The Old Dragon

“Excuse me, I’m looking for something.” 

The Old Dragon turned her monstrous head to locate the source of the small voice. Her eyes, two waning yellow moons, had difficulty pinpointing her unexpected interlocutor in the hazy light of the afternoon. Finally, a child no older than 7 or 8 peeked its head into her field of vision. 

“Hello, can you help me?” 

The child’s face was crooked. Its nose was bent slightly to the left, the eyes misaligned, one stuck looking in the opposite direction of the nose, the eyebrows, like two tiny quarreling sparrows, fought for a place on the child’s forehead, the chin had gone missing, and the mouth pulled up to the right whenever words managed to escape it. Strange, the Old Dragon thought. But what stuck out to her was not the child’s appearance, but that the child was speaking to her at all. 

The Old Dragon considered the child, quite unsure if it was real. “How can I help you, little one?” Her voice, so little used now, tumbled out of her like a rockslide, bellowing, bumpy, uncontrollable.

They had both been surprised by the sound of her, and the child took a careful step back, peering up at her, its errant eyes darting from her long neck to her mouth to the slope of her big nose and up past those grand satellites to her long, gray mane. 

“I need something to help make me brave,” said the child.

The Old Dragon had, in her younger days, contributed something to the world around her. This she knew from all the visitors who had come to her throughout her life: seekers, requesting her assistance on ambitious quests; the unsheltered, seeking a warm refuge during one of life’s storms; the lost, desiring her wisdom to help them find their way again. Her favorite ones were the innocents, like the one before her now, who came to her asking for her to show them something they could never have dreamed, that they thought only she possessed. 

It had been a long time since anyone had come to her with any of that. 

“But you are brave to even come to me.” 

“Why should that make me brave?” the child said, its contorted face somehow contorted even more. 

“Are you not afraid of me?” 

“Why should I be afraid of you?”

The Old Dragon considered the child again, which grew more peculiar and yet more familiar to her with every passing moment. Hesitating slightly, the Old Dragon said, “Do you not find me too…disconcerting?”

“What does that mean?”

“Hmm…alarming.” The Old Dragon had forgotten the joys of conversing with a child.

Another blank stare. 

Fine, the Old Dragon thought. “Do you not find that I’m too ugly to look at?”

The child looked away, squinting as if searching for something in the distance, but then returned its eyes to hers and said, “I’m used to things like that.” 

The Old Dragon tilted her head down towards the small lopsided face and smiled sadly. “So, Little Not-Yet-Brave, what is it that you need bravery for exactly?”

For the first time, the Old Dragon noticed something besides resolve moving across the child’s face, which collapsed briefly before it was able to pull itself together again. “My baba died—“, here the child matter-of-factly pushing its long curly black hair behind its ear, “—and my dad is very sad. I want to help him.”

This the Old Dragon had not expected, having assumed something much more child-esque, a big test perhaps, or a game, even a moving of house, maybe bullies, but nothing like this. 

“Oh, I see. A loss, and a great one it sounds like.”

The child nodded but looked away again, still searching for something beyond her.  

She knew loss, of course. Didn’t everyone? But it seemed to her that her losses were as numerous as the items in her collection. Stacks and stacks and stacks of treasure and pain, piled perilously alongside each other. Indeed it was the loss of Lucy that had toppled everything, sending all her treasures cascading down around her, until she was buried in pain. 

She had only herself to blame for how things changed after that. Lucy was her light, her angel, her better half, and after Lucy, all that was left of her was the worst part of her—the furious fire blazing deep within her. Where once she had been a place to turn to, she became a place to run from. She devoured anyone who came to her with a request, biting their heads off as soon as they opened their mouths. She wanted only her Lucy to return, and if a person could not offer that, then they were useless to her. But with each passing day, it only became harder and harder to avoid the truth that Lucy would never return. As otherworldly as she was, her dear Lucy was as mortal as they come. 

It was this behavior that imprinted in the minds of the townspeople that she was nothing but an old, ugly dragon. What the townspeople perhaps were once able to look past, her generic ugliness, was made starkly visible by her absolute wretchedness during that time. Her face became to them a freakish landscape of shapes and protrusions, craters and scars. Her body a terrifying bewilderment of peaks and valleys, cliffs and dead ends. 

And that’s when the jokes and taunting began: on her age and appearance (that was the thing about her, she had from childhood just always looked old), that her enormous eyes would send you straight to the pits of hell, that if you touched her crackly skin you would turn to stone, that she ate children, ever seeking her youth but never attaining it. They said the Old Dragon had been there for generations, scaring child after child after child, each one reporting back to reinforce the fear. Did you see her today? The Old Dragon bared her teeth at me! I thought I was going to go up in flames! And the adults, once themselves those children, let it slide as a rite of passage, as something to grow out of, like believing in Santa Claus.  

With that labeling, that pigeoning, as she became the Old Dragon, her collection, which once brought all walks of life to her, became her ghastly hoard, which no one dared touch, which no one dared use for their adventures, their loves, their lives, which no one dared get near at all, for fear of her wrath. Soon it too only reinforced in their minds the strangeness of her, her otherness, her ancientness.

Remarkably, it had been a child, much like the one facing her now, that had come to her and helped her. In between times of great fury, there were times of cavernous sadness, where the Old Dragon could barely move for the sheer effort required to put her unwieldy body into motion. Most of those days, the world around her was a blur, and it was weeks before the Old Dragon realized that the child had been visiting her daily, just to peruse her collection. At first, her instinct was to react with rage and madness at being disturbed. But when the Old Dragon found the child innocently caressing one of her most prized treasures, in fact, one of her favorites, one that had been loved by Lucy, her hatred was pricked by curiosity. When asked what it liked about it, the child said, It seems like it has been loved. The Old Dragon had left the child then, before her pain made its way through her eyes and down her face. 

But when the child returned the next day, she was waiting for it. I want to show you other treasures that have been loved. And they spent the next several days, weeks, months–she couldn’t remember how long–going through countless priceless items. She told the child of where they came from and who had created them and what they mean. But she mostly told the child of Lucy. And as she watched as the child fell in love with her collection just as Lucy had, she felt that Lucy was restored to her through the child’s eyes. Over the course of their time together, the child brought Lucy back to her while also pulling her from that dark place of frenzy. 

And one day, not long after she realized that the fire inside her had turned to a manageable flame, the child stopped coming, as though it had come for that sole purpose, somehow knowing its work had been completed. She didn’t resent the child for this, she was only thankful. But she waited for years after that, hoping that the child might return, that she might be able to thank the child, that she might be able to return the favor of bringing her and Lucy back to life. 

But the child never returned, and no other child or person came in its stead. She was left alone with her collection and only her collection. By then, it was too late. The legend of her reign of terror never went away. She was the Old Dragon for once and always. And as time went on, just as the town grew to fear her and disdain her hoard, the Old Dragon too grew weary of it. What is a hoard without those who might take from it? Is that not by definition no longer a hoard, but just a pile of meaningless junk? In the same way, the Old Dragon wondered what use her memories of Lucy had if there was no one to share them with? 

It was this thought that harassed her when the crooked child spoke up.  

“And,” the Old Dragon sighed, her warm breath leaving a plume in the cold air, “why is it that you think I can help you with this quest of yours?”

“Because I know that your collection has things to make people brave and strong.”

“Why would you say this?” the Old Dragon asked harshly. 

“My baba told me,” the child retorted, undeterred by her challenge. “He said he came here and you helped him become brave.”

“I am sorry for your loss, but I did not know your baba. No one has visited me in many, many years.” 

“He came when he was a child, like me.”

The Old Dragon felt the paws of a chill crawl down her scaly back. 

“He told me how he came every day,” the child went on. “Every day for a long time until he moved away with my grandma.”

“What else did he tell you, child?” The Old Dragon found herself somehow not wanting to believe what was happening.

“He told me about Lucy. About her favorite treasures. About how you loved her very much.” The child spoke so directly the Old Dragon nearly laughed. Her Lucy, their treasures, their love, the most natural of things. 

“But tell me, child, how this led you to believe I could make you brave and strong?”

“Because my baba said that when you showed him your Lucy that he felt stronger. That he felt brave enough to love someone like my dad.” For a third time, the child looked in the distance. “So maybe if you show me your Lucy too, I can be brave like my baba, I can be brave for my dad.”

The Old Dragon stared at the child before bending down to put her face closer to the child’s, peering into its eyes, studying it. The Old Dragon examined the child’s distorted face and shiny black hair, noted the child’s imposing stance, the way it stood up to her with such determination. The Old Dragon studied the child until finally the child from all those years ago was revealed to her. She felt a breath leave her then and with it something like a weight, a monstrous burden was taken from her. Puddles formed in her eyes and she felt a stabbing in her heart. How selfish she had been. To think she had thought the child had been there for her, when maybe she was supposed to have been there for him. 

“Come with me,” she said, clearing her throat. 

The child looked at her, as though with fresh eyes, noting the change in her. “Okay.”

She led the child through the towering stacks of her treasures, which seemed to form tunnels in every direction. The stacks dwarfed the child, and even she was made smaller next to them. They wandered for a couple of minutes through the maze until she stopped in front of a stack with dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds of leather bound treasures. Each with glimmering gold-embossed edges. She pulled one from near the top of the stack, careful not to disturb the others around it. The leather was a dull green and the thing looked as if it could be centuries old. 

“Lucy loved this one,” she said, handing it to the child. “She never put it down.” 

“What is it?”

“It holds the tale of princes and warriors and magic and love…and dragons.”

“Dragons,” the child repeated softly, gazing at the leather bound book in his hands. 

“Child, I want you to know something. You are brave. Already.”

The child looked up at her, narrowing its eyes. “How do you know?”

“Because you are here,” she replied quickly. She held up her hand to stop the child’s impending rebuttal. “And I don’t mean here in this place with me. Yes, you were brave to come to me, the Old Dragon. I know what they say about me. And that didn’t stop you.” She paused to smile at the child’s reddening cheeks. “But what I think makes you brave is that you are here at all. That your father has you still. That you have gone out to do what you think is right.”

“Sometimes I don’t feel like I know what’s right.”

“Ah, but see. That is the mark of a true hero. You, child, are doing all you can to figure that out. To do that is brave.” 

“But why don’t I feel brave then?”

“Because the brave never know they were being brave until after they’ve completed their quest.” She grabbed the child’s hands. “You are in the middle of your quest.”

“Arthur!” A man’s voice suddenly broke through to them and they both started, quickly turning to see from where it came. A stocky man in a dark suit came out from around one of the stacks. Only then did she realize that the child too was dressed in a dark suit. 

“Arthur! Hey, oh my god, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Luckily someone said they saw you run in here. You can’t run off like that, buddy, ok?” 

Arthur turned to look at her then, and the man followed his gaze. 

“Oh, Ms. Long. I’m sorry. I didn’t—“

“You know my name,” she said. 

“Uh, yes, well, um. Yeah, my husband is, was, from here and he told us all about this library he loved to go to as a kid and the woman who ran it…” the man trailed off. She nodded, encouraging him to continue. “Anyway, Arthur and I are going to be moving back here soon and we had talked about coming in eventually but just didn’t think it would be today,” he concluded, looking down at Arthur.  

“Right, Arthur and I were just talking about his baba. And I was just telling Arthur about one of my wife’s favorite books.” She couldn’t remember the last time she said my wife. “You have a very special child. Very brave. Just like his baba was.”

She looked at the man, as she had at the child, studying him. Until she saw his eyes glisten and he turned away. 

She then turned to Arthur again, “would you like to take the book home?”

Arthur looked at his dad, before turning back to her. “I don’t have a library card.”

“Don't worry about that. You bring it back to me when you’re ready.”

Both Arthur and his dad studied her then, seemingly unsure of what to make of her. 

“Thank you, Ms. Long,” said the man. “We should probably be going now.” 

“Of course. You know where to find me.” 

At this, the man guided the child away, the child turning back briefly before heading out. It smiled at her. A beautifully imperfect smile. Once they had gone, she turned back to her treasures, running her hand across them, caressing them, breathing them in, remembering them. As she gazed at the shelves and shelves of books around her, those now bright moons illuminating them, a smile grew upon that strange face of hers, a big toothy grin, a smile big enough to devour the whole world.