“What I’m trying to remember right this moment,” I said, looking into the darkness behind his teeth rather than their ivory masses, “is whether or not you actually knocked on my door. \u00a0I had the argument with the Spriggan Sibs and I remembered thinking you almost always knocked.”<\/p>\n
“Your flight into philosophy is more allegorical than you might have guessed,” he said, and I was able to focus on his eyes again rather than the reptilian nature of his mouth. \u00a0“A knock is a notification. \u00a0If you are otherwise notified, have I not knocked? \u00a0Is your opening the door an acknowledgement? \u00a0You are indeed a wizard to ask these questions,” he said.<\/p>\n
I began to reflexively disagree, but he shook his head violently. \u00a0“Let us fly,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I’m trying to think of happy thoughts,” I lied. \u00a0“Things like, ‘This is all a dream,’ and ‘I don’t know any Dragons, just buxom dark-skinned completely human non-witchy women with–‘” my litany of fantasy was broken by a sharp pain in my back.<\/p>\n
“Hey, who stabbed me?” I whirled around, catching a faint ember, as if the fall of a firework. \u00a0I smelled steak for a moment, then the pain doubled and I bent over involuntarily, bumping and scraping my arm into the brick of the wall. \u00a0It was a good thing I hadn’t eaten because the next thing I felt was a wave of nausea and dizziness. \u00a0I heard discord, the smashing of hands on piano keys, the smell of hot foil around fish, the clanging of a siren, the cold of a gate. \u00a0My tail lashed out and helped my balance before I hit my head against the frame of the door.<\/p>\n
My…tail?<\/p>\n
Like Smaug, Puff, and Pete before me, I let out a mighty roar. \u00a0Well, it was more a moan of anguish coupled with a squeak of aggravation and a choir of disbelief wrapped up in a symphony of violation, but that together made a pretty loud roar. \u00a0Of course, it also kind of sounded like a motorcycle revving its engine, so it was doubtful the neighbors would even blink.<\/p>\n
Peredur leaned casually against the rail and rolled his eyes at me. \u00a0I recognized him saying, “Get over yourself,” pretty clear in body language, but my reflexes were not my own. \u00a0I snapped at him, and his hand rose up and grabbed my chin. \u00a0I thrashed in his iron grip, but something about his expression took over, as instincts I never had reacted to his presence. \u00a0I felt myself kneel of sorts, knees bending, head pulled down, eyes closed.<\/p>\n
I took in a deep breath. \u00a0The faint sound of the gate remained, but it surrounded me, as if every move I made had some kind of related to some kind of instrument. \u00a0There were horns in my ears, and a static kind of drum as I walked. \u00a0My eyes were watering, and my ears hurt, and the wings I had grown were knives slicing at my back, a different stretch of pain each time I inhaled or exhaled. \u00a0 \u00a0The parallels to a certain little mermaid were not lost to me.<\/p>\n
“We will fly,” Peredur chuckled. \u00a0I heard it as if spoken from a variety of voices, in chorus. \u00a0When I was able to open my eyes again, I was blinded by color and texture.\u00a0 I closed my eyes just as quickly, preferring darkness to the almost obscene pain of sight.\u00a0 I didn’t even know transformation of this type was possible.\u00a0 I felt wrong inside.\u00a0 I felt like he had done this to me without my permission.\u00a0 I had no consent in this, and it made me angry.<\/p>\n
I think most men my age have a little bit of constant anger bubbling inside of them.\u00a0 Yes, the connection to fear is always there, but there’s just this low level of resentment we work with and try not to feed.\u00a0 This fear of not being good enough, this anger of not making it big, of not being everything you might have wanted to be.\u00a0 The fear of not being wanted, and yet the anger of wanting.\u00a0 I don’t really even think of it most of the time, but if someone asked if I was angry, I’d have to say yes, yes I am.<\/p>\n
The problem is, there’s nothing to do with it.\u00a0 Oh, sure, if I was some kind of self-help guru, maybe I’d gone on about how you use that passion to drive yourself towards your dreams.\u00a0 Not everyone’s got that kind of drive.\u00a0 A lot of us just kind of mosey through life – meandering in a maudlin fashion and never really going anywhere.\u00a0 There’s too much stuff to do, and never enough time or money or other resources to get it all done.\u00a0 Sometimes winning and quitting look kind of the same.<\/p>\n
So anger when given an outlet isn’t mistaken by being compared to the eruption of a volcano.\u00a0 Since reasonable folk stay far away from those that simmer constantly, we don’t know how to handle the sudden spewing of magma… or lava, I guess, once it hits air.\u00a0 Neither the angry person or those around them really has a how-to guide of how to go from there.\u00a0 We’re not taught how to be angry in a rational sense because anger has so little to do with rationality, even if there is a, well, rational reason.\u00a0 We get our fight or flight or fornicate instinct in response, and then things go past the point that we can behave in a civilized fashion.\u00a0 If civilization has all that much to do with it; we still like our blood shows, after all.<\/p>\n
This anger made me uncomfortable because I didn’t know what to do with it.\u00a0\u00a0 Worse, I wasn’t me.\u00a0 I was disoriented, I was clumsy, I was a baby in the body of a beast, and worse than that, a dangerous beast.\u00a0 A toddler with TNT.\u00a0 An infant with insufficient intel.\u00a0 How did Peredur come to this conclusion?\u00a0 I couldn’t open my eyes without a headache and an inability to process all of the things I could suddenly see.\u00a0 If my mind had come along into this body, or if it was my body transformed, and I wasn’t getting enough reasonable signals to determine which.\u00a0 I was past phenomenon and into noumenon.<\/p>\n
It was real magic.<\/p>\n
Okay, you’ve been with me for a while.\u00a0 I’m dealing with more magic on a daily basis, with creatures who are not of our world as mundane roommates (and apparently, occasionally as bodyguards) so that I don’t notice the antinomy.\u00a0\u00a0 I like to figure how things work – if there was an ability to get a degree in magical theory, that’s where I’d shine.\u00a0 (I’m sure it’s just as valid as comparative religion.)\u00a0\u00a0 Most people who are into magic just accept it as magic.\u00a0 Take Maggie, for example.\u00a0 We had a discussion once about fair housing.\u00a0 (No, really, we were talking about Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968<\/span>.\u00a0 It makes excellent campaign fodder for Shadowrun, if you know what I mean.)\u00a0 One of the interesting things about fair housing is that if you’re disabled, and you request what they call a “reasonable accommodation” in order to enjoy the way of life most people do on a regular level, what a reasonable accommodation allows you to do is break the rules.\u00a0 This includes mental disabilities.\u00a0 Say you’ve got a brain injury that makes you forgetful, and if you did not get a reminder you’d forget to pay your rent.\u00a0 Well, obviously, the front office doesn’t generally give people polite calls to remind them.\u00a0 A reasonable accommodation allows you to get that call so that there isn’t any problem.\u00a0 Small thing, doesn’t really break a rule exactly, but it does mean they go out of their way in a fashion they normally wouldn’t.<\/p>\n Maggie suggested that magic was kind of like a reasonable accommodation.\u00a0 All it is is a way of breaking the rules you normally use. Which I then said made wizards scofflaws, and went on my usual tangent of maybe there are laws for a reason.\u00a0 The conversation ended up in an argument, which ended up in make-up sex, and well, you can guess the rest of the story.\u00a0 Anyway, that kind of stayed with me because it showed the kind of utter privilege that practitioners couldn’t see past.\u00a0 “I don’t have to live by those silly laws of physics, or physiology, or reality, because I’m better.”<\/p>\n I’m not really one of those guys with a hard-on for social justice.\u00a0 I mean I honestly self-describe as white and nerdy and I never had real poverty or debt, and I could walk into a store with a backpack and no one would think to follow me, if you know what I mean.\u00a0 It was assumed I’d go to college, and assumed I would buy a house, and fall in love with a girl and really, my life was made of a thousand assumptions that put me into the ruling class of “don’t have to worry about it.”\u00a0 And of course, I don’t think of myself as a bigot, although I might be learning differently.<\/p>\n So how does this lead me to being a dragon?\u00a0 Even a little one, with my eyes closed, and a burning desire to sneeze, and another dragon chuckling at me in a way that just makes me want to bite his head off?\u00a0 I mean, not that dragons are constantly angry or anything.<\/p>\n Peredur sighed.\u00a0 “Your mind is more flexible than that,” he chided in sixteen-bit harmony.\u00a0 Wait, that’s not the right term; it was just that I heard him on several different levels.\u00a0 “I have only painted you with a temporary spell, one for which I have limited lease.”<\/p>\n I recognized that tone of voice.\u00a0 That was, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”<\/p>\n “You will fly for I will lead you.\u00a0 Open your outside eyes, but keep your inner ones closed if it is too much.\u00a0 I forget sometimes what it is like for you.\u00a0 It is not safe for me to dull my senses to such a degree.\u00a0 Do not fear for I have you.”<\/p>\n He pet my snout, such as it were, and something in his voice overrode my conscious mind again.\u00a0 That, if nothing else, made me extremely angry.\u00a0 I didn’t like this automatically acquiescing piece, even more than I disliked being a dragon.\u00a0\u00a0 From “It seemed like a good idea,” to “trust me,” in a few sentences just turned on all the warning signals I’d ever had in my brain, and there were flashing lights and a calm voice saying, “There’s an emergency going on.\u00a0 It’s still going on.”<\/p>\n “And no, I will not change you back immediately, so do not bother to ask.”\u00a0 He sounded a bit tired, which worried me.\u00a0 I remembered his look, how he had been willing to beg me to help him.\u00a0 I still didn’t like it, and I calmed myself a bit just holding on to that feeling.<\/p>\n I opened my eyes carefully.\u00a0 I didn’t understand the inner and outer eye business, but figured maybe dragons had some kind of third magic eyelid.\u00a0 It was still exceedingly sharp, like seeing the world in high definition.\u00a0 “Remember that darkness is in some part an illusion,” I remembered it as paraphrased from some book.\u00a0 But it made sense – just as the rotation into dawn had Meaning on a magical level, darkness could have its own veil of sorts, its own magic.\u00a0 The night was alive, very alive, and I had to think in order to drown out its noises.<\/p>\n I hadn’t figured out how to talk as yet.\u00a0 Peredur had removed his hand, and he had moved out further between the cars, seeking room for something.\u00a0 A moment later, I figured it out – he had to transform.\u00a0\u00a0 I was to him like a Chihuahua was to a Rhodesian Ridgeback.\u00a0 The creature I was wanted to keen in recognition of his glory, but I was able to at least resist that much.\u00a0 He was gold and black and red in all the right places, with horns and wings, and smoke and darkness.\u00a0 The balrog of the eastern city, the king of the ancient embers, the Dragon in my parking lot.<\/p>\n When he tensed to fly, his wings, more like tatters of black lightning flickered dark against the black of the night sky.\u00a0 I was bending my knees, ready to jump, my wings thin and strong, like metal scything through the night.\u00a0 He lit up in the air silently and easily, like most cats jumping onto a table.<\/p>\n I followed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A flight allegorical and metaphorical, metaphysical and cosmological.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-09-opener"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1427,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}