The Dragon's Close

Once upon a time, there was an odd, and yet typical, girl. The world around her was confusion. The villagers were hateful of other villages' citizens. Their militias fought battles on several fronts with several enemies. Sometimes their weapons were sticks, and sometimes bright orange, circular globes. Sometimes it was their bodies. But most often, it was their words and insults that fought the hardest to keep peace away. Likewise, the villagers were in a civil war, using these deadly weapons with these full intensity amongst themselves. It was a balanced threat; As they ripped themselves apart, the thought of ripping something else held them together.

The kingdom was in a similar position against other kingdoms. The world was at war.

And the girl saw it all. The reckless, pointless, hatred. She saw no sense in it; It saddened her. But she held her tongue, for yes, it was senseless, and yes, it had little worth, yet she also saw the beauty in the world.

The hate only did that which they let it. For her, it only accentuated the caring and kindness. While she was often adrift in a world that could not accept another, it allowed her to see past the desolation into those times of Hope.

And that was where she tried to live; In Hope.

She tried to bring others to this new, and yet infinitely ancient, land. Every time she saw that gleam of Real Happiness in their eyes, she knew she was getting closer to opening that world to them. And it made her Happy.

For that world was not Her World, it just happened to be the world in which she lived in, and it was beautiful, yet lonely. She knew that to some, the promise of sharing this World would be better than actually sharing it, but to her, each would be equally, if differently, Beautiful.

But every story has a villain. This one is no exception.

Deep inside the girl lived a great dragon. Small, yes, and terrible, but great nonetheless. His scales were a dark lavender, and they lay overlapping each other. When he stretched, they moved fluidly over their siblings as water over a pebble in a stream bed. His claws and teeth were smooth as glass, the edges wickedly sharp. A pitying combination. One that promises little lingering pain. But it was a promise cruelly broken, for both tooth and claw were made of a substance much colder than ice. The kind of material that leaves you shivering and in twisting agony.

This dragon was pitiful and pitiless. Without warning or provocation he would slither up, up, up. His claws ripped her chest, his teeth sank into her heart. The pain drew tears to her eyes, the frigid temperatures drawing shivers through her body.

But to her, that didn't matter. She could blink away the tears, pretend her chest wasn't being shredded away, and smile so as not to worry those she tried to open that World to.

The thing that mattered was that once the dragon had hold of her, the gate she had struggled so hard to open, had poured her heart and soul into, closed. You could see it in her eyes, a hopelessness from being locked out of her only haven.

She couldn't remember how to open it.

She didn't know how to go back to hold the gate open for anyone else.

She could only remember.