Once his boat was far enough out to sea that the only witnesses were a couple of gulls swinging in aimless circles above the mast, Len took the talisman back out of its bag, feeling more than a little foolish. The problem - besides the fact that the family legends were probably all nonsense - was that none of the stories gave any details on how to use the thing. Tales about pirates and gold, those they had plenty of. Fantastical stories of monsters that sank ships on command, fishing out the treasure they carried like pearls from an oyster? Those too, although Len had stopped finding them entertaining when he hit about ten. It would have been a lot more useful, he thought bitterly, if the damned thing had come with written instructions.
Rather sheepishly, he tried saying a few so-called magical words out loud: abracadabra, alakazam, open sesame. Even he knew that last one wasn’t going to work. He tried to think like an ancient pirate, but what he knew about ancient pirates was pretty much limited to talking parrots and telling people to walk the plank, and he didn’t see how either of those would be helpful. Finally, he just cursed at it, which seemed as pirate-like as anything else, but it just sat there, a useless hunk of ugly metal and rock.
He was pretty sure the damn thing was laughing at him.
Finally, he bashed it against the side of the ship in a fit of temper. The talisman didn’t even get a dent, but the edge of one brass tentacle slice into the hand holding it, making him yell out loud as blood beaded up on his palm and dripped onto the stone.
An odd vibration seemed to make the talisman ripple and the greenish-brown gem developed a crack down its center. Then the crack opened like two round eyelids, and a swirling golden eye with a green tempest at its center stared up at him, unblinking.
“What the hell!” Len yelped and dropped the talisman onto the deck, where it rocked back and forth with the motion of the boat, still staring upward. The eye seemed to follow his movements, the whirling green pupil shifting slightly from side to side.
“I’ll be damned,” he whispered, crouching down to look at it more closely. “What the hell kind of thing are you?” There was no answer, just an uncanny glow. “Can you get me some treasure?” he asked. “Gold? Jewels?” A two million dollar bag of heroin?
The eye blinked at him once, and the wood planks under his feet shuddered. Off the starboard side, the water began to churn and bit by bit, a monster emerged from the sea. A bulbous head with two eerily shining eyes, and tentacles longer that Len’s boat thrashing the sea into a froth.
“Holy crap,” he breathed. “What the hell are you?”
One dripping tentacle hovered over the bow and Len just about peed himself, but all it did was uncurl its suckered tip and drop a small object on the deck with a muffled thud. Then it vanished back under the waves as silently as it had arrived. When Len looked at the talisman again, it was simply an ugly, inert piece of family history.
He placed it almost reverently back into its bag and tucked the leather pouch carefully inside his shirt. Then he examined the gift the monster had brought him. It wasn’t much; just an old coin. But Len knew it was the beginning of something much, much bigger. He just needed to figure out what to do next.
*
Hayreddin stirred in his cave, startled from his decades-long nap by a restless tremor that made his massive body shift atop its bed of golden coins, precious gems, antique vases, and other treasure. In his natural dragon form, he took up most of the space in the underground cavern, his shimmering black scales and yellow belly - almost the same color as the metal he hoarded - gleaming dully in the dim light. A ray of sun snuck in through a crack in the rocks above, illuminating the bounty that stretched from wall to wall, bits and pieces slithering down to the floor as Hayreddin stretched and yawned, trying to pinpoint exactly what had awoken him.
He looked about rather hopefully for a would-be thief, but this was the Otherworld, and few of its denizens cared for Human treasure, and none were foolish enough to brave a dragon in his den. Too bad. He would have relished a little excitement. Since the high queen had decreed that all paranormal creatures retreat to the Otherworld permanently, life had been rather quiet. Boring, even.
And the queen had made it clear that killing any of her other subjects, no matter how stupid or useless, was a fate punishable by whatever whim struck her fancy at the time. Too bad. Hayreddin liked killing things. Most dragons weren’t as bloodthirsty as Human legend painted them. Some, like him, were. But the queen’s whims were nothing to be trifled with.
He missed his days of adventure on the other side of the doorway, where he would take on the guise of a Human and lead bands of pirates in search of treasure and glory. Mostly treasure, of course, but he’d rather enjoyed being feared and admired, too. Through the years he’d had many names and faces, and had gathered much wealth which he’d brought back to his cave in the Otherworld. Gold and jewels had no intrinsic value here, of course, where you could find entire paths paved with rubies and trees whose bark was made of precious metals, but he was a dragon, and for dragons, it was more about the having than the value in the items themselves.
The having and the getting. Being a pirate king had been fun. There had been a lot more freedom on the other side and no one to tell him what to do. Or who he could and couldn’t kill.
Hayreddin sighed, causing a cascade of tarnished silver goblets. When the queen’s edict was issued, he had assembled one last huge haul, but the ship it was on had sunk in a storm before he could get it to land and through the doorway he was using back to the Otherworld. The Queen allowed occasional short, authorized visits to the Human lands, as long as you kept a low profile, but on his few visits there, he’d never been able to track down his lost treasure.
It had become something of an obsession - not an unusual hazard for a dragon who didn’t have enough purpose in his long, long life - but he still felt as though his hoard would never be complete without that final piece. It was annoying, like a broken scale that itched at the back of one’s neck, just where it couldn’t be reached by claws or teeth.