When Dragons Lay PART 1 of 5

Rite of Passage: a Fantasy in 5 Parts

Jul 01, 2025

Too easy. Easy to...

This is what the beast thought. Not in those words, exactly, but in those circuitous brain loops that go round and round, dip and ascend, dive deep and recoil higher, until the obvious drives his next move. One cautionary sieve of constraint filtered the itinerary to allow an unexpected conclusion.

Delicious. Alone. No fight. No screaming mother. No father in fixed in slaystance. No sword-wielding brothers or chainmail'd uncles or androgynous sisters. Her bloodline is absent. Around, he looked around: not worse. Around that: not worse. See, sweep to the horizon, circle back, roll eyes up and down. No smells of them. Too easy.

Too easy is seductive; means a surprise beckons. The sieve worked: his next move was caution.

In all the texts written of dragons of the Nethertimes, none told of the inner workings of the mind of Draco ignium. In the archives of ancient libraries were accounts of learned men's forbidden dissections: convolutions, invaginations, convexities, concavities, lobular clusters surrounding an inner, more primeval dysreptilian mind. There the dissections always stopped.

This innermost primeval mind of a dragon was off limits to vivisection, as exposure to air meant sudden, explosive combustion at the center of a 125-paces-wide sodium conflagration. Or was it carbon subnitride abrading a graphite conscience in the presence of ozone? Or was it just that this innermost troubled mind was so unstable?

No one lived to tell the tale, and the mystery, of why the science of dragon dissections went no deeper, persisted as part of the lore.

It was the surrounding of the upper, more evolved lobular gray matter clusters, however, that inhibited the jump to his next move, normally driven thoughtlessly from the deep dungeons of muscle memory. Thoughts arose, began their circuitous journey, then consulted the primitive part which voted gulping down the human toddler as part of one fell swoop.

It would be easy.

Merely a glide, three cubits high--one flap, really--with an open mouth, then vertical lift into the ill wind to assay reactions from below, perhaps from heretofore absent family champions.

The beast alighted on a large outcropped rock pockmarked with the history of those consumed in prior times. The forest canopy above allowed crisscrossing slits of light to paint the floor with a luminous checkerboard. Cold-blooded creatures of the floor moved from square of light to rectangle to rhombus to circle, each creature chasing the warmth and clarity of a moving geometry. As time passed, so changed each particular resting spot--once bright, now dark; once dark, now lighted anew. The predators who attacked from the dark needed only wait for a passing cloud; the predators who attacked from the light needed only wait for a sound from a shadow.

As in life, he thought. Favorable to you becomes un-; what is un- to you becomes favorable. As capricious as the wind, the shield above as solid as it is false, strewn with colander holes to strain out the doomed.

He looked down to consider her; she had chosen her lighted spot on the forest floor, which made her hair sparkle. Some of the ground creatures shifted from sunlight to darkness without actually moving--due to the capricious beams that danced with the wind above. She remained steadfast and inert.

He was close enough to the child to simply retrieve her with only a semi-outstretched talon. Even for a beast, he knew this was a beautiful human child. Of three, possibly four, circlings around the sun in age, having seen as many fallings of the leaves.

The child became amused. The beast became amused because the child was amused. Nothing, it seems, extends middle ground between two adversaries as the bridging effect of humor understood at a higher level than what meets the eye. The child laughed.

The beast's graphite conscience buffered the oxidizer from his breath as he cackled. The insidious incandescent alchemy deep inside defused, impotent.

The child laughed more, in a continuous quaver that one day would define a giggle. Between them, squawks, chortles, squeals, and snorts evolved into japes: the young girl flapping her arms viciously, huffing menacingly; the beast throwing his head back, as if whiplashing long locks of hair out of his face.

She especially liked that, and ran her fingers through her golden hair to put over her face, then jerking her head to mock, in turn, his mockery of her.

He especially liked that, and he recognized the two-way conversation as communication, the imprint of bonding.

He wondered. Why alone? Easy for me? Low-hanging fruit. No one around. Certainly her beauty and embodiment of flawlessness held purchase on the need for preservation. Must protect a treasure such as this.

He lost his appetite.

He swept his gaze 360 degrees. He wanted to spot them, her family--deserters, runaways, and cowards. Lurch at them. Make them cinders. After all, both he and the child were creatures of God. How dare they ignore her worth? A female child at that!

It was not lost on him the specialness of the female. He knew all too well.

He looked down and discovered the small girl had crawled onto the rock on which he had made his perch. What do I call you? Call me Dragon; what do I call you? Call me Ezzie. Can you take me home, Dragon? she asked him. The conversation continued without the need for words.

No, he couldn't.

But why, Dragon? Because I am not welcome there, Ezzie. But why? Look at me. I like the way you look. How could that be? Because, silly, you are the topmost point of the Earth--fire and water and earth and...

The beast broke wind.

...and air.

The resulting aroma was of sulfur and methane, wafting malodorously into four nostrils between the two of them, a bouquet of hydrogen sulfide. With this the young girl was inconsolably hysterical with laughter.

Dragons can be hurt, and this is why he dared not search for her home. Yet, she nagged him. Eventually the intuitive conversations strayed from homesickness to the continuity of the days and the quotidian duties to sate hunger and quench thirst. By morning they hunted. By evening he delighted her with his blue-hot breath; nothing they ate was ever raw.

Over the years, she grew up more fine and more beautiful until he didn't know how he could live without his little gnat, always in his ear:

Dragon! Grab me and take me over the mountain, really fast, just for fun. Burn that bush--make it pop. Laugh with me. Play with me.

And he did these things.

Once, on a day that was bright and made one assume everything else in the world was shiny and bright as well, she crawled onto his back, the most inciting thing one could do to a dragon. Someone positioned on his back was the only way he could be slain, of course. That is, no face-to-face confrontation would go well for a confronter. Even if the assailant were lucky enough to drive a sword deep between his eyes, it would breach his inner primitive mind and release the inferno vapors to create hellscape. The dragon-slayer would know immediately what the vivisectionists had learned as their final lesson in life. There would be no winners.

TO BE CONTINUED PART 2