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over the bridge · behind Widdershins · a walled yard at noon · under a sun you can look at

Behind Widdershins, in the city over the bridge

The Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons

A home for small dragons nobody else wanted, kept as they are, under a sun the smoke has turned down.

A walled yard of sand under a smoky sky the colour of weak tea, with the sun in it turned down to a pale disc you could look straight at. Chimneys stand over the brick wall breathing their smoke into the sky, and an iron gate stands open in it under a board with the yard’s name painted on it, too far off to read. Low brick pens with round tops stand along the wall, each with a doorway and no door, straw spilling out of it, and a bucket of sand and a bucket of water beside it. Small dark green dragons are in the yard: one up on a pen’s roof, one coming out of a doorway, others standing about on the sand, and some asleep, curled with their tails round their noses and a wisp of smoke going up from each. The ones awake each breathe a little flame, and those flames are the brightest things in the picture, brighter than the sun. Every shadow is soft and round its own thing’s feet. Nothing in the yard moves.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.

The Sunshine Sanctuary for Sick Dragons is Lady Sybil Ramkin’s, in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! (1989): a home for small swamp dragons that nobody else wanted. Swamp dragons are small, they breathe fire, and so much goes on inside one that now and then one goes off.

This one is ours. It is a walled yard over the bridge, behind Widdershins, at noon on a day when the city’s smoke has turned the sun down to a pale disc you can look straight at. The yard is lit by the whole smoky sky at once, so nothing in it throws more than a soft shadow round its own feet, and the brightest things in it are not the sun. They are the dragons.

A home, not a waiting room

The street has shelters, where animals wait to be taken home: Rescue A Cat, Rescue A Dog and Rescue Small Animals. This is not one of them. A dragon who comes into this yard is not waiting for anybody. Nobody is shown off at the gate, nobody is chosen over anybody else, and nobody leaves to make room. The yard is the home, not the waiting room.

And nobody is here as a good deed. A sanctuary is easy to tell as a story about the kind person who keeps it, with the animals as the proof of how kind. In this yard the dragons are the point, and whoever keeps it is just somebody who lives here too.

Sick, and staying here

The sign says sick, and the yard keeps the word. Nothing here is put right in order to leave. A sanctuary that kept its dragons only until they were well would be a hospital, and some of these dragons are never going to be well in the way a hospital means. That is not a sad ending. It is the middle, where most of life is.

They’re health conditions that can’t be cured and so they must be managed.

So what changes is the yard, never the dragon. The floor is sand, so nothing on it can catch. There is a bucket by every doorway, so when a dragon goes off, nobody has to run. The pens have doorways and no doors, so a dragon goes in when it wants the dark and out when it wants the sky. None of that asks a dragon to be any different.

When Terry Pratchett was told what was happening to his brain, he gave it a word of his own, and it was not a fight. Star Stuff wrote it up in One Atom of Justice:

Not a battle he was losing. Not a lesson. A thing that was in the way, named accurately, out loud, by the person it was in the way of.

What is in the yard

Kept by everybody in it

In the book the sanctuary is one woman’s, kept by her. A yard like this is easier to keep the way our pages say care gets kept: by everybody in it, the ones who need looking after included, because everybody does, some days more than others.

Sometimes we call them care webs or collectives, sometimes we call them “my friend that helps me out sometimes,” sometimes we don’t call them anything at all—care webs are just life, just what you do.

Resisting the model of charity and gratitude, they are controlled by the needs and desires of the disabled people running them.

A sanctuary is not a charity, and this is the difference: nobody in this yard owes anybody a thank-you for being let in, and nobody’s place depends on being grateful, good, or getting better. The dragons keep the yard too: the bricks round the pens are warm because the dragons are, and the yard is warmer for everybody in it.

I am fighting for an interdependence that embraces need and tells the truth: no one does it on their own and the myth of independence is just that, a myth.

What is not in this yard

Next door, and over the bridge

Whose this is

Job marker — a bucket of sand set down on the floor

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: What will not catch?

Before the code: The floor of the yard, and the bed of every pen in it, is made of one thing, so that nothing on it can catch. What is it?

Hint 1

It is in every bucket of one kind, at every doorway.

Hint 2

It is what the first card under What is in the yard is about.

Last hint

Sand.

Give me the answer

The answer is Sand. The floor of the yard is sand, and so is the bed of every pen. A dragon having a bad day has it on something that cannot catch.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: BUCKET

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →