Beasts of Old
We were summoned in the wee hours, that strange time after the stars have gone to bed but before the first light of morning when the whole world is impossibly dark and still. It is a time that always puts your life and its small problems in perspective juxtaposed as it is alongside the relative hugeness of the universe and the inexorable march of time.
There has not been a gathering of our kind in more than six decades, so we went with anxious hearts knowing that whatever brought us out of bed was going to change the fate of mankind. An old storyteller, a man who died long ago but is still vibrant in the dusty archives of my memory used to say in an ominous tone that the darkest hour is just before the dawn, and he said it long before modern storytellers made it cliché. As my feet whispered over the mist covered ground, my eyes fixed on the point ahead to which we flowed like water, his words came back to me and I thought that the hour must be very dark indeed for if it were not then we would not be here tonight.
It has been centuries since we wore our true forms, but I suspect you have heard of us nonetheless. We are the beasts of old, hulking shapes beneath the mountain, slithering shadows in the depths of the ocean. Human mythology remembers us most often as exceptionally long lived, ill-tempered hoarders of treasure, a scourge that descends upon their lands to ransack their towns and eat all their livestock. Occasionally we are depicted with more reverence as fearsome creatures representing such traits as dominance, ambition, dignity, authority, capacity, and wisdom, but those depictions are hardly as memorable because, of course, nobody dies.
We feature in folklore from every notable ancient civilization from all parts of the globe and while some of my kind pay no mind at all to fanciful human stories, I have read every single one and it is my opinion that no human storyteller ever got it right. By the time the legends transformed us into the four-legged fire breathers prominent in tales from the high middle ages, we had already agreed that humanity’s short-sighted aggression made our survival perilous, so we enlisted the help of a powerful sorceress and adopted new forms. As modern historians puzzle over the widespread mythology of our kind, a creature that seemingly never existed, we live among them and sometimes we even look over their shoulders whispering meaningless morsels of information that seem like clues to keep their interest piqued.
What is our truth now that our existence as humans know it has been relegated to the collection of fairy stories they tell their children at bedtime? Ours is a disguise so clever that no one has discovered it in more that seven centuries, and all along we have been hiding in plain sight. We look like them, we live like them, we occupy the highest echelons and the farthest fringes of society depending on our proclivities, and only the most basic parts of our true nature remain.
We are without doubt exceptionally long lived, and some might even say we are immortal. We are not, of course, we can be killed as the old stories have shown, but it is not an easy thing. As told in the legends, we tend to hoard treasure, but only because we love the feeling of it all around us, and now we adore the freedom it can buy. We no longer sleep atop golden piles, of course, but the trappings of wealth are evident in the sanctuaries we create. As for the ill-temperedness, the inclination to obliterate whole towns, think how upset you would be if creatures no larger than your smallest claw were trying to kill you and take your things, and as for the reports that we have decimated entire herds in one hungry gulp, you might imagine it is difficult to keep a body so large adequately nourished. My kind are indistinguishable from the imprint we left on human stories so long ago, and the people who wrote them would scarcely believe their eyes.
If we are not in our true forms, or living our lives as nature intended, what are we doing with ourselves in this modern age? We became the guardians of humankind, actually, a pastime the ancient bards would find all the more unbelievable.
When we enlisted the help of the sorceress and adopted our disguise, it took us more than a hundred years to adjust to our new forms. We became history’s most notable hermits, the recluses that came alive in the pages of books, and we couldn’t care less about this new depiction since our new bodies, frail and diminutive, were a nasty shock. At last, we mastered our reborn selves, and the more ambitious among our ranks rallied us together and gave our existence purpose in a way that it never had before. If we were to be here forever watching human beings destroy each other one pointless war at a time then we might as well make ourselves useful and protect them. At first I think there were many who imagined we would be protecting them from outside threats, other beasts of old that had not yet gone underground, or perhaps even invaders from another dimension, but it became clear quite fast that the beings from whom humans needed protection most were themselves. So, any time a major conflict tipped the balance towards the probable extinction of all mankind at their own hand, we intervened and saved them by any means necessary. It was beneficial for both sides, actually, because the sooner they stopped trying to kill one another, the sooner we could return to our peaceful solitude and the consumption of life’s many pleasures that we so enjoyed.
We were not a united front in our quest to save the world, however, and it sparked more than one instance of controversy among my kind. One particular argument nearly erupted into a war of our own and at its conclusion one member of our ranks was banished and the other, our queen, abdicated her throne and faded into obscurity. No one has seen our banished comrade since he was sent away, although many keep tabs on him to ensure he does not carry out the means to which we objected so violently, and if the queen is still alive then the secret of her whereabouts is well kept. Since the conflict we have done well enough and the queen’s brother is leading in her stead, but we are a matriarchal society used to being governed by the unique strength of women, so her brother’s leadership is a potential source of conflict in and of itself. It was he that called us to meet this evening and as we took our places in a hall we had not seen in more than half a century, we were eager to hear what he had to say. I noted that his face seemed thin, there were dark circles under his eyes, and an anxious shadow hung about his person like a heavy cloak. Whatever he had to tell us, we would need to stand behind him as a unified force.
“Brothers and sisters, thank you for answering my call to gather, and in the middle of the night, no less.” Jacob’s voice reverberated off the stone walls and rose to linger at the heights of the soaring ceiling.
“When last we met, humankind seemed determined to wipe themselves off the planet at the hands of Hitler’s war machine and the Allied Forces’ invention and implementation of the atomic bomb. We stopped them from destroying everything then, and we are called to do the same once more.”
“This time the enemy is different, however, one we never could have envisaged, and one I think we will all be heartbroken to vanquish if it comes to that. But he leaves us no choice and so we must act for the preservation of mankind, and the preservation of ourselves.” Jacob trailed off with his last words and the sorrow I had mistook for anxiety was palpable in all of our bones.
“Hundreds of years ago, Leif, one of our brothers, had ideas about how our lives should be lived alongside humankind that did not sit well with the mission we established when we took our new forms. He believed it was cowardice to hide in plain sight, and that to preserve the humans was to babysit an ungrateful, inferior species. It was his design that we should live in the light and expose ourselves for what we are, dragons in human flesh, and that the creatures we vowed to protect should bow to us and serve us instead.”
A ripple of unease coursed through the assembled and their whispers rose above our heads to mingle with the words from Jacob’s speech.
“Many months ago, Leif abandoned the terms of his exile and began to live among the humans once more. By the time we noticed he had gone missing, he had already taken up with a community of scientists exploring the possibilities of modifying the human genome. They are intrigued by it because it may lead to the elimination of terrible human illnesses. Leif is intrigued by it because he believes he may be able to use it as a measure of control. One scientist shares Leif’s demented vision of world domination and together they have created a virus that, when injected into a human subject, bends their will to Leif’s and renders them beholden to his whims. He is building an army, brothers and sisters, one he will use to exterminate any humans who do not wish to bow to him, and that will wipe us out as well.”
In our hall, it was deathly quiet. “It is our darkest hour, brothers and sisters, and we are called to rise as we have never risen before. Once again we are tasked with saving humanity, but this time we must save ourselves as well, and we must vanquish an enemy who knows our weaknesses as no enemy has known them before. It is hard to say what this challenge will demand of us, but I can tell you this, if we fail, we are lost.”
When Jacob was finished speaking, you could see it as well as hear it because the light of the world seemed to go out of him in an instant. In the wake of his address, the murmuring started up in earnest among the assembled. Some were immediately roused to his call, some where merely worried about the outcome of this dire situation, and others were decidedly angry that any of this had come to pass.
“How could you let this happen, Jacob?” Said one voice in the crowd.
“You were supposed to be watching him,” said another, “so he could never carry out such a coup against humankind or his own brothers and sisters.”
Jacob looked guilty even though it was not an individual failure on his part. We all allowed this to happen, we were all to blame.
“If the queen were still with us Leif never would have broken the terms of the exile she had placed upon his head.” Another angry voice from somewhere in the back of the room.
At that, Jacob looked up, searching for the voice that dared to dig up the memory of his missing sister.
“You are right,” he said with a sigh, addressing the speaker and the crowd as a whole, “if she were still leading us, this may never have happened, but she is not and so it has and we will have to do our best.”
From his elevated position before us, his eyes found me and looked at me expectantly, but I refused to meet his gaze, instead turning my thoughts and my vision inward on events from the past. My old friend’s voice, the storyteller, one who never feared us in our true form, was as loud as a scream in my head and in my ears. This was the darkest hour we had ever known, as dragons or as humans, and falling into it as we were, it was hard to fathom there might ever be a dawn.
