We Fight The Dragon

This story was conceived weeks before the previous article was published on Rice Media and all the backlash that followed. This isn’t meant to be about that.

This story is about a girl.

The girl was Angela, 16. She lived in a castle up on a hill far away from the main village where the rest of the world lived, at least she thought. She wouldn’t know. On the boring days, from the window of her room, she would look out and see the sprawling wood and brick houses that was the village far down the hill. Living in a castle, it’s reasonable to assume she’d be royalty or at least filthy rich. You’d be right on both accounts. Well, her family was royalty, Angela had no interest in politics really. In that sense she’s as normal as any villager. And the villagers were normal, in that they were the average working class.

As is common with inequality, hatred was bred. Mostly, the hate came from the villagers and was delivered unto the royal family. Angela contributed her part too. The village, as well as Angela, regarded the royal family as good-for-nothing, corrupt, unconcerned with the welfare of the village and general assholes. This wasn’t helped by the fact that Angela’s parents were, in fact, good-for-nothing, corrupt, unconcerned with the welfare of the village and general assholes. They were also ugly. Some villagers chalked it up to the fact that they locked themselves up in that castle and never actually come down and talk to them or hold a rally or do some public networking. But the royal family claimed they had very good reason to. They claimed that they needed to rule from a healthy distance, like one would try and rule over the sun. This analogy was particularly apt because periodically, the village would turn into a giant fucking ball of fire due to attacks from an evil dragon.

Nobody knew why the dragon came or why it wanted to destroy their homes so much, but it did. For that matter, nobody knew why the dragon just ups and leaves either when it does. What the villagers did know was that when the fiery flames died down to ash and debris, all they could do was clean up and rebuild. It happened so often and so predictably that it became part and parcel of living there. The village didn’t do anything crazy like offer sacrifices or pull a How-To-Train-Your-Dragon and try to domesticate the beast. The village conceded that that would be really cool though; It would really help with the smithing industry. No, this village was rather sensible. Like Finland in village form.

Though a girl her age might have spent her days chasing boys or going to school or sitting down for tea with friends, Angela did none of those things. She was locked up in the castle, she was told, for her own safety. The castle would be more than large enough to rid anyone’s sense of claustrophobia inside it but it was far too small to live one’s entire life in. Somehow or other, it was also far too large to feel homely. She noticed this most when having to speak up to be heard by her parents across the dining table and when the messenger pigeons got tired out from delivering messages to places within the castle. Mostly, she felt it because due to the ratio of living beings to floor space, she rarely ever came across anyone in her daily wanderings. Despite this, Angela tried to expand her horizons beyond being a cooped-up damsel in distress. More specifically she spent most of her time training in combat. Even more specifically, she trained in Jiu Jitsu, the martial art her master was most fluent in.

By 15, Angela was, in short, fucking awesome in Jiu Jitsu. She reckoned she could pin a dragon. Her master reckoned her reckoning skills weren’t as honed as her Jiu Jitsu skills. Not to put all her eggs in one basket, Angela also trained in many other forms of self-defense like archery and Muay Thai. One might wonder how Muay Thai ever came to reach the village in the first place and where and when this place was exactly. Well this place was ancient cosmopolitan New York. I guess that would make it just York.

As a result of spending most of her time training with her master, he had become her pseudo-parent. Her values and morals were his, her habits and speech patterns were his and he was the only one she really admired in her life. Not that there were many people in her life to choose from. It came to be that his opinions were the only ones that held any sway over her. Having said that, her master rarely gave her any opinion at all besides comments on her stance, form or anything regarding combat. Her master was a private person, only ever putting up a professional front. And yet Angela felt he spoke volumes in his silence, like an audiobook on mute. Regardless, the few conversations they had had over the course of her lifetime meant the world to her.

At this point, in the peak of her teenage rebellion phase, Angela was bubbling with emotions. She hated the dragon firstly. Without the dragon she would have been free to make friends and kiss boys and maybe fly to Bali to see what she heard some people call ‘culture’. Without the dragon the people wouldn’t suffer nearly as much either. There would be both less destruction and reconstruction and she thought that her family just might actually do their job.

She also had massive sympathy for the village and its villagers. Though she had never seen them, she imagined their suffering was unimaginable what with all that firefighting. She shuddered at the thought. Her thoughts on firefighting could be summed up as follows: totally not my thing.

Lastly and most strongly of all she hated her parents. She hated their actions, she hated their attitude towards the people and she hated their royal, ugly faces. More than that she hated them because as a result of their actions, the villagers lumped her together with them. They thought that she was guilty of just as much assholery as her parents if not a little more, being a spoiled, rich teenager.

All this hatred and lack thereof culminated in a goal: to slay the dragon. She resolved to prove to her parents that she would not become them, to prove to the villagers that she can be more than what they saw her as and to get some kickass revenge on that bitchass dragon. And so, on her sweet 16th birthday, she snuck to the front gate of her house. She considered for a moment that, in this journey, she would probably make more friends than she had ever made in her life, then left home for the first time. She also considered the fact that, should she succeed, she would almost be a slay queen. Angela needed friends.

Now you might ask why she didn’t tell anyone, not even her master. And she would tell you that she didn’t know why herself. She figured it had something to do with the fact that this mission seemed something she had to do on her own and that it didn’t concern anyone. At least not immediately. She was also afraid of being stopped. Perhaps, though she may deny it, she was really worried that nobody would care enough to stop her.

She left the village, travelling north: the direction which the dragon came from during every attack. You might expect that the journey was arduous and the task of finding the dragon challenging. But really, it wasn’t more than a day’s stroll outside the village when Angela saw puffs of smoke coming periodically blowing out from the entrance of a large cave tucked away amongst some trees. This could only mean 1 of 2 things: either it was a large group of smokers hiding out in a cave and, for some reason, syncing their puffs or it was a dragon. She would soon find out.

As it turned out it was both, but the smokers quickly left, realising they were non-essential characters and only meant as comic relief. What was left was Angela and a sleeping dragon. Angela entered the cave shrouded in the cover of trees.

Eventually she came up to the dragon’s snout. For a space so large, it was eerily quiet save for the rumbling breaths of the dragon, so inhumanely slow. Angela was used to this quiet in large spaces, having been surrounded by silence her whole life. She was, however, creeped out by the breathing. In her mind, dragons were huge, but it never prepared her for the sheer size of this one. The cave could easily fit her entire castle and yet it was barely a kennel for the dragon.

Scary as it was, the dragon was remarkably beautiful. Its scales sparkled with what little light leaked into the cave. The contours and, for lack of a better word, aerofoil which its heavy body necessitated gave the dragon an elegance and delicate nature that few gigantic things had. In some ways the dragon was the exact opposite of Angela’s castle. Very opposite from her house as well were the presence of enormous nostrils expanding and contracting rhythmically, so large that she could comfortably walk into them. And, even though it was never part of any Jiu Jitsu tactic, that’s exactly what she did. Her confidence that she could pin the monster down was waning.

Like a human, the dragon’s nose was connected to its mouth and so Angela found herself unintentionally crawling back out again on the dragon’s tongue. But this time she found the cave was suddenly filled with a bright orange glow, a sunset. The dragon’s eyes were wide open. Those eyes stared down at Angela with what must have been maxed out intimidation skill.

She greeted the dragon nervously, following her first instinctive reaction and by far the least logical one. She didn’t really expect the dragon to understand her, let alone reply but it did. He, and it was a he, asked who she was with a deep booming voice. Benedict Cumberbatch’s reprisal. She explained her background. He asked what she was doing here. She explained her purpose. He asked her how old she was. She declined to answer; it was a social taboo.

Why are dragons so commonly evil? Do we think their invincibility empowers them to act hedonistically? Perhaps the better question to ask is why dragons are so special in the first place. Haku, Smaug, Mushu and Eragon . Good, Bad, feisty and loving. It seems to give dragons power is to humanize them; to make them covet something, or for them to represent benevolence. There is something seemingly perfect and omniscient about dragons that make them seem to be an ideal. It’s as if we use them to reflect some ideal about ourselves too great or forceful for man to portray. This dragon was nothing like that.

Much to Angela’s surprise, the dragon was rather eloquent and more than that, very congenial. They got to talking. In some way it seemed that the dragon made up for all the years of socialising and interacting she had missed out on. It showed. The dragon thought she was a major loser, but he humoured her because he could.

They talked about the intricacies of fire-breathing and about the art of shooting an arrow. He talked about his struggles with wooing female dragons and she talked about her lack of interaction with boys. He talked about his ability to fly and she suggested that maybe they could hook up some time to fly to Hawaii. He declined.

But her original purpose was unavoidable and despite the developing friendship, it did not falter. Eventually they both ran out of topics to sidetrack on and had to face reality. She asked, with a harsher tone than she thought she was capable of mustering, why the dragon kept destroying her town.

She was prepared for diabolic or malicious reasons like to see fear in mankind’s eyes or for fun or to kill his boredom. She was even prepared for personal reasons like a grudge from an ancient war with humans. What she wasn’t prepared for was that he had no reason. Not to train his fire-breathing muscles if ever there were such a thing. Not to use the village as target practice, not even out of boredom. It was purely because he could and barely even that.

In that moment the dragon became not an evil thing that deserved Angela’s wrath or in the unlikely event that he had a good reason, a being she could learn to understand and empathise with. Instead he became insignificant. There was no learning point or moral clashing between the dragon and her. There was no dilemma for her to overcome or new reasoning or perspective on life or any other product of climaxes you read about in stories.

The dragon really then was like herself, indifferent. Angela would not see it, but it didn’t really matter to her whether the village burned down. She just felt it right to care because that’s what decent people do. But on days where the village burned, Angela was busy training or reading. So to what extent then did she really have a stake in whether or not the dragon attacked the village? To what extent then could she really sympathise with the villagers? She was a false crusader. A leader by power and not by nature. But unlike her, this dragon had accepted its own true nature. Hanging out with some smokers, to the dragon, was as unmomentous as burning down a thousand houses. Its sole reason to do anything was because it could and, as invincible dragons were so often left unchecked, it could do a lot. Angela was in pain because to look into the dragon’s eyes was to see herself, embracing what she really was.

Would slaying the dragon then be some inner battle won? Would it signify her resolve to fight her lesser self? Not really. It seemed to Angela that to slay this dragon and come back a hero would just be a hollow endeavour, like those coconuts in Hawaii she heard so much about. Maybe she should joke about it to herself more, so she’d feel good enough to move on.

She realized then that she didn’t want to slay the dragon for any of the reasons that the narrator took so much time to expound on. She really just wanted to have some conflict. To find something that was maybe more evil than her and maybe more righteous than her and overcome something. She wanted to be a protagonist.

Though on the inside she was going through a long and complex thought process, on the outside she was really just staring. The dragon was bored to tears, but dragons don’t cry so he too appeared to just be staring at her. Eventually though the eye contact ceased, and he decided to cut the silence with an offer. Seeing as how she came all this way, they should make use of this. He explained that she should go back and lie about slaying him, then the riches she will inevitably be rewarded with could be split equally between the two of them. With the riches, the dragon would promise to never come near the town again. Though she wanted so much more, like an adventure or a near-death experience, she couldn’t think of a better alternative. So she agreed. The dragon gave her a week to return with spoils or else another attack would be guaranteed.

And so it came to pass that she would arrive 2 days later at the village square, which, like all village squares, was really all too round. On the podium, she announced that she was the princess and that she had slain the dragon.

The people demanded proof and in response she held up a birth certificate. The people clarified that they meant about the dragon slaying. Having been taught to always be prepared, she then showed them a tapestry depicting an epic fight between her and the dragon. The people were still skeptical, having been deceived many times by tapestry manipulation. A kerfuffle a few years back involving an over-edited tapestry of some CK models had taught the villagers a lesson.

More than remaining unconvinced, the people were rather unappreciative even if on suspension of disbelief. A group of villagers claimed she was just trying to make the 1% look good. Others pointed out the wrongness of a systemic imbalance that would allow her to have such power. Some questioned whether the dragon was killed ethically seeing as how the tapestry looked rather violent. One girl asked whether the dragon was an important keystone to the ecosystem and still another asked what she planned to do for the current victims of the dragon’s attacks who still lay wounded in the village hospitals. She could not answer.

The skepticism continued. A group of well-to-do men had arrived smoking cigars and looking a little too much like snobs. They complained that she had effectively cost thousands of firefighters their jobs. She had also nullified millions of dollars spent on firefighter lobbying as well as all the research into dragon-resistant technology. A mother of 7 asked whether she was such a fit role model if her entire heroism was founded on defying her parents.

A young boy thanked her for saving the day.

Angela was strong. Considering that she never set out on the adventure to chase public approval, she decided she was indifferent to public ridicule, so she asked them to shut up. She instead decided to see the one person whose opinion she did care about.

Back home, she entered her master’s dojo which was predictably occupied by her master. She told a carefully weaved tale of her slaying the mighty dragon, complete with details of Jiu Jitsu techniques. At the end of it all the master was quiet. Not too strange a reaction, given how this was his standard reaction for almost anything. Then, with considered timing, he said he was disappointed. As it turned out, her master was a dragon lover, having come from a home full of dragons. In fact, he was currently raising 3 dragon pups of his own. Destructive or not, her master could never bear the killing of any dragon. With that he left the dojo.

She never did it for the world to see but was she so wrong to seek approval from people that mattered to her? She guessed it shouldn’t matter because it wasn’t like his reason for disliking her actions was a good one. He just liked dragons, that commented on the action, not the merits or benefits of her efforts. His disappointment failed to weigh in on her saving the village and the improved lives of thousands that she would directly cause. But somehow that made it hurt more, that her actions weren’t noteworthy enough to have a thoughtful response. It hurt that his preferences and opinions put a time limit on how long he was obliged to consider her actions. But it’s not like he owed it to her to fully evaluate her actions.

For that matter, did the world ever owe Angela anything? I guess that is the difficulty of it all: that it’s so unilateral. The smiles should speak volumes and the volumes should be enough. The results of her actions should be the motivation. The end is the means. Humanity trudges and works for the betterment of itself, not because it could ask the world to pay up once the hard work was put in. In other words, the result is the payment. But the world doesn’t owe us anything. If it did, we have no proof of it. Nobody has enough grip to twist the world’s arm and demand renumeration. Angela could have done everything right and still be wronged back. To expect to be able to demand something seemed all too entitled. What a shaky foundation it is then to fight on for the sake of the spoils of the war. Maybe it makes more sense for us to continue just because we can; to exercise our existence. To deny our true nature is to have a will and Angela’s will was at the time stronger than anybody’s.

Regardless of what she felt, Angela didn’t cry. Dragons never do.

Instead she picked herself back up and stayed in her room. She stayed there to wait the week out. Come 7 days later, the dragon arrived as promised. From out her window she watched as the village was set ablaze. The dragon flew in an efficient zig-zag pattern, never using more force than was necessary and never putting on a show.

The flames were, if anything, beautiful. Someone looking only at Angela in her room might think she was watching the sunset. She might as well be. She didn’t look with regret or fear or vindication. She just stared. She wondered why she tried to prove something to the people, to her parents, to her master or to herself in the first place. If ever the was a valid reason, it was lost somewhere along the way.

Angela would eventually be forgotten. Guess it didn’t really matter. Living our lives in constant concern over being remembered is such a waste. The remembering happens only after we die anyway. Then our concern over being remembered is really for the people doing the remembering? I don’t really know. Maybe I shouldn’t really care. A generation later, a new member of the royal family would arrive. A prince. He would publicly announce that he would slay the dragon and then do so, bringing back a bloody decapitated head as a trophy. Historians centuries later would remember his name and his deeds. They would not remember Angela. In fact, they would not remember the generations of capable fighters before her who also failed to defeat the dragon properly. In the books their stories would be written as ‘the village was plagued by attacks for centuries.’

But this story was never about that prince or those failed warriors.

The dragon eventually flew off precisely when the job was done whilst Angela continued to witness the flames slowly dying down over hours, losing the battle against the firefighters. Angela watched, truly and honestly. There is in inalienable truth in all of us, a true nature. To fight that is to better ourselves i.e. changing is a fight. The world rarely ever sees the battles we all wage within ourselves let alone appreciate them. Angela was too busy fighting her own crusades to fully understand the same ones her parents were waging, or her master or the villagers. So how could she ever demand that someone witness her war? It didn’t matter though because Angela wanted peace, so she signed a peace treaty and accepted herself. The two sides disarmed and returned to their kingdoms, never again to fill the rift between.

If two sides are equal, would the two sides eventually cancel out? Every change we endeavor to make is a risk then that it won’t rid us of all our energy. How unfair is it then that some people’s oppositions are far less equipped to pose a threat than others? Angela had an army as large as any’s. But the enemy had a dragon and we’ve written dragons to be invincible. We’ve written dragons to be so far out of reach. Maybe if we didn’t do that it would be easier, but Angela lived in a written world. My forces fight a wall. We don’t know why it’s there or who built it or really why we want what’s on the other side so goddamn much in the first place. But I fight because it seems right. Because to have troops sit around all day seems such a waste. Well it’s not like I asked for them anyhow. Maybe it would be easier if I was facing another army. Then I could think that there may be another commander on the other side wanting this as much as I didn’t. But a wall feels like someone built this long ago. Like they’ve upped and left and moved on to much better things and we’re all left fighting what is essentially a memory long gone and barely clinging. Angela isn’t meant to be an allegory or a metaphor. This story isn’t more than it is.

This is about a girl.

As a passing thought, Angela wondered if she connected the dots whether she could be faulted for the hundreds of lost lives. Could she be at fault for the thousands of torn livelihoods and shredded homes? Could she be blamed for all the destruction and the screams and tears of the villagers? It’s undeniable, she thought, seeing as how she was the dragon.

Photo credits: https://www.deviantart.com/kendraw