Dragons...Dragging On
What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a dragon, reader? I think of scales, iridescent and hot to the touch. Of claws to rend cities, horns to spear stars, and membranous wings like the sails of ships charted from hell. I think of teeth taller than a man, and the searing heat of dragonflame building behind them.
If you’ve been reading the greats, or watching them, or playing them, you’ll have come across a great many kinds of dragon. There are black dragons, golden dragons, three-headed dragons, undead dragons, ice dragons, undead ice dragons, dragons who are gods, and dragons to eat worlds and moons and all the marvelous rest. Somehow they’re always cool.
Terrifying and exhilarating as they are to behold, it’s often their mode of being which lends them weight. This too has been presented in a dizzying sprawl of ways; as was said, you’ll have come across a great many kinds of dragon. Greed-stricken and cunning tyrants hoarding stolen wealth. Sage advisors laden with guilt. Loyal beasts steered by those of worthy blood, raining down fire from above, and mindless monsters of furious devastation. Dragons youthful and naive, ancient and haggard, war-weary and corpse-starved.
We’ve collectively expanded upon their nature, appearance, and ability across decades, reassembling them again and again until scales and wings are the only traits to be adhered to. Try as we might, we’ve still not exhausted them yet. And, no matter how much they change, it seems they can’t be stripped of their magnitude in the changing.
Across years in their thousands, dragons remain to us. This is not merely because they are fearsome to look upon, or because their motivations are gore-indulgent and deeply-written by turns. More than anything else a dragon is a symbol, and what a dragon represents is far too powerful for the minds of men to outpace.
A dragon is the embodiment of our greatest danger. Our mightiest foe on the best day of their life. A dragon is a stand-in for that which is insurmountable, something impossible to defeat, an end-all to…end all? There are few conceivable opponents that a man could possibly be less well-equipped to fight than an armored behemoth of incredible strength and speed that can fly and scream fire.
A single man facing off against such a threat? It’s laughable. It’s not even a noble thing to do–it’s boorish, short-sighted, and arrogant in the extreme, like a particularly stupid ant charging at a lion head-on. Make it ten ants, or twenty, or thirty. It’s still entirely hopeless, depending on what universe is inhabited and what dragon is faced.
And yet, we know where this goes! A lone knight paving with jaw set and sword bared into the lair of the beast, trying to ignore the clatter of the shield in his trembling off-hand. A man standing squarely in the path of that which can never be defeated, regardless of his chances of survival, the fear in his blood, the smoking flash of death grinning from the darkness up ahead.
This, reader, remains the triumph. I put forth that the actual slaying of the dragon matters far less than the decision to go forth and slay it. This is when we are shown the unconquerable human spirit at its most raw–the willing sacrifice of all that a man is in defense of all that might be saved.
Similarly to how the actual slaying of the dragon is not of central importance to this story, neither is the actual dragon. Replace it with a hostile army of crippling numbers or any daunting confrontation that’s immensely imbalanced. In a roundabout fashion, you’ll get to the same place–the mad bravery of the ant charging at the lion head-on.
Like I said, somehow dragons are always cool. More than this, they remain significant. They have endured all this time, and no doubt will continue to for more centuries, because man has not outgrown his need to face them. I pray he never does; the ambition they invite, the scope of challenge they pose, and his own dogged stubbornness belong to mankind as fiercely as dragonkind belongs to the fantasy genre.
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