Dragon’s Grove

Sunday, 6 May 2007.

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In a broad, wide field stood a grove of trees; tall, dark trees, with stout trunks and low branches and the most beautiful orange flowers you've ever seen; flowers as large as teacups and as fragrant as young love.

Beneath trees as these, a flight of little dragons slept peacefully, out of the sunlight. Dragons were actually quite peaceful creatures, just as the ones here; quite undeserving of their vicious image, which was, in truth, due to a harsh quirk of biology: while dragons could speak as fluently as any man, fire spewed from their nostrils whenever they opened their mouths to do so. Early man feared them for this, and they were subsequently hunted to near-extinction, when, in reality, all they wanted was to befriend us.

Truly, though, nature is strange; more strange than man can hope to comprehend; it is this very strangeness, sadly, that cause the decline of dragons, and why only isolated clans yet exist with young to sleep softly beneath lovely trees.