Category Archives: The Dragon Epic

August 22, 2012 · 6:10 am

28. Unexpected Warning

an epic poem, The Dragon Epic, by Thomas Davis

For four whole days Ruanne stayed in her cottage,
Her mind obsessed with understanding how
Ruarther had decided that he’d keep
His vile intent to kill Crayllon’s young child.
When Reestor knocked and called to her, she sat
Inside her rocking chair, her energy
So sapped she could not force herself to move.
When Old Broar came she listened to his voice
And told herself she ought to answer him,
But as she tried to force herself to move,
She lost her will and fled into a place
Where silence made her feel as if she was
A stone, a weight too ponderous to stir.

What’s wrong with me? she thought. How can I sit
When in the wilderness Ruarther stalks
The child, and dragons calculate how fire
Will rain upon the village that I love?
Why can’t I find some energy to act?
To try to talk to dragons, let them know
The humans want to keep the peace alive?

She got up from the chair, her restlessness
So powerful it seemed to make her move.
I need to sleep, she thought. Or maybe die.

The thought of suicide hit like a bolt
Of lightning coursing through her sluggish blood.
She’d been so positive, determined that she’d find
Ruarther, keep him safe, end threats from dragons,
And shield Crayllon’s child from Ruarther’s rage.
She sat down on the bed and longed to end
Insomnia and all the doubts that crowded
Into her head and took away her rationality.
She been awake for days, she thought. For days.

She laid down, closed her eyes, the universe
A journey in the dark toward a place
Immenseness spiraled ever outward, past
The smallness of the woman who she was,
Past consciousness into an emptiness
That seemed to stretch and stretch into forever.

The darkness overwhelmed her, made her feel
Alone, as worthless as a woman lost.
But then she felt a rhythm in the dark.
Hands wove a web into the nothingness.
A woman’s hands, had grabbed a spirit bear
Translating from one world into the next
And forged a passageway, a tiny portal,
Between the purgatory of the dark
And sunlight stretched across great fields of snow.
She felt Ruarther’s rage strike at the bear…

And then she felt a dragon’s curious mind
Invade her like a boiling swarm of bees,
His hugeness startled at the spark she sent
Across the fields into a darkened cave.
Her body shook to feel intelligence
That poked at her as if her insignificance
Was novel, hardly to be countenanced.

Inside the dragon’s thought she forced herself
Away from where she’d been inside her bed
And, sloughing off her lethargy, discovered
The fire of who she was, the woman wild
Enough to set off in the wilderness
To find the only man she’d ever loved.

She felt the dragon staring at her mind.
He did not speak, but stirred out of his thoughts
To see what human was confronting him.
At last he said, “And who are you?” his voice
So loud inside her head it made her tremble.

She looked into his eyes inside his cave
And wondered how she saw across the miles.
She could not think. His hugeness was too large.
He waited, looking patiently at her.
She felt a panic rising up into her throat.
“Who are you?” she demanded, wondering
At how she’d found the bravery to speak.

The dragon blinked. “I’m Mmirrimann,” he said.
“I ask again: And who are you that’s brave
Enough to face a dragon in his lair?”

His words unnerved Ruanne. Mmirrimann?
The leader dragon who had made the peace?
The murderer of Reestor’s father ? Legend
That spoke to her as if she was alive?

“The humans do not want a war,” she said,
The mission given her by Reestor flooding
Into her head. “Our children need to live.”

The dragon blinked again. Inside his eyes
So alien to human eyes Ruanne believed
She felt a sadness powerful beyond
The human sadness that had troubled her.

“I too would like to keep the peace,” he said.
“But I am old, and younger males see war
As part of who a dragon ought to be.
You’d better let your leaders know my words.
I cannot stop the war to come though I
Would give up all my years to see the peace
Stretch out into an endless march of time.
War’s near, and though I’ll try to keep its rage
From ending dragon life, I’ve searched, but found
No way to stop the conflagration’s fires.”

He looked away. The emptiness returned.
Ruanne stared at her hands clutched in her lap.
The greatest dragon that had ever lived
Could find no way to stop the war Ruarther
In madness had engendered from his rage?

Someone was pounding at her cottage door.
“Ruanne? Ruanne?” a worried Reestor called.
“You can’t hide from the world, Ruanne,” he said.

Ruanne remembered sadness in the eyes
That stared so powerfully into her eyes.
She got up, went to open up the door.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Unexpected Warning

Note: This is the twenty-eighth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Conversation From Love Through Fear to go to the section previous to this one. To read the next section of the epic, click on Another Dragon Scale.

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August 14, 2012 · 8:17 am

27. Conversation From Love Through Fear

As Mmirrimann stirred, lost in ancient times,
A great green dragon in a cave as black
As scales that somehow gleamed inside the dark,
He felt Ssruanne beside him, sending life
Into the dreams that tried to capture him
And let him drift away into forgetfulness.
Then, slicing through his dream as if a claw
Had separated clouds, revealing sky,
An image of a valley high above
The caves, beneath a shining silver moon,
Filled up the emptiness inside of him.

He opened up his eyes and saw Ssruanne.
Her head raised up, her eyes awhirl with colors,
Engaged with all the images that flooded
Through Mmirrimann and forced him back to life.

He stirred, his thoughts replete with shadowed shapes,
And concentrated on his long-time love.
She saw his grin and puffed a ring of smoke
Into the darkness of the icy cave.

“What did you find?” she asked inside her head.

He looked away from eyes that seemed to scald
His life with endless memories, the two of them,
Wings filled with power, spiraling toward
The summer sun as passion trumpeted
Their fervor to the mountain peaks below.

“The mother of the girl has built a bridge
Of power in the purgatorial space
Where winds that are no winds blow in a gale,”
He grumbled deep inside his massive chest.
“She needs to save her child and interrupts
The natural order of the universe.”

Ssruanne stayed still, and let her body’s heat
Send life into the love she’d cherished through
The human wars into the days of peace.

“The geas is right?” she asked. “The child must live?”

“I took the woman’s bridge from nothingness,”
He answered. “When I passed I’m sure the bridge
Disintegrated into nothingness.”

“It’s over then? The child has lost her powers?”

“Shrrunak has left his cave and gathers males
Around him for another human war,”
He said, the image of the valley bathed
In silver light inside his head. “I felt
The rage the witch felt when I used her bridge.
She’ll not give up. She’ll make another bridge.”

Ssruanne looked at the smudge of morning light
That tinged a small cloud’s underside outside
The cave, dawn gray and cold with winter winds.

“How can you build a bridge between the wall
That separates reality from death?”
She asked. “I know the spirit beasts can find
A moment anchored in our time, but they
Are insubstantial, not quite corporal.”

“Perhaps the child should perish,” Mmirrimann
Said softly. “But I fear the forces spinning
From where I was into this world or ours.
I don’t believe the dragon race can live
Unless we find a way to live in peace.
The human girl is like a key stone strong
Inside a wall, but if it’s taken out,
The wall will crumble to a pile of dust.
Shrrunak can send all that we’ve built to dust.”

Ssruanne looked long at him and hummed her fear.

“We’re old,” she said. “Shrrunak can char our scales.”

“He’s gathering a dragon army, figuring
He’ll use the tactics made by human wiles
To waste the villages and towns that sprout
Like mushrooms all across the wilderness.”

“The deathless realms will fill with spirits then,”
She said. “Both dragons and their human foes
Will die in droves. As dragons we won’t win.”

“Shrrunak has left the caves and won’t be back
Until he’s built his dragon army, ravening
Across the landscape like a fiery scythe.”

Ssruanne’s scales rippled her distress that made
Her move from Mmirrimann. He did not move.

“We’ll face our doom,” he said at last. “I need
To rest and think about experiencing
The winds of purgatory, what I’ve learned.
I did not journey past my memories
To die,” he said. “I trekked to find a path
That leads to dragons hatching out of eggs
Into the glories of a dragon’s life.”

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Conversation from Love through Fear.

Note: This is the twenty-seventh section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to Escaping Possession to go to the section previous to this one. To read the next poem in the series, click on Unexpected Warning.

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August 6, 2012 · 6:33 am

26. Escaping Possession

The Dragon Epic by Thomas Davis

Ruarther woke to sunlit cold, his head
So sore he felt as if his life was bound
Inside the thrumming pain that made him scowl.
The burns were gone from arms, legs, chest,
And though he felt as if he could not move,
His spirit rose to know that he’d survived
The night black dragon and its searing flame.
The fire beside the boulder smoldered, smoke
Still rising from the cold, gray, lumpy ash.
He stirred up from the hollow in the snow
He’d made for sleep and, groaning, found his pack
And put a slice of jerky in his mouth.
The goat was strong beneath the heavy spice,
But he had never tasted food so good.
He was alive and eating, wolfing meat
That tasted like sweet honey to his tongue.

He looked toward the campfire, felt the cold,
And thought he’d build it up and warm his hands,
But then he picked his pack up, shouldered it,
And started climbing through the dazzling fields.
He’d not find where the witch’s cottage was
Before the sun blazed down, he told himself.
He’d better move before his will had failed
And warmth became the cause for lethargy.
He’d never kill the child by staying put.

The surface of the snow had frozen hard.
He moved as swiftly as his legs could move.
The walking cleared his head and made him feel
As if he’d found his humanness again.
He thanked the spirit bear inside his mind,
Exhilarated at the strength he felt.

But then, just miles from where the cliffs rose black
Into the winter’s white, he stopped, confused.
The air in front of him looked charged, a mass
Of swirling chaos threatening to end
The world’s solidity with nothingness.
He felt the bear rear up inside the chaos,
Felt snow and fields and light sucked into dark.
A woman, waving hands, had somehow grabbed
The bear with energies Ruarther felt,
But could not see, a battle raging far
Beyond his senses even though he sensed
The powers devastating what was real,
Miasma threatening existence anchored
To life he’d always thought was all that was.
He stepped back as the chaos inched toward
Where he had stopped, the swirling wild with songs
Originating from beyond existence.

A greater fear than what he’d felt the day
He’d faced the golden dragon seized his heart
And made it beat so fast he could not breathe.
He saw the bear’s face waver in the light
And then the woman’s weaving web of hands
As death came from its natural place and tried
To build a portal to Ruarther’s world.
He wondered why he’d left his days-old camp
To face a wilderness he’d thought was myth
Made up by women and old, doddering men.

The great bear turned away from chaos, stared
At where Ruarther stood in front of him
Inside the realness of the real world
And leaped toward the body with a heart.

The witch is doing this, Ruarther thought.
The witch! He tried to dive away from where
The bear had aimed his leap, but even though
He moved as fast as any human could,
Convulsions ripped his consciousness.
He fought against the spirit entering
His spirit, tried to be the self he was,
But in his mind the great bear roared and roared.
Time wavered as the sunlight flared, then died,
Then flared alive again, the chaos mixed
With life’s stability, existence swelling
With spectres lost beyond the boundaries
Of what could ever be or come to be.

The child, Ruarther raged inside himself,
The witch’s child had made the dragon mock
Him as he hunted in the woods that day,
And now she’d witched the bear into his spirit.
He’d kill the child, he roared. He’d kill the girl.

The spirit in him roared against his roar.
Ruarther felt the self he knew recoil
As chaos swirled into his head and bones.
I’m stronger than the bear, he snarled inside.
His heart beat crazily, his fear
The only rage that kept him from possession,
The end of who he was, a human man.
I’ll kill the girl, he chanted in his head.
The witch’s girl is dead. I’ll kill the girl.

The great bear twisted as it fought to find
A place away from where the woman’s hands
Wove order out of chaos in chaotic song.
Ruarther twisted painfully in snow
So cold it seemed to burn his throbbing flesh.
He felt as if he was inside a furnace,
The brick kiln burning with a glowing heat,
His skin so sensitive it seared with pain,
As if he’d touched a fiery red-hot coal
And spread its agony across his face,
Hours blistering into eternity.

The bear retreated from the searing pain,
Life’s sharpness shredding who it was
Into the emptiness of air and sky.
Chaotic swirling dissipated like a mist.
The sunlit cold possessed the world again.
Ruarther, body still, stunned, felt his life
Inside the who of who he was, a man.

Splayed out upon the snow, he wondered how
He’d ever thought he had the strength to kill
A witch so powerful she had the force
To bend a dragon’s spirit to her will.
He could not countenance that he still lived
Outside of deathless chaos in his world.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Escaping Possession.

Note: This is the twenty-sixth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 25 to go to the section previous to this one. Go to 27 to read the next section.

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July 29, 2012 · 6:13 am

25. Plotting Human Extinction

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

The darkness, black as scales upon Sshruunak,
Awash with atmospheres that breathed unrest,
Intensified inside the mountain valley
That saw one dragon, then another, then
Another glide with silent wings to land
Into a ring of black obsidian boulders.
Sshruunak, placed in the ring’s dead center, glared
At each great dragon as they flared their wings
And settled in a loop around his force,
Eyes glittering to see he’d left his cave.

No dragon spoke, but waited for Sshruunak.
The wounded male puffed fire into the air.
It let them see each other in the dark,
But only briefly as Sshruunak began
To speak inside his mind about his plans.

“The humans cannot live,” he said. “Their minds
Are dangerous to dragonkind, their tools
As evil as their deadliness and hate.
I’ve learned,” he said, his voice still silent, “how
Our strength is not enough to make them cower.
They swarm like wasps inside a paper hive
And pour out on the ground with deadly arrows
As if their puny bodies boiled alive
The end of who we’ve been through centuries
Of living strength upon this earth, our earth.
I’ve lost an eye and feel the pain they bring
To every dragon who has sense to rage
Against abomination in our midst.

“I’ve brooded long,” he said. “I’ve seen their power.
I’ve seen that if we try to use our strength,
Our fiery breath, our flight, our deadly claws,
To end the peril that they represent,
We’ll end up fertilizing earth in graves
That mark the final end of dragonkind.
Old Mmirrimann is not the fool he seems.
Ssruanne’s geas capturing our spirits
Burns from a knowledge born of memories
And senses I have never known or dreamed.”

His rumbling stopped. The long necks of the others
Stopped moving from the trance he’d interweaved
About them, capturing them through his mind.
At last, the silence lengthening, Ssshraann,
The dragon closest to Sshruunak, his red,
Dark scales dull in the valley’s darkness, sneered.
“And so we hide inside our caves and let the humans
Grow stronger year by year as dragons weaken?”
He shook his massive head and almost grinned.
“That’s not Sshruunak,” he said, his voice intense.

Sshruunak stayed silent, but his voice rang out
Inside his head and stunned the other males.

“The humans swarm,” he said. “Like ants or wasps,
And then they use their tools to penetrate
Our scales and seek our vulnerabilities.”
He paused, his eyes alight with swirling colors.
“Each dragon feels his power in his hearts.
He breathes his fire and spreads his massive wings
And throws himself at puny, boiling ants
And rends and tears their flesh and spills their blood
In gallons on the ground and murders them.
But never does a dragon swarm and boil
Like wasps stirred from a threatened nest,
And so we fly into their stinging arrows
And die as solitary as our spirits.
We murder them, but let their numbers murder
Each one of us as if we were alone
And had no species linked to who we are.”

“We learn to form an army like the humans?”
Sshraann asked. “Act like insubstantial fools?”

Sshruunak raged fire into the night, his breath
So hot it penetrated dragon hides
And made each dragon step away from him.
The great snow covered peaks around the valley
Grew even darker as his fire went on and on.
He roared so loud an avalanche began
To roar in distance down a mountainside.
The males, eyes glittering, stared amazed
At dragon power unleashed into the world.

The silence following the roar was sudden,
A chaos filled with dreadful absences.
Sshruunak’s great head bowed down toward the snow
Inside the circle of obsidian.
He spoke outloud, his voice as soft as snow
Descending slowly out of windless skies.

“I see us flying in a full moon’s golden light,”
He said. “As silent as my voice is now.
We’re primed with fire and human discipline.
Each one has targets to attack and kill.
Each one of us is bound by orders planned
So that we decimate our enemies.
We come upon a human town and swoop
Into the human helplessness and burn
Their leaders as they try to form defense
Against a threat they’ve never thought would come.
I see our legions wing into their mass,
Our darkness deadly, purpose aimed and armed
With knowledge born of dragon strength and wiles.
I see the humans dying like the ants they are,
Their villages and towns black, smoking ruins.”

Sshraann grinned in the darkness, showed his teeth,
And looked into Sshruunak’s bright, whirling eyes.
He felt the dragon army forming in the night
Around him, Drressel, Stoormachen, Waanderlund,
The leading males born since the human peace
Born in the caves agreeing with the vision
Of dragons massed into an army, flying
Through moonlit skies toward the final answer
To humans and their domination of the earth.

Click on Planning Human Extinction to listen to this section of the epic.

Note: This is the twenty fifth section of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 24 to go to the section previous to this one. Click on 26 to go to the next part of the epic.

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July 22, 2012 · 7:04 am

24. Rising Sentience

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

Inside her cave, emotions traumatized
From feeling how Wei’s eyes had looked at her
And seemed to strip her essence from her spirit,
Ssruanne instinctively sent out her thoughts
To Mmirrimann inside his nearby cave.
The ancient dragon dragged his shrouded spirit
Toward his bed beside the cave’s deep pool
Exhausted, beaten by a journey taken
In desperation that he could not curb.

The sense of Wei’s bright eyes beneath her scales
Exploring deep into a dragon’s self
Dissolved when Ssruanne felt the song of chaos
Reverberating uncontrollably
In Mmirrimann’s unconsciousness as if
He’d faced his doom and somehow was alive.
The aches she’d felt from feeling violation
Wisped out of her and, with an eagerness
Pushed by a rush of fear, she stood outside,
The mountain winds soft on her golden scales.
What had her ancient lover tried to do?
She leaped to air and glided to his cave.

The leader of the mountain dragons slumped
Onto his bed and stared at golden eyes
That whirled at where his head was pressed in stone.
He tried to order thoughts into his mind,
But images replete with nothingness
And roaring sounds of endless chaos made
Him close his eyes against the fierceness burning
In living dragon eyes that stared at him.
He had to live, to leave the nothingness
Infecting who he once had been behind,
But in the roaring thought was tenuous,
A string of self that could not know his self.
He willed the window from the chaos closed,
But in the cave the stone walls wavered, motes
Solidifying, then dissolving into motes,
Light flickering into his mind, then sweeping
Into the roar of silence swirling, swirling. . .

Ssruanne stared angrily at Mmirrimann.
He’d gone too far. She saw the journey braved
Past dragon memories into the realms
Where time and living spirits danced in chaos
More spectres than a memory
Of life once lived upon the living earth.
What will had brought him back into his cave
Was past an understanding she possessed.
His scales seemed insubstantial, light, not flesh.
He did not seem to have the strength to open
His eyes to see the safety that he’d found.

She knew the motivation driving him.
She heard, inside her mind, the rage Sshruunak
Spewed from his mind into his followers,
The great young males that saw his massive strength
And did not see how puny human strength
Had sent him, wounded, fleeing to his cave.
She saw what rage and mindless joy in strength
Had done to dragon lives through time, the long,
Dark spiraling toward a time when dragons
Were only myths long lost from memory.
His courage blazing, Mmirrimann had braved
The chaos where the spirit beasts brewed life
From nothingness and came to feed
Upon earth light and dragon/human lives.
He’d tried to find elixirs that would lead
The mountain dragons past the young males’ rage
Into a future guarding dragon eggs
And dragon wings and dragon sentience.

“You are a fool,” Ssruanne said. “Just a fool.”

She walked into the cave and pressed her scales
Against his scales and tried to warm the cold
Chilled deep into his spirit by the wind
That was no wind, the place of deathless souls.
She forced her warmth into his cold and strained
To find the order still inside his mind
And tried to reach the will that he had used
To bring his body back into his cave.

“The dragon race is not gone yet,” she said
Outloud, her voice an echo in the cave.

She felt his reaching out toward her warmth,
The fiery essence of her dragon mind.
She forced her thoughts of Wei to disappear
And placed a block upon Sshruunak’s dark thoughts
To keep them out of Mmirrimann, his cold.
She laid beside him on his stone smooth bed
And sent her memories of watching eggs
Begin to wobble as a hatchling struggled
From darkness into light and dragon life.
She felt again the joy of seeing life,
The promise of another generation,
Continuing the glory of their race.
She nestled close and soaked his cold with warmth
As hours passed day toward the winter night.

“You’ll live,” she told him in the ancient tongue.
“We’ll face Sshruunak and keep the war
He’s brewed from ever happening. We will.”

He formed a thought, then lost its substance, fought
Toward his sentience, fell back, then felt
Ssruanne beside him in his mountain cave.
He reached toward her warmth and living mind.
He loved her. She loved him. A thought
And feeling formed inside the chaos, let
Him feel her body pressed against his body.
He sighed his rising sentience and grinned.

Click on Rising Sentience to listen to this section of the epic.

Note: This is the twenty fourth installment of a long narrative poem, which has grown into The Dragon Epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 22 to go to the section previous to this one. To read the next section click on 25.

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July 13, 2012 · 6:20 am

23. Creating a Dragon Out of Air

Wei waved her arms and saw the dragon grow,
The bones and flesh beneath scales pulsing life.
The image seemed to meld her blood with blood
Alive and moving through the morning’s sun.
Inside her mind she started singing, trying
To bring from light a life that flowed from hands
That conjured particles of light and made
them dragon flesh. Her voice, reverberating
With power larger than a little girl,
Rang out into the mountains, fields of snow.

She felt the dragon twist in front of her,
Saw dragon eyes look down into her eyes,
And felt the power in the spells she cast,
Her spirit singing hymns of earth-born bliss.
She’d never dreamed that she could see a dragon,
Feel deep into its spirit and its bones,
And conjure life from sunlight, empty air.
She felt as large as jagged mountain peaks
That rose majestically above the world.
Her voice rose deep into a dragon’s roar.
She breathed her life into the dragon’s life.
She reached for chaos where her mother’s hands
Were weaving magic through her hands,

But then she felt the dragon’s tail begin
To flicker as the whole she tried to hold
Inside her mind began to dissipate.
She quickly moved her hands, solidified
The tail, but as the image firmed, the life
Inside her voice began to skitter, fragment
Into a dance of light above the snow.
She reached out to her mother, tried to find
Her essence in the chaos of the light.
An overwhelming sense of emptiness
Engulfed her, causing her to feel how young
She was, how vulnerable, how lost.
The dragon, formed of light, collapsed as flesh
Became the molecules of nothingness.
The winter day was bright with morning sun.

She tried to find her mother in the maelstrom
Where death whirled clouds of souls into a dance
That had no individual substance, life.
She felt like wailing like a little girl
Whose mother slept inside her restless grave.
She held back sobs, got on her feet, and stumbled
Into the cottage to her mother’s bed.
Ssruanne, she told herself. Ssruanne still lives.

She tried to see her mother by the bed,
Her form half in the room, a wavering
Between the universe of death and life.
She waved her arms and tried to cast a spell
That penetrated boundaries and let
Her see her mother and her father’s forms,
But nothing happened. All her power wisped
Into the air and only let her touch
Her mother’s bed, an aching emptiness.

She felt the dragon’s scale upon her arm
Pulse hot with beating from a dragons’ heart.
She stared at where it glowed with dragon life,
A life inside of her that was not her.
Ssruanne, she thought. Ssruanne still lives.

The revelation seeped into her like
The rising of the pool where dragonflies
Assembled in the early days of summer.
The dragon scale was part of her, her flesh.
She’d conjured it without Ssruanne in front
Of her to make her feel how it should be.

She reached out to her mother once again.
She felt the knot of humans waving arms
Inside a wind that was no wind or substance.
She felt despair inside the knot, the sense
The gate they’d made had transferred dragon flesh
Into the world and now was closed for good,
Their power faltering inside the chaos.
Wei sent her mind into the place her mother
Had made outside her deathbed’s bleak despair.
The essence of her mother sensed her presence,
Surrounded her with deathless weaves of love.

Stunned, Wei sat on the floor and stared at where
The dragon scale, embedded in her arm,
Throbbed from the beating of a dragon’s hearts.
She was alone, she thought: No human friends,
No dragon friends, no family, alone.
The winter cold burned harshness through the world.
She wondered if she’d be alive come spring.

To listen to this section of the epic, click on Creating a Dragon out of Air.

Note: This is the twenty third installment of a long narrative poem, which has grown into an epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 22 to go to the section previous to this one. Go to 24 to read the next section of the epic.

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July 4, 2012 · 7:39 am

22. Reordering Salvation

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

I.

Ruanne packed carefully, then heaved a sigh.
The hunters would not willingly allow
Her presence as they braved the treachery
Of miles of snow now frozen on its surface.
They’d think she’d be a burden as they watched
For warring dragons and the wounded men,
But she was going if she had to travel
Behind them as they tried to find Ruarther
And Cragdon struggling back to where the village,
Tense, fearful, waited for a dreaded future.
She loved Ruarther even as he caused
The chaos threatening all that she loved.

Outside her cottage Reestor waited, looking
Exhausted, circles black beneath his eyes.
He shook his head to see the pack she’d packed.

“I knew you’d try to go,” he said. “A-Brimm
Will try to stop you, but he’ll not succeed.”

Ruanne smiled at the village leader, shook
Her head, but silently walked past to where
The hunters gathered as the morning sun
Threw blue, long shadows out from trees
Whose branches bent beneath their loads of snow.
A-Brimm looked carefully at her and Reestor
The moment that they left her cottage door.
She did not look at him, but looked toward
The trail they’d travel as they made their way
Into the slopes and fields that rose snow-bound
Into the mountains where the dragons lived.

When Reestor opened up the wooden gate
The grim-faced hunter shook his head and frowned.

“This trip is not a woman’s trip,” he said.
“I’ll not be blamed for leading you to harm.”

Ruanne glanced at his glare, then walked on past
And started down the trail toward the fields
Beyond the denseness of the forest’s trees.

A-Brimm turned, desperate, to Reestor, pointed
Toward Ruanne, frustration in the way he stood.

“You’re leader. Make her stop,” he said. “Who knows
What nightmares that we’ll face outside of here.”

“Ruarther’s hurt and dying,” Reestor said.
“We need her here if we can stop this war
Before it overwhelms us all, but I
Can’t stop her, so you’ll have to keep her safe.”

The seven other hunters mumbled, growled
To hear the village leader’s words. A-Brimm
Just stared at him, then grabbed his bow and pack
From snow and stalked to where Ruanne had walked.
The other hunters, voices cursing, scrambled
Into the trail Ruanne and he had left.

II.

Blind, stumbling, Cragdon felt his death
Beside him in the snow he’d walked for days.
His body jarred each time he forced his muscles
Into another step, another mile,
His eyesight blurring in the winter sunlight.
He’d lost the reason why he kept his legs
Alive with shuffling downhill toward
The endlessness of emptiness. His thoughts
Were haunted by the vision of a dragon
That flamed out from the fullness of a moon
With searing tongues of fire that made his flesh
Smell charred and sweet with putrefaction’s rot.
He kept on swatting at the empty air
And flinching as the flames shot out at him.
He thought he’d welcome death when movement
Became too difficult, and life gave out.
He thought he’d smile and take death’s hand in his
And feel relief that he, at last, was done.
He could not bring his wife or child alive
Inside his mind. It troubled him, but still. . .

III.

Ruanne walked from the woods into the fields
And squinted at the brightness of the snow.
A-Brimm, ten steps behind, stopped when she stopped.
Behind them hunters started leaving woods.
Ruanne then saw the figure stumbling
Toward them out of light, his head hung down.
Her heart inside her throat, she saw that Cragdon,
A man near death, was struggling alone.
Ruarther was not anywhere in sight,

And then she smelled a bear’s rank smell and felt
It rising up inside the forest, light
Cold-deep in red eyes burning hate and rage.
She saw it rise up from a fire’s dark ash
And hunch above Ruarther’s sleeping body
Burned raw by dragon flame and coal-black rage,
Its roiling spirit flowing like a stream
Into the rage that made him who he was.
The vision made her stagger, sending blackness,
A thin, sharp, liquid arrow at her brain.

She heard A-Brimm shout when he saw the man.
She watched as Cragdon stopped his movement, tried
To understand if he was hearing things,
And lifted up his head into the air.

She turned toward the village, away from Cragdon,
As all the hunters ran toward the man.
She could not see. The great bear smiled at her
And laughed its weirding as she fled its madness,
Ruarther’s madness, wondering how she
Could keep him safe from who he was inside,
A man who thought that he could kill a child
And bring a peace he’d purposely destroyed.

I should have known, she thought. Ruather’s strength
Was great enough to live through dragon’s fire.
Salvation layed in her and not in him.

To listen to this section of the epic, click Reordering Salvation

Note: This is the twenty second installment of a long narrative poem, which has grown into an epic. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 21 to read the installment before this one. Click on 23 to read the next installment and continue the journey.

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June 25, 2012 · 5:57 am

21. Journeying to Chaos: A Search for Survival

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

Inside his cave, his massive spirit brooding,
The great male Mmirimann was still, his hearts
Swift rhythms slowed to somnolence, near death.
He journeyed through the layers of his self,
The memories ancestors had bestowed
In him kaleidoscopic as he saw
The dragon race devolve into a rage
Red-eyed, incensed that human brains could scurry
In bodies small as ants and still wrap him
With ropes that would not let him save himself.
And still he journeyed through his dragoness
Until he passed the vestiges of who
A dragon was and let the darkness grow
Into a universe much greater than his self.

At last, inside miasma, hearts still slow,
He came into a barren field, a place
Between the stars where sunlight never shined,
Not earth, not space, a place devoid of substance,
Yet real, where shades gloamed in the dusk
As chaos sang into the birth of stars
Yet in the eggs that would grow into light.
He felt the living substances of spirits,
Great animals whose strength had let them flee
Finality of death, the human shades
That teemed and swirled in clouds of mourning, searching
For absolution from the dark that came
Out of their lives and sense of who they’d been
While living in their times upon the earth,
The dragons, that still flew in rage in dark,
Grown monstrous with unwillingness to die
Though some had lived three hundred years or more.

Inside cacophony Mmirimann
Searched for an answer to his endless quest
To find a corridor where dragons lived
And did not spiral to their race’s death,
But everywhere he looked the universe
Of death whirled clouds of beasts and humans, dragons
That flew at him, their momentary faces
Alive with being, then a trail of mist
As bright eyes disappeared into the rising
Of other beings with their faces solid,
Then mist and chaos swirling endlessly.

There was no ending, no beginning, just
A swirling where a train of beings rose
Into their sense of self, then lost themselves
As time coagulated, formed, then flowed
Into the swirl of being, nothingness.
There was a dragon race; there was no race,
Its rising swallowed by the human song
That dominated all the earth, then, like
The dragons, swirled its eyes into miasma
As planets swung around their suns, and suns
Flared light into their darkness as their fires
Exploded into nova gravities
That swallowed matter near in time and space
And swirled into the chaos like the dragons,
The humans, the spirit beasts, the beings found
On other worlds in other times, miasma
Creating, shaping, then destroying as
Forever spun the endless mind of God.

The swirling tugged at Mmirimann and tried
To suck him deep into its endless maw.
He felt his mind and body disappearing
As dragon after dragon formed, then misted,
Its substance real, then disappeared, time filled
With lives that were, but never were, that sang
And then became a hurricane of souls
That had no individual substance, life,
But were the matter of the universe,
The swirl of chaos that created All.

He fought the tugging, taloned deep the spark
That made him who he was, a dragon great
Enough to brave the journey past his self,
And searched in desperation for a shelf
That he could grasp inside the maelstrom’s swirl.
And then he saw a single buzz of light
That did not waver, but was fixed inside
The endless swirling weaving strands of time.
He fought toward the light, the ledge where he
Could spread his wings and launch back to his life.

Time roared with silence, buffeting against
His will, his self, his sense of who he was.
He fought toward the buzz of light and forced
Himself to know himself, his dragon hearts—

And then he saw inside the light a human,
A woman from his place and time now dead,
Surrounded by a knot of humans waving
Their arms, creating substance from the chaos,
Their force a bridge between his world and where
He was inside the wind that was no wind.
A golden dragon wavered at the edge
Of where the human spectres generated
The ordered light, the only dragon seen
Inside the chaos of the roiling darkness.

He did not know if dragons lived or died
As time swirled from chaotic winds and gloam.
He could not see the corridor he sought
So that Sshrunnak’s rage would not lead to death
For dragons borning future generations.

He urged himself toward the light and blinked.
He felt his cave’s stone walls, hearts quickening,
The chaos just a song inside his ears.

To listen to this section of the epic, click Journeying to Chaos.

Note: This is the twenty first installment of a long narrative poem. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 20 to read the installment before this one. Click on 22 to go to the next section of the epic.

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June 17, 2012 · 7:24 am

20. Inside a Furnace

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

He felt as if he was inside a furnace,
The brick kiln burning with a glowing heat,
His skin so sensitive it seared with pain
As if he’d touched a fiery red-hot coal
And spread its agony across his face,
Hours blistering into eternity,[1]
The fire from dragon’s breath a shroud he wore
That made each wracking gasp for air his life.

Inside this pain he still got to his feet
And gathered wood and kept the fire alive
As night turned day turned night turned day again.
He would not die, he said inside his mind.
He could not think, but still, he told himself.
I will not die. I’ll live another day.

A dawn rose golden over mountain peaks.
Snow sheened sky gold across the wilderness.
Asleep at last, arms twitching uncontrollably
As nightmares danced with fire and pain,
Ruarther did not see the bear rise from
The ashes of the dwindling fire so huge
It seemed as if it was the spawn of dragons,
Its dark, brown fur tinged gold by morning light.
Its smell was strong enough to have a whiff
Of sulfur as it shimmered, then solidified
Above the man who whimpered in his sleep.

The great bear wove its arms above the man.
Ruarther woke, his blood shot eyes wide with his fear.
The bear stood silent, waiting, coiled intensity.
Ruarther tried to gather thoughts from pain,
The shroud of heat consuming who he was.

“I have to kill the witches’ child,” he croaked,
His throat so dry with heat it hurt to talk.

The bear’s eyes gleamed and glared at him.
“Blood is a juice of rarest quality,”[2] it said.

“You are a spirit bear,” Ruarther said.
“You have the strength to take this pain away.”

The bear just stared at him. Light streamed around
Its massive form and shimmered as the sun
Rose up above the mountain peaks and golden light
Blurred deep into the blue of winter sky.

“I’ll feed upon your pain,” the great bear said.
“I’ll feed upon the pain your hatred burns
Into the human and the dragon worlds.”

The fire behind it blazed a dance of flames.
The great bear turned and seemed to sway with winds
Not felt within Ruarther’s winter world.
It roared, the sound so loud if shook a crest
Of snow and sent it plummeting from off
The ridge above Ruarther’s camp, a cloud
That stung Ruarther’s skin and chilled the shroud
Wrapped round his burning flesh and mind.

Ruarther gasped. He could not breathe. The cold
Of nothingness pierced deep into his bones.
He felt as if he had no eyes or ears,
As if his human senses had dissolved
Into a void where men did not belong.
The bear was in the void, a monstrous shape
That had no form, but whirled into a wind
That was no wind, but ash that heaped its blackness
Into a glittering beside a fire
That wisped with smoke into the freezing skies.

Ruarther’s lungs gasped air. He shuddered, gulped
The bitter cold into his lungs as if
It was ambrosia, life, unexpected joy!
He was amazed to feel that he was still
Alive, a human not possessed by spirits
That roamed the earth in search of human souls.
He touched his arm. His flesh was hot.
He flinched to feel the pain his touch could cause.
His weariness ached deep inside his mind
And made each joint and bone seem brittle, sore,
But he felt cold. The shroud of fiery heat
Had dissipated when the bear turned back
Into the ash he’d risen from to life.

What now? He asked himself. He was alone.
The fields of snow were blinding bright with sun.
He had to have a fire to stay alive.
The huge, black dragon dove out of the dark
Toward the boulder that he hid behind.
He closed his eyes and felt the wind of wings
That lifted blackness through the moonlit skies.
He had to end the dragon threat of war.
Inside his universe of pain he’d kept that chant.
He glanced toward his bow and deadly arrows.

The bear had given back his life and will.
He’d kill the witches’ child. He’d kill the child.
He smiled. He’d rest; then, with the coming dawn,
He’d start the journey to the meadow where
A cottage sat below the caves of dragons.
He’d drive an arrow through the child’s black heart.

1 This passage was inspired by Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “The Future Punishment of the Wicked Unavoidable and Intolerable,” delivered in 1741.
2 From Scene IV of Faust by Johanne Wolfgang von Goethe.

To listen to this section click Inside the Furnace.

Note: This is the twentieth installment of a long narrative poem. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 19 to read the installment before this one. To read the next installment, click on 21.

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June 9, 2012 · 7:47 am

19. Brewing Dragon War

an epic poem by Thomas Davis

Inside his cave Sshruunak’s dark thoughts unleashed
A constant storm that pummeled him with lightning
As pain and anger raged with burning hatred.
He felt a fire so fierce it made scales burn
Into his flesh and scar his spirit’s song.

He’d let the healers come, extract the arrows,
And wrap his bloody eye with salve and webbing
Designed to let a membrane heal the wound,
But then he’d sent long streams of dragon fire
To singe all other males brave enough
To bring their fury to his cold, dark lair.
He brooded in the darkness like the worm
The humans once had said described his kind
And tried to find his balance in a world gone mad.
He’d always thought himself impervious
To any human wile and could not understand
How two small humans had defeated him
And made him flee the battle like a coward.

When old Williama came and stood outside
His cave and called to him, he snorted fire
And rumbled with his incoherent rage,
But chasing elders off was not as easy
As threatening the friends he’d had since birthing.
The old, dark dragon waited for his fire
To spend its breath, then came inside, her eyes
So wild with whirling colors that she seemed
As potent as Ssruanne upon the dais.
She stood in light made by her eyes and curled
Her lips so that her rows of teeth gleamed white
Inside the storm of hatred that he’d brewed.

“You’re hiding from yourself,” she said, her voice
A whipping blade of anger. “Now you know
Why peace was made before all dragonkind
Was lost to history and ancient myths.”

Sshruunak let silence stretch and coil
Into discomfort as the elder stood
And stared implacably at where his eye
Was blind, her stance aggressive, challenging.

“This universe cannot let dragons live
While humans breed like rabbits in the spring,”
He growled at last. “We live; they die, or else
They live, and we become an ancient myth.
You used the words; I spit them in your craw!”

Williama’s eyes grew more intense. She snorted,
A puff of fire flared out to light the cave.

“I was a fool,” she said. “I heard the geas Ssruanne
Called from the ancient spirits of our race
And let my hatred of the humans crush
My sentience and send you out to where
You were as big a fool as I when I
Called for destruction of the human girl.
When Mmirimann negotiated peace
I thought he was insane, but we are thriving
Inside these caves where once our numbers fell
Year after year through centuries of time.
The peace has got to hold. It’s got to hold.”

He stirred. “The young will follow me,” he said.
“I’ve heard their talk outside the cave for days.”

“You think you are a leader then?” she asked.
“Like Mmirimann? Ssruanne? The ones who made
It possible for us to live our lives
Without the threat of arrows in our eyes?”

The blackness in him stirred alive a force
More powerful than any dragon was.
It overwhelmed his pain and blindness, swept
Aside the reason in Williama’s voice,
And roared into the cave so loud the stones
Above their heads began to tremble, crack.

Inside the universe of sound Williama
Stood still, despair a wailing in her head
That echoed back into the times when dragons
Were solitary in their greediness.
Inside the cave Sshruunak seemed like a nightmare,
Wings black, his spirit black as shining wings.
She stared into the storm of who he was
And tried to find his sentience, the key
That could unlock the future of his kind
And let them all avoid a dragon war
Where young fought elders as their futures waned.

“You cannot kill the human girl,” she said.
“Ssruanne is eldest. She has seen the song
That’s gathering inside our dragon hearts.”

The silence was so sudden that it echoed.
He glared at her, his eyes so strong they seemed
As if they had the will to hypnotize all time.

“The humans who were brave enough to send
Their arrows in my eye are dead,” he said.
“A single dragon’s not the force that dragons
Assembled like a human army are.
Ssruanne’s girl took away my dragoness
And made me silent when I meant to speak.
She’s just as dead as those two hunters are.”

“Ssruanne and Mmirimann will fight against
Your craziness,” Wwilliama said. “The elders
Won’t easily forsake the future of our race.”

“The elders battling the young?” he sneered.
His blackness seemed to stretch outside the cave
Into the winter cold and coal black night.
“The young will win,” he said. “The young will win.”

“We’ll see,” Wwilliama answered, sadness like
A pool of water covering her spirit.
“We’ll see what dawn and dragon hearts will bring.”

She turned and left the cave. Sshruunak saw deep
Into the universe and saw the power
Of rage engulfing all the earth in flame.

“The hunters and the girl are dead,” he said.
“And if the elders have to die, they’ll die.”

Ssruanne would never use her geas on him.
Inside the darkness of his cave he saw
His blackness leading as a hundred dragons
Flew massed toward a village wrapped in peace.

Listen to an audio of this section of the epic: 19

Note: This is the ninteenth installment of a long narrative poem. Inspired by John Keats’ long narrative poem, Lamia, it tells a story set in ancient times when dragons and humans were at peace. Click on the numbers below to reach other sections, or go to the Categories box to the right under The Dragon Epic. Click on 1 to go to the beginning and read forward. Go to 18 to read the installment before this one. Go to 20 to read the next section of the epic.

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