My dear friend,

I write first and foremost to inform you that my journey through the dragon lands has been without any fatal accidents, or events that could cause me any permanent physical damage. That does not mean I never risked my flesh, though. The age of knights may have ended millennia ago, but some scars between our species and theirs are still hard to heal, so meeting dragons is a hazard. Still, some are more disposable towards humans, and I managed to talk with a handful of them who learned our language. I have tried to say some words in their tongue, but I’m afraid our mouths are incompatible with the hisses and deep growls that are typical of their words. I must say, dragons can be really chatty, once (if) you conquer their trust: they have shared with me tons of notions about their life and culture, which I will be glad to sum up in a book, because one hundred letters would not give them justice.

But there is one fact about this land that I urgently need to share. It is something I experienced directly; not through the voices of those dragons, for I have a granitic sensation that dragons would never share this with us, but with my very own eyes. I tell you, my friend, that I may have assisted at the most sacred, and secret, dragon usance, and watching it lead me to this hypothesis: we humans know much less about the world we live in than we thought.

I remember some people pleading me to stay away from the big valleys where dragons come all together, and I took care of their advice, since the sudden appearance of a human there could mean an act of aggression. But some gave me additional alerts about traveling there the night before spring equinox. When I asked for more explanations, their eyes revealed too much confusion – or was it fear? Ah, I’ll tell you that it could have been anything - to even talk about it. Whatever the reason was, it was clear that in such a long journey, I could do very little for not being too close.

Therefore for my whole journey, I made myself sure of keeping track of the days. I spent the whole day before spring equinox finding a safe refuge, and luck assisted me in the best way possible: I found a rock formation where not only could I easily set up my tent, but I could also see one of the dragon valleys through my binoculars, distant enough to be perfectly safe. I could discover what dragons do in this moment of the year without risking my body.

When the twilight of spring equinox arrived, my binoculars saw nothing interesting at first. The valley was peaceful, except for the occasional dragon landing and then going away. It was a nice panorama to admire, I must say, but it was hard to me to see any danger. My first thought was that the designed valley occupied by dragons was another one. Then at night I was ready to retire in my tent, when suddenly, as my head was about to lie on my sleeping bag, earth trembled below me. I became filled with adrenaline and panic, so I rushed out of my tent, preparing to escape from an earthquake, when I realized the tremors didn't come from the earth. As I searched for my binoculars in my tent, from the valley came a sound, a sound that no human mind has ever conceived. I may attempt to describe it as a pack of howling wolves, but this was far more powerful and devastating. It was like hundreds of mouths emitting the loudest and most primitive ensemble ever made – hundreds of raw voices, some high pitched, some low, all joining together in an infernal choir.

I rushed out to get my binoculars, but even when I got them, my hands were so shaky, I had a hard time putting my eyes on them. One second after I managed to,the night sky got filled with fire. For a moment it felt like if I had found the gates to hell, and I was going to look at the procession of the damned souls descending into its depth. Instead, I found dragons. I should have thought about it of course – I was in the dragon lands, after all. But even though I was at a reasonable distance from them, scare was pervading me. There were hundreds, all of them like in a kind of trance. Some where violently stomping on the ground, causing the tremors. Some had their gargantuan muzzles lifted up to the sky, releasing their inner fire to the stars. Some were intonating those terrible chants.

It was the complete opposite to all that one of us could define as civility.

As for myself, I was completely hypnotized by the chants, the pyrotechnic show, keeping my binoculars with one hand and myself balanced with the other one. At one moment, two dragons, bigger than all the other ones, landed on the center of the barbaric spectacle, and as they arrived, the rest of them stopped. They had to be the king and the queen of them – or whatever name we decide to define them. King, alpha male, chief and all other humans terms are probably unfitting to describe what they really are. One of them was red like the fire in the sky, the other, slightly smaller, was green. They rubbed their noses for a long time, while all the other dragons watched them in silence; after the confusion I saw before, it felt even more disturbing, and incremented my anxiety. Then the two dragons started rubbing themselves in other parts, and the crowd began more agitated. It was then I realized it had to be a mating ritual, at least, in part. At last, they both rose up to the sky, and the inferno returned. I saw the couple dancing in the sky and exploring their bodies wherever they could, while literally surrounded by fire like Ulysses and Diomedes in Dante's Inferno. But if for humans it would be torment, for dragons it looked like primitive joy. The abominable chant returned stronger than before as the two dragons in the sky furiously united their bodies; then other dragons joined them in their dance, yelling and roaring the hell out of them, reminding every other living being they were the masters of that land. So there I stayed, under that scaled sky, fought between terror and fascination in front of the most primordial spectacle this world had to offer, a cacophony of growls and hisses and a pastiche of red and dark blue.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Once it finished, I couldn’t sleep. The anxiety slowly turned into astonishment and then into an ocean of thoughts. I literally spent the next day there, doing nothing but writing down in my notebook. I could say I foresee some conclusion about what the dragons have shown me, albeit accidentally. That was not only a mating ceremony: it was Nature herself, speaking through the dragons to announce her new yearly flourishing. Just like the draconic life that soon will come to life from that dance.

Humans have conquered the Earth by taming it and its laws, but dragons, to me, look like they achieved the same by being an essential part of it. They don’t need to study its rules and way, nor to express them in terms of symbols and numbers: their essence resides in those rules. The fear expressed by those people who recommended me not to visit dragon lands during spring equinox is due to incomprehension: We distanced ourselves so much from what has formed us that we have become mere spectators of our essence, while dragons have fully embraced it. Our artistic representation of Nature couldn’t be further from the truth about Nature. Vivaldi, Constable, Wordsworth were all wrong. What they showed was only the Nature bended to satisfy our own criteria. If the dragons could paint or write poetry, we could study their works for millennia and still not see their true meaning. What I have called cacophony, for them is harmony: the harmony of knowing their inner essence, of fully embracing it without hiding it under a mask of civility, of rules, of patterns…at least, that's what I think. It’s unlikely I will ever understand in fullness the spectacle I have seen that night, simply because I am a human.

I want to clarify that I do not intend to suggest we humans should aspire to embrace the way of the dragons. First of all, I am pessimistic we could ever do that. Too much of what makes our essence is rationality, which makes us see everything under schemes and models. It would be unwise to change this. Second, this rationality is what makes us, as humans, special. I said Vivaldi, Constable and Wordsworth were wrong but Kepler, Galileo and Newton weren’t. Look at our planes, our cars, our arts. This is not something dragons will ever aspire to achieve. Plus, we cannot think of obtaining what dragons naturally have – whatever they have. Joy? Interior peace? Frankly, it is probably a feeling that has no human terminology, yet still gives them deep knowledge of something we cannot imagine.

With all probabilities, dragons are aware of the fact we can’t understand it, and therefore they will not share this meaningful ritual with us. Just like they have never been able to fully understand the natural laws we have established. I suppose you have read, of heard about, those scientific papers who proved this: despite dragons demonstrating astounding levels of intelligence and ownership of self-consciousness, they become totally lost once we try explaining to them mathematical notions over simple basic operations. But after all they probably do not need to understand them.

To conclude, humans and dragons have obtained the same equal mastery of Nature, but with ways that are opposed and incompatible. Because of this, as far as I’m concerned, dragons deserve our admiration. They certainly have mine. Nevertheless, I’m afraid this kind of distance between our minds may be too big to make us accept each other, and probably it was this that made our ancestors hunt them with such fiery passion. But if we try thinking of them as intellectual brothers, in terms of what I have described, perhaps we will learn how to share this world – and who knows, maybe our knowledges.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Sincerely,

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