A cloud dragon is a dual-element creature of legend. Born of water and air, it is given to both truth and freedom. My grandfather once told me that he met one as a child, that it was as soft as marshmallows with the scent of meadow flowers. Its voice, he said, came as if a choir of angels sang and it took great joy in the beauty of its words. A dragon, apparently, is so wise that it soothes the soul of even the most worried mind. He said that, beneath its open wings, the human heart and soul begins to dream in entirely new ways.
Money spiders fanned out over her palm, their tiny legs all of a tickle. She giggled. How intense they were, absorbed by a common purpose. Theirs was a sweet chaos, the kind you see in every schoolyard at playtime. Tip, tapperty, tap, tip: went hundreds of feet that weren’t feet at all. Her hand lowered to a nearby sunwarm rock to enable them to disembark. Away they streamed in arachnid merriment, this shoal of eight legged friends.
In a sigh of lamplight, rain drizzled down the hill. Damp. All was so very damp. It would take a magician grander than I to conjure heat from the shivering cold. The air was a scrooge, stealing warmth pennies it needed not. Eyes could not plead with city smog. Even the nightingales only leaked a slow lamenting warble.
Here they come, the sweet babies of recent years. Here they come, those without the manners of their elders or affluent peers. Here they come, the future of nations breath, our greatest treasure, our hearts. Here they come, the fodder for the machine. Here they come. Here they come. Here they come. Why so glum? Why not be more chipper when the morning comes? Hey ho! Hey ho! Put on your work boots! Put on your gloves! In this great system, in our grand plan, why on Earth would you be so confused?
Rain splattered, the storm cloud grey headphones perched half in and out of the backpack. The bluetooth moving out of range, their sound was an inconsistent dribble to the beat of rain on the closeby pane. Quieter they grew. Splutter. Splutter. Silence. Connection dead. And so they sat there, rested, wrested from the demands of the phone. Silence. Silence.
To the grim unflinching light that seared the unguarded retinas, came a form of shadow’s breath that brought the stank of rotten fish. Of form, it had none. Of eyes and mouth, it had none. Yet this beast grabbed and consumed all things as if it were both black-hole and tornado in one. Upon the sweat-slickened tile floor, I slipped. Clunk. Gasp. Heart racing. With neither footsteps nor sound, it neared. Only its stench intensified with proximity. Eyes on the door I locked into a sprinters pose - now or never, live or die, this was it. Go.