Introductions: the Dragon King of the Well. Surname unknown. Fief: one well. Subjects: one — the little red carp downstairs who keeps the coins.
Yes, you heard right. Fief: one well. Finished laughing? Good. To business.
I was a well-carp myself once, born centuries before the one downstairs. In my day, a carp had a proper career path: accumulate your merit, swim the current upstream, leap the Dragon Gate, become a dragon. I accumulated four hundred years' worth, until my scales shone gold; on the day of my leap, half the village's water-folk came to see me off.
I made the leap.
You heard right again. I cleared it. The Gate's golden light poured down over me — my whiskers lengthened, horn-buds broke, all four claws came out — and halfway through the transformation, a decree fell from Heaven:
"Dragon registration is temporarily suspended."
One sentence. No reason. No term. No recompense. The light dissolved and left me stuck mid-passage: dragon body, carp tail; horns but no pearl; able to call three feet of rain but not one cloud. The gate-clerk was civil enough and issued me a settlement: in recognition of completed merit, you shall hold the provisional title Dragon King of the Well, guarding one water-eye at Gao Village; upon reopening of the registry, you shall be enrolled with priority.
Provisional. Upon reopening. With priority.
That was three hundred years ago.
You imagine I spent those centuries cursing Heaven? The first hundred, honestly, yes. I coiled at the well-bottom seething: by what right? I never stole, never robbed; four hundred years of wind and current, swum fin-stroke by fin-stroke — to be jammed on the threshold without so much as an explanation.
The second hundred, I reasoned out half of it: the decree said suspended, not revoked. Suspension means something happened up there — the registry office had no hands to spare. And what size of event leaves Heaven's own offices short-handed?
This last hundred, I stopped resenting and started investigating.
A small fief has one virtue: depth. This well is a water-eye; its spring-veins run everywhere — one line to the village river, and one, which took me decades to trace, joining the Old Road that Elder Wave-Crown speaks of, straight through to the East Sea. News travels the veins: the gate-sealing order. The disordered tides. The Dragon Palace enrolling no new dragons for three hundred years…
It matched. The year my registration froze is the very year the palace gate fell.
All dragon-affairs under heaven stopped as one. I was never forgotten. I was swept up in the wake of that.
There is one more thing, told to no one until now — and I tell you because you are bound west.
At every lunar eclipse, a moon appears at the bottom of my well. By rights a well-moon is the sky-moon's reflection: when the one above runs black, the one below should blacken with it.
But the moon my well shows is bright.
Round, white, immaculately full, resting on the water at the well's floor like any good-year night from three centuries past. I have watched it from dusk to dawn: it is no reflection — reflections shatter with the ripples, and it does not shatter. It shines as if rising through from the well's own far side.
A water-eye is an eye, and eyes look both ways. One side of my well faces this present world with its black moon overhead —
and the other side faces where?
That clean full moon — which sky is it hanging in?
Boy: my one small subject has gone with you, and this king is bound to his fief and cannot follow. So I charge you with two matters.
One official: if in the west there truly stands an office that governs wishes, dragon registries, and all the stopped machinery of the world — deliver a message. The Dragon King of the Well at Gao Village, awaiting decree these three hundred years: your servant still keeps the water-eye.
One private — keep it in your heart only:
if the day comes when you pull that black moon out of our sky —
trouble yourself to visit my well, and see whether the moon at its bottom still shines.
Because if it does… then the sky over our heads has not been the original one since three hundred years ago.