The Flames of Freedom

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Since they came down here, I sit on my front porch each morning and watch them in the distance, knowing that the distance will only continue to get shorter. They radiate raw emotions that I feel in my own body: fear, confusion, anger, grief.

Dragons prefer the cool tops of mountains to make their homes and raise their young. I used to watch them soar far above and feel their joyful freedom flow through me with the wind. They have not felt joy in some time now. I knew their anger was directed at us, the people who had long lived peacefully below them, and I’ve tried to explain it to the king’s people but they didn’t understand. Or care. When I talked to them, the feelings I received came only from their own stress and distraction. They didn’t have the mindset or the energy to listen to me. They were single-minded in their own pursuits.

And I am becoming an old woman now. I may not be around when the dragons finally turn on us. I sit at my front door, shelling peas or mending clothes or reading a book or strumming my guitar and I watch my community live its life. Children loudly at play. Men and women watching over them while doing their own work and chatting together. There is only love here, and freedom. I am the only one who feels the dark edge of that freedom approaching. I am the only one who knows the emotions building and entwining themselves, first softly like a breeze but always with a sense of the hurricane brewing. I have always felt the emotions of other people and animals in my own body. It has been a gift and a curse that no one else shared.

The machines in the mountains have their own rhythm and we hear their pulse from morning to night, faintly but always there. A slide-thump, slide-thump, slide-thump that continues even into my dreams. I envied the people who were able to tune it out and stop noticing it. But at the same time, I thought it important that someone was tracking it and witness to what it was doing.

High above us and through other mountain ranges all over, life was being displaced by the violent extraction of minerals to be used to make more machines in order to extract more minerals and then make other machines. Taking more than is needed, or than the earth can replenish, is an unnatural chain of events that would be stopped sooner or later by the earth or by the end of life itself. Most people trusted that no one would allow that to happen, but I had my doubts. The world had changed since the royalty was implemented, and nature - or even the barest minimum of common sense - no longer influenced public decisions.

The soldiers who came to bring us the news, back when I was still a child, carried machines that violently killed anyone who would defy the new king's self-imposed authority. None of us could have ever imagined a person having the ability to do violence to another simply to hold power, and we couldn't comprehend what it would take within one’s self to override their own humanity. This is also not a natural phenomenon but intentionally created. And not only are the people who die suffering for it, so are the people being made into killers.

But after the initial violence, the king allowed us to carry on with our daily lives without interference, and so people grew to accept it as a new normal. We get used to things. We adapt. Often that is a good thing, but not when we start adapting to dangerous things.

I could not adapt, but I watched and waited. I was never sure what I was waiting for.

As neither my wife nor I have ever given birth to any babies, all of the people in the village are our children. We cared for each new generation as it grew. My happiness at seeing the youth approach me this morning drowned out the feelings of shyness and uncertainty that emanated from her.

Neeta cried more than most as an infant. When her mother slept, I held her close and sang softly to her and I felt a whirlwind of emotions overwhelming her tiny body. I joked that they must have come from a previous life, but I knew she had her own cursed gift and I wondered how it would differ from mine. Now she has grown into a quiet and solemn young woman radiating a confusion and torment that only I could feel. She didn’t understand the people around her and didn’t feel like she belonged. She never knew how to act or respond to things that happened. She felt that she was somehow wrong, a mistake, broken, and so she withdrew into herself and avoided taking any risks that might show other people the person she saw in herself.

It was confusing to me, because in our community we worked hard to show that every person matters and no one is excluded or ridiculed for being different. Difference is strength and power in our view. It felt like Neeta was partly living in a whole other world outside of our own. Where were her feelings coming from?

She approached and I asked her if she would like to take a walk with me. We wandered through the woods around the village, to see how things looked there and if anything was new. We picked berries, piling most of them into baskets but also occasionally putting one into our mouths, and we listened to the birds in their ever-changing, nearly-continuous symphony. It was a hot day, but comfortable within the shelter of trees. I felt the life all around me, aware of myself not as a focal point but as one part of an intricate web. The breath of insects and plants flowed into the pores of my skin and I knew who I was.

And then a loud crash nearby sent all the little creatures scurrying away and interrupted the bird song, and Neeta turned to me with a depth of panic in her eyes that shook me. I reached out to grab her hand just as she started to fall to the ground. My fingertips brushed her slender wrist and I dropped to my knees beside her as she broke into a violent seizure. I removed my shirt and pushed it under her head to protect it and waited as calmly as I could.

Then I looked up in time to see a distant dragon above the trees open its mouth and spray forth flames. I froze but my heart raced. Fire was the dragon’s last, most extreme, uncontrollable form of self-defense, and it would destroy us all. This was the beginning of the end.