The trees were whispering secrets above her, shielding their words with waving branches and fanned leaves until nothing but a presence of suspicion hung in the darkness. Brittany held tight to the stones, preferring their silent observance in the midst of such skin-prickling noise. The night shadows were her cloak and they were as warm and comforting as her mother’s wool sweaters on this night.

Everything felt wrong in the wake of this man. Layered. Fractured, even.

The air had been the same in the village.

From the moment he’d arrived, the thrum of voices had been disrupted, jostled by an undercurrent of hushed whispers. Never had she felt such creeping instability. Peace and routine and talk of no more than the weather: these were solid ground. They were all things understood so that no mysteries remained.

He’d done nothing but walk amongst them. He’d made no sound save for the rhythm of breathing. All the same, his mere presence had begun to erode that stability.

She needed to know why. She’d followed him.

He sat below her now. Over the past few minutes she’d studied him in silence and it was beginning to seem to her that, whatever he may be, he was more at home here than he ever had been in the village. What fear of him she had held was shifting to purest curiosity.

He seemed not a man now, but an entity of the earth. He blended in, not stealing the shadows for his cloak as she did, but wearing them as something that had always belonged as a part of himself. They weren’t just shadows. They were his shadows. Like skin.

His whole being was ownership: skin of shadows, leaves for eyes, bark for hair. A crystal chained about his shoulders glistened even in the darkness with a light that reminded her of sunlight on the sea.

In the village he had been like a tree grown legs. Now she saw why.

So why come to where he is so misplaced?

He moved.

No. She squinted. No, something else had moved.

She shuffled along the stones, gripping a tree root for balance and silently moving closer. Eventually, the details of what she was seeing registered, and she froze once again. With scales as red as blood, as purest warmth, as sun-fired stone, a snake was coiling around his left arm. She tilted her head to one shoulder, sensing something strange.

It was then that he did move, slowly, intertwining the motion of one arm with the snake’s in a dance that seemed at once to taste of danger and again of control.

They’d called him a Charmer.

Of beasts. Of Men, Of life.

Stay away.

“Really, do you believe that?”

Her breathing hitched. He hadn’t even looked up. As quietly as she could, she moved back up the stones, trying to find her shadows again.

Below her, he laughed. “Oh, I know you’re there. Don’t worry and don’t speak. Only watch and listen, for I know that’s why you’re here.” She couldn’t see his face, but she could smell his smile. “Men see surfaces. You are not of Men. You seek truths, and therefore you will see truths.”

The hand, still dancing against the snake’s slow movements, became a distraction. His free hand moved, and only belatedly did she see what he had done. A touch to the crystal against his chest, and then there was light. A thin thread spiraled into the air, thickened, coalesced, until her wide eyes were met with the deep feral gaze of a serpent’s. A snake of smoke and glass hung in the air, green and gold, looking straight through her.

She cowered but did not run.

He spoke again as the scarlet serpent and it’s ghostly counterpart curled their way up. One reached for the man’s shoulder, the other for the heavens.

“Am I right about you? Do you See?”

To her silent surprise, she did see. More than just an ethereal creature, this ghost was changing its shape, just subtly. A smoky tongue flickered in the air before her eyes and tiny wings unfurled in a wave across the creature’s body. First one, then another and another: tiny feathers, tiny fibers, tiny lights, until the final pair glinted into existence along the snake’s head. Scales and feathers blended seamlessly until what had been a simple animal became a creature of greatest ancient wisdom and power.

A memory stirred.

Carved illustrations of the great legends, coaxed from wood and skins into the walls of the elder’s hall. She was too short to reach, but by standing on the tips of her toes, her fingers could trace the edges of those tapestries. She smiled. Beasts and men, but so much more.

One: an elegant snake with fearsome fins and wings like a ship’s sails. Said to be the wisest of all souls.

She gasped.

His chuckle silenced the trees, left the night air still in its wake, and dissolved the vision before her. The yellow eyes left last, hanging and then fading until all that was left was the burning memory.

“My travels were not in vain. You are one who sees.” He turned and met her gaze without falter. “In all Men, in all creatures, in all the world, there is the surface and the truth. There is the safety of the surface, the safety of blindness, and there is the freedom of truth. Call it miracle. Call it magic. Call it legend. Call it what you will. The stories never leave. They merely wait for eyes to see them.”

He looked to the trees, beyond, and to the stars. “I hope this gift is used well.”

Then, like the snake, he faded, until all that was left was his bloody red companion in the rusty dark of dead leaves. Its mission complete, it escaped into the shadows, never to be seen by her eyes again.

A tiny dragon taking flight.