ON THE METAPHORICAL DRAGON

in a world where man has long since gone, or where man has never existed, a dragon stands alone on a stone cliff overlooking a valley of lush falling waters, and ferns that open and close with the sun in a symbiotic dance, and scurrying animals that cannot be discerned from bits of brush blown by the wind from such a great height. the dragon is silent, and it is proud, and it lays its weary head on its talons and turns its head to scare away butterflies that greet its snout. it is weary of killing, and it is weary of hunting. it is weary of chasing down its food. 

the dragon refuses to move. it lies still for hours, which turn into days and eventually into weeks. it's eyes become dry from lack of water, save that which falls on its glistening scales during midnight rainstorms. it cannot reconcile its soul with its ferocious body, and when it rains, the dragon is able to cry, because its tears are disguised by the rain. only the insects that swarm around the dragon's thinning body can tell the difference between the salty dragon tears and the fresh rainwater, and they bathe in the tears of the dragon and swim in it and when they leave they have absorbed some kind of blessing and fierceness that they will forever retain.

the dragon has never seen another dragon like itself. it has seen other scaled beasts, and other dragons, but none that it can fully relate to. the dragon has spent its life killing, as is expected of a dragon, but in each kill the dragon has difficulty coming to terms with the scope of his own power. how can it be that he, red-scaled ugly majestic beauty of a being, has the power within him to take the life of another? the days of taking lives in order to fuel his own, without finding anyone to give life to, take their toll on this dragon's swelling heart, and the more he killed and the more he sat alone and the more he contemplated, the more his heart felt too large for his body. 

the dragon became unable to cry. he hoped for rainstorms so that he might again be able to weep, but the rainstorms did not come, and the tears did not come. he was hungry, but he did not notice, because there was a hunger in his soul far greater, and he knew he could not move until he was able to discern how this hunger might be fed. he watched lightning stretch from the eye of the sky down to the cracks in the earth, and it created more cracks in the earth, and it split trees into hundreds of pieces. the dragon, from his great height, watched the great trees fall, and the dragon watched an entire valley below him catch fire. it seemed that nature, too, had an ability to take life from the forest, and so in this way the dragon found an alibi in the lightning, and his growling belly found an alibi in the rumble of the dry nights.

as hard as it was for the dragon to watch his kingdom burn, it gave him a sense that he was a part of things. there was something bigger than him that could do more destruction than he ever could, and for some reason this convinced him that he should honor his own life and, in doing so, honor this bigger thing. honor the lightning and the mightiness of the earth and the earths temperaments. he crawled on his belly down into the valley, his wings too weak for him to fly, and he rested his long neck and nose in a swampy bit of water, his teeth catching grasses on them that he would have to untangle himself from. he drank the cool water of the stream there, and just across the stream was a wall of fire. it had burnt everything, all the way to the river's edge, and this river, that encircled what had been his kingdom - his jungle - was now a domain of fire, encircled all the way around by a river, and thus isolated to this specific area. the dragon drank from the stream, and blinked his eyes against the heat of the fire, and he could feel the water grow warmer even as he drank it. frightened fish swam below him, and he lifted his neck to the heavens that were lit up by flame and exhaled a long, mournful wail to the night. 

the dragon caught some fish with his talons, and after eating until he could eat no more, he curled up near the fire and slept by the stream, knowing that the water near him would keep him safe from that which the lightning had ignited, so near to him. 

at dawn, he awoke. the fire had died down, and remaining were smoking trunks of trees, and a few lone vultures screaming high above his tail, and a bit of pink visible through the smoke above. invigorated, he lifted his body and stretched. he was determined to live. but the only land he had ever known was burnt, and it was gone, and it was transformed. he did not know where else to go. and he did not know what he would do when he got there. and so he picked a direction, randomly, and lifted his tail proudly, and marched away from the dwindling flames out onto a vast playa, not sure whether he would ever reach water or food or nourishment. his pace was slow due to days of weariness and lack of sleep, and he lumbered on, empowered, toward an empty horizon in search of something that might remind him of the self that he had not yet been acquainted with. he lumbered off, and the sun burnt his scales and dulled them over their gleam, and he blinked his heavy lids and continued walking: the only dragon in the world to walk forever, somehow resilient and somehow determined to cover the whole world with his steps, not in order to find anything but more in order to make sure that he was right in thinking that he had nothing left to find now that his kingdom had been turned to ash, and coal, and one day into diamonds.

and what mattered was that he had some will to roam, even if he did not have any hope of finding something. perhaps this was why the quest was beautiful, because it meant that anything that he might find would be so startling and shocking in its existence that he would be rendered all-the-more delighted to find it, all-the-more awestruck, and all-the-more grateful. and what mattered was that he sensed that there might be something there. the evidence rolled off of his back like rain and did not matter to him, because what he felt inside was a discovery in itself, and perhaps he only wandered in order to create musings about his own internal discoveries, letting things find him if they would but never expecting much from anything other than his own self.