The Dragon and the Spire
I dreamed. Odd isn’t it, to know your dreaming? It’s not unheard of right? I stood on a mountain. The wind was whipping around me, but it wasn’t so bad. I had my favorite duster. It looked like it was only a short walk to the summit. Only once I reached the top did I understand how high up I was.
“Mountain” was a towering understatement. This thing was a spire. The tiny path I’d climbed was the only hand or foothold anywhere. As far as I could see, the way down was a sheer cliff.
I sat down. The stars were out. The Milky Way was perfect. I had never seen the night sky that well, not even when vacationing with my folks at the beach.
“It is good to have some company, here at the end of the world.”
I started. There was a massive dragon sitting not ten feet from me. Pure black, with wings a deep red. He should have been scary as hell, but hey, it was a dream. Just go with it right?
“Who are you?” I asked as I stood.
“I am the last dragon. My time is ending and soon I will leave this place.”
“Where will you go?”
“Beyond the horizon, to the Realms Invisible, where the Gods wait for me.”
“Why do you have to leave?”
The dragon craned his neck down, so he was looking me straight in the eye. “Will you fly with me?”
I said yes, what else could I say? We winged across the sky, he and I. Together we sampled the wonders of the true prehistory.
In Iqqua, the city of Librarians, we looked though books written in colors and scents, helped by spider-like librarians that climbed on shelves.
In Nasir, in the temple of graphite, we were blessed by the Saber-tooth priest in his mask of ruby. Before resuming our journey we paid homage to a god of quixotic delusion.
In the jungles of Kled I ran with Velocorapter lords, hunting mammoth while the last dragon spotted for us.
On the floating island of Zura, we had our fortune told by skeleton seers who divined the future from the dreams of cats.
Man, I was getting poetic there for a second. We had more adventures that night then I can count.
Finally I asked, “Why did all of this go away?”
Without a word the dragon flew east. We found what I could only describe as a garden. There had to be every kind of tree there. In the very center was an apple tree, with perfect red ripe apples.
Nearby there were two people, human, male and female, completely nude.
“Is this Eden?” I asked.
“You will call it that in time yes. Soon man and woman will taste the fruit and understand that wonders such as we have seen tonight cannot, and will never exist. I am leaving because I do not wish to die.”
“Is there any way to bring it back?”
He only said one word: “Remember.”
A second later I woke up. It was still dark, but that didn’t matter. I got up and went to my computer to write the whole thing down. It’s just a dream, you might say? If that’s true, why do I have this tusk around my neck, given to me by a dinosaur prince?
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