Josh,the Mallard of Myth.

Word reached the marsh of one who did not gather to worship. From the reed-cathedrals of the north came the Heron — slate-feathered, long of knife, patient as winter. Where Josh floated, the Heron stood unmoving. Where the pilgrims sang, the Heron said nothing at all.

"He does not squeak," murmured the wizards, and for the first time their certainty trembled.

They met at the water's edge as the light failed. Neither bowed. The dragons, who feared nothing, climbed higher.

Here the folio is torn.

The elders spoke of one who had faced the Heron before and lived — though "lived" was generous, for mostly he slept. Beneath the great willow, wrapped in seven quilts and the fog of his own dreaming, lay Sleepy LaBeouf, the Dreaming Knight. His snores were said to be prophecy. Twice a village had been founded on something he mumbled at noon.

Josh approached the willow. The pilgrims held their breath. To wake Sleepy LaBeouf was to risk the things he saw behind his eyelids.

"Five more ages," murmured the knight, and rolled over.

Josh squeaked — once, softly. The willow shivered. One obsidian eye, then one heavy-lidded human one, opened upon the marsh.

"...Oh," said Sleepy LaBeouf. "It's you. It's finally you."

So they stood: the duck of impossible buoyancy, the heron of impossible stillness, and between them a knight who kept nodding off mid-stance. The dragons formed a ring. The red-cloaked seers wrote nothing down, for some things must only be remembered wrong.

"You cannot win," said the Heron, who had never been wrong.

"He can't," yawned Sleepy LaBeouf, "but I dreamed how it ends." He smiled with his eyes already closing. "You're not going to like it, tall bird."

Josh said nothing. Josh floated. And the marsh leaned in to listen.

Here the chronicle waits, as all good chronicles do.

It was not a battle. The chronicles that promised one were written by herons.

Josh did not strike. Josh did not squeak. Josh simply floated — and kept floating — as the tide of the marsh rose with him, slow and certain, the way belief rises in a crowd. The Heron, whose whole glory was to stand unmoving, found the water at its knees, then its breast, then its black and knifelike chin.

To stay still now was to drown. To move was to lose.

"Ah," said the Heron, very quietly, and at last it lifted one foot.

The marsh exhaled. Sleepy LaBeouf, who had dreamed exactly this, was already asleep again, smiling.

"Told you," he murmured. "Buoyancy."

They did not make the Heron a prisoner, for you cannot cage a thing that has agreed to move. It walks the marsh still, a step behind Josh, learning the slow art of giving way. The pilgrims tell it wrong on purpose. The dragons approve.

And beneath the willow, the Dreaming Knight sleeps on, founding villages by accident, guarding an ending he has already seen.