Many have said they do not exist. The doctors at this dreadful hospital are, by
far, the worst. They think I’m
crazy. They peddle me medicine every six
hours and talk to me like I am a child who does not know what to do with
himself. One day, they will see; I will
show them all.
I know what I saw that final night in the
Alps I can remember, hiking through the mountains on my own. I had sworn to my friends I would not take
the trip alone, but I betrayed their trust.
I suppose I have always been a stubborn fool, ever since I was a
child. I inherited that stubbornness from
my father, mostly. He, too, would commit
to things that my mother always told him were bad ideas and he should let them
go before he got himself hurt.
His stubbornness is the reason he is no
longer with us.
I hike through the mountains all day,
seldom resting and doing everything in my power to get to where I need to
be. At night, I would pitch my tent and
stop for the evening, knowing how much more dangerous the mountains get after
nightfall. “It is almost like they acquire a mind of their own once the sun
goes down,” an old sheepherder told me on the way here. It was something I would keep in mind for the
entire trek.
Well… most of it.
Four days into my hike, I ran out of
food. I thought back to when I was
packing my rucksack full of supplies, and with horror, I realized that I had
taken some of the food out to make room for some other things I believed I
would need. At the time, I hadn’t
thought this would be a potentially-fatal mistake. Perhaps I’d had a stupid notion that this
trip would only take a couple of days and I would somehow be out of the
mountains in that amount of time. An
ideal situation, but an impossible one.
I contemplate turning back; climbing
higher and frantically waving my arms around for a rescue pick-up; trying my
hand at hunting something myself. The
idea of hunting was quickly extinguished.
I had only a pocket-knife on my person, incapable of killing anything
larger than a rabbit… and I had scarcely seen any rabbits on my trek. I would not be fast enough to catch one and
kill it, anyway.
By the fourth night, I am panicked. Will I die here? Will anyone ever find my frozen corpse? These questions are constantly racing through
my head, providing a buzzing background noise louder than the falling
snow. As I am setting up my tent for the
night, a huge gust of wind takes it and blows it over the edge, nearly taking
me with it as I stumble and fall. I
barely escape falling off the ledge; my heart is racing.
Distraught and scared, I decide to just
keep walking. Perhaps I will get lucky
and find a cave that can provide some shelter for me until morning. If I needed to spend the whole night out in
the blizzard, I knew I wouldn’t survive until morning. I would bet my life on it.
Just when I was beginning to lose all hope
of finding some type of shelter, I stumbled upon one—quite literally—by accident. He had slipped on some ice and tumbled down
the rocks, crying out with each impact of my body against the hard
surface. My whole life flashes before
me, and then I finally stop rolling.
There, right in front of me, is the mouth of a large cave. It looks empty, so I hurry in, wincing with
each movement of my body. I am certain I
have broken one of my arms, and definitely a few of my ribs.
I pull out a flashlight and turn it on,
relieved that it still works, and make my way deeper into the cavern. As I go deeper, I start to see more signs
that something may have been living here: the skeletal remains of animals, and
even a few remains of humans. It makes
me nervous. Will I die in here just like
all the rest?
I hear something: a growl, and I can tell
it belongs to something big. I stop walking when I see movement in front
of my flashlight beam, my heart racing with fear as I see what it is. It is larger than any animal I have ever
seen, covered in sparkling, white scales that shine silver in the light. Its long neck, like a snake, rises up off the
ground from where it was resting and it turns its head toward me. Those eyes seem to look right through me,
blue and catlike and seeming to glow. It
bears is teeth, as long as swords and white as the purest ivory. Framing that face that seems like a mix
between a dog and some reptile are frills, which expand in warning when I make
the slightest movement. I see a ridge of
black spikes lining the length of the beast’s back, starting at its head and
going all the way down to the tip of its tail.
The large body shifts toward me, and I notice that it only has a pair of
hind legs, a long, black talon attached to each toe. Its front limbs are something else:
wings. Large, leathery wings.
It is a dragon. I scream, but it doesn’t attack me. It just roars, shaking the walls of the cave
and effectively sending me running out of the cave.
After that, I black out, and the next
thing I remember is lying in a hospital bed with doctors tending to me, giving
me painkillers for my broken ribs and asking me what happened in the
mountains. I tell them repeatedly of the
dragon, but they don’t believe me.
The cave was searched later, I learned…
and no one finds anything; not even old bones.
