Dragons' Truth

Chapter 14

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Finally, as Larry opened his eyes from the apparent trance one more time, he found himself face to face with a dragon who had not been standing there before.  It was the last dragon he would meet, the last dragon who had been burning America, the dragon who had started it all.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Welcome home, Bryyt.”  Larry bowed with the formal bow that was customary when greeting the oldest and wisest of all dragons.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Who are you?  How did I get here?  What kind of disrespect is this?”  Bryyt’s voice shook the bottles holding the scrolls all around him in the chamber as it rolled out in a deep and grumbling tremor.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “All of your questions will have their chance to be answered, Bryyt, and I apologize if I have done you any disrespect, but we must speak.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I don’t even know you.  How … how is that possible?”  There was a trace of fear and confusion just under the surface of Bryyt’s gruff and commanding voice.  Despite it, every word sounded as though an order for an answer that would satisfy him quickly.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Before I introduce myself, we must speak.”  Larry paused, waiting for another outburst from Bryyt, then went on, “We are alone here, in the chamber you have made secret from all others.  There is no one listening in, but there is also no way for you to escape.  Every other dragon alive is waiting outside, at ground level, to find out what happens next.  To find out if what they have seen is true.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “What have you shown them?  The truth, I suppose.”  Bryyt’s laughter knocked over a few of the less stable jars, shattering them and crushing the scrolls they contained in a pile of broken fragments of clay.  “Or at least whatever it is you believe the truth to be.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “The truth is what you and I must discuss.  Truly you are wise to have got right to the heart of the matter so quickly.  Perhaps though, you have been given too much stature.  More than your wisdom has earned.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Such insolence, and from a stranger no less.  Who are you to question me?  What have you done to show your place among us, the greatest of all life in the universe?  Nothing!  Nothing!”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Perhaps not in a way you have seen, but perhaps you have not seen everything.  As I said, we will save introductions for later, and I promise you that all your questions will be answered.  First, a question for you.  An easy one.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Any question you ask will be easy for me, stranger.  Do your worst.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “What were you expecting to find, when you first set out from the enclave, nearly three thousand years ago?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.  What is this all about?  I assume you’re the one who has shrunk my numbers and stopped my most important work.  I can’t allow you to hold me here forever, stranger, there is work yet to be done.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Will you not answer my question?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “What’s the point?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Perhaps another, then?  Why did you lie about what happened with Siddhartha when you returned?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I don’t have to take this.”  Bryyt tried to move past Larry, and Larry made no move to stop or slow him from his course.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “If you go out there now, alone, you know who you’ll be facing, but you don’t know what they’ve seen.  Think about it.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Bryyt stopped, dropped back to the floor of the cave.  “I don’t know how you found out about all this.  I don’t even know who you are.  But I know I’m in the right.  Dragons are the highest form of life.  Humans are little more than pond scum stuck between our toes, and deserve to be sterilized from the face of the Universe.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Larry, after everything he had seen and learned, after all he had become, had no trouble remaining calm.  “There was a time when I might have reacted violently to a comment like that.  Torn you limb from limb with my claws and teeth and left you to bleed out.  But now…  how’s this?”  Larry’s black eyes seemed to glow with a black light that was not light; like a shining darkness, reaching out toward Bryyt.  Bryyt’s arms and legs and wings fell to the floor, and Bryyt’s torso floated helplessly where it had formerly been supported by his limbs.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 With a mouth and lungs, Bryyt was still capable of a scream, and although the average human would not have recognized the horrifying and horrified sound that escaped him, as it echoed and filtered its way up to the surface, the waiting dragons knew it.  They knew it, they knew whose scream it was, and they did not move.  They waited.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 When silence finally regained the nerve to come creeping out from behind the cracks and crevices in the cave walls, slowly filling the space between Bryyt and Larry, it had a chance to settle in before Larry asked again, “Why did you lie?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “What else was I supposed to do?  The future of all dragons was at stake, and it needed to be protected!  There was no other choice!”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You were a mere sapling of a dragon at the time, barely twenty four decades.  How could you have known the future of all dragons?  You were on your first trip out from the enclave.  What had you been expecting to find?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Nothing.  Animals, not souls waiting to be awakened!  I was expecting to find humans to be just as harmless as everyone before me had said they would be.  But I was wrong!”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Tell me what happened, in your words.  I already know the lies you’ve got documented here, and I already know what the other side of the story is.  Tell me what you believe.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I swear, it’s the truth!”   Bryyt, in over three thousand years alive, had never seen such magic as the dragon standing before him seemed to possess, and he had never before seen the dragon.  He could still feel his arms and legs and wings lying lifeless on the floor of the cave, but could not move them, could not move at all, except to speak.  He told the truth to Larry, telling it for the first time in his life.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I… I went out on my own with wild ideas in my head.  I thought I’d try to train one of the humans, as a lark.  Bring it back to the enclave in a cage and show off whatever tricks I could get it to mimic.  I flew until the humans’ colors were different, darker than those nearest the enclave, and I watched them from on high.  I watched them until I found what appeared to me to be the best performer of the bunch, the human that all the other humans seemed to watch the closest.  When he was alone, I flew down and snatched him up.  I carried him to an unpopulated spot on a mountain I had seen, and I tried to get him to fetch.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “But it didn’t work the way I’d expected.  The human was not afraid of me at all.  It spoke to me, but I did not understand that it was even trying to speak.  I kept trying to teach it simple tricks, and it kept speaking to me until after a couple of days I began to grasp that the strange squeaking it kept making was a language.  I learned its strange language and when we were finally communicating, I tried again to teach it some tricks.  It didn’t want to learn tricks, it wanted to talk.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “So I thought that maybe I could teach it to mimic some of the ideas from dragon teachings, that that would impress the dragons back home.  Except that instead of just mimicking me, it seemed to understand me.  Even though its language was primitive, even though its mind was as feeble as any other human’s, it seemed to understand me.  It asked all the right questions, and for a while I was so stunned that I actually answered.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “And then it went too far.  I could see that it could see past what I was telling it, that that nasty little human actually seemed to have a soul, and that if I kept it up, it might connect with it.  And if it was able to connect with its own soul so quickly, through a broken conversation in its primitive language, then it would be able to get other nasty little humans to do the same thing.  I had worked for twenty three decades to create even so much a connection between mind and soul as to get permission to play outside of the enclave, and this puny human had begun to grasp it in only a matter of weeks.  I had to think fast, or at that rate the humans were going to advance right past dragons before I could even explain to my elders what had happened.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I did what I could to feed him misinformation, flawed versions of advanced philosophies, the sort of things that would take a very careful study to see were incomplete or had invalid concepts in them.  He had felt that what we had discussed so far was right, and rightly so, considering his growing mind-spirit connection.  When I began filtering in little lies, he accepted them without a second thought.  And then before he could ask too many questions and either figure out what I was trying to do or simply reach full enlightenment, I disappeared.  I flew him back down the hill to his people in the night as he slept, and I returned to the enclave.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I reported that the human had begun to sow the seeds of enlightenment on his own, and that for the safety of dragons, I had kept him off the track that would lead him right to us.  At the time, everyone believed the same as I had, that humans were little more than animals, and they didn’t think twice about my story.  They documented it, as you have seen here, and life went on.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Except I knew then what danger humans represented for dragons.  I could see what everyone else was blind to.  I had learned that if humans were left to their own devices, dragons would be made irrelevant and removed from their spot at the top of the evolutionary chain in no time at all.  I set myself to the cause of protecting dragon-kind, no matter how long or hard I would have to work to keep it up.  I was young, but dragons were few, and I made connections.  I did what was necessary to earn myself respect in the eyes of the eldest dragons, so that as they each completed their life goals and passed on, they would do so with their expressed confidence in me.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I used my growing influence and power to gradually change dragons’ perspectives and beliefs to reflect the idea that allowing humans to even begin to approach true enlightenment was a real danger to dragons everywhere.  Dragons believed me because they knew it was true, and eventually there wasn’t a dragon alive who hadn’t been taught that very thing about humans from their earliest education about humanity.  When Jesus came along, everyone understood the threat he represented, and I was the one to go try and confuse his understanding, as I had been able to do with Buddha in my youth.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Unfortunately, before I arrived, Jesus had already made the full mind-body-spirit connection within and throughout his being in the Universe, and had achieved the full potential that humankind represented.  There was no lie I could tell him that did not stand out to him as a lie, and there was no way I could dissuade him from spreading the word to humanity.  I even tried simply destroying his physical body, but it was no use; he was entirely embodied by the truth, and the truth cannot be harmed against its own will.  Luckily humanity conspired against him and he thought his message would be best taught with proof of life beyond physical death, which gave me a chance to corrupt his teachings after he had departed entirely from the physical realm.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Again, I reported back.  This time telling the truth when I said he had begun on the path to enlightenment on his own, but lying about my part.  I did not report my physical attacks on him, because I did not want dragons to realize the truth of human potential.  I knew that while most would still side with me, a select few would see humanity’s apparent superiority as sign enough that we ought to step aside and let humanity ascend while we declined.  I could not allow that to happen.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “And I still can’t.  I’ve worked too hard for too long to give up.  After two more millennia’s work on this.  It has become the only motivator remaining for me, the moment that word came in that the seeds of enlightenment were spreading through the country of America, it took no work or conversation or debate at all to raise a call to arms.  Every dragon, young and old alike, had been taught from early life that humanity finding the true path must be stopped, and they had never needed to question it.  Burning them like that had been made to seem like saving them from themselves.  Saving them from the downfall for all life that humanity’s enlightenment would really mean.  And I would have killed every last one of them if not for you.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You killed quite a few of them, Bryyt.  Your attack has cost America more than you know, and it has cost you your life.  What were you afraid of?  Did you believe that if humanity reached enlightenment they would destroy or enslave the dragons?  True enlightenment would not allow for such an outcome.  If you had not stalled their ascension and fulfillment, where would they be today?  The violence and destruction they continue to wreak on each other is because they are not enlightened, don’t you see?  If you had helped them, instead of hindered them, you would be a member of a community billions strong instead of hundreds, all working towards continued growth instead of the mockery that you have twisted dragons into today.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I did what was for the best!  We would have been as meaningless as the trees if humanity had had a chance!”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Exactly as meaningless as the trees.  But remember, Bryyt, even the teachings you allowed to filter through to dragons today allow for the purity and truth of trees, their vital relationship with all other life.  Even you would deign for dragons to see that without the tree, the world is not the same.  That constructing out of trees, burning them, and any other thing that takes their life must be done in consideration of life as a whole, as the universe entire is reflected in each part.  Just as each tree must be considered an extension of that life, enlightened humans have no choice but to recognize the value and place for dragons to remain in the world, and be respected.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You don’t know what they’re like!  How could you know?  You must have been raised under the same teachings as the others, so you can only see them through the lens I have crafted!  Not through truth, not as they see themselves, and thus not as they truly are in the world.  You don’t know their true nature.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “The lack of vision you speak of is reflected in your words.  You admit that you do not know me, but you claim to know how I see the world, how I can not see the humans.  This is the same crime you accuse me of, to believe I know the inner nature of a creature I know nothing about.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “Who are you to call me a hypocrite?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I told you introductions would come later, but I suppose now is as good a time as any.  I can see that you, after over three millennia, still only have the most basic grasp of the true sight.  Let me share it with you.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Larry stepped closer to Bryyt’s floating torso and opened his eyes wide.  Again the black they appeared to be made of flowed out of them, rays of darkness reaching out.  This time they were as dark lasers, tight and steady as they drew lines through the air towards Bryyt’s own black eyes.  He tried to struggle, tried to move, but could not even flinch or blink away from the approaching darkness.  It was as though he was going blind, and then it encompassed all of his vision.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 And then the darkness was replaced by light all at once.  The dim reflection of the truth seen through a fractured lens that he had known before was washed away by this new vision.  Now he could see with all the clarity and fullness of truth that Larry could.  He was connected and at one with the entirety of the universe at once for the first time.  He could see past, present, future, distant galaxies, Earth, and every mote and speck in the cave he was in.  He could see the souls and lives of every creature that was and is and will be, their connections to each other and to the greater whole.  He could see the creature standing before him as it truly was for the first time.  His sight was not interrupted as he spoke:

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You’re human.”  His tone was no longer confident at all.  Every ounce of strength had drained from it as the reality of truth washed over his mind and enveloped his spirit.  He struggled only weakly, verbally, “That can’t be true, you couldn’t be human… I can see you, you’re so … connected and pure.  So much more than any dragon I have ever known…  ”  If Bryyt could have cried, he would have, and if he could blink or shield his eyes from the truth, his body would not have hesitated to do so.  “This is exactly what I was trying to prevent…”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Larry backed away from Bryyt, and his eyes returned to their former appearance, no longer radiating dark.  Bryyt now had full and true sight forever, and there was nothing he could do to save himself from his newfound vision.  Larry let him hover there for a moment longer to let the truth fill him up.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “No, no, you can’t do this to me!  You can’t leave me this way!  I tried to protect us, to keep this from happening.  For nearly three thousand years, my singular drive has been to protect dragon culture from the meddling hands of humanity, and it’s all been for naught!  You’ve undone everything!”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You can see the other dragons.  Do you understand now what they have seen?”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “I always thought it would be Ghadshyk and Merle who would bring this fate upon us, but you’re not Merle, and Ghadshyk … No!  No, I can see him!  He started you down this path!  He started all of you down this path!  I should never have allowed Tyllym to reckon him at the proving ground.  I should have done it myself and turned him away.  I knew he would be my undoing.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 Bryyt’s arms, legs, and wings, lying on the floor, began to decay quickly away.  It was as though they realized they would never be used again, and did what they knew was right, returning to the Earth.  They broke down before Larry’s eyes, layer by layer turning to dust and fading away.  Bryyt’s torso began to do the same thing, slower, but working up and up and up towards his floating head.  Larry let him have his final words.

Permalink for this paragraph 0 “You’ve taught them all the truth now, given them the sight as you’ve given it to me.  After I’m gone you’ll go undo the rest of my work, too, removing any mark of my existence from the world, and removing dragons’ last chance along with it.  You’ve answered my questions alright, and in so doing have shown me that the only reason I had left to cling to the world is gone.  Humanity will see the truth, just as you have, and dragons will help them to it, as they should have done from the beginning.  I see the error of my ways.”

Permalink for this paragraph 0 This last phrase came out only as a whisper.  The last of his lungs were then turned to dust and scattered, and suddenly when only Bryyt’s head remained, it fell under gravity’s power once more.  It fell quickly at first, pulled under its whole weight.  As it approached the ground it became clear that the air resistance of its own fall was enough to peel the layers of his face and bone away as dust into the air.  There was no sound, as there was nothing left to hit the floor by the time it reached that point, fifty feet down.  Bryyt, having seen that the last thing he had ever wanted to do had come and gone, never to be regained, no longer needed to hold onto the physical shell that tied him to this world, and he finally let go.