Here Be Dragons: Book 1 of the Emergence Series

“These bones are strange, darker than normal bones,” Pryce observed.

“These bones have color like dragon bones, is normal.”

Pryce raised an eyebrow. “Dragon bone color is like this?” He asked, pointing at the broken vertebrate he had cleaned up for examination.

“Yes, but it become more white if you burn it, I do not know why,” Fathom said, looking at Pryce to see if he could explain this as well.

“It turns whiter…?” Pryce muttered. That was indeed strange; bones would turn black if burnt for long times or high temperatures, at even higher temperatures then the bones would turn to ash. He was assuming the dragon didn’t mean it would turn to ash.

To test this, Pryce made a small wood fire and placed the damaged bone on top of the flame. Sure enough, the bone soon began to lighten. He poked the bone out of the fire to cool it off, but was shocked to see that the bone was actually producing a small aura of flame around it. He watched as the bones continued to lighten, the flames burning out once it had become a shade of sooty white. Using a rag, he wiped away the soot to reveal a bleached white surface.

“Huh,” Pryce said. He wasn’t sure what to think of this. “Why would it turn white…?” Pryce wondered out loud to himself. He sat down as he stared intently at the neck bone, as if that would make it confess it’s secrets. “And this bone is very light, much lighter than normal bones.”

“Gryphon bone is dense like dragon bones,” Fathom supplied.

“Interesting…” Pryce felt like this was a clue to the structure of the bones of dragons and gryphons. They didn’t have the lightly iridescent sheen that raptor bones had, so he assumed they were more closely related to each other than to those animals.

The microscope didn’t help much either; he saw the bones were very porous, but other than that there was not much else he could discern with that device.

The color of the bone lightening seemed like a big hint. Fire was the combination of some carbon-rich molecules with oxygen, hence the term combustion. Carbon was black, and the disappearance of the grey tint in the bones could be explained by the carbon turning into carbon dioxide. Could the grey be indicative of pure carbon?

It couldn’t be graphite, which was theorized to be made up of sheets of pure carbon stacked haphazardly onto each other. These sheets slid off of one another, which was great for making pencils, but not great for the structural integrity of the material.

It couldn’t be diamond either because that was ridiculous; diamond was only hard, and that made it brittle and fragile.

Graphene was a two-dimensional structure of carbon created by researchers a few decades ago using nothing but a block of graphite and cellophane tape, though of course the quantity of the product was too thin to be of actual use. This allotrope of carbon had incredible tensile strength, but could only be produced in quantities far too small to be useful.

And of course, it being two-dimensional made it incredibly weak since it was so thin…but carbon nanotubes were the very same structure wrapped into a cylindrical shape. What if gryphons used some small amount of carbon nanotubes in their bones? Or they might even use it in other parts of their bodies, like muscles or tendons? The tissue in question had been surprisingly difficult to cut in directions opposite to the muscle fibers, even for a razor-sharp obsidian scalpel.

But that was a bit too fantastical, Pryce thought it was more likely that they incorporated some kind of carbon-fiber structure into the matrix of their bones.

“Dragon bones become white when burned like this, yes?” Pryce asked, turning to Fathom for confirmation.

“Yes, I tell you this 5 seconds ago,” Fathom rumbled, proving that dragons were capable of hyperbole.

“Let’s try another test,” Pryce said, picking up a machete and swinging it down upon at a gryphon’s fibula he’d placed atop of wood log. The machete bounced off the relatively thin bone with a sharp crack, sending it flying several meters away. Upon picking up the bone he could only find a small indentation where he had struck it. Pryce swung the machete as hard as he could many more times, adding a few more minor deformations, but the bone refused to chip or break.

"Can you...break this...?" Pryce asked between pants.

The dragon simply picked up the bone between two talons and crunched down on it with his unusually sharp molars, shearing the thin bone in two. “Bigger bones is very strong, I can not break bones like this,” the dragon said, gesturing to the tibia as an example.

“I understand,” Pryce said, glancing warily at the bone that had so easily resisted a machete. He hoped there weren’t any creatures covered in bone-armor like this.

Pryce turned to Fathom. “This is enough tests on bones for today, I need your help for what I want to do.”

“Help? How?” Fathom asked, tilting his head curiously at Pryce’s excitement.

“This is…not look strong,” Fathom said, looking skeptically at the nailed together collection of nine crates that he had just helped push into the ocean.

“Can’t you try landing on it? Or moving onto it from the water?” Pryce coaxed. He was in swimming trunks, and had already cut notches into the crates to mark the waterline without a dragon on top of them. All he needed now was to record the waterline while Fathom was on it, and he could get his first estimate of the dragon’s mass.

Fathom rumbled uncertainly, but waded knee-deep into the water and stuck his head underneath the waves for a few moments, and seemed to check if there was anything in the water.

Pryce quirked an eyebrow, wondering if there could be predators even in the shallow waters that could give dragons pause. “You see anything?” He asked, unsure if the dragon could hear him with his head underwater.

Fathom brought his head back up to ask, “What did you say?”

“Did you see anything underwater?” Pryce asked again.

“I see small fish, some jellyfish, not much else,” the dragon said dismissively.

“Are there any animals that can hurt a dragon in the water?”

The dragon gave an uncertain glance at the open ocean, and replied, “Some dragon fly far over ocean, and do not come back. But many dragon go in ocean near beach and be not hurt,” he added optimistically after this ominous piece of information.

“…Be careful then, see if no big predators around in ocean,” Pryce cautioned, a little worried.

“That is why I move my head under water,” the dragon said obviously, tossing his head.

“Look for details, make sure no predators. I don’t want you to be attacked and hurt,” Pryce said, causing Fathom to huff in exasperation as he stuck his head back underwater.

“No predators,” he said in what Pryce suspected was a playfully mocking tone.

“Good,” he replied seriously. “Please move onto crates now.”

“Please?” The dragon echoed back this unfamiliar word.

“Please is word that you say when you ask someone to do something for you,” Pryce explained.

“Only hatchlings say that” Fathom huffed, but still put a foreclaw on top of the crates to pull himself up. Pryce waded into the water after him with a long-but-sturdy stick and a utility knife; the stick was to help make sure he didn’t step on anything venomous, and the knife was to cut notches into the crates in order to record how far they sunk.

He waited a few meters away in case the dragon fell over or accidently pushed the crates away; he doubted the makeshift floating platform was very stable. Despite the rickety setup, Fathom was able to get himself out of the water by flapping his wings, and he used the same limbs to maintain balance as he perched upon the relatively small three-by-three-meter-wide platform.

“You okay?” Pryce asked, seeing that the platform had mostly stopped rocking.

“Yes, this is not hard,” Fathom scoffed just as a moderately sized wave caused him to flare his wings as a counterbalance. “…Maybe a little hard,” he amended reluctantly.

“I’m going to measure the crates now, okay?” Pryce asked, continuing on when the dragon gave his assent. He would have ideally preferred to do this experiment in a small lake, but the waves today were about as small as they got, so this was his best chance.

He had tied the crates to a tree using a long rope so that they wouldn’t drift off too far, so it did not take long for him to approach the crates, where the water was about hip-deep.

He stood at a corner of the platform, watching as the waves washed against the crate. He had marked the unloaded waterline on the right faces of the crate when the platform had been unloaded, now he marked the left faces. He hoped that the average between those two points would give a somewhat accurate answer.

“Okay, I measured the water,” Pryce told Fathom, who had his neck craned down to watch Pryce. “Wait until I move away when you go off the crates, you might make crates hit me,” Pryce reminded Fathom.

“Yes, I remember this,” Fathom said, tossing his head in annoyance just as a wave hit the crates, throwing him off balance and causing him to flare open his wings – too late, the dragon fell backwards, his talons digging into the crates which served only to lift the whole platform up above Pryce’s head as he fell.

The water restricted his movement; having nowhere else to go, Pryce ducked beneath the waves.

“That almost killed me, next time, be more careful,” Pryce sighed, stabbing the stick into the ground.

Fathom's spines drooped ashamedly as he helped pull the ragged platform back onto the beach. Pryce was glad he had brought the stick with him; not because it had kept him from stepping on any sharp rocks or venomous animals, but because he was able to stake it into the sandy bed of the beach to block the crates from crashing onto him.

Perhaps he would have been fine lying flat under a meter of water, but the stick had certainly helped his odds.

Once Fathom had pushed the crates back onto the beach, Pryce measured the notches.

Lowest Measurement (cm)

Highest Measurement (cm)

Average (cm)

Unloaded

1

11

5.5

Loaded

53

60

56.5

Pryce first calculated where the waterline should have been to see if there was something wrong with his ‘apparatus’.

That wasn’t far off from his measured value, so that was a good sign.

Pryce plugged in his measured values to get:

Pryce frowned at that value, unsure of what to think of it. He looked up at the 13.5-meter-long dragon and tried to think if 4,590 kilograms was a plausible weight for him…When that didn’t work, he tried to think of things that might explain how the number was wrong.

Technically speaking, mass and weight were two different things. Mass was the amount of matter an object had, and weight was the force the object exerted, usually thanks to gravity. What he was measuring now was weight, not mass, as the hydrogen in the dragon would make him somewhat lighter, but it was easier to think in kilograms and he could just multiply it by gravity to get weight, even if it would ignore the weight negated by the hydrogen.

If he calculated the total mass of the platform and the dragon by using the ‘loaded’ values, he got 5,085 kilograms. Subtract the platform’s 360 kg and that gave him 4,725 kilograms, but he wasn’t sure which value would be more accurate since his uncertainty was so high. The difference in this value compared to his first one was 135 kg higher, which was due to the measured lower water level being 1.5 cm higher than the calculated value.

Regardless, even if his measurements were 10 cm off that would be ‘only’ a difference of 900 kilograms.

To compare this value against other creatures, he tried applying the square-cube law to the first flying creature he could think of; a pigeon. They were about 30 cm in length and had a mass of around 300 grams. Fathom was 45 times longer than a pigeon, so that meant 300 grams multiplied by 453 which was…27,337.5 kilograms. Okay, maybe that wasn’t a good model to use.

He tried scaling up the gryphon instead. That got him a mass of 6,769 kg, while doing the same with raptor specimens #1 and #2 got him 5,905 kg and 6,164 kg, respectively.

Dragons were flying creatures, so it made sense that they would be lighter than these non-flying ones. He felt a bit better about his calculated value after calculating these approximations; 4,590 didn’t seem a ridiculous value.

In a technical sense, his uncertainty should be half of his lowest unit of precision, which would be half a centimeter. However, the crests and troughs of the waves varied so much that it made the uncertainty far greater than that. Pryce decided to use an uncertainty of 2.5 centimeters just to give himself a range he was confident in:

Pryce looked up and was startled to see the underside of Fathom’s neck, the dragon peering at the mostly incomprehensible scribbles.

“How much mass do I have?” He asked curiously, earlier shame evidently forgotten.

“You have a mass of around 4,590 kilograms, I have a mass of 70 kilograms.” Pryce had weighed himself on a scale earlier and found he was still about 5 kilograms short of his usual mass.

“That mean I have more mass than 65 humans, yes?” The dragon asked, sounding satisfied.

“Yeah, that sounds right – wait, how did you calculate that so fast?” Pryce stared, surprised by this casual use of long division.

“This is like if dragon have 4,590 shiny things, but can only carry 70 shiny things, then dragon need to fly 66 times to move all shiny things,” Fathom explained, as if this were a common problem for a dragon to encounter.

“Do dragons move shiny things often?”

“No, that is example, sometimes dragons trade shiny things, or take shiny things from dead dragon, need to use division.”

“I…understand,” Pryce shrugged. Humans probably developed math to do much of the same things if he thought about it, though it was most likely centered around trade.

“How do you find mass?” Fathom asked, squinting at the numbers.

Pryce wondered how to best explain the logic behind this principle for a few moments, then answered, “One cubic meter of water is 1,000 kilograms, now imagine this crate is 1,000 kilograms, what will happen if you put this crate on water?”

“If…if crate has same density as water…crate will not sink, not float,” Fathom said, slowly.

“Yes, exactly!” Pryce said approvingly. “So if half of this crate is underwater, then the crate and the thing on top of the crate is 500 kilograms.”

“This makes sense,” Fathom nodded. “You have nine crates, and…you know weight of crates?”

“Yes, I need to know the weight of the crates,” Pryce said, impressed by the dragon’s quick thinking yet again. “Each crate is 40 kilograms, so this platform is 360 kilograms.”

“How much I sink? 51 centimeters?” Fathom tilted his head. “That does not make sense.”

“Uh, yeah,” Pryce said, surprised again by how fast Fathom thought. He explained how he calculated the value of the crates when unloaded, and how it was different from what he measured, probably due to the waves throwing off his measurements. Then he explained how he took the difference between the loaded and unloaded measurements to get a difference of 51 centimeters, but the total depth of the waterline was 56.5 cm.

“This is…smart,” Fathom noted. “Unit of mass is very useful.”

“Yes, that reminds me, how many kilograms do you think dragons can carry when flying?” Pryce asked, he needed to know how much he could bring to and from Fathom’s home after all. The dragon rumbled in thought, and Pryce added, “The pigs you take had around 100 kilograms of mass. You took two, how many more do you think you could take?” It was obvious he could fly with more than 200 kilograms since he had brought Pryce the 250-kilogram Gryphon.

“…I can only carry three pigs,” Fathom said, clenching his foreclaws and teeth pointedly. “I need to use legs to land.”

Pryce shook his head, “Size not important, I am talking about mass, how much mass can you carry? Can you carry two gryphons?” He asked, and Fathom looked unsure of this though he did not voice any denials.

After a few seconds he slowly admitted, “…Maybe two not big gryphons?”

“So you can carry two small gryphons,” Pryce clarified.

“Not big is different from small,” Fathom justified pridefully.

“Okay, okay,” Pryce said, relenting with a smile. “You can carry two gryphons that are not big, maybe 300 or 400 kilograms?”

Fathom let out a pleased rumble in response, bobbing his head in approval.

“Okay, you come here tomorrow morning, then take me and my things to your home, right?” Pryce asked.

“Yes, you bring shiny things?”

“Yeah, I can bring shiny things,” Pryce said, smiling at the dragon’s one-track mind. “Is there anything you want in particular?”

“Shiny things, alcohol, pigs,” Fathom listed immediately, and Pryce noted with humor that treasures, alcohol, and food were all some of the things most coveted by humans as well.

“You can take the last pig tonight, that way you don’t have to carry me and the pig at the same time tomorrow.”

“I can carry you and pig,” Fathom scoffed, offended by the implication that he could not.

“I will be bringing other things, will be heavy,” Pryce warned, feeling less apologetic about weighing down the dragon and more so towards the last pig now.

“Good,” Fathom rumbled, an avaricious gleam in his eyes.

[JOURNAL ENTRY]

Day 39,

By using Fathom as a baseline, I can scale up his weight to the shortest and longest dragons to estimate a weight range for the species. Fathom told me dragons range from about 12 – 14 meters in length, that gives me a result of approximately 3200 kg – 6300 kg.

I’m not sure if the females are denser than males or not, but they are larger. I cannot account for sexual dimorphism until I weigh a female dragon, and not reliably until I weigh at least a few individuals of each sex. Fathom claims to be a large male, and while he does not seem prone to deceit, he is quite prideful, so I would not put it past him to be boasting a little.

Regrettably, I do not have the resources on hand to determine the exact type of carbon that makes up the bones – if that is even what it is. As things are, I’m leaning towards the explanation of organic carbon fiber strengthening the bones.

Final wound progress update: The scabs have completely fallen off, I’m quite excited to be visiting Fathom’s home tomorrow.