The Dragon

The Dragon shifted. A Dragon this size does not move, but shifts her weight slowly. Something is awakening her, and lazily she lifts one eye to her deep cavern. She can smell men now, and men are something that at once she despises and fears. Dragon once had a name, but centuries of stillness lost it to her memory. She has slept for so long, remember days of old when her and her kin rose like majesty into the night sky and rained down their terror. She remembers the smell of sulfur and death in her dreams, and it is the sweetest of the sweet. Dragon once held powerful magic, but now can barely remember the incantations. She wishes she could die, but she can not, and therefore sleeps.

But something is awakening her none the less. She shifts, and shakily tries to stand. Her long back legs strain and creak with the movement, and at first she feels that maybe, maybe, she should just lie here and let them come for her. Dragon only wanted to rest her last few thousand years, and fade into the stars a quiet death. She remembers her kin, her mother, and her children. Those she loved who no longer rested on this plane, but somewhere else. She did not know where her kin was, had not heard their minds in five hundred years. But she could taste their deaths, oh she could still smell their skin burning and melting, she could still hear her babies screaming, some even still inside their eggs. She could hear that like ghosts can hear other ghosts, a memory of fear and pain seeping through her midnight blue scales.

Dragon, however, is not a ghost.

She is still physical, and physical meant two things. The first being that she could inflict pain and the second was that she could feel pain. She felt pain now, standing, stretching, and opening her great maw to spit out cobwebs and mildew. Her teeth, once gleaming with bone and blood, now shined a dull grey and yellow, pitted with cavities of deep brown. She was old, and Dragon felt old. Her bones creaked loudly; the sound would have deafened a mortal.

Dragon stretched her wings, flinging off centuries of dust. A thick film of mushrooms and moss had grown on them, and she thought to breathe fire to burn the growing things off. First, the fire did not come. It was only smoke, a puff that would have been comical had any seen it. Her dull silver eyes thinned to a glare. She breathed in once again, concentrating on releasing the spittle that would bring fire from her mouth. Fire came, and in the blackness it was bright and beautiful.

Oh, she was awake now.

She shook the ashes and dirt from her wings, and stretched them wide. Tip to tip inside the cavern, she grinned at her own awakening. Dragon did not feel groggy now, but she felt alive instead. In fact, Dragon had never felt more alive. She took in a deep, sounding breath, but coughed on the dampness of the deep cavern. Dragon was alive, and awake. Now, Dragon wanted out.

She stretched her mind first, stretched it beyond the cavern, and through the mountain of lava that she slept beneath. She stretched her mind to the world of men, far and wide. But she heard none of her kin; she felt none of her kin. Dragon was the last. Memories came to her when her mind was opened, the last memories before she had shut herself deep within the darkness. She cried then, and fire poured from her mouth and eyes. Dragon remembered now, remembered the treachery of man, of the wizard. The deaths dealt to her kin, those murdered by man who would never find the stars. It is an old curse, but one that had been made to keep dragons in good standing with mankind. That any dragon killed by the hand of men would not reach their home in the stars, and any man killed by a dragon would have his soul swallowed by the Chimera (who was her own ancient being, long forgotten, but old friend and sometimes enemy to Dragon).

Dragon wanted to remember the ancient languages, she knew some of the new languages, and they had slipped into her dreams from the dreams of men. She knew also of things like guns, wars and mankind’s attempt at controlling fire, and also something of a man named Jesus, but she cared not of the trinkets of mortal men. She was ancient, and she knew the ancients. The call that had awakened her from her century’s long slumber came again. This time it was louder, stronger, and darker. The voice tore through her like none other. She tried to ignore it, she wanted to taste being alive, but could not linger here. It was the command, an ancient command that only few could give, and fewer of those few would dare. Dragon did not want to answer. She wanted to enjoy being awake, being alive. But the ancient words of magic tore through her as fire mixed with ice would, all at once painfully burning and freezing her thick blood.

Dragon tore herself from the cavern, plowing through the rock ceiling with all her force. The tears of rocks did not touch her in pain like the ancient magic was; in fact, they did not bother her at all. She pressed, harder and harder, until her nose bled and her scales tore, but she moved still. Molten rock began to sweep to her, because liquefied rock does not move, much as a dragon does not, but it grows with a life of its own and marks its prey with thick red eyes. The lava, Dragon knew this new word from dreams of men who had neared her mountain, licked her with its burning tongue, but lava, fire, heat, means nothing to a dragon such as herself.

Up, up she clawed, spat and screamed.

And for those who somewhere, on some part of the mountain, were living as trappers or as traders, the sound they heard was that of a demon. Something dark was coming. They knew it, felt it. The men folk dropped their hunting or farming tools and ran to their women, many of whom had already grabbed their children and were hidden in cellars or under their beds. The sound was deafening, causing the small herds of livestock, sheep mainly but some cattle, to huddle together in their ramshackle barns, bleating their own fears.

If there had been airplanes in this time of man, or helicopters, flying near by, they would have seen an awesome sight. The mountain opened its great maw, a maw that had been shut for thousands of years. There was a slow gurgle sound as the lava came forth, not in the great bellows of a volcanic eruption, but rather as though the mountain were bleeding from its top. Then a hemorrhage began, and the mountain (whose name had been Sliabh Tarragon, but as many things, was now simply forgotten) opened, spilling forth its own life blood from deep within. A massive blackness came from the glowing red, so large that it would have blocked the sun had any dared to look.

The blackness rolled almost lazily across the crumbling top, rolled with the bleeding lava and out into the world.