Searching for an old dragon's roots...

I've said little about my parentage in this blog, mainly because they left me quite young to fend for myself. That's a hard thing to say, and a pretty rough way to start life. It is, sadly, pretty much standard dragon child hood. I suppose it's another reason why there aren't so many of us left. The smaller, dumber and weaker dragons often get themselves killed long before they reach maturity. Some might say I'm lucky to have come this far, but I don't think luck as much to do with it. Lucky seems to be how we like to characterize the life of others.

Until this moment, I have never mentioned or let on that some of my long absences as of late have had a purpose other than sleeping off the grouches and depression that I so often fall into. Rather, I have been searching for my parents, or at some sign of my roots. There comes a time in a dragon's life when he just needs to know where he came from. For some this is just a curiosity, but for me it has become an obsession as of late. And it's been an obsession with me that I am pretty sure will just lead to disappointment and sorrow. I want to find my parents, but more importantly, I need to know that I wasn't just some nuisance left behind in some dark cave somewhere. What scares me, and dragons aren't often scared, is that I mind find out that a nuisance left in a cave is exactly what I was to them. Though at this point, I just want to know, I can deal with the pain latter. Finding out is the mother of all hope or dread moments for me.

So given that I don't know where I am from, it's a hard path to trace. As near as I've figured the best place to start is the beginning, the place I was born. Problem is, I don't know where I was born, except for memories of a mountain and an ocean. So much of the land has changed that it is almost impossible to retrace my footsteps even if I had did have a good memory of the early times. I decided instead to zero in on mythology with the understanding that in the time proceeding my birth my parents, two mature dragons lingered in the same place for many months at a time.

Since Mexico was my best guess as to where I was born, I started there. I spend many days looking through books with the local mythology, and then I spent many more days flying from village to village and listening to local folk lore and legends. Sometime I would hear something promising, but none of it ever panned out into a true lead. And then when I was nearing exhaustion, I overheard and very old story of two great dragons that long ago settled not far from a little village by the Gulf of Mexico. One was a great Red dragon who breathed fire, the other a smaller, less terrifying green dragon.

As the legend goes these two dragons swooped in from the ocean one day and laid waste to much of the fishing village, indiscriminately eating villagers and the fish they had brought in from the sea. After days of this, the flew off towards a great mountain which overlooked the village to the northwest. The villagers heard nothing for days as they began to rebuild their shattered and burned houses. After a week, the red dragon returned flying low over the village, but not stopping. Later that same day they saw smoke to the Southwest. Out of the smoke the red dragon flew towards them, his massive claws closed around two terrified cows. He flew off towards that same mountain.

For many months this pattern continued; red dragon flying out and returning with food which could be livestock, fish and often enough people, screaming and crying in unrelenting crush of the dragons great claws. After more than a year the raids stopped all together. All was silent and quiet. One clear and cloudless morning a sharp eyed villager spotted the two dragons again. They flew out over the village and then went back to circle the mountain several times before heading out over the land to the west. They never saw the dragons again, and no one was ever so brave as to venture up to the mountain. After many years their lives returned to normal, the story forgotten except for in the legend that had passed down through the generations.

And that was a good start to my quest....

Jack Dragon.