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Whirlwind
Continued from p. 52
engineered to breathe actual fire. The little purple dragon
plushie they got me as a souvenir was not enough to stop me
from dreaming of going myself ever since.
Now that I have grown up a bit, I realise their aweinspiring
appearance and deadly powers aren’t why every
human knows of them. We use them almost as a placeholder,
just as we claimed Mercy Brown to be a vampire, or
tell our children that a tooth fairy is the reason they awake
to coins under their pillow. When people come across
ideas too big or complex to conceptualize, we use legends
such as these to visualize that which cannot be defined.
Humanity simply manifested our fears, our wonders, and
the unexplainable into the scaly bodies of dragons.
Whether you grew up on stories of these malevolent
representations being slayed by knights, or of wise guardians
bringing good fortune, dragons taught us all something.
G.K. Chesterton summed it up the best, in my opinion, in
just three sentences: “Fairytales do not tell children that
dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist.
Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.”
I give dragons four stars.
53
~Sophia F.
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