//------------------------------// // 8. Home // Story: The Celtic Dragon // by JumpingShinyFrogs //------------------------------// Strange lights and colours swirled all around me. I heard things that tasted like the colour blue; saw things that smelled like love. Bright flashes of light dazed me and messed up my vision. What's happening? Where am I? I thought. The complete sensory overload was actually painful at this point. Would it ever end? As a matter of fact, it did. Very abruptly, I saw a picturesque landscape spread out below me. I didn't appear to have any body per se, but I did have a bird's eye view of the rolling hills below me. Dragon's eye view, even. Whatever force was showing me this sped my viewpoint towards a mountain that had something sticking out the side of it, but before the mountain was a fluffy white mass. It was a city, but one totally unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Instead of being built on the ground like a normal city, this place was floating in midair! It almost looked like it was made of clouds, and rainbows seemed to be used as casual decorations. Pillars and arches were the main motif here, with most buildings looking like miniature versions of the Greek Pantheon. The most interesting part? The inhabitants of the city. They were al ponies, like Rian, but these ones had wings! It was amazing that their tiny little bird wings could even hold them up, but somehow they worked. Flying ponies hovered with other flying ponies and chatted, laughing and making conversation as if they weren't defying the laws of physics and reality. According to whatever was showing me this, I wasn't supposed to be looking at these ponies because I was quickly pulled past the cloud city and towards the mountain. I still couldn't quite tell what was sticking out of it, but I supposed I'd find out soon. As I drew closer, I caught sight of what it was—a castle taken straight out of a Disney princess movie. Tall, elegant spires of polished stone rose up into the air, pennants waving from the pinnacles. The castle was surrounded by a massive garden of neatly trimmed hedges and brightly coloured flowers. A menagerie of animals hopped, ran, and flitted about the garden. Below the castle was a city with equally fairytale-esque architecture. Like the cloud city, the inhabitants of this city were all ponies. But these ones were more like Moondancer. They didn't have any wings, but most of them had horns, and some of them were even lighting up those horns and using them to float things around. It was like telekinesis from a sci-fi movie, only a lot frillier and cuter. Also I sort of wanted to eat them, but we don't talk about that. But I was only given a few brief moments to look at the ponies before my view was dragged off in another direction. I sped away from the mountain city and across plains and hills. I caught sight of an old-fashioned steam train chugging towards the mountain city, but it passed through a tunnel in a hill and I lost sight of it. But no matter, because the forces on high had given me something else to look at. Rolling hills gave way to flat plains, and eventually a huge, tangled mass of a forest appeared on the horizon. There was a little village near the edge of the forest, filled with ponies once more. But these ones had no wings and no horn, and their village was the most normal out of all of them, if you ignored the fact that there was a very high proportion of thatched roof cottages in the town. All of the wingless and hornless ponies were going about their business, a lot of them having decided to farm or garden. Still I was pulled off, past the forest and into flatter ground as the land turned from green to brown. I caught sight of a few more pony-filled towns, but then I was pulled into a barren, rocky plain that seemed to stretch forever. There were no more pretty towns. Just sad, empty wasteland. As I was pulled above the scorched ground, I very briefly spotted a sickly green structure that looked like it was dripping slime, surrounded by creatures that looked like a sick hybrid of a pony and an insect, but I wasn't given very much time to look at them. I was picking up speed now, being flung towards a distant plume of smoke coming from a tall ridge of mountains. When I finally reached the mountain range, I stopped above a huge ring of spiked mountains, several pools of lava glowing eerily in the center. I couldn't move anymore, but I found I didn't want to, because what I saw took my breath away. Dragons. Nothing but dragons as far as the eye could see. Big dragons, small dragons, dragons with six legs, dragons with two legs, even a few dragons with no legs. Massive piles of scale and muscle lounged about on the mountain peaks, while smaller dragons fought in the centre of the ring of mountains. I saw a big dragon push a very small dragon into a pool of lava with its snout, only for the small one to start swimming in it like it was nothing. A few smaller dragons, closer to my size, were clawing their way up a huge pile of gold and jewels, trying everything they could to throw one another off. One of them finally made it, only for someone else to leap up and knock him off. The victor picked up something that looked like a diamond and started eating it. I guess dragons aren't very good at money management. A few more small dragons were challenging each other to a fire-breathing contest. So we could do it after all. Red fire, green fire, yellow fire, every dragon had a different colour. One of the dragons only sputtered out a pitiful little purple ember, and the others dogpiled him. Violent creatures, aren't we? One of the gigantic dragons suddenly lifted its long neck and stood up. It was only about halfway up the mountain, but it clambered up to the top, simply going over the other dragons and disturbing them in the process. Once it had reached the top, it spread its wings and leapt off. I could almost see its wings catching the warm air from below and lifting it. The dragon beat its wings slowly and evenly, and it simply soared off and away from the mountains. I wanted to be able to stay longer, to see what else the dragons could do, and maybe to learn how to do those things myself. But it wasn't meant to be. I felt the dream, or whatever it was, slipping away. The scene of the dragons blurred, and then suddenly I was back in Ballyvourney, standing next to the strange circle in the soggy football pitch as though nothing had happened. I heard a faint hissing noise, and looked back down at the circle. It was sparking, and a light steam was rising from it. I got the impression that this meant 'get the hell away', so I scrambled backwards and tried to put some distance between me and the circle. I slowly walked back over to the wagon and struggled back into the harness. I think something may have fallen out of the wagon, but I didn't bother picking it back up. I was too busy thinking about what I'd seen. Was it another world or a vision of the past or future that I saw? Could I learn to fly and breathe fire like the dragons in that mountain range? If it was the future, I sincerely hoped I'd still be around long enough to see that cloud city. I wondered idly how big I would eventually get. Some of the dragons in those mountains were huge. Still thinking about the mysterious world beyond the circle, I began to walk back towards Rian's farm. Man, Rian really knows how to get things done. By the time I got back, he had already gathered some essential supplies from around his farm and loaded them into a massive trailer that he'd attached to the back of a tractor. He had also managed to coax all of his animals into the trailer as well. Don't ask me how he did all of that with no hands. He was in the middle of loading up some cans of something marked stabiliser when he spotted me walking up to him. "Jaysus, what kept you?" he asked. "I took a...detour," I said. I wasn't quite ready to tell him about the weird circle yet. He'd probably think I was crazy. "Did you get the stuff at least?" he asked, hopping down from the trailer. I turned to show him the wagon I was pulling. "Class!" he said. "Help me load it all up and we can be heading off." I did exactly that. For all their sharpness, my claws were actually quite useful for moving things around. Watching Rian struggle with his mouth was both upsetting and uplifting in a sadistic manner. Still didn't stop my claws from tearing things though. It took us about half an hour to load everything onto the trailer. Rian scrambled up into the cab of the tractor. I couldn't help but notice that he had climbed into the passenger's seat. "Think you're in the wrong place there, Rian," I said, looking up at him. He looked back down at me like I was stupid. "No, you're driving. Christ, how d'you expect me to hold the steering wheel with no hands? Sure my back hooves can't even reach the feckin' pedals." "I know that, but I've never even driven a car before, never mind a tractor," I said. "Sure 'tis easy," he said. "Now get in. I want to be at the park before it gets dark." Says the farmer, I thought. I sighed, resigning myself to my fate, and climbed into the driver's seat. It was horribly uncomfortable. Though it didn't hurt to sit upright, it did feel very strange, and my body seemed to want to sit on my haunches like a dog, or on my belly like a cat. That's not even counting the fact that I had a frill thing on my neck, a tail, and two wings, none of which were happy to be crushed up against the back of the seat. Rian tried to talk me through the process of driving the tractor. It didn't go very well. "Easy off the clutch!" "You said this was easy! You lied to me!" "Hit the brakes! Hit the feckin' brakes!" "Why didn't you tell me not to drive into the wall?" "Jaysus, Deirdre, will you shlow down?" "I'm going too fast! I'm going too fast!" After a lot of screaming and shouting from both of us, I managed to steer the tractor out of Ballyvourney and onto the main road. I nearly rolled it over a few times, and the trailer did start jack-knifing at one point, but no one died and nothing fell off, so it was largely ok. It was certainly a lot faster than walking. All I can say is thank god there was no one else on the road. It did the job though. It was only half an hour until we were back at Glenflesk. That was still twice as long as it should have taken, but it definitely beat out the several hours it took me to walk there. After Glenflesk it was a short twenty minute jaunt back to Killarney. Navigating through town was a struggle. Too many bends, kerbs, and overgrown bushes. The tractor was too big to drive through the gate to the Demesne, so we had to slowly and painfully unload everything and drag it through the gate. Once that was done it was an even greater struggle to get all of the stuff from a pile by the gate, to our chosen home base. We'd decided to use Ross Castle as our base, since it's big, located by water, easy to get to, and the most intact building besides the very impractical Muckross House and Knockreer House. Unfortunately, Ross Castle was a fair hike away from the entrance to the Demesne. And we had a lot of stuff, which meant several trips, even after Rian somehow managed to convince his animals to carry some things. All in all, it took more than three hours for us to move most of the stuff. During that time, the sun started going down and Rian once more got very tired all of a sudden. Partway through one of our supply trips, of all times, he couldn't stay awake anymore and dozed off while walking. I had to carry him on my back, as well as everything I had already been carrying and everything he had been carrying. I was a very tired dragon by the end of it, so I just half-assedly threw an open sleeping bag over Rian and curled up on a patch of gravel by the lake. Despite the fact that I was horribly tired I still couldn't stop thinking about that weird world beyond the circle and the creatures within. Not just the dragons, but the ponies as well. Some of them could fly, and some of the normal ponies were farmers. The horned ones seemed to be psychic or something. Even those weird bug-pony monstrosities had caught my attention. The dragons still intrigued me the most, but the rest of the creatures that world had to offer were just as fascinating. Maybe someday I'd find out what they were. For now, I was just going to sleep.