The Blue Dragon

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. They had emerged from the river cliffs of Gren Amar during an unprecedented cosmic event of starlight showers eons ago. Since then, the dragons negotiated their heavenly beginnings with their lives on land. It required the movement of stars and the transforming power of earth. It required huge feats of courage and even more exacting rites of surrender.

Under the falling snow, under his deep blue eyelids, the sleeping Ladrin watched himself running through a shadowy maze of dream and night. The turns ran under him from every direction and he sped through the darkness with a mysterious urgency. He did not know where he was going, but deep in his sleep, he was going very fast. He could see himself from overhead: the lean body, thin and rapid wings, the glints of light from his own eyes trying to see in the dim dreamscape.

The young dragon had been curled up in a snow drift for nearly three days. His deep blue scales glistened in the moonlight and he kept his tail wrapped around his body. His thin wings, still growing into their full wingspan, were folded close along his back.

The cold was bringing him home. In the arctic ice, he could sleep. In the frigid air, he could see more clearly, smell more deeply. In the muddled heat, experiences and sensations tangled themselves inside him in a hot disarray of colors, smells, and noises. The disorientation was sorting itself in the clarity of the ice. The receding strands were leaving, exposing a dragon that had begun to recognize himself in the dreamtime. For with each turn of the dark maze he could feel himself coming back to where he belonged.

He had never needed to find his way back. This whole experience of needing to return to himself gave him a strange anxiety that intensified his slumber. This search for his own belonging was utterly new. A sense of having been displaced increased his urgency to close the gap between his uncertain heart and his certain home.

This rest was his first step toward rejoining his tribe after four months away on the southern continent. It was a hot, vast unnamed place to which all young dragons were sent. They would leave their own continent they knew as Gren Amar, with all its deep ice and endless snowy peaks — and fly to the strange golden plains and soft rolling hills that would unseat a dragon’s whole identity.

This was intentional. It was the ancient vision of the elders that every dragon venture into these mysterious lands. Every time a youth beheld a new horizon, the sense of newness and wonder would expand inside every living dragon, no matter where they were. Through every individual quest, the collective culture of dragons maintained a more accurate sense of their place in the mystery they regarded as their existence. Through this continually revitalized relationship with what they did not know, the dragons kept lovingly to the tenets of their lives that were familiar to them. Peace among the dragons was maintained by continually and ritually sending the young ones away.

The sleeping Ladrin had fulfilled the purpose of his journey: to see. He had answered the vision of the dragon elders that every young dragon fly away into the unknown. Now he rested in the ancient grove to which only returning questors and the ill were assigned. Nobody could enter without surrendering something: a burden, an ailment, a limiting and outdated sense of the self. His chest ached. Now everything inside would expand for the next three days. He had been warned of this. He couldn’t just fly back to the Valley where his tribe lived. They waited for him among the massive, ancient nests hung from the cliffs over a river that opened into a nearby sea. The way for Ladrin to pass this time was to remain as close to the earth and eternal snow as possible. If this was not undertaken, the dragon would be subject to the incurable and dangerous bends of the spirit. This was an agony of malaise and disorientation to which, in the long history of dragon lore, a few hasty dragons had lost their souls. However, Ladrin had not missed a word of his teachings. He knew what he was supposed to do. After the three days, the restored dragon would make the last flight toward home.

Ladrin turned and attempted to burrow deeper into the snow. The soft cold around his muzzle lightened his sleep and the dark maze of his dream began to grow wider, like a rushing stream that spills out into a broad confluence. But before the last of his brow could descend beneath the bank, a sudden burst of light flared through the nearby trees and directly through the thin blue membranes of Ladrin’s eyelids. Ladrin jolted with a grunt and awkwardly raised his tired body above the snow. His nostrils immediately detected a metallic tinge in the air mixed with the smoke of charred wood. His sleepy eyes scanned all around. Such a light, he thought, could only come from a dragon breathing fire. But, Ladrin recited to himself, a dragon only breathed fire in anger — and anger was not allowed here. The old rule said that anger was always taken to the sea, which was the only force greater than the dragons.

The sense of displacement that had been receding within the resting dragon now returned full force. Something was not right. His mind raced. Perhaps this was no other dragon but something else. Ladrin ambled his body with his flight-sore wings and aching heart forward. He’d seen enough strange phenomena in his journey — all the creatures and landscapes — that surprisingly, his courage remained in place. This surprised him and he noticed the passing awareness of how brave he had grown. It swelled within him until dampened by a sudden doubt. What if he had been followed home? This was strictly forbidden. The sanctity of the dragons and all of Gren Amar depended upon every dragon’s solo return. A great deal of his early teachings had been about how to be an observer and keep one’s distance — to take it all in without being seen, and if encounters with other creatures were made, how to relate sparingly.

Just as the other creatures seemed strange to him, so did the dragons seemed to the animals of the unnamed continents. In some places they were feared and considered bad omens. In others, reports of their sitings were considered aberrations of vision, and at the most, unreliable projections of legend.

Ladrin paused to get his bearing in the soft snow. In the dim dusk light he saw no tracks, let alone no one else. Yet he could feel someone there. He took a few steps out into the moonlight and stopped. Something shifted up in the trees and then a flaming orange and red feather floated to the ground. It sizzled in the coldness.

Ladrin snapped his head upward and there, high up in the branches, he saw a dense fire that hurt his eyes. The dragon blinked and focused on the flames until he could make out the shape of a massive bird burning into the night. The glare simmered and Ladrin began to rapidly take in every emerging detail. The bird’s entire head flared with the brightest red that ran down its broad shoulders and back. Orange draped down the wing tips and tail plume — and radiant golden claws gripped the branch that smoldered and sent up fingers of wood smoke into the shimmering feathers of the bird.

Ladrin gasped as his mind rushed into questions, none of them yet specific enough that might result in an answer. Finally he began to find a rhythm to his thoughts and the beats started to form words. Ladrin’s uncertainty hurled through him in an internal avalanche that pounded his stomach until the fully-formed words burst forth. They spoke to each other in the language of all earth creatures — resonating sounds that were both heard and felt. Beyond the questions of who this was or what it intended here, the young dragon had to know that he had not broken the rule. “How… how did you get here?”

The phoenix flamed fiercely and paused to let Ladrin’s churning questions settle. An answer was not worth speaking unless it could be received. “You bore me from the southern continent.”

Ladrin reeled. His mind lurched toward despair. Certainly he had not broken the ancient covenant. His thoughts flashed abruptly to the disappointed faces of his elders. Their wisdom had been lodged within him with repetitive blows by the ageless hammer of the ominous consequences. Their lives were only protected by upholding the fragile balance between exploration and privacy. The dragons must explore, but they must remain hidden. Everything depended on it.

The phoenix spoke again. “I am what you were supposed to bring back.”

The dragon flailed between his internalized rules and the impossibility of what was before him. Nothing, he recalled, was supposed to be brought back. If this thing had followed him, he should have noticed it. How could he have missed this bird on fire? Ladrin’s heart deflated in his rising doubt. “But I’ve never seen you.”

The bird shrieked. “I am all you saw!”

The piercing cry faded in the wounded silence. Ladrin stood helpless as the cold calm slowly flowed in. It gathered itself and began to float between them and once again between every snowflake. The quiet only left Ladrin with his struggle. “But...” there were no words to contain the feeling of standing before the utterly improbable. His words were clumsy and wrong — and they resorted to insisting on his innocence. In all his confusion, he had only the option of repeating himself. “…I’ve never seen you.”

“Do not think that you haven’t.” The great bird’s quick reply seared into Ladrin’s head and down his long spine. “When you left,” the bird continued, “all you knew was ice and rock and the cold, cold sea. Then you flew over the hot plains, the myriad streams, and the endless groves of trees. You watched the creatures of the land and the water. You had never seen any of them before. You saw a whole new world. Where do you think all that vision goes?” As the phoenix spoke, flames curled around his eyes, around his body, and sparked off his tail feathers. Ladrin stood shakily in the snow. Not one of the elders had ever spoken of the phoenix. How could they have not told him if they knew? The bird heard the dragon’s every thought.

“We cannot be spoken,” the phoenix said.

Ladrin began to tremble now. His whole sense of the world shuddered. He was sure his teachings were complete and the dark inadequacy grew. But a roar of wind came from the tree and he was snapped out of any further descent into self-pity. A rush of hot air blew over him.

“You will see,” roared the bird — and everything else. For an instant, it seemed that everything spoke to him at once: the trees, the night, the snow, the great blue-streaked boulders.

The phoenix thrust out the great flames that were his wings. He shot up high into the air, lighting up Ladrin’s drawn and weary face and all the forest around him. Ladrin stared up with awe and then terror as the phoenix turned down and began flying, a hurling mass of fire, straight for the young dragon. Ladrin couldn’t move. His mind screamed that he should run, but something hesitated. The dragon’s mind spun in furious confusion. Why couldn’t he move?

There was something within him that wouldn’t go. It remained still, even calm. The young dragon screamed at this betrayal. It was his heart. To his own astonishment, his heart felt no need to flee. It waited, taking in everything. Then something snapped in his brain and his eyes turned back. His mind slowed as his body became filled with the same stillness. Everything beyond his ability to think waited for the bird. The fiery phoenix rushed down, faster and faster, its burning gaze aimed right at the dragon’s heart. Now Ladrin saw no more night, only the growing flames of the fiery vision getting closer and closer. The dragon raised his head higher and stared more intently into the fire. The air roared and sang in shrill tones all around him.

Ladrin’s mind had spent itself into empty perception. Everything was consumed with thrilling anticipation. The urge to jump away had dissolved in the glare. Something was different here. All of him was now full of the understanding that there was nowhere else he could be. At last, a new thought entered his mind and hung brightly in the purified vastness: this is what he had been waiting for. This was the conclusion of all his teachings; this was the goal of his quest. Like a perfect eclipse, his mind shifted into alignment with the radiant orb of his heart just as the phoenix flew right into him, passing through his skin and soaring deep, deep into the center of his soul. Upon touching the core, it exploded out until every part lighted up in flames, every dark corner was engulfed and burning.

A profound light emanated from all of Ladrin’s body. The dragon sucked in big gasps of air as he felt himself churning in the immense heat. His wings suddenly grew to their full splendor. They flared in opposite directions, sending sparking lights of every color into the night. The rest of his body expanded until he was twice the size he had been —the full stature of an adult dragon.

Ladrin stood on bare rock now, in the center of the grove. The melted snowbank rushed away in variegated torrents in every direction. Inside, Ladrin burned with ferocious pleasure. The weariness was long gone, replaced with strength and clarity beyond all his experience. A massive thrill rushed through every bone, every muscle, every scale along his body. He lifted his head, gazed over his bright blue wings and roared into the night, sending up a broad torch of fire that could be seen across all the continent of Gren Amar.

It was the signature beacon of light that announced to every dragon who had ever quested that another dragon had at last come home.