Free writing: Dragons

Struggling up the slope, jagged edges of rock sticking into her hands. Sweat slowly dried from her forehead as the fierce rush of wind swirled around and up towards the top. Oh, how welcoming the cold and sharp wind is, she thought. The bugs and trapped heat of the forest below had almost broken her vaunted calm. And though she had spent most of her life amongst such conditions, this place carried more of an ominous presence than usual. Suddenly she looked up and found no rock but blue, cloudless sky. Stepping over the ridge onto the summit she dropped down to her knees and exhaled long and hard. The sun beat hard onto her back, unrelenting and no place to seek shade. There she sat and waited, watching the sun approach the horizon. Light grew golden, fat and illuminating. It threw its radiance down onto the sea of clouds below the mountain. Barely able to breathe she knew the moment was near, and yet she wanted it never to happen, to savor this moment where the world she knew was sane and safe.

And then it slid up through the clouds, a luminous shaft of steel throwing off glints of light as it turned. Dragons, the word slipped from her lips like a piece of joy escaping. Dragons, as hundreds of sleek, muscled forms burst upward into the air. Later, telling people that they flew, tumbling about each other and twisting in sinuous arcs, she would know that no descriptions could give such majesty and grace justice. This was a animal governed not by instinct nor seeking solely a joyous expression of play. These creatures were creating a canvas so vast that it took as a backdrop the entirety of nature illuminated by the dying sun.

With every flowing movement, every soar and fall, every mighty roar and every curving turn they created a monument of expression. Majestic, she would say, awe-inspiring and even unfathomable. But only in her own mind did she know the truth because she had seen it. These creatures had a severity and ruthlessness, would bear no efforts at taming them and could not be communicated with. For they had a trait that in all her travels she had never witnessed before. They acted with a will and created with a spirit answerable only to their own need to express their nature. And she knew without a doubt that here was a creature more willing to die than to ever compromise on an inch of that willful ferocity.

-Pure creation. Born from an image in my head. When I read it I feel awe and wonder that such words spring from my pen. I remember reading a passage that described dragons in flight and ended with something like "Arren did not speak but he thought: I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning." I have often stood on a high ridge and wondered what that would look like.