The Plains of Fear

There weren’t always dragons in the village. The woman watched it drag parts of itself along the floor in the corner of the room with indifference, though it moved on rotted wooden floorboards all its sounds were that of a dead weight dragging against deep sand. Now that the woman had cried all the tears she had left whilst watching her last child starve until his last breath, she marveled at how different dragons were to the image conjured in collective imagination. Where dragons in children’s tales and historic scrolls blew breath of white-hot flames, the dragon in the corner of her room blew a breath that was more similar to that of a void. with every muted dragging she heard from it, its breath would slowly remove any whisper of wind around it and move the temperature closer to a point where it could not be felt on the skin. The dragons that were slain by great heroes had thick leather wings, armoured with scales that arrows could not pierce; this had wings that were smooth and warm, weighted to the point of an embrace. The woman knew that if she were to just move closer to the dragon she could be enveloped in those wings and all sound and light would be cut from her world, she would feel comfortable lying on those rotted floorboards- pressed down just enough to not feel interested in once again joining the world that for her was being slowly drained of any colour. A dragon’s roar was meant to be a grandiose, shaking terror. The roar this dragon had was the silence between the woman’s cries of grief for her child; it was the thing she feared the most, those moments of silence. The dragon’s roar forced the moments of silence to grow longer and longer and the silence in that lessening physical world was to the woman the loudest roar she could possibly imagine.

She wondered briefly whether the Ecclesia Maggiore had always known that this was the true form of dragons. She wondered whether it was simply easier to deal with the raw nature of fear than it was to fight the emptiness of depression. How is a beautiful war hero with flowing hair supposed to fight a monster that makes them feel as if it is not worth lifting their sword in the first place?

The woman wished with desperation that she felt fearful of that dragon in the corner of her room, that she could run from it. She had heard rumours of what it felt like to accept the embrace of a dragon. Most people said it felt like drowning in a body of water that was neither warm, cold, or wet; the part of drowning after your body had finished struggling. Others said that you never really died, that the silence of their roars was the dragon harvesting the newest victim’s grief to feed to the ones that came before. Fed to people that had become addicted to the feeling of all-encompassing grief because compared to the nothingness that the dragon bestowed upon them, it was a state of ecstasy.

The woman stood, moving her form with a lack of purpose towards the dragon in the corner of the room, its wings started to stretch towards her with a deep groaning. The envelopment felt pleasant. The woman realised it was the first time that she had felt any warmth in months. The events that occurred past the envelopment were remembered to her only in sharply fractured moments. First, she remembered the silence being broken by a language that she had never heard before, each guttural stroke of its voice struck deep lacerations across the skin of a body that no longer felt like hers, though the pain had never felt like it had belonged to her more. She then felt her mind and nerves being slowly stretched across this plain of darkness she didn’t understand. Then came the fear. The fear that she had given herself over to a creature that she didn’t understand with consequences that were beyond her human comprehension. As her mind stretched, she laughed with a hysteria she had never before felt; the dragons were an infinitesimally small part of this new fear she had discovered. Every story that had been told of the dragon’s embrace was so wrong and pathetic.

Depression was a gateway to these plains of fear. The grieving mother bowed down to all they could offer.