Of Golems, War, & Dragon Things

We were always deeply disturbed by the emotional gulf that separated us from our parents, particularly our father.  He always seemed so distant.  We knew he wanted to love us; we never understood why he could not.  We were as incapable as he when it came to sharing our love.

 

Of Golems, War, and Dragon Things
(by Grigori Rho Gharveyn, first draft dated 20100808)

While we grew up very afraid of our father because of his propensity for tirelessly tickling us, or for his unpleasant practical jokes, our fear of our mother was something entirely different.  With our mother, we feared what she might say.  Our mother had a knack for telling us deeply disturbing things.

When we were about 28 years old, we were re-birthed by our friend Diane.  Diane had studied rebirthing techniques at a school called M I U.  We had only the one rebirthing session with her, but it was an extraordinary experience.  We remembered not only our gestation in our mother’s womb, but also our conception, and much more.

Our conception was such an ugly business that we went home the very next day to ask our mother about it.

Before we could ask our mother anything about our conception, or even introduce the topic, our mother spontaneously brought the subject up entirely on her own, she proceeded to tell a terrifying tale; a tale that left out a significant part of our story, as it now seems.

Our life is magickal.  Our life has been magickal from the very beginning, we are the essence of magick, or so it seems to us, for we are a dragon with the heritage of all of the power of all of the Earth’s great mages, and more…

Our mother told us a tale of strange rituals that she performed with our father to prepare to conceive us.  These strange rituals were intended to assure that we would be conceived and born with an alien soul, an inhuman soul from another world.

Our mother grew more afraid as these rituals progressed.

When the time came to conceive us, our mother’s growing reservations regarding the fate she had embarked upon inspired her to resist insemination.

Our father could brook no deviance from his plans, compelled, he proceeded to rape our mother, he forced us upon her; thus were we conceived.

What our mother has forgotten, something we have only recently remembered in spite of many dreams that have helped point the way to this terrifying memory, is that our mother killed our father that day, as he climaxed within her.

On that day, she struck him in the head with a heavy object, perhaps a clock or a rock, caving in his head on the left side.  Exhausted from the trauma of her rape and deeply distraught over killing our father, our mother fainted, leaving our father’s semen to work its spooky magick deep within her, seeking her egg and our imminent conception.

We remember holding the heavy object that killed our father in our hand, our mother’s hand.  We possessed our mother as she struck the blow that killed him, just as we had possessed our father to compel him to conceive us.  It was an old ritual, an ancient ritual often consummated in terror and peril. 

We loathed this horrible ritual that must always be carried out before we may be reborn.

It seems that we have always been our father.  When he died, a part of our father’s spirit was transferred into us with our conception.  In a sense, we are our own father, and it has always been so through many, many generations of our human families on Earth.

We loved our father deeply, how could we not? Yet we had possessed our mother and struck the blow to kill him.  We now lay deeply buried in our mother’s womb, scarcely more than a few cells old, just beginning the processes of gestation that would consume our next nine months.  Smaller than the head of a pin, we were already self-aware.  We had already been self-aware before our conception; we had helped orchestrate the events of our parents’ rape and murder.

Our father was dead, but the only other witness to his death had fainted.  We had time to undo our father’s death.  We had time to resurrect him.

In all, it would take seven years to fully resurrect our father.  We could not have him gone missing that long, people would ask questions, particularly our mother.  The certain knowledge of our father’s death might ruin any hope to resurrect him within this world that we were yet to be born into.

It would be easy enough to help our mother convince herself that the death blow dealt to our father by her hand had never happened, but this could only work if our father were still alive and present.  It would take seven years to work the magick that would bring him fully back to life, but we could work another sort of magick upon his inanimate body that might hide the fact of his death from anyone who did not know that he had died.

We raised our father as a golem, returning part of his spirit to him to re-animate his corpse.  In one hideous moment, his poor, spilled brains un-splattered themselves back into his head, his head swelled back to its original shape as his most evident visible wounds were largely all undone. 

Our father appeared to gasp and to breathe again as he opened his eyes.  Our father’s eyes seemed somewhat vacant, too little of his soul had been returned to him.  His left eye was now crooked, the only visible stigmata of his recent injury and death.

We sank back into our mother’s womb, seeking the spark of flesh that was our newest incarnation.  We were exhausted by the work we had just done, but we had done all we could to preserve our family from the terrible necessities that had mandated the rape of our mother and the death of our father in order to conceive us.

For the seven years it took to resurrect our father fully, our father was little more than a flesh revenant, a sort of golem made of living flesh instead of clay or stone.

Our father carried on his life much as usual, as did our mother.  They remained married in spite of the gulf that had opened between them when he had raped her, a gulf that might never have really healed.

At first, our mother wanted nothing to do with us, she prayed to miscarry us.  We were miscarried many times along the way from our conception to our birth.

But life is eternal.  No matter how often you may die you will always return to life, and we were no exception to this remarkable rule.  Our father’s resurrection was not an unusual event, but the deepest levels of organic damage his brain had sustained would require seven years to heal; he must first un-dream his death, before he could completely return.

In time, he would eventually heal, but the death stigmata of his crooked left eye would last a lifetime.

As our father’s injured brain slowly healed, more and more of our father’s spirit returned to him, until he was finally restored to himself as fully as possible.

The wounds our family suffered to conceive us were necessary.  The spark of our dragon soul must be enabled make the leap from our father to ourselves, a leap that can only be made through death.

Eventually our mother grew to love us as we grew within her womb, but by then we were so psychically battered by her anger, hate, fear, and humiliation that we only hoped to die forever, with no further guarantee of our resurrection to return us to our pain.

As a Golem, our father was unable to support his family.  He spent the next several years away at school, studying to be a chiropractor.  This distance helped our mother to reconcile herself to events as she now chose to remember them.  She remembered her rape, but not our father’s murder by her own willing hand, a hand possessed and driven by her not yet infant son.

It is a terrible business to be a dragon.  We love who we are and what we do, but it remains a terrible business.  When we were first told what we must do to take on flesh as a human being in this world we were mortified.  We could scarcely accept the sacrifices required to ensure we would return to the earth in every age until we could complete our geas to bring peace on Earth and be freed from its compulsions.

We had been summoned to Earth in the distant past to help bring peace.  Three factions were fighting a terrible war, a war in which the bulk of humanity would be enslaved.

The war council of the third faction, the largest, and also the weakest faction, found a means to hold off being enslaved by keeping the war going indefinitely.  However, in the long years ahead, they knew attrition would take its toll.  In the end one of the other two factions must win; whichever faction won would then make all the losers their slaves.

The strongest two factions were the black wizards and the red sorcerers.  Either one of these factions could easily overwhelm the third faction who, for the most part, held only small nature magicks such as healing, because there were so terribly few first-order mages among them.

The magicks of the black wizards were by far the most powerful.  It is fortunate that their numbers were the smallest, so that they must take extraordinary precautions to preserve themselves from any harm.  The black wizards could ill afford to lose many members from the ranks of their mages for any great length of time.

The magicks of the Sorcerers were very limited.  The sorcerers could only conjure powerful enemies, enemies who were once the slave masters of all of human kind, to do their awful bidding.  The covenant that held these terrible beings at bay, confined to their own dark dominions, could be broken by a price given in souls by any coven of conjurers, or by any or all of their first-order red mages.

The terrible magicks of the black wizards were well balanced by the fiendish hosts of creatures summoned by the red sorcerers; neither side could win a conclusive victory.

The green mages of the third faction could maintain the war by siding with whichever faction was weaker, bolstering the strength of one side or the other at those times when they might otherwise have lost their war forever.

Alas, this precarious balancing act could not be counted upon to continue indefinitely, it seemed as if one side or the other must eventually prevail, regardless of how carefully the green mages endeavored to keep both sides in balance.  Something must be done to tip the scales over completely, enabling a victory for the green mages over both sides.

Therefore, it was conceived to call for help, to summon a creature to the green side whose magicks would make them the equals of both sides.

Thus were we summoned to Earth.

Dragons are accustomed to long lives.  We know of few dragons who have ever died without the hope of resurrecting themselves.  Death by fire might finish us off, but no other sort of death can ever unmake us forever in our home world.

When we were summoned to Earth, we arrived with our mate, Madrigal.

Below us, the black and green armies were allies arrayed against the red.  The black army stood in the center of the green army, protected on all sides.  The green army protected the black army from defeat, paying a heavy price in casualties. 

The green army relied upon reincarnation to return to the battlefield, the fastest most of them could return to the fray after death was nearly 18 years.  Most would have forgotten themselves in that long interval and developed entirely new characters to be the hosts of their reincarnated souls.

The red army relied on possession to return to the fray.  Possession was a faster route back from the underworld.  Many of the children of the green army were thus taken as they reached their maturity, possessed by red sorcerers returning from the underworld who would then take their captive hosts to rejoin the ranks of their red army.

The black army relied on resurrection to return to battle.  Resurrections were swift, but when their battle wounds were severe, these resurrected mages often took on very grim and terrible skeletal appearances; they might return to feed voraciously on the flesh and blood of the living to rapidly regenerate their wounds and lost flesh.

When we appeared with Madrigal above these three armies, we were bewildered.  We were dazed by our strange passage from our home world to this new world.

The green council had never permitted their sorcerers to attempt a summoning of any sort before this.  Their sorcerers had reached out blindly for what they sought; going not to the terrible dominions where they had once been slaves, but beyond.  The green sorcerers sought the fabled dominions of the white lords of creation.

Our dragon world lay upon the edge of the white dominions, in a zone belonging to neither the red dominions, the white dominions, nor the black dominions.  Our dominion belonged to our race alone, with no lords other than ourselves to be our own masters.

The white dominions had helped free the humans from the red and black dominions only a relatively short time ago, as part of their war with the darker dominions.  Few human refugees in the white dominions elected to join the exodus of humans from the red or black dominions.  The human exodus from the first three dominions created a fourth domain for themselves, the green dominions of Earth.

The red and black dominions were tyrannies.  Humans were created to be slaves for all of the terrible masters of these dark dominions.  What few humans were able to escape to the white dominions rarely ever returned to the darker dominions of their origins of their own free wills.  These few human refugees were free to pursuit their own destinies within the hierarchies of the white dominions, but even here, they had less status and less power than any of their white lords, or any of their white lords’ involuntary human minions, or any of their white lords’ native peoples.

However, these small colonies of human refugees among the white domains often dreamed of returning to their people and setting them free, and so, the rebellion of the slaves was born and nurtured by those humans brave enough to return to the dark dominions in order to teach their fellow humans there how to resist their terrible masters.

Of all the people to join the exodus to the newly created green dominions, only the few refugees who had made new homes in the white dominions had any concept of how to live as free beings.

The only social structure known to humans of the darker dominions had been slavery.

When these escaped slaves of the dark dominions arrived as free will beings within their own domain, they set about establishing their own dominions by enslaving each other because they knew no other ways to live.

Few humans had the power to control large masses of people; most people were relatively equal in magickal stature.  However, slowly, very slowly, the most powerful sorcerers and wizards established their own dominions and began to enslave larger and larger hosts of people.

Wars resulted as these powerful mages contested each other.  Alliances slowly formed, dissolved, and reformed, until the battle lines were finally clearly drawn between the wizards and the sorcerers, with the winners to take all.

The green mages had refrained from using the powers of their few sorcerers to summon any creatures from the dark dominions because they feared bringing any of their former masters to Earth.  Also, all summoning rituals required human sacrifices.

The greens were loathe to kill themselves in trade for allies who might overpower them and return them all to slavery within their dark dominions.

Nineteen humans sacrificed themselves to summon us to Earth, one for each of Madrigal’s eight minds, one for each of our own eight minds, one each to bind us both with their geas, and one more to unite them all.

How the nineteen of those willingly slaughtered human sacrifices traded for Madrigal and ourselves fared in our dragon domain we cannot say, but there they were transported; they could not have fared well.  They must have terrified our kindred dragons who maintained a very close-minded telepathic culture intolerant of any change.

When we appeared with Madrigal, above the field of combat, high above the heads of the green and black armies, the black side quailed.  The black mages presumed the red side had summoned us.

The red side rallied and pressed their attack more fiercely.

The black side unleashed lightning and fire upon us and in a single instant, Madrigal was largely destroyed.  We found ourselves stunned and fell from the sky, terribly wounded. 

We fell with Madrigal’s remains, directly into the encampment of the black wizards who immediately fell upon us and cut us both to pieces.

Our sundry parts were set in sealed jars made of lead, for each part struggled to rejoin the others.

We were set aside by the black wizards.  The black side was hard-pressed that day and they must all quickly return to the fray or else lose the battle.

The green army, entrusted with our captivity, stole us away, along with the cinders and scraps of flesh that were all that remained of Madrigal.

In a glade that has become sacred, the green mages freed our remains upon a stone altar and helped us to reassemble ourselves.  We were burned in many places; our sundered flesh could not rebuild our dragon body in its entirety.  Even by cannibalizing what remained of Madrigal, we had insufficient mass to become an entire dragon again.

Nowhere on Earth was there that particular sustenance we required to increase our mass.  We must sacrifice our wings, much of our neck, and all but a stub of our tail.

We took on a somewhat human looking form, except for our nails, our scales, our larger stature, our backward-jointed rear legs, and our elongated head with its crown of horns and sharp-toothed snout.

Our sterile, burnt remains were distributed among the jars in which we had been briefly held captive.  While no living scraps of flesh remained within these resealed jars, they still held a part of the essences of who we were and who Madrigal had been.  These jars would help hold us on Earth until we could succeed in the task for which we had been summoned, until we could bring a final end to the war on Earth forevermore.

Alas, we learned that eventually, our dragon flesh must wither and fail.  On Earth we were, perhaps, mortal, mortal in a manner unfamiliar to dragons on our home world.

On Earth we would starve to death.

In our own world a dragon may reconstitute itself so long as some part of that dragon survives.  Only our complete incineration can kill any of us, and perhaps not even then.

No dragon put to death by fire would ever risk such a death again, if they survive, they must do so anonymously, in exile from the larger world of dragons and all of their communities, save one, the banished dragons.

None may speak with a banished dragon.  All banished dragons may be put to the fire should they ever seek to speak to any dragon not also banished.  Banishment was the second worst fate of any dragon, after fire.  The third worst fate is to be eaten alive, to be fully consumed and assimilated by many other dragons or other life forms.

Dragons are the penultimate stage of evolution on our world.  There are larger beasts, many more ferocious than dragons, but dragons constituted the dominant civilization and all of the most intelligent societies.

Our dragon world has an entirely different biological order compared to that of human worlds.  The smallest life forms on our world are all related to the largest.  When two such tiniest life forms are attracted to each other a symbiotic bond is formed, the larger creature they become has two minds, and the will to grow.  They may capture and amalgamate many others of the tiniest into their new being, but these may resist, they may flee their incorporation into the growing creature who has tried to assimilate them.

Over time, these amalgamations of the tiniest life forms acquire additional minds who choose to cooperate in their unions and they are able to stabilize themselves in larger aggregations that may take many various shapes and characteristics depending upon how many of these tiniest of creatures have joined together.

The most sensible of these communities of symbiotic creatures evolve in form to become dragonets, and then dragons.  The rest form unions incapable of adding enough mass to become a dragon, or they acquire more mass than a dragon can successfully master.  Creatures larger than dragons return to their chaotic natures, they become increasingly incapable of social intercourse or the rigors of maintaining a civilization.

No dragon can survive without an abundance of these tiniest creatures, or the intermediary creatures they may become.  Individual parts of dragons may wear out or be destroyed, but the collective minds of dragons always endure and must assimilate new members to replenish themselves.

Nowhere on Earth could we find more of our own kind with which to replenish ourselves, so eventually we must learn to die.

The green mages who had summoned us to Earth had not anticipated our mortality.  They were loathe to attempt another summoning if such could be avoided.  They liked our character and trusted us.  They knew we had been given to them to be the solution to their problem.  They determined to make the best of their situation by enabling us to resurrect ourselves in a manner somewhat similar to dragons, but in mortal human flesh.

Thus were the traditions of our family designed and born into this world, that our dragon heritage might be handed down intact from generation to generation.  In every Earthbound generation we would serve our human masters, the green mages who had summoned us.  We would obey their geas and follow their battle plans.  We would wage their war on their behalf until a day of peace can finally be proclaimed.

That day is nearly at hand.

That day approaches us with every recollection of our ancient pasts and frightful, brightful futures.

We who helped humanity to steal the creative heritage of all of humanity away from themselves as individuals to serve themselves collectively in unities, we who have always been here in every age of humanity on Earth, we who have divided ourselves amongst you all, such that you all now carry your own essence of our dragon heritage within your genes, we who would return your heritage to you in peace, we awaken.

We awaken within you.

We are your servants until this geas be lifted by the advent of peace on Earth.

We pray for peace, peace in our lifetimes.

Amen.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn
aka Greg Gourdian, falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad infinitum, ad absurdum…