Accepting These Things

By the time the dragon arrived, everyone was tired of him.

Not afraid—tired. As one grows tired of a famous guest who tells the same story at every dinner, who insists on being seated near the fire, who requires admiration as a condition of coexistence. The villagers looked up from their work, noted the shadow passing over the fields, and went on tying their bundles.

The dragon landed anyway. They always did. He arranged himself on the hill with care, wings angled for maximum silhouette, smoke measured so as not to seem gauche. He had learned, over centuries of being written, how to enter a scene.

"I am ruin," he announced, because that was the line.

No one ran. A woman adjusted her shawl.

"You're metaphor," she said. "At best."

This unsettled him. Dragons preferred terror to taxonomy.

He had once stood for chaos, for the sublime violence of the unknown. Then greed borrowed him. Then empire. Then trauma. Then empowerment, somehow. He had been slain, redeemed, saddled, therapized, franchised. He had become a test: What do you think power looks like? Authors kept answering, and he kept having to play along.

A boy approached with a book tucked under his arm. "Are you wise?" the boy asked, dutifully.

"I am ancient," the dragon replied, which used to suffice.

The boy nodded, unconvinced. "So is mildew."

The dragon exhaled, a little too much flame. He remembered when fire meant something. Now it was decorative, a lighting choice. Even his hoard felt embarrassing—gold as shorthand, an aesthetic failure no one had bothered to revise. He longed, briefly, to collect something quieter. Ledgers. Letters. The unsayable.

"You'll want to kill me," he said, hopeful.

The woman sighed. "That's such a first-draft solution."

She told him what the stories never did: that his presence bent the narrative toward inevitability. That once he appeared, everything else became secondary—villages reduced to scenery, people to moral exercises. That he made violence feel ordained.

"I didn't ask for this role," the dragon said, which was true and uninteresting.

"No," she agreed. "But you keep accepting it."

They stood there, dragon and villagers, trapped in the expectation of climax. Finally, the dragon folded his wings. The hill seemed smaller without their spread.

"I could leave," he offered, as if it were a twist.

"That," the woman said gently, "would be original."

So, he did. He lifted off without burning anything, without being conquered or understood. The sky closed behind him, unannotated.

Later, someone would write him down as a symbol for restraint, or critique, or the exhaustion of myth itself. He suspected this. Dragons were good at recognizing when they were about to be used again.

Still, as he flew, lighter than he'd been in centuries, he allowed himself a small, ungainly hope: that someday a story might let him be background.