The desert sand is constantly shifting; over a year it can go from flatness to massive convolutions. We rarely venture on to it; easy to be lost beneath an unstable dune.
Occasionally a dragon is forced to land from fatigue or injury, only be mired and engulfed as their weight drives the sand into quickness. They go down with remarkably little struggle; the lore-geeks say they are ancient beings with the wisdom to accept their fates.
We see these tragedies almost always in the distance, but as a youth I saw one up close. I was alone up on the eastern cliffs, running messages. The dragon was mired below. They were sunken to their shoulders, with the peaks of their wings and tip of their tail rising from the sand behind. They were facing the cliff, and I remember thinking that to be a sorry last sight for them; I would much rather go down facing the horizon.
I perched on a safe rock at the cliff edge and looked down on the dragon, and the dragon raised their great head and gazed back up. I saw straight into their eyes, huge and deep and amber-red, and something happened. I can only compare it to finding a book in an unknown language: you cannot know what the words say but you know they say something, that they come from a person and a mind. There was a mind and a person in the dragon's eyes, and great thoughts I had no hope of understanding. I only knew that those eyes were looking back into me, and that my own mind, though tiny, was just as incomprehensible to them. We were two people gazing at each other, each knowing the other was a person and saw them as a person too. And that one was about to drown and the other could do nothing.
The dragon uttered a deep low sound - a sigh? laugh? grunt? - and turned their gaze back to the cliff. The connection was broken. I could not bear to go on looking, and I had messages to run. I headed on, trying not to picture the sand closing over their head, trying not to guess the moment they died. Returning on the same track I resolved not to look, but ended up back on the same rock gazing down at where they had been. I could see the pits left by the head and wings and tail. Passing again a week later all trace was gone; the sand, as I said, shifts.
Occasionally a dragon is forced to land from fatigue or injury, only be mired and engulfed as their weight drives the sand into quickness. They go down with remarkably little struggle; the lore-geeks say they are ancient beings with the wisdom to accept their fates.
We see these tragedies almost always in the distance, but as a youth I saw one up close. I was alone up on the eastern cliffs, running messages. The dragon was mired below. They were sunken to their shoulders, with the peaks of their wings and tip of their tail rising from the sand behind. They were facing the cliff, and I remember thinking that to be a sorry last sight for them; I would much rather go down facing the horizon.
I perched on a safe rock at the cliff edge and looked down on the dragon, and the dragon raised their great head and gazed back up. I saw straight into their eyes, huge and deep and amber-red, and something happened. I can only compare it to finding a book in an unknown language: you cannot know what the words say but you know they say something, that they come from a person and a mind. There was a mind and a person in the dragon's eyes, and great thoughts I had no hope of understanding. I only knew that those eyes were looking back into me, and that my own mind, though tiny, was just as incomprehensible to them. We were two people gazing at each other, each knowing the other was a person and saw them as a person too. And that one was about to drown and the other could do nothing.
The dragon uttered a deep low sound - a sigh? laugh? grunt? - and turned their gaze back to the cliff. The connection was broken. I could not bear to go on looking, and I had messages to run. I headed on, trying not to picture the sand closing over their head, trying not to guess the moment they died. Returning on the same track I resolved not to look, but ended up back on the same rock gazing down at where they had been. I could see the pits left by the head and wings and tail. Passing again a week later all trace was gone; the sand, as I said, shifts.
Category Artwork (Digital) / Fantasy
Species Dragon (Other)
Gender Any
Size 600 x 800px
Probably. The sands are pretty much a mystery to folk roundabout. Nobody knows why they keep changing like that or what's going on underneath.
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