is not the same as not having one, you absolute-"

The pupils contracted. The wide mouth opened and closed twice as the lizard cycled through what appeared to be an internal catalogue of insults, searching for one that matched the severity of the offense. "- you absolute tone-deaf noodle."

"Noodle!? Where did you get that from!? Ugh... anyways, how about Shadow?" Raizen said.

The lizard recoiled. Physically. Its entire body contracted away from the name like it had been offered spoiled food.

"Shadow?" it hissed. "Do I look like a shadow to you? Shadows are cast by things. They are dependent. Secondary. I am not secondary to anything."

"Okay, not Shadow. What about Onyx?"

"What in the world is an "onyx"?"

"A black gem. It’s-"

"You want to name me after a rock."

"It’s a nice rock."

"You’re pathetic." The lizard’s voice had reached a pitch that seemed physically impossible for something its size. "Next you’ll suggest ’Pebble." Or ’Gravel.’ Actually, why not ’Dirt’? Why not just call me ’Dirt’ and complete the humiliation?"

"What about Ember?"

"Too hot."

"Ash?"

"Too dead."

"Spike?"

The lizard looked at him with an expression that transcended language. It was the look of a creature that had lived through too much and was now being asked to respond to the name Spike.

"I would rather transform into a bug," it said quietly.

Raizen almost laughed. Almost. The absurdity of it - standing in a bathroom, arguing names with a lizard that thought it was a god - was pressing against the edges of his composure. But he held it. Barely.

"Fine" he said. "No name yet. We’ll figure it out."

"Oh, I will figure it out" the lizard corrected. "When my name returns - and it will return - you will use it with the appropriate level of reverence, or I will bite something you value."

The lizard closed its eyes again. The warmth of the stone was pulling it toward sleep - he could see it in the way its breathing slowed, the way its body softened and flattened, the way the spikes retracted one by one like a flower closing for the night.

He should go back. Kenzo and Saffi and Atman were waiting. The food was probably arriving. He’d been in here too long already.

But one more question.

"The things I saw" Raizen said. Quietly. "When I was summoning. The visions. The fire, the villages, the -"

"The guy with a shiny stick" the lizard completed.

Raizen stopped.

The comedy in the lizard’s voice was gone - the ego, the insults, the theatrical outrage. All of it. Stripped away completely.

"The one who gets whacked" it said. Its voice was different. Smaller. Like the voice of something very young remembering something very old. "Over and over and over. Ye, I know him."

The bathroom was quiet. The muffled sounds of the casino - laughter, dice, conversation - pressed against the door.

"Who is he?" Raizen asked. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The lizard looked at him, then tucked its head beneath its tail. Curled tighter against the warm stone. The membrane along its tail fin trembled once, then stilled.

"I dunno. Ask me again later" it said. Muffled. "When I remember."

The bathroom was silent.

Raizen stood there. Hands at his sides now - the determined pose, the hands on hips, the interrogation posture, all of it gone. He looked at the lizard curled on the warm stone, and just stood there and let the creature have the quiet it was asking for.

Raizen exhaled slowly.

He’d been gone too long.

Suddenly, he reached toward the lizard. But gently this time - no grabbing, no forcing. Just an open palm, offered, the way you’d offer a hand to something that might or might not want to be held.

"Come on" he said. Quiet. "We have to go back."

The lizard didn’t move. Its head was still tucked beneath its tail. Its breathing was slow, rhythmic, the shallow pulse of something half-asleep.

Then it spoke.

"You should be careful with those flowers, ya know?"

Raizen’s hand stopped. "Ha?"

The lizard didn’t lift its head or open its eyes, like before. The words came from beneath the curled tail, muffled by membrane and skin, barely reaching Raizen’s ears.

"The ones in your pocket" it said. "The black ones."

Raizen stood in the locked bathroom of an underground casino in Ukai, hand extended, palm open, and felt the two preserved black lotuses in his right chest pocket press against his ribs like they’d always been there.

They felt heavier than before.