They cannot climb with her.
She leaves them all among the soft grass and the gentle foothills below. She tells them not to wait for her.
She tells them to go home.
She climbed your mountain for you. She was afraid, and it was high.
The winter lashed there. The strong sun scorched her. She ducked the landslide of snow and boulders the flip of your wings dislodged, when you resettled them in your sleep. She smelled the sulfur fumes emerging from long vents, and watched the pale blue flames burn here and there, eerie among the barren rust-black stone.
She drank melted snow; she tried to step around the ochre and yellow and burnt umber ruffles of the lichens, knowing they were fragile and ancient, the only other life tenacious enough to make its home in this place of fire and stone and snow.
The knight-errant sings a song to herself as she climbs, to keep up her courage. It is an old song now, a ballad with parts that can be traded between two people, and it goes with a fairytale, but it was a new song when she sang it then.
This is the song she is singing as the basalt opens her palms:
She is still singing as she achieves the hollow top of the mountain where the dragon nests, glaciers gently sublimating into steam against its belly. No one would bother to try to sneak up on a dragon. It doesn’t matter, however, as she is struck silent by the sight that greets her even as she comes to the end of her song.
How does a dragon seem?
Well, here is a charred coil like a curved trunk that has smoldered and cracked in a slow fire. And there is a flank as rugged as a scree slope, broken facets slick with anthracite rainbows. And there is a wing membrane like a veil of paper-ash, like the grey cuticle and veins of an enormous leaf when some hungry larva has gnawed everything that was living away. And over there is a stained horn or claw or tooth, deeply grooved, blunted by wear, perhaps ragged at the tip and stained ombre amber-grey with time and exercise and contact with what substances even the gods may guess at.
And here is an eye.
An eye, lit from within, flickering, hourglass-pupiled, mottled in carnelian shades.
An eye that as one regards it, is in its turn regarding one as well.
She took off her armor for you. She set it aside, piece by piece, even knowing what you are.
So that you could see her naked.
She showed you her scars and her treasures.
She stretched out her arms to the frost and her tender flesh prickled. Her breath plumed. She shook with the cold, unless it was fear that rattled her dark feet on the ice.
“Did you come to destroy me?”
The dragon’s voice is not what she expected. It is soft and sweet, spring breezes, apple blossom, drifting petals all around. Ineluctably feminine. Everything the knight is not, herself.
The dragon sounds neither wary nor angry. Mildly curious, perhaps.
Intrigued.
The woman shakes so hard in the cold that she feels her own bones pulling against, straining her tendons.
“I came because you are the only challenge left to me,” the woman says. “I have crossed the ocean, yes, and sounded it too. I have braved deserts and jungles and caverns and the cold of the North. I have cooked my dinner in a geyser, and I have scaled mountains, too.” Here, she taps her bare heel ruefully on icy basalt. Her toes turn the color of dusk. They ache down to the bone.
She will put her boots back on soon enough, she decides. But she still has something to prove.
She says (and she only sounds, she thinks, the smallest amount as if she is boasting, and anyway all of it is true), “I have won wars, and I have prevented them from ever beginning. I have raised a daughter and sewn a shroud for a lover. I have written a song or two in my time and some were even sung by other people. I have lost at tables to the King of the Giants and still walked out of his hall alive. I even kissed that trickster once, the one you know, who turns themself into a mare and what-not, and came away with my lips still on.”
Maybe now she sounds a little like she is boasting. And anyway, still all of it is true.
And maybe even the dragon looks a little impressed.
“And now you’re naked in front of a dragon,” the dragon says, amused.
“That’s how it goes.” She wraps her arms around herself. Her words are more chatter than breath.
“Am I another item on your list?” the dragon asks. “Will you tick me off on your fingers when you climb back down?”
She looks at the dragon. An awful tenderness rises in her.
“No,” she says. “I do not think I will.”
“Come closer,” says the dragon. “It is warmer over here.”
She chose to trust the dragon.
She chose to have faith in winter. In danger. In the fire as old as time.
She chose to seek you. She chose to reveal herself to you.
She loved you, and that last thing, she could not have chosen.
That last thing just happened.
Things just happen sometimes.
“So you came here,” the dragon says, when her muscles have relaxed and she can stand straight again. She turns, so her back warms, too. The heat is so delicious she’s not quite ready to get dressed yet, and put that layer of cloth between herself and the warmth of the dragon’s skin.
“I came here because you are the only dragon left.”
“I am the only dragon ever.”
The knight-errant turns back to the dragon and stares.
“Dragons live forever,” says the dragon. “It would be a terrible thing for there to be more than one.”
“How can that be?”
“It simply is.”
“But where did you come from?”
“I made myself,” says the dragon. “A long time ago. By deciding to exist, and take up space in the world.”
“Is that all it takes for you to be real?”
“Are you the litany of things you have accomplished?”
The woman is silent for a while. Then she says, “Yes. That is how we make ourselves real. That is what we are.”