Sashs vs. the Whole Wide World (and Dragons):

It should've been an entirely normal, early-morning, low-tide, late-spring, nothing-unusual-happens run on the beach. I left the house at 5:27 a.m., the sun a hazy reflection from behind the horizon. I wore my usual outfit: long hair in a pony, light hoodie, running shorts, and $500 running shoes. (No, we are not rich. Dad, Gramps, my brother, and my brother-in-law went in together on the shoes as a combination Christmas and graduation gift last December. Yes, I am that girl who graduates from high school a semester early. There were extenuating circumstances of the practical type.)

The drive to my preferred beach took 20 minutes. There were closer beaches, but I liked this one because it was remote enough to be quiet even on a busy day and was always empty early in the morning. The downside of the quiet was the beaches popularity with horse people. If the tide hadn't had time to do clean up, there were poop piles to avoid. Gross.

I parked in the sand-strewn lot, hid my keys under my seat (no one was going to steal my ancient Hyundai), grabbed my phone and earbuds, and began the hike over the dunes toward the water. It was my favorite time of day. My favorite activity of the day.

Also, I was determined to have a full-blown, dead-normal college experience next fall, which meant being in top form for the cross-country team and having enough money saved to not work two jobs while taking classes.

Hence graduating early and working four jobs now.

I knew from the moment I left the dunes that something was off. The Bay has a feel to it, a rhythm, and the rhythm was wrong. It was too quiet, too still, even with the come and go of the surf.

I ignored the feeling as I was one minute 30 seconds early to start my run and wanted to use the time to pick my playlist.

I had the timing of my runs down perfect. If I began at 6 a.m. sharp and kept my pace, I'd finish at 6:54. This gave me 38 minutes to get back to my car and drive to Carmel and arrive for Job #1 only two minutes late. (Any later than that as Mrs. Lee gave me a bruising lecture on punctuality and threatened to fire me. Weird motivational tactic to increase my running speed I know, but it worked.) I moved songs around until my alarm went off, then shoved the phone into my pocket and ran. Only then did I notice why the Bay felt different.

Where there should’ve been a long panorama of sand and ocean, my view was marred by what looked like an overturned boat hull, half-in and half-out of the water.

That did happen sometimes. A boat from one of the marinas would get loose, drift down the coast, and show up beat-to-death on our shore. But it was April and this was California. The weather had been pleasant for several months now. Whale then?

That happened too. Things died and washed up. I'd seen a dead dolphin once and several dead sea lions. A couple years ago a partially eaten whale calf had caused a big stir. My Dad and brother had taken me out to get some pictures. Seriously gross.

This was much bigger than the calf. Much, much bigger.

I ran straight toward it, grumbling to myself that stopping to shoot video was going to mess up my run time, but I knew the routine. My Dad had a YouTube channel, and while his platform was all about exotic car parts, he could work in pretty much anything that might get views. A recently deceased whale was a no brainer.

I slowed several hundred yards back, turned off my music, and started filming. I described what I saw as I walked forward and made all kinds of excited noises. (My brother was Dad's cameraman/producer and he endlessly lectured about the importance of not just the visual but the auditory experience of the viewer.) As I panned my camera, I noticed that whale didn't end where it should have but continued on (and on and on and on), like a massively thick, extremely long seaweed that was being lolled about in the surf.

No whale had a snaky tail like that. Also, even in the low light the tail had a purple cast to it.

I put my phone down and really looked. “Mother of Dog, no way.”

I picked my phone back up. “I think it's a seadragon.” My voice hitched with real excitement this time. I continued forward, swinging my phone right to left to capture the never-ending length of it. “And a huge one. No one's seen one beached since… Since… Since long enough that I have no idea when one was last seen. So before I was born, basically.”

Now that I knew what I was looking at, I couldn't believe I’d mistaken it for a whale (or a boat). Unlike their flighted cousins or the desert fire-lizards, seadragons had no necks and blunted heads, making them look whale-like in the front. But that was the end of the resemblance. The curve of their bodies was entirely different, longer and more serpentine. Instead of fins they had water wings – long, thin appendages that stuck out from the creatures' sides with a gossamer webbing that rippled under the water.

Or at least that's what the documentaries about them said. It wasn't like I'd ever seen one before, in the water or out of it.

Frankly, neither had the documentarists. Seadragons were that rare.

And valuable. Pricelessly valuable.

I kept talking, describing what I was seeing. If my voice was overly high pitched, well Dad's audience would understandably be that much more drawn in. This dead dragon was likely worth an easy hundred million dollars just in the scales alone.

And I was the only one who currently knew it existed.

There was an opportunity here for more than just a video.

Seadragons were protected under every single international law on the planet, and the Monterey Bay was a marine sanctuary. Removing anything from here, touching anything, was likely to get me arrested and even worse, get my admission to UC Santa Cruz revoked.

Right. I wouldn't touch it.

I was totally going to touch it. A single scale sold to a jeweler would pay for four years of college expenses without my having to hold down multiple jobs and live on a diet of peanut butter and carrots. Two scales would get my dad out of debt. Three scales would make a down payment on a house for my brother and his husband and help them adopt the baby they wanted.

Yeah. No way was I not going to pilfer a couple of scales. I'd just do it quick and high-tail it out of there. Luckily, I knew how to run.

The sun cracked over the dunes, splitting the shadows. The carcass lit like the priceless jewel it was, reflecting iridescent purple and green and black. That was the thing about magical creatures, they tended to be universally beautiful.

This one definitely was. So much so that I paused to take a breath of appreciation. And it wasn't just the richness of the color, but also in the sinewy shape and texture of the hide. I only paused for a moment though. Beauty, while great, didn't pay bills. “We're going to be rich. We're going to be rich. We're going to be rich.”

I ran right up to the thing's blunted head. It was easily twice, maybe even three times my height. Its huge eye was open, but had a hazy, dead cast to it. The scales were even more gorgeous on the creature than they were in the photos of the British crown jewels, pearly and reflective and colorfully brilliant all at once. Each scale was maybe the size of a piece of binder paper. (Although it was only the innermost bit that could be used for rings and crowns and such. Dirtwyrm scales were worthless.)  After taking some close-up photos, I tucked my phone under my arm to use both hands to try to pull one free. It was fastened firm, and after a moment, I moved my phone to my pocket and put a foot on the side of the creature to give it my all.

I failed. My hands slipped on the velvety smoothness of the scale, and I fell backwards onto my butt on the sand. The massive eye blinked at me.

I screamed.

Then I jumped to my feet and ran away faster than the day I’d come in second in the central coast cross-country conference (another fun thing to repeat five times fast, which I could do, but my coach could not).

The seadragon wasn't supposed to be alive. How could it be alive? Was it now going to kill me? I had, after all, been attempting to tear a piece of it off, a small piece, but still. How salty would I be if someone tried to steal one of my fingernails while I watched?

Since it made no move to chase me, I stopped running and turned back to look.

Seadragons weren't thought of as killers, not like the fire-lizards or the eel-like-things that lived in Norway, but all the magical creatures were supposed to have better-than-cow intelligence. It blinked a second time, and I realized the milkiness I'd assumed was the cast of death was actually some kind of inner lid. I only got a quick glimpse though because it threw its head in the air and I threw my arms over my head as sand sprayed everywhere. It began to thrash. Great thumping thrashes, head up and down, body back and forth, salt water and sand going everywhere. A flock of gulls took off with wild screeches for the safety of the sky. I began to run backwards again. Dead was fine. Dying fell under the category of gross. And well… dangerous.

At the same time, I could just hear my father voice when I told him that I'd witness the death throes of a seadragon and I hadn't filmed it for his channel. Sasha Dawn Clems, Have. You. Learned. Nothing!

I stopped again and pulled my phone back out to hit record right as the creature threw itself straight in the air. It must have made it fifty feet.

With the movement, I could see what had happened to it. It had a breast wound with something jagged and bronzish sticking out one side like a giant piece of metal, a harpoon maybe.

Holy freaking not-a-cow. Someone had shot it?

And then the creature fell back to the earth with the loudest thump I'd ever heard, making the ground shake way worse than the 6.3 earthquake we'd had when I was ten. Even the ocean waves seemed to stop waving for a long, held breath.

I kept filming. Even if I didn't get a scale, I was pretty sure no one had ever filmed a seadragon's death. And not just any death, but possibly a murder. This video wasn't going up on Dad's channel. I was going to sell it. To the documentarists. Or the makers of True Crime shows. And it wouldn't even put me in danger with the coast guard or FBI. I could almost feel the dollar signs dancing around my head.

The creature had come down crooked and facing me. It seemed to squish up its face as if in terrible pain, and I was hit by an unexpected, sank-like-a-stone pity. (I wasn't entirely a hard-hearted, finances-obsessed heretic.) The seadragon was beautiful and it was in pain and it didn't deserve this and none of this was alright.

The wide grimace of a mouth parted. My previous fear-of-being-eaten overcame my sympathy, and I bolted backwards a third time.

It made a wet popping sound as if blowing the world's largest kiss, and then it went slack. I noted the time, just because that was what one did in these type moments (on TV anyway). “6:12 a.m..”

The creature had expelled something with that kiss, and I realized I'd been a complete and utter idiot. Dumbest of the dumb. Too stupid to own a phone, smart or not. There was only one group of people with the gall, the resources and the desire to hunt and kill a seadragon, and especially to do so within one of the most protected marine sanctuaries on the planet.

The magic-handlers.

They wouldn't care about the scales or the value of the creature itself. They had more money than many small nations and were said to have their fingers in the economies of half the planet. Nope, the magic-handlers didn't care about the creature's value or beauty or pain. They cared about stealing its magic, the thing that made the dragons alive, the thing magical creatures gave up when they died.

As the dead seadragon in front of me must have just done with that kiss.

I could see it there, half-buried in the sand, in front of the creature's slack head. The Semis, that's what raw magic was called. It was spherical and glowing with an internal light of blue and purple-black. It looked like something that might’ve come from a trendy glassblowers shop that’d been filled with a myriad of tiny candles.

If a scale or two would solve all my financial problems, a Semis could make me a gazillionaire.