Fearless Bridge

There she was. Sitting quite happily beside an old moss-covered stump, her face tilted upwards as she followed an orange butterfly with her golden eyes. She was smiling the way only human children can, with the unfettered joy of truly being in the moment. For her, there was only those fluttering wings against the blue sky, and maybe the scent of damp earth and young spring grass in her nose. How I wished that she could have remained there forever, untainted by what I knew was yet to come.

For me, that moment held more than the innocence of a child held rapt by the beauty of the natural world. A great much more, for I carried the weight of knowing that my every action from this point onward would influence the outcome of this child's fate.

Feeling troubled in this way is purely a human phenomenon, a quality that apparently lingered in my being despite the fact I hadn't walked as a human for nearly three years and would never do so again. A dragon's mind is different than that of a human; we aren't saddled with the gift-curse of mental workings which worry needlessly over the past or the future. A dragon knows that to worry is to pray for the things one does not want. Yet there I was, my stomach churning over how best to approach the girl without frightening her away.

Before I could decide how to make myself known, she noticed me. Her colourful winged friend had flown between where she sat in the clearing and where I was nestled in the shadows between two large evergreens growing along its edge. Her eyes landed on mine, and stayed fixed there in a gaze that penetrated my very soul. I saw again that they were exactly the same colour as my own.

She had her father's eyes.

The girl seemed unafraid, so I stepped into the clearing. She regarded me unselfconsciously and with wide-eyed interest, and I sensed no alarm in her open searching face. Birġe, we had named her. Fearless Bridge.

Dipping my head, I intoned a dragon's greeting, Hoona, in my mind, reaching out to hers, wondering if she would be able to hear it.

Hoona, I heard in reply, in a voice as sweet and musical as a flowing brook dancing over stones. You could say it began the great melting of my hardened heart, but I imagine it must never have been completely hardened, or else I would not have been there in the first place, quietly looking out for her all this time even as I told myself I did not care about what happened to her.

My daughter—for that is who she was—stood up and waddled over to me on tiny legs. A chubby arm reached up to touch my face, and I saw that her light brown skin was beginning to show the outlines of scales, although there was no texture to the markings; the surface of her skin remained smooth and soft. Like her mother's.

I recalled in that moment my own mother Ronain, a great queen of a dragon whose name spoken in the language of the human tongue would roughly translate to She who Casts Shadows over Shadows and Turns them to Light. I heard an echo of her voice in my mind, and remembered the first time she told me the prophecy.

Every young dragon born over the past score of centuries has listened to the tale, often by the light of the glowing embers of our bedfires. My mother would heat my sleeping stones with the fierce white flames of her breath, and I would curl upon them to warm myself while sleeping. Sometimes she would drape her wing over me and purr from deep within her throat. The rumbling vibrations would comfort and settle me.

She began, "Once, in a time yet to pass, there shall live a young male dragon who will fall in love with a human woman. Her kindness and beauty shall enthrall him, and he shall forsake his dragon kin for her. This dragon, led by the steadfast determination of his love, shall forge a contract with Fierno, the dark spirit of the fire, and give up his pure blood to become human.

"It is known that in time, a child shall come of their union. She shall be the first true two-soul Human Dragon. By her very nature she will know the pain of not having a rightful place or sense of true belonging, for she shall be both dragon and human, and at the same time, she shall be neither one. Hers shall be the journey of forging a few understanding, and of being a bridge.

"The dragon-father of this girl shall be her protector, for the humans shall seek to destroy her out of fear of the new and unknown. Of the dragons, there shall be some who cast her out, and there shall be those who worship her without boundary, and wish her free reign without paying any heed to the checks and balances of the natural world. They will forget that she is young and still needs guidance.

"The rest is less certain. The girl may be a blessing or a curse upon all of dragon and humankind, for the light in her heart may or may not outweigh the shadow. As a singular creature, she shall be a rare beauty. But only if she embraces her true nature."

I asked my Mother, "What about the Dragon who became human? Isn't he a two-soul?"

"No, my dragonling, not truly. His heart will always and forever be the heart of a dragon, and it is said that he shall eventually lose his human aspect altogether, and once again become a dragon completely in body and soul."

I always wondered how this could be true, for if this dragon loved the woman as much as the prophecy foretold, would the power of it not allow him to remain human forever? Even young dragons know that there is no force greater than love.

I did not know that this story told of my own ill-fated future. And that the heartbreaking answer to my own question would reveal itself in time.

Now I looked back at Birġe, this girl who was the reason for my continued existence, and yet who was also partly responsible for my greatest pain. There was a time when I had blamed her entirely, but that anger was nothing more than the crying out of my own grieving heart, and it lasted but a fleeting instant.

I touched her mind again with my words, "Will you come with me, child? I see you have been left here, and I would like to take care of you now."

At this, Birġe showed the first signs of distress I had ever seen on her young face. Tears welled up in her eyes and began to run in generous rivulets down her cheeks as she looked around in a panic, as if until now she had not realized her human guardians were no longer with her.

She did not know what I knew of these people—Fenia and her husband Stego, the ones who had taken her in. She had not heard their urgent whisperings in the dead of night as they lay in bed together, trying to decide what to do with the girl who was starting to change into something different than the perfect newborn human they had so eagerly welcomed into their home so many months earlier, when she had no physical signs of dragon yet showing on her body. As she got older, Birġe inevitably began to develop traces of those scaley markings, and her round pupils elongated into reptilian slits. Tiny mounds appeared on her upper back where her wings would one day grow.

I had watched and listened from the woods surrounding their cabin every night since I left her on their doorstep. Their joyful laughter and sing-songy baby talk turned into silence, which turned into whispers I would catch snatches of on the wind: "Cursed," and "Child of Fierno," and "People are starting to talk," and finally, "We can't keep her."

They must have known whose child she was, and that it was I who left her roughly swaddled in blankets in front of their house early one morning, for no one else in our small village had been pregnant, no one else had died in childbirth. No other would-have-been father had disappeared without a word to anyone.

I thought they would love Birġe as her mother Celia and I had while the child was in my beloved's womb, and that they might raise her as their own. Fenia and Stego had seemed such a loving couple, and were good neighbours. We had been friends, although they did not know that I was a dragon in human form. I suppose one never knows one's true friends until every aspect of one's nature is revealed and accepted—the beautiful and ugly, dispicable and lovable. I did not give them that chance. It turns out they were what Dragons call Indirca, which translates to Only Lights, and refers to those who cannot stand to walk in darkness, those who would keep their eyes shut tightly in places of uncertainty and unfamiliarity even at the expense of their own eventual growth and wisening. Those who won't face their fears but rather pretend that they do not exist.

Fair weather friends, I think humans call them. Bright and sunny as they seem, Indirca are more captive to their shadows than those who are able to look at and embrace themselves deeply, because they remain unaware of their own complete nature. Indirca are only half-alive.

Standing in the woods now with Birġe, I saw the distress of my daughter's face when she realized she was alone. Perhaps she had loved them. She turned around and started walking to where Fenia had placed her on the ground by the stump. I felt a burst of rage towards this woman and her man, for they had broken my daughter's heart, and I wanted to fly to their little cottage in the woods and set it ablaze, preferably with the two of them still inside of it.

Then I remembered this was the second time she had been abandoned, and that most of the rage I felt was towards myself.

"Birġe," I thought her name, and she heard it. She stopped her rapid breathing, and her toddle-walk slowed to an eventual halt. She turned in my direction.

"Birġe, you are safe now. With me."

She plopped down onto her backside, and held both of her hands up towards me. I pressed my wing against the ground and gently nuzzled her onto it with the side of my face so that I could lift her onto my back. I did so with great care. She instinctively crawled to where all dragons carry their babies, into the nook between where each of my wings emerges from my back.

I pushed off the ground, into the twilit sky. I didn't have a plan exactly; I'd never raised a dragonling before let alone a half-human one. But all creatures need shelter before all else, a place to stay dry and warm and protected from the elements. I flew over the forest and the river to my mountain cave as the sky continued to darken and the first stars appeared against royal blue.

She was asleep when I set her down upon her mother's cape made of wolf fur, which I had salvaged from the wreckage of our home for this very purpose, along with a few other human things, mainly clothing. I knew I'd need them for Birġe, at least while she was still young and soft.

That first night I simply watched her sleep, taking in all the details I could of the sight of her. I was as enraptured by her as she had been by the butterfly in the meadow, content to simply be in her presence. I listened to the sound of her breathing, and noticed the way her belly rose and fell. The fire light gently danced across her flushed skin, setting it aglow. Right now, she was here. Right now, she was sleeping peacefully and safely.

In the morning she woke up bright-eyed and curious about her new surroundings. Then she seemed to remember her human guardians weren't with her, and she began to cry.

I let the river of her tears flow, and did not try to silence her wails of anguish, for grief is a thing that festers and eats away at a being—human or dragon—when it is not released. This is something Indirca do not realize, and I was not going to raise my daughter to be an Only Light.

I offered her the wolf-skin cape for warmth and some sweet berries to eat, but of course she ignored them; when sobs of sadness need to come out of the throat, it never feels right to push food in. Eventually she fell back asleep.

These first days were difficult for me as I witnessed my daughter so raw with exposed pain. I remained by her side through it all, as constant as the rising and setting of the sun, and as accepting as the ocean, receiving her completely as she moved her grief. Eventually she began to relax, and came to lie beside me on my sleeping stones.

When her sleep was no longer restless I began taking her for short flights to nearby fields of wildflowers, and to the bank of the river where she could watch darting minnows and chase after frogs—although the hopping toads were more her speed—and take solace in the sounds of the flowing water. The sooner she could bond with the natural world, the stronger she would be when the time came for her test. I did not know when that would be, or what it would be, yet I knew she would find her way through these wild channels.

As Birġe and I explored the wonders of the forest together, a sense of peace and contentedness that I had not known since my early days with Celia began to return to me. My memories of her now came with warmth and joy, and with only the smallest hint of the terrible sadness that for so long had overshadowed all thoughts of our love. In such moments, my relaxed tail would sway and slither along the ground behind me in a soothing repetitive motion.

"Doggie," Birġe said aloud one morning as she sat upon my waving tail. She lay down flat against it and extended her arms around its width, and rubbed her tiny face against my scales. I felt her hands patting my tail affectionately as she embraced me and repeated, "Doggie."

While I felt mildly affronted that she should equate my gracefully meandering tail with that of a dog's frantically wagging one, I was quite touched by the gesture. And the name stuck, I'm afraid, as time went on.

The days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months and years; time passes quickly, especially when one is watching a child grow up. Birġe grew tall and I marveled at her transformation as the chubbiness of her limbs stretched into lean defined muscles. She was an exquisite living sculpture, ever-changing. Her skin with its scaley markings became darker, her black hair grew longer and full down her back, and the first signs of her wings began to show, although I didn't think she'd be able to fly for many years to come.

We spent most of our days exploring our surrounding habitat, venturing sometimes to new places, and sometimes to familiar ones that Birġe seemed to prefer. I showed her the fruits, nuts and greens that were safe for humans, as well as the ones that would poison her. She ate them, although she had a much larger appetite for the deer and rabbits and occasional cow or sheep that I would bring to our cave. I taught her to read the language of tracks and animal sign, and to pay attention to the birds, for they are always telling us something. She made a bow from yew wood and deer sinew, and learned to hunt with it.

Birġe absorbed knowledge quickly, for she had both the dexterity and innovative mind of a human, and the acute senses and clear head of a dragon. I watched proudly as she learned to build shelter, and to make fire with sticks the way humans do.

From her I learned once again how to see the world with eyes of reverence for the everyday miracles of life itself. Sometimes we would simply stand or sit in awe of a flower or a sunset, or a family of skunks walking by. More and more, my healing heart unfurled into openness. I wanted to love her deeply, for she was a being of creation worthy of love and I was her only companion. An open heart is a requirement for such a gift of brave vulnerability.

We communicated mostly by touching minds, although at times she used her human tongue to speak aloud. Her vocabulary in this realm was limited, and Birġe preferred to use her voice in song. The melodic vocables she intoned had no literal meaning, yet they still carried some kind of magic. Her voice moving across the land would raise the hair on any human's arms with its penetrating clarity. The melodies were often haunting and sad. I once saw her hold her hand over a still pool of water as she sang, and ripples began to flow outwards across the surface, although she never touched the water.

I remember our time together with fondness and wonder, and I wished it would never end.

When she was in her tenth summer, Birġe began to grow restless with the surfacing questions that naturally arise within self-aware beings as they get older.

"Doggie," she said one afternoon as she sat with her legs dangling over the edge of our cave in the mountain. Her eyes searched my face and her mind touched mine with, "Who am I?"

I could have pretended not to understand what she meant and given her a human-ish answer such as, "Why, you're Birġe of course."

But why waste her time and mine? I knew what she meant. Perhaps What am I? was a more accurate way to voice her wonderings.

"Come, Birġe, let me show you."

I took her first to the farthest side of the mountain, a place we had never flown before. There was a human village at its base, and we sat on an overlooking cliff that allowed us to observe its inhabitants from afar without being seen. I watched her face as she took in her distant kin below. She kept still, her full attention on the figures of three humans that were walking towards the river with an empty pail, presumably to fetch water. She squinted her eyes as if trying to retrieve something from the brink of her subconscious.

"You are partly human," I told her. "Your mother was human. And you spent your babyhood in the care of two humans after your mother died."

"How did my mother die?"

I looked away now, into the distant sky.

"She died giving birth to you. It was not your fault."

She was silent for a time, and her focus drifted back to the water-fetchers. She marveled, "They are fascinating. See the way they talk to each other constantly and don't even see the family of foxes crouching only a small distance away. That one almost lost his balance because he knocked his foot across a fallen log."

The trio in question unmistakably found humour in this clumsiness, and sounds of their mirth carried up the cliffside.

"What is that sound?" Birġe asked, fully alert, "It is wonderful! Like a song, but bouncier and rougher, like raindrops on water."

"That is called laughter. They are laughing at their friend who almost tripped. And he is laughing at himself."

"How strange, and pretty."

After a moment, Birġe's demeanor sobered and she asked, "If I am human, why do I not look like them?"

"Come. There is more to show you."

Next we flew further than I had ever gone with Birġe on my back, well beyond the limits of the land she knew. We passed into the Dragondom of Ronain, which was the realm of my mother whom I hadn't seen for many years, not since I made my contract with Fierno.

Here it was more difficult to remain undetected, since dragons have a far greater grasp of their senses than humans do. For this reason, I stayed high in the sky and soared in slow circles, knowing that dragons rarely look up. It is they who are usually soaring amidst the clouds and looking down upon the world below.

Still, it was a risk to be there and we lingered only long enough for her to glimpse others of my kind. Others of her kind.

When we arrived back to our mountain Birġe asked, "Why didn't we stay longer? Why did you not take me down to meet your kin?"

"Because they are not ready to meet you. Nor you them. The dragons are your kin as well, dear one. That is why your mother died giving birth to you. Your father was—is—a dragon. And it wasn't your fault that the fire of your being was too powerful for your mother's human body to contain. She knew this, and she willingly gave her life for yours. She wanted you to live, even as she knew she would not survive long enough to even hold you in her arms."

"Doggie, you are crying," Birġe remarked, her golden eyes full of tenderness. Then she understood.

"You are my father."

"Yes."

Without hesitation she fell against me, and I enwrapped my daughter with my wing. In that moment I was filled with such overpowering love that I thought I might explode with it. It was the immediacy of her acceptance that undid me, and I realized that I could not regret one single event of my life because they had all led me to being in that moment with Birġe. My path was one of pain, of having loved and lost. I had endured the slow agony of healing, grieving even as the tendrils of an unexpected gift grew slowly from the ashes of the life I had dreamed of with Celia—a life that was never meant to be. And it had all been worth living through.

I had known when I made my agreement with Fierno that there would be a price to pay for becoming human. I thought I had paid that price when Celia left me in death—Oh how I suffered for it!

On that terrible and beautiful night of Birġe's birth, My love lay on the birthing bed—her deathbed—and faded into oblivion as I helplessly watched. Then she was gone, and the eyes that once shone so brightly with the spark of life were now as dull as the dirt on the hearth.

I was overcome with rage and it ripped from my throat in a ragged scream like the cry of a warrior. I felt a fierce desire to destroy everything within my reach with merciless fire, and this instinct triggered my transformation back into my dragon form.

It happened quickly; I felt myself growing wider and rising taller until my head burst through the roof of our cottage. My body was a roiling inferno as scales sprouted through my skin, the heat of it reaching my core and burning my humanness away organ by organ. I felt my wings cut through my shoulder blades, pushing outwards with an urgency fueled by my own despair. I reveled in the pain of it, this violent rebirth, because for a moment it distracted me from the fresh pain in my heart.

I tore from the ground and into the sky, flying up and up as I desperately sought escape from new unfathomable reality: she was gone. I might have kept going into the endless forever of the sky if I hadn't heard a tiny cry. My child, far below, was alive and taking her first breaths of air. For a moment I envisioned myself in a pointed dive towards the cottage; I would take a deep preparatory breath and spew fire down upon them both, my dead love and the child that was the cause of her demise. I would engulf them in the brightest funeral pyre that ever existed.

This impulse was stilled by the sound of Celia's voice—whether from her departing soul or from the depths of my own heart—say calmly, "She is our Love."

And I did come down then from the sky, only not in a single-minded act of reigning destruction. I let go, and truly let myself fall. I probably would have let myself crash to my own death if I hadn't heard Celia's voice again say, "She needs you. I chose her to live. And she needs you."

So I did the only thing I had the strength left to do. I wrapped the infant as best I could in blankets, and left her on the neighbours' doorstep.

Indeed, I thought I had paid the price of my contract then. But we sentient beings, conscious as we are, can never know how many times we will have to surrender, again and again, and to let the beings we love make their own choices.

Celia made her choice. Birġe would make hers.

Three years to the day after I took my daughter to see the humans and the dragons, I would face this call to surrender again.

On that morning, she awoke before me. I heard her putting things into a sack that she had made from her mother's wolf-skin cape. She didn't need clothes anymore, as her scales were becoming more prominent and her wings had almost fully grown; she had even begun to take short flights on her own. When she tucked her wings around herself they resembled a robe of sorts. She remained the height of an average human girl of her age, and tended to walk upright as two-leggeds do.

"Father," she said when she noticed me watching her, "The time has come for me to go."

I had known that this day was coming. She had spent the past many months revisiting the human village as well as the faraway dragondom as often as she could, watching from a distance, sometimes with me and sometimes on her own. Birġe was always pensive with longing and soul-searching on these forays.

My heart wanted to protest, and I stopped myself from crying out with the thoughts I longed to share: Birġe! No, not yet. You are too young. You are not ready. I haven't yet told you of the prophecy.

No, Birġe, please don't go. I love you and I want to keep you with me, always.

I did not say these things to her. I saw the straight and sure set of her posture as she stood before me, her sack over her shoulder. I saw strength in the determined look in her eyes as she stared back at me, just as unselfconsciously and directly as she had on the day I found her in the forest.

She has my eyes.

"Go then, my Birġe," I said, "And know that you carry me with you."

She touched my face softly before turning to leave our cave.

Go, my fearless bridge.

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Pixabay image credit: Sarah Richter