From the top of the hill, he looked
majestic. It was incredible to see him glide over the water and then fly up
towards the sun and then fall, breaking the surface of the lake with his huge
body. The creature loved to swim, or so it seemed, and it looked really happy
to be there. He looked like a child that meets the ocean for the first time.
But he was much larger than just a child. He was more the size of two horses
and there were far from any ocean although he could reach one in no time. The
people who found him had called him Mjölnir, like the hammer that the god Thor
held in battle, the hammer that the gods had created to bring order and
stability to a world in chaos. He was that for them, a fantastic creature
capable of bringing calm to this world.
The two explorers that had gone to see him
were so amazed that they just stared at him for an hour, never mind the fact
that he might fly away in any moment. The locals said he lived deep in the
mountains because they were the only inaccessible area of the region. The
mountains her were sharp and built by nature like razors. Not any human could
climb those and to use any means of transport would be a waste of time because
of the magnetic instability of the area, which no one had ever explained. Maybe
there was something to mine down there; maybe it was because of him. No one
knew. What they knew was that he was, for all intents and purposes, unique. The
locals never spoke about another one or a herd of them nor nothing like that.
He was alone in the world.
After a week of the discovery, the scientists
had begun to look everywhere in the world with the same circumstances but
nothing had come up yet. Maybe he wasn’t alone but they had to help him mate or
he would be extinct in a number of years. To be honest, they had no idea how
long the lifespan of a dragon was but the general thought was that they could
live for hundreds of years, so that gave them some time to organize and look
for a suitable mate. They studied him for weeks and weeks and more and more people
came to meet him, which was astonishing due to the fact that, in the past, any
person that had attempted to get close had died.
Doctor Lemon was a brilliant biologist. She
had discovered many new plants and animals in the deep forests of Indonesia. As
for Doctor Samuelson, he was a paleontologist, the one that had discovered the
first skeleton of a dragon in China. He was the reason the two of them were
granted help from an American institution to go and explore the Razor Mountains
and see if its inhabitant was real or not. They had to train hard for days in
climbing and trekking and in every sport that could help them pass the mountain
range. When they got there, they had to try it several times, risking their
lives, in order to finally make the crossing that would lead them to Mjölnir.
The
lake was not a place they went to look for him. They had seen it from the range
and had thought they needed to recharge their water supplies before attempting
to do anything else and the lake was probably made of melted ice water from the
mountaintops. It was summer, so the lake was not as large as it could be but it
happened to be large enough for a gigantic creature to swim in it. It was so
strange, for both scientists, to see the creature so at peace and relaxed. If
they hadn’t known any better, they would have thought he was a giant dog or
something. Not for his looks of course but for the way he behaved in private,
playing around and just enjoying himself.
They had always been portrayed as savages in
every single culture. They have been deemed dangerous and quite vengeful but
this one did not seem like that. He seemed nice. Maybe that was because in all
of the first week, they didn’t see him spout fire. It was possible that he used
it only as mechanism of defense but when they saw him eat a deer, they realized
he wasn’t able to do it at all. He was a very large lizard who happened to fly
short distances but he had no ability to propel fire from his mouth or
nostrils. This disappointed many who followed the investigation but he was,
nevertheless, a species in the brink of extinction. The two scientist looked
all around the area and found the skeleton of another dragon but it wasn’t its
partner but its mother.
The bones indicated it was a larger animal,
with a far longer wingspan and a huge body. It was now easy to see now why they
had such a clumsy ability to fly: they were too big. They weren’t like the
pterosaurs of the past that were light like birds. These dragons were heavy and
had to train their whole lives to be able to fly properly. That’s why no one
had ever spotted one. Contrary to belief, they didn’t fly that much, they
didn’t spout fire and they lived in an area where the magnetic field was just
crazy. The area was soon protected by law, so only scientist and authorized
people could come in, dare to cross the mountains, and then just watch him to
his things.
Both Lemon and Samuelson stayed there for a
whole year and were the ones who set the rules on how to behave while staying
in the area. They would explain to any visitors that they had been very careful
for him not to se them or be able to smell them. They used a special perfume
that made them smell like plant life so he wouldn’t come too close and attack.
People always obeyed because it was more important for them to see him and take
pictures than risking their lives in a silly way. But like with everything that
goes into fashion, most people soon forgot Mjölnir, after only a year. Lemon
and Samuelson were happy that this had happened because they needed to
investigate more and see how much time he had.
They
gathered saliva from the remains of his meals and some scales that had
apparently fallen from him. Maybe he was changing skin like most reptiles or
maybe he was sick. They had no real idea and that made them insane. For a
while, they had to go back to a proper lab and just try to understand more
about him. As they did all the tests and experiments they had to do, they
realized it was a very difficult job as there was no other creature like it.
Lizards and snakes were only similar to him in small things but, in the larger
picture, he was a unique creature. And that worked against him hard because
it’s much more difficult to protect something you don’t understand than the
opposite.
It was during that time that a couple of
explorers in remote parts of the world found more dragon remains and even
fossilized eggs. They were brought to a laboratory for investigation and hoping
they could lead to a possible cloning project but that was cancelled when they
realized there was nothing they could do with the eggs, except noting it
features and putting it in a museum. After six months of hard work, they had
come to the conclusion that the dragon was about to enter adulthood. His mother
had died at least fifty years ago when he was a baby but only know he was
beginning to grow up. That explained, at least partially, his behavior in the
lake and the way he did things. He was becoming an adult all by himself and it
appeared he would die alone too.
Then the news came. The locals had found his
body lying next to the lake. He was dead. Lemon and Samuelson flew to the area
but it was too late, another team had come for the body and, with permission
and bribes to the locals, they had managed to take the body in a helicopter and
now it was far from the reach of those two scientists, the ones that had
discovered him. For months, no one heard one more word about anything related
to the creature. But both scientists decided to release a book with their
impressions and experiences with the dragon. They thought they should at least
be the first to say what he was like and how thrilling it was to discover him.
The rival scientists released an autopsy
report saying that he had died from drowning and that they had found the organ
that might have produced the flames every single culture in ancient history
attributed to the dragons. The discoverers of the creature published an article
saying all of that was false and that there was something they weren’t telling
and that they should have been able to check the bodies themselves or at least
leave someone else do it. But they never did. And the body was never donated to
any museum or organization. People, again, largely forgot about the dragon and
about them, even as they slammed scientists without scruples every time they
had the chance.
Mjölnir was dead and the truth was he had died
because he had wanted to. He was smarter than people thought and his fly over
the lake were just an attempt to understand how to kill himself. He was grieving
and because he missed his mother. And he was alone and that wouldn’t change. So
he took matters into his own hands and did it. People would have never understood
that because of the intelligence factor but that no longer matters. We will
never understand.
