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The Old Dragon and the New Egg

The once beautiful sky was opaque, not that I had seen it a lot. There would be no more noticeable sunrises or sunsets for me. Most importantly, for my kind, was there would be no more stars…

It would have been hard to say what had caused the sky to be this way on the day this story starts. My memory is as cloudy as the heavens were that day and my knowledge, with my lack of my ability to fly any longer at that point, left me in the unknown. However sad, there are more important things to discuss with you. But to give you a clearer picture, the landscape itself was white with gray and black. Not much less depressing, to say the least. Plumes of smoke, I remember, rose all around me as I surveyed the scene from the foot of my mountain. I came down to find food.

I peered through the trees, much like burnt matchsticks by then, like I did every day of the past few weeks, open-mouthed, slobbering, just willing prey to appear. I was stranded; I felt alone, like I was the only dragon on earth now.

It was as though the earth had opened up and the food had fell into it. Weeks ago, I witnessed volcanoes erupting, earthquakes shaking the ground, mountains—my mountain—toppling into the sea. The earth, I think, had given up. Its most notorious inhabitants—humans, forgive me—had finally done what they had been threatening to do the past seventy years. They had started a war that could not be won, and where everyone turned out to be the loser.

I can still imagine seeing other dragons. Not hard to visualize; I had lived with them for centuries! Dragons, soaring high overhead weeks ago, during the day—an oddity. We only ever hunted, came out, at night. We flew so high up you would have been convinced we were flies you could swat with your hand. Then, when you inevitably missed, we would have been gone from your sight. We flew as fast as airplanes, those metal birds you contrived to move humans from one point to another.

Not too long ago, dragons had been driven out of their dens deep inside the mountains by the war. Two countries went back and forth, back and forth, releasing their bombs, which got bigger and bigger and more and more deadly, until everyone—everyone—and everything was destroyed.

I remember looking up, delirious no doubt, expecting to see another dragon that day. I remember this because dragon’s are strong of mind, stronger than any human could conceive. I was hoping. Hoping to see another dragon, even one diving down on my weakened form. Hunting me! Even scouting my—no, no, of course not that!

I think I closed my eyes on the nonexistent dragon at that point. There was no food to be found and soon the ocean would rise even higher. I couldn’t fly anymore. And my source of food—deer, bears, moose, alligators. Anyway, the dragon I could most hope to see is the rarer gray dragon. If there was a gray dragon, I’m sure I would have thought, then there would more likely be other dragons. A gray dragon, sharing the white underbelly we all had. Most dragons were black, despite rumors of them being rainbow colors. Some, like I said, were gray—dark gray, to be more exact—but all were either black or gray, whether black, with some striped with gray or patched by gray colorings. At least, I have never known a dragon to have any other color other than those two, and I know quite a lot. Either way, our dark colors made us easier to hunt—if you could call it that, as it was more like “find” and, seconds later, “finish”—at night. It was how we evolved. I think your Darwing mentioned something about that with other flying creatures. Nevertheless, being of dark colors, it made us easier to stay hidden.

I admit to you that I hesitate to return to my tale. But please be patient. This isn’t easy for me.

To emphasize, I was most assuredly the last of my kind. Dragons can see for miles and miles and we can fly a thousand miles, soaring on warm current, before needing to land again. This is important. I believe I would have seen another dragon by now if there had been another.

Most everything around me on that particular day was burnt or burning, even before we dragons were forced from our homes and we fought back, attacked and burned everything that wasn’t already dying, be it trees or homes or….

I was not one of them. I knew from learning that for us to begin to grow, we needed the world around us to be well. I tried to tell the other dragons this, but they wouldn’t listen, they couldn’t heed my words, and, in their rashness and anger, they sought to destroy the very things that enabled them to survive.

The little bit of warm water that had seeped from the steadily rising seas, a true hour’s flight away, to my mountain tickled my scaly feet. It brought me back to my sense.

I myself am black, of course. I stood again, at the base of the mountain, wondering how I would ever find food for my young. I was desperate. This was daytime.

I’m sorry if I am a little scatter brained. I don’t have much time left to tell you before you go. I’m lying. I don’t have much time left before I go. Before I return to the earth to be no more.

I once had six hatchlings. When the bombing started, I didn’t fly off in anger, but brought my children, you will call them, to a safer place. I fed them as best as I could, sometimes flying for leagues. There was never enough to eat. Exhausted by the time I came back, I had only enough to feed a few of them and myself (very little), so that I could fly off again once I rested. I fed what I felt to be the strongest of my children. Soon, only f-four r-remained…then t-t-two…a-and now, m-my friend-d, i-it is only you and m-me….

Where was I? The pooling water by my feet…the expanding s-sea…. Sniff.

The sea.

Once covering a good portion of the world, it was now looking as though the ocean would take over all of it.

And quickly at that!

Just the day before then, the ground I stood on had felt like coals. Even where I nested higher up on the mountain the soil and rocks were felt like they were burning underneath from all the bombs. It was not a good time to be alone.

If I wasn’t so sad or maybe even wasn’t so weak, I could laugh remembering just after the last bomb fell that I almost felt like they could fall through the scorched earth at any living moment into an abyss of even more flames. I thought it was paradise, in a way. I was confused, certainly. I mean we were freed from hiding and now the world looked to be in prime conditions for survival. My eyes droop thinking about it. You can’t understand my expressions, even if you were as old as me. But I’m crying again. Ha ha. Madness. Lying on a bed of coals or being pitched into a weightlessness with flames licking your scales makes me yearn for a single restful night of sleep. I hadn’t had one of those since the first day I was “released” from our hideout. I think I will have that sleep, a long, long unawakening sleep.

The land itself was ablaze, and the sea was quenching its thirst. How…fortunate.

I was so malnutritioned by that point—and delirious—standing there, looking out at the woods again, I was sure I was seeing things…

Before, when the world knew naught of us, things were manageable, our numbers limited, yes—dwindling slowly, really, as Man spread across more of the earth’s surface, making our nighttime prowlings for food, liitle by little, ever more challenging. If anyone found out about us—and survived—it would be the end of us, in less than a blink of an eye.

Of course, we had our defenses, and an odd but sometimes useful talent: mindspeak. At least, that’s what we call it in your language. Any being we could look into the eyes of, we could enter into their minds and communicate with them; it worked well on simple-minded prey, stunning them with a barrage of words in whatever means they used to communicate and convince them to amble into our waiting, open mouths, telling them it was safe and there was food in there, for example.

My stomach grumbles.

But, Man, being of strong mind than bears or deer, we could only drive crazy, in the hopes that no one would listen to them—again, if, they got away, and they were not known to get away, obviously, or we would have been obliterated long ago….

I have enough energy for a smile. I am smiling now; perhaps you can tell. Things were favorable, perhaps, as far as survival, as a whole. If I were to be optimistic, though I would rather not tell you this, even humans spreading into the mountain ranges looking for habitation could have supplied a bigger resource of food…

Yet it wasn’t to be.

We were learned your ways, through adventurers, and the few books you carried over the millennia, when not engulfed in flames or accidentally eaten, and brought to one of us that knew a bit how to read. Those stories then trickled down to the other, more nomadic, dragons, and the stories spread far and wide. I was one of the ones who could, more or less, read. I was an important—

Well, I’m getting off track again.

I “knew,” being of course limited in the amount of books I read and stories I heard, that humans thought us as fairytails and to be, perhaps, as base as reptiles if we ever existed. Dragons eat their dead. We give off a certain smell that wafts for miles, which our noses seem keen to detect; that is why no human has ever discovered our bones, I think. Even our own kind had fairytails of humans: There used to be riders of dragons, my ancestors taught me. I always thought those stories were solely for our young, which was about the time I had heard it as well . I think they called the humans cowtoys or such, because they couldn’t tame us, and could be seen trying the same with cows, which would buck them off.

Now, how could a human tame a fully grown dragon when it couldn’t tame a cow, I ask you! Toy indeed!

In the tails, the humans usually hung onto our backs on daring, drunk nights (with our permission no doubt, though I don’t remember how that part went) and rode until their minds were either mush from mindspeak and they fell prey or—well, now that I think about it, I don’t think there was any other ending.

Most of this is the past. In fact, all of it is really. But I never ate humans. You need to know that.

I’m sighing. This is the hardest….

Well, on this particular terrible day, I was peering into the woods, as I have said, sure of my mental faculties leaving me, when I spotted something a few leagues away. I stated that we dragons have very good eyesight, but it is better in black and white like the landscape was that day. It works very well at night for us, when we are active. So this spot of sliver of pure white I saw, naturally, stood out to me.

I stomped toward it slowly, of course hoping it was something decent to eat, like a sheep. Not that I had any more reason to live at that point, with my young all gone, survival still churned me on. The only food I had had since we were forced from our mountain’s depth was burnt sheep (delicious) or charred game (another good one), but the ones I found were so badly burned, there was hardly enough nutrients in them. We dragons prefer to cook our own food, if we cook it at all; fresh meat is the best, but when we cook it, we like to cook it ourselves; we know just how we like it, and, to me, these…things…were disgusting. Hair burnt into the meat the wrong way, the eyes still there somehow, staring blankly off in two different directions, the tongue hanging out, whatever this source of food was. Only the most desperate type of dragon could eat this. I was one of those so far, so this fresh, white thing I saw…well….

What had become of humans?

I’m smiling. It is important you know the truth.

Why start a war that stirs even the most cautious creature?

And a meaningless war, from the sounds of it, over which side of a hardboiled egg should be cracked! It was meant to happen, I suppose, as someone had written it down years ago in one of your books. The war destroyed most everyone anyway, even if the dragons hadn’t been stirred. A lot of the food on the earth was probably no good to eat because of all the newclear bombs. Clear, indeed!

They had miscalculated, if, indeed, those presidents of those two countries were calculating at all! Spitting rockets so quickly and wildly, before they themselves were obliterated, they began to hit mountains—and the retaliation was so fast, no one might have known where it had come from. Well, they didn’t survive it, if they did know, I’m certain of that with food becoming so scarce.

For mountains were where dragons slept, if I didn’t say that already. It was where they nested their young, taught them lessons—and we’re talking thousands of dragons, sometimes tens of thousands, living in a single mountain’s core, like bats in a cave.

There was so much man didn’t know about mountains—oh, they thought they knew!

But, again, it doesn’t matter now.

The world held a little over eight billion people at the start of the war: food aplenty, fat people, fit people, one-hundred-thousand dollar watches, toilets made of gold—and still they fought. We’ve had dragon wars, but they were about more important things: invasive dragons into others’ mountains. We fought for survival, defending ourselves! I’m dying. Forgive me for judging you. We, too, no doubt, had our mistakes.

As I got closer and closer, the image of the white sliver disappeared. I kept my mind off it as I walked, stumbled, and then it was gone. I’m not even sure I was heading in the right direction, toward it, the whole time. I stood still again. I was swaying on the spot—

It had come from nowhere. A rustle of wind whistling between the young, burnt tree stalks. A small tornado, like in the sand but higher, appeared in the air about a dragon’s length in front of me—then, zip! The wind subsided and finally dissipated. Something was among the charred saplings of the nearest tree.

It was an egg.

The thing that had appeared was shaped exactly like an egg anyway. It was white all around, but it had large silver dots running up the sides and crosswise all the way around it, it seemed. It was the size of a dragon’s egg (fifty times the size of a chicken’s egg).

There was a line—no there were four lines—creating a rectangle between two rows of these dots. The first thought that entered my mind was that this was a door.

Clearly, the thing could be opened.

I just stared at it. Could it be eaten? was my first, irrational thought.

I looked up at the sky again. No dragon overhead as usual. But who was to say one wouldn’t also magically come darting out of the sky and burn this “egg” to ashes as well.

Just then, my stomach grumbled. I’ll say that it was always grumbling by that time.

I hurried forward, dashing madly at it, teeth chomping on their own, mouthwatering—

Whish.

I stopped in my tracks, just before it, kicking up a spray of ash and dirt.

The rectangle on the egg I had forgotten might be a door, had lifted slightly, and a puff of cool, blue air escaped all around it. Then the door—for that is what it clearly was—slid upward, until the opening was entirely visible.

And inside was a little boy, wearing a sort of swimsuit with feet, shoulders, arms, and head bare. A human boy, currently fast asleep. It was hard to wrap my head around. Cool air continued to puff out of the opening in short bursts. It was too hot for anything this fragile to survive. I rushed and slid the hatch back closed with my paw, a little roughly and the egg rolled and hit my taloned foot. I bent lower—I was observing it closely—and I put my ear up to it to see if the baby was okay. There was a snuffling sound from within; it must still be asleep.

I picked up the egg and carried it back up the mountain. I don’t know how I managed to get back up in my state, but I suppose the surprise at seeing the egg had somehow given me strength. My home then was a shelter of boulders and stones, enshadowed twenty hours of the day by smoke and clouds, the rest by nightfall. The shelter was on the low side of what was once a real mountain and was now a sort of crooked, cratered plateau, if you could call it a thing at all anymore. The high side still had boulders rolling down it every few minutes, which made it hard to sleep; the low side, which had them rolling down every hour or so, was not much easier, but it was the safest place I could find. I could no longer make the steep climb up the crater.

I suppose this is all irrelevant.

When I brought the egg back up and thought that it was safe, I opened up the egg again. It took a bit, but I forced it open with my claws while trying not to break the door; I knew the door would need to be put back on quickly, but I wanted to get a better look.

The baby, it turned out, was a three-year-old boy. Brown haired, green eyed, pale skin, almost translucent…

And then I noticed something.

Four pink slits on the left side of the neck. The toddler was fast asleep, his head resting forward and to the right, making the mark visible for the first time. He was strapped into the inside of the egg by a black thing in the shape of an X. I reached out a black, long-taloned finger and moved the boy’s head to the right, my right. There again, the same four slits on the boy’s right neck.

I noticed something else then, as well.

A number on the upper-right chest, by the shoulder, of the boy; it looked like the number had been inked on. The number was 62.

Now, I am not a simpleton. Of course, I was helped when the boy took a sudden deep breath, after I had adjusted his head, his lips sputtering sleepily. However, the boy’s lips weren’t the only things that moved. The four slits on the side of his right neck fluttered, too.

Gills!

“And the number…?” I asked myself.

I smiled that time.

This wasn’t the only one sent here. This was the 64th of however many.

There was the “why,” of course. Or “how!”

I have seen magic before, long ago. Dwarves in the mountains—we usually took over their dens when we were forced in the inside of the mountains. We feasted on them; don’t worry, they were wickeder than humans and warred among themselves more often than neighboring ants. The elves too, who knew the most about magic, who were much kinder than any other species, leaf-eating, pacifists, and died out naturally, foresworn to become extinct, which they became ages ago, before harming another being.

But there was little time to think about all of this. The water would be up to the base of my home on the side of the mountain in less than a day.

I knew then what I had to do…

1. Walks down to the height of the water, waist deep. The egg floated.

2. Snap the straps of the belt. Take out tubes fitted into child’s body.

3. And let him into the water. The baby splashed wildly for a moment. Then sank under the water.

4. I begged for him to break the surface again. To come back to me, to thank me.

5. There were multiple reasons for this. I knew it would survive. If it took off, then all hope was lost…

6. The boy’s head broke the surface in front of me.

7. His eyes darted back and forth to mine, scared but curious.

8. I was getting weak. I might not be able to tell you everything before—

9. That’s when I steeled myself.

10. I had to use mindspeak on you. In the hopes that you will save my kind if you see us in the future.

11. Save us. Save us as I have saved you!

12. I repeated this over and over and over to you… You must remember. You must!

13. Or my kind is doomed forever…

14. And then I began in more earnest, telling you everything. I started from the beginning…

15. The once beautiful sky was opaque, not that I had seen it a lot. There would be no more noticeable sunrises or sunsets for me. Most importantly, for my kind, was there would be no more stars….