Dragon Flight

He stood uneasily at the threshold. Tal was not yet a man and no longer a child. He was a young one on the cusp. Leaning against a pile of grain sacks, he intently observed the scene unfolding around him. It was late afternoon in the village and preparations for the Autumn feast were in full stride. The men were preparing the fire and ceremony grounds, the women were putting the finishing touches on the food and everyone was working together to put the decorations in place. The children were playing some intricate game, lost inside that particularly enchanting kind of play that can only happen when there is something in the air, some great celebration imminent.

Everyone was absorbed in the proceedings except Tal. He was interested, yes, but not absorbed. He saw the joy in the children, fully immersed in their invented worlds and he delighted at their delight, but his was a delight once removed. He also watched the adults and saw their commitment to the children, to holding the structure of the village, committed to the feast and to tradition. It struck him as he watched that the adults also played in their own invented world, the only real difference between theirs and the children’s was that the adults’ invented world of stories, roles and traditions would still be there in the morning and the children would have moved onto something else.

The village was preparing for the most extravagant feast Tal had ever seen. Families were arriving now from neighbouring villages. There was a buzz in the air. “The biggest yet” he heard them say. It had been a good harvest. The rain had come when it was needed and stayed away when it was not and food stores were bursting at the seams. For Tal, this year was different and not because of the size of the feast. For the first time he was not pulled along by the magic of the preparations, instead he was being pulled apart. One part of him compelled towards the adult world, wanted to become a man of the village, important, like his father and grandfather - strong, reliable, needed by the others. He was good at his work, admired already. It would be easy for him to become an important man in the village, inevitable even. At the same time he couldn’t help but also feel the tugging at his heart, a longing to go back to the children’s world, to play and to break things and not have to fix them, to have no responsibilities, no cares. No longer a child and not yet a man, he did not belong to either world. Tal was foreign there in that moment where familiarity lay all about him. What to do? There appeared to be no other option, the only choice he had was to follow in his fathers footsteps, but it is not a choice if there are no other options. The only thing Tal knew at that moment was that the possibility of following his family tradition and becoming a man of the village filled him with dread.

He began to walk, slowly at first, surprising himself with the deliberateness of the movements that were being produced by his body. His mind was far from sure what it was doing. He walked in slow motion, consuming the scene with all of his senses as if it was his last meal. He was invisible to the gathering crowd, they didn’t know where he fitted either, so they did not know how to treat him. Tal walked straight through the gap between the adult and childhood worlds. He progressed steadily from the center of the festival grounds to nearer the edge, where the sleeping huts were. The air was fresher there and quieter. The forest sounds mingled with the bustle of the village. The sounds of late afternoon forest life were crisp in his ears, Bird and Frog, Wind in Trees and the distant monotone rush of Ocean colliding with Land. He began to feel different, less claustrophobic, like invisible blinkers were being widened. The air was cool and delicious and the sense of freedom that was growing in him contrasted painfully with the familiar love he had for his family and the village. His throat tightened and eyes swelled wet, tears leaked over his cheeks.

After a moment, something new began, a gentle warming arose in his chest, a swirling and concentrating of energy coming together in him, bringing him to clarity. He stood a little taller, shoulders back, eyes sharp, the ball in his chest got hotter, denser, more precise, more insistent and all of a sudden his path was clear to him. There was no longer any doubt. He had to go. It was not a plan, it was a knowing, a certainty not of the mind but of the bones. He had no time to second guess anything before the fire in his chest catapulted him into action. Tal ran. He reached full speed in half a dozen strides, dodged a few bustling villagers and jumped the pile of logs he had been cutting into firewood earlier that day with a howl of delight. He squawked and hooted as he ran. He ran because he wanted to, for the sheer delight of it, he ran because he was alive and because he didn’t know what else to do, he ran with joy in his feet, tears on his cheeks and a ball of fire in his chest that would have it no other way.

Tal settled into his stride, no longer powered by that initial ecstasy of movement, more by the steady, powerful rhythm of feet on Earth. He ran like he might never stop. His bare feet thumped out a joyful pattern on the smooth, familiar, hard packed earth paths. Each tree and rock was an old friend. Every bend, dip and rise of the path was as familiar to Tal as the curves and corners of his own body. He jumped easily over the same rocks and roots he had played amongst for all of his childhood. Tal ran and ran and as he ran the paths gradually became narrower, rougher, less familiar. By now he had lost track of how far he had gone and for how long he had been running. His pace had slowed to a tentative jog as the terrain became less familiar and the light began to fade. The rocks had changed, not so smooth now, not so friendly. The roots too were harder on his feet and the path was not so well formed. He wondered if he was still on a path at all. The only thing he knew for sure was that he had no idea where he was. He was exhausted, out of breath, he was no longer in full control of his legs and he wobbled and swayed his way from a jog to an inelegant stumbling walk.

The fire in his chest still warmed him, though its immediacy and urgency had dimmed. He jumped and sucked in his breath sharply as a shadow licked at him from his right side. One came from the other side next, then more and more. The shadows were seething at him now, coming from all directions, dark and reptilian, claw, wing, tail and tooth, indistinct and terrifying. Tal panicked, his world spun as he tried to look in every direction at once, tried to see where it was coming from, where they were going, what it even was and what they wanted but no matter how desperately he tried, he couldn’t get a good look at them, couldn’t work it out. He did not know what was going on. Had his imagination finally gone too far, like his parents warned him it would, or was he actually being swarmed by dragons? Tal could just make out that there seemed to be one area where the dragons were not - a distinct gap in the swarm. It can’t be an accident, he thought, they want me to go that way. Despite his instinctive reluctance to be herded anywhere by dragons he did not seem to have much choice. The story of his life, he thought grudgingly as he shuffled, terrified, toward the gap. He decided that he did have a choice after all - he could walk into the gap … or he could run. Tal ran. Running on rough ground in near darkness requires a certain combination of surety and dexterity of foot, and while Tal had plenty of both, it did not make much difference because after a few heroic strides, Tal ran, right off the edge.

Tal’s stomach dropped as he closed his eyes and braced himself for impact, but instead of hitting the ground or being met by the jaws of a dragon, there was rushing air all around him. His loose shirt thrashed at his face, wind loud in his ears, eyes open now and watering. Tal’s initial terror gradually settled into a practical assessment of the situation. Firstly, he had not hit the ground yet, which was a good start and falling seemed a slight improvement on dragons, although he would not fall forever, so what could he do now to lessen the impact when the falling finished? The next thought was speculation which, although essentially useless, was nevertheless alluring and he chewed up a few moments wondering if the stories in the village were true and if the world did in fact have an edge and perhaps, just perhaps, he had fallen off it. He had certainly fallen off something and Tal was not overly upset by the prospect of that something being the edge of the world. It was a more honourable way to go than to die of some horrible disease or to have a tree fall on your head. Then he realised that if he had in fact fallen off the edge of the world, that would explain the dragons he had seen at the edge. The village stories were explicit about the dragon population being thickest at the edge of the world. Something about the thing you feared the most guarding that which is most precious… he didn’t get it - how can the edge of the world be precious? No matter. His full attention returned then to the falling, regardless of from what, to where and why. The next thing that happened was utterly inexplicable. Tal had no reason to do it, no thread of logic had led him to try it, he simply did it. Slowly, gradually he lifted and spread his wings, caught the air and soared.

A limitless yawning void unfurls beneath me
Wondrous and vast

Flying the lines as witness
Surveying the luminous threads

Binds creation to itself

Weaves the realms
Holds the fabric together.

Moss, mountain, sky, sea and river
Thought, feeling, memory and dream
I fly the lines

My eyes bear witness
My body is proof
Something at least
Is real
Now, at least
Is here.

I am
Therefore I move
Away from one thing and toward another
Direction
Has consequences
Creation is inevitable

Ball of fire
Born of the sun
Erupts from within to
Illuminate, incinerate, essentialise… direct
To become again
Remade.

When he told the story later, Tal would say that the ball of fire in his chest told him to do it, to run from his village. Sometimes, when he told the story, depending on the audience, he would confess that he had become a dragon in that moment, other times he kept that part quiet, not quite believing it himself, or not wanting to admit it more like. People simply did not turn into real life fire breathing dragons. On the other hand once you have breathed fire, your throat is never quite the same and ever since that day Tal’s throat was clearly capable of breathing more than just air. He knew it and no one who heard this version of the story ever doubted it.

Every now and then the dragon’s fire returned to Tal, clarity of purpose lit his words and his speaking was infused with the kind of precision and power that sliced through bullshit and made other things possible. So that Love had more room to move - that is how it seemed to him at least.

Afterword
This story is as true as any story can be. Each of us is made up of parts. Some of your parts are more mature than others. At any given point there is a part of you that is coming of age, it is ready to go to the edge of your flat earth story of what is possible and take a leap, a risk. It does not matter if you are 9 or 99, there is a part of you that is ready to heed the dragon’s call and move to the edge, to leave the illusion of safety behind and fall into the unknown. Perhaps that part of you will figure out how to fly before it crashes … and perhaps not.

Is it worth the risk? Is one question you could ask yourself, as if danger haunted only one path. A better question would be: Which risk do you choose? - the risk of crashing? The risk of flying? or the risk of staying ‘safe’?