Baroomba, cackooo. Baroomba, baroomba, cackoo, allooo. The steady blowing on the shells continued to lull the Chosen One in his delicate sleep. He looks almost like a regular 7-year old in his gentle slumber. I gazed at him with admiring eyes. I must stay focused on the steady beat and don't let my mind wander too much to my memories of the time before they froze him. If I lose the beat and he leaves his frozen, serene prison, I will face a wretched consequence.

I am a Timble. I have 3 ten-hour shifts a week playing the ancient sounds by blowing on the shells. The correct patterns continue the blessing of the Chosen One's slumber. My job elevated me, my immediate family, and my extended family to the 3rd level caste in our nation. The degradation of our lives in the bottom Mud Stone class is almost unspeakable. Yes, it means that I will never marry, embrace my own children, and will live my life as a vegetarian. But these are small prices to pay for the benefit of my family. And of course, to be in the presence of the Chosen One and gaze at his lovely countenance is a blessing.

Life went on like this for almost 53 years. Then the cold, autumn morning came like a bomb. The green glad thugs who want their own youngster to be the Chosen One, broke into our compound, and took our sacred shells and cracked them!

The silence was deadly, deafening, and harsh. The biggest nightmare of all began in front of my eyes. The sweet, angelic Chosen One started to blink his eyes and slowly move his limbs.

I watched in horror, glued to my small seat in the corner of the Chosen One's chambers, holding the two pieces of a cracked shell. The silence was deafening. The Chosen One's small hand twitched. Then, impossibly, the claws lengthened, the nails darkening to talon-points before my eyes. I had spent fifty-three years memorizing every plane of that sleeping face, and now I watched it change like ice-water. The realisation hit me that I'd never truly known its solid state at all.

"No," I whispered, though there was no one left to hear me. The other Timbles who kept the rotation had scattered when the thugs came. I alone remained, clutching the broken halves of the shell as though pressing them together might undo what had been done.

The boy's skin was rippling now, going grey-green at the edges, scales surfacing like something rising through still water. His seven-year-old face stretched and lengthened at the jaw. I understood, in that moment, what the Elders had never told us in fifty-three years of sacred service: what the old texts must have meant by "slumber" and "vessel" and "the Chosen One's true and terrible nature."

Every shift, every note blown through those shells, had not been a lullaby for a child. It had been a sedative for something ancient and enormous, wearing a child's shape the way a wildfire hides behind harmless embers, waiting only for the draft to change.

The Chosen One's eyes opened.

They were the yellow of old brass, and they were not sleepy at all.