A monk in Aberdeen, seven hundred years dead, once wrote that the dragon’s strength lies not in its teeth but in its tail — that it kills an elephant by knotting itself around the beast’s legs until the animal suffocates under its own weight. He got the anatomy wrong. He got the patience right.
The folio survives. Vellum, gold leaf gone thin in places, ink that has outlasted the empire it was written under. Whoever illuminated it had never seen a dragon and drew one anyway, confident and exact and entirely invented. I keep it not for its accuracy, which is nonexistent, but for its certainty. He did not doubt for a moment that the thing existed. Neither did his readers.
There is something to be said for a species that survives seven centuries on nothing but conviction.
