Getting Back on the Horse and Killing Your Dragons

Ouroboros 16 x 20 digital image. copyright 2016 Dee Rapposelli

A few night ago, I was feeling discouraged about my creative endeavors and pondering existential thoughts about being and purpose. Teary-eyed, I fell asleep shortly after the witching hour and had a bad dream that included a continually recurring scene in which a small bird or bug-like creature with talons kept clamping into and piercing my upper lip--the focus of expression and nourishment. I kept struggling with and then dislodging the little monster by carefully withdrawing the talons from the piercings--all the while being careful not to harm the creature--as if it were some kind of vicious little pet. I drifted into another, quieter stage of sleep before fully awakening. When I did wake, I did not feel an emotional charge.  I felt profoundly quiet and stilled in my mind. Completely in the present moment. I slept peacefully for the remainder of the night and into morning. When I awoke, I put aside all the misgivings I had had about spending time doing the things I do. I got back on the horse, and that day was probably the most productive day I had had in years....

Turning opposite the sun’s westward arc, she could see a clearing. A tattered and huge pine tree with tortuous bows loomed from the middle of it. Lumie took a few steps closer but was startled to detect movement within that alcove. People were there. She wasn’t sure whether she should approach. Then Rodney came into view. He smiled brightly and waved his hand for her to near.

“Took you long enough,” he said.

She was about to ask him what he was doing there when she realized where she was. An ancient pine tree was at the hub of this highpoint and the full moon in daylight was directly overhead. She had alighted on Lunarium Hill. Zosi was there, too. He was squatting beside the tree and hammering something into the ground.

“What’s he doing?” Lumie mouthed.

“Killing mini-dragons,” Rodney replied. “Bite-size.”

“Is anyone else here?” she asked.

“No, there too busy being fuck-ups,” Rodney replied.

“The Lord Consul Tau-Bridge is going to give Dade a job,” Zosi uttered in a wondrous voice. It was jagged with breathlessness because of whatever he was hammering away at.

“What?” Lumie replied, not because she hadn’t heard him but because the idea was crazy.

“Tau-Bridge Sortiar is offering Dade a job at this very moment. He should take it; otherwise, he’s going to end up like me,” Zosi said.

“A job doing what?” Lumie exclaimed.

Rodney shrugged. Zosi continued to pound the ground. He made an “I don’t know” gesture with a smirk and lit-up eyes.

Lumie insisted that he and Rodney be serious and tell her what Zosi was doing.

“He’s killing dragons,” Rodney repeated.

As Lumie stepped closer to the professor, she saw that his hands and clothes were caked with brackish, sanguineous gunk and that he was smooshing small dragons into a sigil gouged into the dirt. The dragons were pot-bellied and about the size of golf balls. They were fiery-bright colors and had tiny claws and cute dragon heads with bulging eyes and cock’s combs on their chins and heads. The creatures were mindlessly rutting around the dirt and dragon-blood mud and sniffing and nibbling at the remains of their sacrificed and macerated brothers and sisters until their own time came to be snatched up by Zosi and pummeled.

Lumie was astonished and nauseated by the sight. She felt sorry for those little dragons.

“You want one?” Zosi said and tossed a bright, winged, fiery-colored creature at her. It immediately clamped its jaw onto Lumie’s index finger and deeply pierced the digit with its fangs. The sting and burn made Lumie hiss and wail and flail her hand. She gouged the creature’s eyes and crushed its head with the fingers of her free hand to dislodge it. Then her own hands were full of gunk but there was no pain—or even a wound—in her finger.

Zosi snickered in a way Lumie had not heard before. “You wanna’ do one?” he asked, and held out the gooey rod he was using to beat the creatures into his sigil.

“No,” Lumie said abruptly and was crying.

“It’s not like they’re real,” Rodney disdainfully commented.

“The real ones don’t look like this,” Zosi said, continuing with the slaughter.

“The real ones are ‘metaphorical,’” Rodney crassly added.

“The real ones don’t look like dragons,” Zosi asserted.

“Why are you doing this anyway?” Lumie screeched.

“Someone has to,” Rodney remarked.

“Sure you don’t want to smoosh one?” Zosi asked.

However appalled and terrorized, Lumie thought she ought to. This was a very special and eventful journey, and if Zosi said so, then . . . But she couldn’t get herself to do it.

“I was saving yours for when you showed up in case you wanted to kill it yourself,” he said. “I’ll do it for you; it’s not a problem,” Zosi assured her.

“Didn’t I just kill one?” she asked.

“Dade’s,” Rodney piped in.

“I killed Dade’s dragon?” Lumie exclaimed.

“Well, you did, and now you did,” Zosi cryptically quipped.

“The real one and the metaphorical one,” Rodney chimed in.

“Thank you, Rodney. I got that,” Lumie griped.

“Alright, Lumie. I’m going to kill your dragon now. Come over here,” Zosi announced. The tone of his voice had changed. He was not goofy or spaced-out but professor-like. A breathless specialness inflated Lumie’s lungs. Rodney gently and soberly smiled as if Lumie was now in for a great moment. He hung back as Lumie stepped closer to her teacher.

“Magianism is good for girls, but if you’re too mooshy and watery, you need to do something else,” he told her and added in a mood infused with annoyance that Dade should have been killing her dragon. “But he’s too busy.”

Lumie bit back her tears and vowed to become a little darker and more sorceress-y. Fighting repulsion about the violence and gore about the little dragons, she tried to let curiosity take over.

Zosi grasped one that was serpentine, with webbed claws and fin-like structures instead of wings. It was a very sticky-bright turquoise blue. “This is your dragon,” he said and held it by the tail so that it flailed and twisted to spring up to nip Zosi’s fingers.

Lumie merely tried to remember that it wasn’t “real,”but she was feeling queasy and macabre—panicked in fact. Zosi braced the thing in the bloody mud on the sigil and took hold of the rod.

“You know what a Pyr Sacra empowerment is, Lumie?” Zosi asked.

“Yeah,” Lumie replied. She was about to tell him that she seemed to have gotten one from an old mage just before. Then she felt her head open up to a massive nova of adamantine light as the rod crushed the dragon’s tiny skull. There was only light and space of a quality that was deeper than the taste the old turbaned man had given her to get her up the hill. It was not like those EMA trips that Zosi was so generous with. No. There was something very spacious and clear about this experience. She felt very safe and soothed in the effulgence, and she knew that it would be lasting. 

An Excerpt from Chapter 16 Killing Dragons from The Savior at the End of Time by Dionesia Rapposelli(click on book title in the header of this page to visit it at the Kindle store on amazon.com)