The Great Green Dragon

In the great wide woods of the world that so few had ever tread, a Great Green Dragon heard a cry that sent her heart in a whirl. It was the cry of something small, much smaller than she was, and most of all of something frightened. The great green dragon stomped heavily towards the ongoing sounds of the small, loud, scared thing. When she found the thing it was indeed small, loud and scared, but she did not blame it for being scared. The thing had no scales, it had hardly any teeth at all, and those it had were not sharp nor fierce, nor were its claws. The little thing’s only defense seemed to be that it was exceedingly loud and dirty and would need to be cleaned before being eaten. A hatchling.

When the strange hatchling finally saw the Great Green Dragon, it became silent. The dragon’s footsteps shook the earth and the hatchling took a tiny un-clawed paw and rubbed the tears from its eyes so it could look upon the awesome and quite terrifying mass and majesty of the Great Green Dragon. Her head lowered slowly to the dirt where the hatchling sat transfixed upon the dragon’s eyes or perhaps her teeth. The dragon held her head inches above the dirt and turned her neck so that one great glowing green eye examined the hatchling. A male.

The tiny boy was instantly lost in the patterns and colors of her gigantic eyes. Any trace of the child’s previous anxiety melted away in the sight of what could’ve been infinite space within the dragon’s eye. The Great Green Dragon blinked, a huge slow movement, and there was an audible click of the bones in the dragon’s massive eye. The child broke into a peal of laughter with the sound of the click and shakily but successfully stood up on his tiny legs. I see now.

The Great Green Dragon saw the hatchling upright now and realized in her travels around the wide world, that she had seen creatures who walked like that. Creatures who made the same sort of sounds and while bigger than the boy who were also, to a dragon, very small. These creatures had fashioned themselves claws and scales hoping to be as dragons but never growing even so big as their hatchlings and had, in ages so long before they had spanned the lifetimes of dragons, hunted her and her kin, and driven the dragons farther and farther out into the wide world. I remember.

The Great Green Dragon began to lower her whole body onto the ground and, setting in a spot where she felt comfortable, she took one last look at the little boy, shut her giant eye, and appeared, by way of her breathing, to rest. The little boy was for a moment somewhat confused then, understanding the dragon was resting and feeling tired himself, he too curled up on the ground, in a place warmed by the breath of the dragon, and slipped into an easy slumber. There.

The dragon’s gigantic eye opened once again with a click. Observing the sleeping child the dragon took pity on him and, calling on the powers all such dragons have, cast upon him a spell that put him into an even deeper, supernatural sleep. The dragon then rose with a great rumbling, though the child was entirely undisturbed by virtue of her magic, and reached out her expansive claws to scoop the hatchling up. The boy rolled over in her palm as if he slept upon an immense bed of fine down, as comfortable as if the dragon were his own mother rocking him to sleep. The Great Green Dragon lifted the boy up to her mouth and let him fall off her paw and past her teeth. Then she crouched low to the ground on all four of her sturdy legs and with a thrash of her wings pounced into the air…..

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Everybody in the town was going mad. Old men and mothers and school children were rushing around grabbing what they could, old swords that hadn’t been swung in a generation, broomsticks, stones, though nobody was really thinking about what they’d do with these trinkets when faced with a dragon of yet undetermined size. A green dragon could be seen flying in the distance from the south gate, though nobody could say how far it was for sure. The townsfolk had plenty of time to prepare, they spotted the dragon from so far off they watched it approach for the better part of a couple hours. Many folks left their homes and ran for the next town, many said they’d only gone to get help and kept running. Nobody had seen a dragon in ages, and while there were plenty of myths about dragonslayers in these parts, many didn’t believe in the existence of either the dragons or the slayers.

By the time the Great Green Dragon arrived, ragged battle lines had formed in front of the south gate. Two hundred arrows bounced off the dragon’s scaly hide in the time it took her to lower her body and head onto the ground. The Great Green Dragon only looked at them, waiting to see if they were done. The little creatures kept on, running themselves out of arrows, children came out and threw rocks, everyone in the town finally attacked as the dragon sat there, her vast glowing eyes, older than the trees that had built this little town, opened and closed periodically. The things could not make a scratch on the dragon’s scales, and eventually they retreated within the gate.

The Great Green Dragon’s eyes shut and opened once more with a click. Her terrible colossal maw opened as the people of the town cowered in fear and screamed “fire”. When there was no sudden increase in heat, the townspeople crept back to the gate and saw, climbing from behind the mountainous ridge of the dragon’s teeth, a tiny little boy. The dragon tilted her mouth to allow the hatchling to descend and waddle towards his kind as her spell gradually wore off and she returned him to the waking world, cleaner than she had found him. The people within the gates were speechless, the hatchling waddled towards them reaching his hands out asking to be held. The hungry little boy began crying again and, though nobody stepped forward, somebody picked him up as soon as he reached the gate. Needless to say the people here had seen something they had ever expected that day, but each one of them had expected the Great Green Dragon to leave.

She didn’t.