Dragons

Something quiet and nostalgic for anyone who's ever wondered what else was out there.

Dragons

By S.R. Koch

Dragons live in the north. It’s their homeland. Their race was born from the roots of a great mountain that has long since been lost to time and memory, and so they have an inherent love of the cold that drives them to live in the far north where the snows never leave. They wander, of course. They like to travel and see the world, and many dragons are born in warmer climates while their parents roam. They all end up migrating back to the north, however. Never the far south. Perhaps it’s something scientific, like magnetism, but they and I both believe that it has more to do with being on top. Their race was born of the mountains, and they like to be at the top of things.

I knew a dragon—Tormund, was his name—and he was an amiable enough fellow. Few people get to meet dragons these days. They were hunted mercilessly during the middle ages, and since then their race has avoided humans as often as possible. I met Tormund as a yearling, when he was young and inexperienced and had not yet made his pilgrimage to the north. He’d gotten himself stuck in a cow pasture, with his wings tangled in the barbed wire fence, and was panicking because the cows had found him interesting. It was almost funny—a creature well over the size of a good-sized draft horse squalling and shrieking in terror as a herd of big-eyed cows shuffled and lowed curiously around him. I had to get wire-cutters to get his wings free, and afterward he tried to hide behind me, all the while hissing fearfully at the cows, who were still trying to get a good look at him. He came from an island out in the pacific where his parents had hatched his egg, and he’d never seen anything like cows before. I had to explain to him, as I was dressing and binding the scratches and cuts on his wings, that they were not dangerous, though the men who usually kept them could be if they caught a large predatory animal prowling around their cattle. He listened raptly with big, luminous, gold-and-green eyes staring fixedly at my face.

            Dragons are actually strangely catlike in appearance. Tormund was green—like emeralds—with black edges to his scales that made him seem like a patch of shadow beneath a tree. His body was lean, muscular, and streamlined, with slim but powerful limbs tipped with long claws set on surprisingly deft fingers. His head was long and horse-ish, with spined crests above the eyes and running down the length of his back, and his wings were wide sails of thin green membrane stretched between five clawed fingers and traced with delicate blue veins. He was a beautiful creature, and he knew it very well. Not all dragons are vain, or greedy, or kind-hearted. They’re like people—different. Tormund happened to be a very vain creature, though he was gentle, and he had an avid sense of curiosity. We became friends, and he stayed with me for a time while his wing was healing.

            He eventually left, for which I had mixed feelings—sadness because he’d been a great companion for the month or so that he’d stayed, but also relieved because he ate half his weight once a week and the deer in the area were on the verge of running out. Where he went to, I did not know. I waited, and watched the skies, but didn’t see him again for another ten years. By then, I had my own family, and he surprised my wife and me as we were walking in the woods behind our house when he suddenly touched down in a clearing nearby. He’d grown a lot since I’d last seen him—he was now easily bigger than my big pickup truck, and longer than a bus even if you didn’t count his tail, and the beginnings of a small, spined beard had grown on his chin and down his neck a little ways.

            After introducing Tormund and my wife, I asked how he’d been. He said fine, and he told me what he’d been up to; He’d visited the Amazon for a time, prowling along the banks of the river watching snakes and crocodiles and their hunting. After that, he said, he’d traveled to Egypt, where he flew to the top of the pyramids at Giza during the night and perched there to watch the stars. He said that he liked the desert because of the sand and the way the sandstorms polished his scales like glass, but he felt slightly wrong there because of the heat, and he’d eventually left to fly the ocean just to feel a cool breeze. He’d met a few other dragons, he said, old ones, and they’d gotten him thinking about making a pilgrimage to the north. He’d decided to wait, though.

            When he asked how I had been, I replied that I too had been doing well. I had Mary and my two kids—Rodney and Brianne—and a nice home out in the country with a dog and a small flock of chickens. I told him of college—about business school, and how I’d met Mary at a party one night and we’d decided to get married a few years later—and I talked of the business I’d put together—a small booksellers just on the corner of Snelling and Cross down in the little town nearby. He seemed pleased that I was happy, though he asked me if I would like to travel with him for awhile. I politely declined, saying that I had my family to look after, though I would have liked to come. He nodded, understanding, and after goodbyes and expressing his pleasure in meeting my wife, he left in a clap of wings and a burst of dried leaves.

            I didn’t see him for another fifteen years, in which time my kids grew, one by one, and left. My wife and I continued to run the bookshop and tend our chickens. The dog had died, years ago of a cancer in his neck, and we’d never had the heart to get another one. We got a cat instead—a scrawny stray tortie that my wife rescued off the side of the road. We named her Milly, and she was a terrible beggar at the dinner table. I blame my wife—she encouraged her.

            I was alone this time, tending the chickens, when Tormund appeared again, this time with something clutched carefully in his foreclaws. When I asked him what it was, he presented it to me proudly—a huge, obsidian egg, with red and blue veins shimmering along its surface like streams of ruby and sapphire. He’d found a mate, he said, and as the male, it was his duty to care for the egg until it hatched. He’d been so excited, he needed to tell me right away, and so he’d flown all the way from India to show me without stopping once. I asked him if he was hungry after such a long flight, and replied no, he’d eaten one of my neighbor’s cows just a few minutes ago. He was too obviously proud of his egg to get angry at.

            He was bigger again, but not by much—his growing had finally leveled out and stopped at maturity—and the horns on his eye ridges and down his back were longer. The beard was longer, and his muscles thick and well-developed. He asked me how I’d been, and I told him. He asked me again if I wanted to travel with him, but I said no, my wife had been ill lately, and I couldn’t leave her. He nodded again, and gazed lovingly at his egg, and after a hasty farewell, he lifted off again, sending my chickens into a panic and making the weather vane on the coop roof spin wildly.

            Five years later, my wife died. Skin cancer. She fought long and hard, but in the end, she was too tired to go on, and she told me as she lay in the hospital bed, among all those unnatural white smells and the harsh fluorescent lights, that she wanted to be in the sun. I nodded silently and took her up in my arms, and snuck her out the back door. I took her to my car and drove her out to the countryside—to a state park we’d visited when we were dating—and I walked with her in my arms far out into the woods, until we found a sunny little patch of moss at the edge of a clearing, right at the base of an old, old maple tree with twining roots. We sat there together for a time, just listening to the leaves and the birds, her with her head on my chest, and me with my arm around her, and we stayed there without speaking until she eventually left me. I carried her back to my house without a word or tear, and the funeral came a month later. I didn’t cry until after the funeral, when I came home and saw the old hiking stick she’d carved for herself, back when she’d been carrying Brianne as a baby. I was sad then, but in a way, I was happy, too. One of the great mysteries of the world.

            I lived alone for two more years. Milly was still with me—an old, scraggly, but still deeply affectionate thing who still begged at the table and who curled up at my feet and drooled on the coverlet at night—but she was bound to leave soon as well, and I was growing tired. One day, on a whim, I walked out to the woods, my cane making a third, round footprint wherever I went, up to the field where I’d first met Tormund as a yearling. The farmer who owned the place was five years dead, and the field had gone wild, but the fence was still there, and I could see where the wire was different from having to be replaced after I cut it out. I stood there looking at it for a while, and was somehow not surprised when the thunder of wings and a rush of wind told me Tormund was back.

            He was in his prime, now—about twenty-five by human terms—with a deep, powerful chest, a proud, spiny beard beneath his chin, and horns jutting from behind his jaws as well as over his eye ridges and down the length of his back. He looked at me with those huge, wise, golden-green eyes, and asked me how my wife was. I told him, and he said he was sorry. He sounded sorry. I asked him how his baby was, and he said that it had been a young drake (male), and that it had hatched blue like sapphires. He had parted ways with it in Egypt—still his favorite place in the world, so far—and then traveled listlessly across China. He’d come back, he said, because he was about to embark on his pilgrimage, and he wanted to ask me one last time if I wanted to come.

            I thought. I was old, very old, probably too old to travel, but like him, I was listless. I had nothing left here—my wife was gone, my children grown, and the bookstore I’d been forced to close two years ago because of the advancement of kindles and the lack of buyers of old books. I wondered what the land of dragons was like, and if anyone like me had ever been there before.

            I told Tormund to wait, and hobbled back to the house. I found an old pack from when my wife and I had taken our hikes around the woods out back, and I filled it with some food, a little money (just in case), denture cleaner, and warm clothes. I replaced my cane with my wife’s old walking stick, and then I hobbled back out to the field with and old blanket and a rope slung under my arm. I told Tormund to crouch down. He did so, his arm proffered for a step, and allowed me to tie the blanket to the slight depression behind his shoulders, where the spines were widely spaced enough for me to sit. When I was done, I heaved my old, aching bones into the makeshift saddle, slung my pack on my back, and told him I was ready. He nodded, told me to hang on, and took off.

            I’ve never experienced anything more thrilling than dragonflight. It took my breath away at the first beat of his massive, powerful wings, and I felt my soul soaring as the two of us lifted higher and higher into the sky. I could see everything for miles—trees, farms, the house where I’d lived my life—and I could feel the wind in my thinning hair as Tormund angled himself forward and into a thermal that brought us even higher. When he’d reached his cruising altitude—the happy medium where he wouldn’t be seen from the ground and I could still breathe—he slipped back out of the thermal and began winging his way forward, towards the north. I leaned back against the spine behind me, and found that I was content.

            I was going to see the dragons, one first and final time.

THE END