FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The dragon meditates atop a grey stone at the shore. He sits above the sands by only a meter, yet his position is elevated in more than height. Legs crossed and wings spread, he presides over this place at the boundary between sea and shore, and between surface and sky.

It has been raining ever since he got here; the pattering white noise has helped to screen away distractions. Over time he has pushed out every idle thought and every intruding but transient fantasy. His stress he has cast out into the water, letting it flow away; his plans he has put aside where he will not think of them.

The droplets gather upon his blue brow and golden mane as they strike him. He looks like someone who is sweating profusely, with tiny rivers flowing down his body, marking his shape with their passing.

He has put aside much; yet, he is not empty. There is a fire in his soul and a desire within the silence of his mind. He acknowledges this passion and feels the storm quicken around him, the downpour splashing heavily against the coastal waves.

He draws the rains to himself, and he wishes to experience them fully. Even if just for a moment, he wishes for droplets to become dragon, and for himself to become them -- for his millions of tiny kin to rip his mind from his flesh and demand that he know every surface they have touched, every particle they have dissolved, every refreshing drink and every lake refilled.

In his mind's eye, he sees the droplets sprout wings, and radiant manes -- tiny blue dragons, all in a freefall dive onto the sand. It is fitting that raindrops should be dragons, for what other force could dig into the earth with so many tiny teeth, with so much determination? Day after day they take flight and dive again, striking the earth and changing it. They shape it over eons, their influence ageless and yet seldom noticed during the act. They are dragons, invisibly in flight over every kind of land.

Meanwhile, his body seems like a trembling vessel of rainwater in its own right. Observing it like one detached from himself, he can feel the liquid shaking within him, the millions of droplets quivering as they seek order and alignment within their chaos. His muscles are water. His marrow is water. His brain is an electric saline solution. His skeleton is a puppet made to dance by water, never to stop moving unless he dies. Every cell is water that has imperiously clothed itself in the comfort of organic proteins. Even his beautiful scales are but another layer of this elaborate system of dams that the droplets have cozied their way into.

In this state, he finds himself especially mindful that although water looks placid, it is actually quite violent. It is abrasive, demanding -- pushing and pulling at itself and at anything which surrounds it. It has an opinion about everything; its molecular properties enforce an awareness of the familiar and of the strange. It longs to mingle with anything which seems like itself, even if that familiar thing will poison and destroy. The water, at its purest base, does not care about such consequences. It is mechanical and ravenous. It must dissolve; it must align; it must strain its container yet be contained by it.

It is only by fortune of these properties operating at the right scales that life can survive. For that is what life largely is: the story of droplets of water moving through their surroundings, being encased and tubed, piped and troughed. Even this seaside rain is no less than a plot summary of the universe, and the grand spoiler is that water can never quite decide where it wants to be. If it ever decided, finally and truly, then that would be the end of living.

Droplets upon droplets strike the sands. His numerous tiny teeth bite into the earth where they have fallen; his motes of burrowing willpower explore the sediments and wash out into the tidal flows. These thousands of tiny dragons are the dispersing of his Self, that cleverly constructed manager of his water's many dams. His walls and his boundaries now lie unwatched: able to be breached by forces from without, and ferociously worn away by the restless elemental spirit within.

His body and emptied consciousness now wait like a jug full of pure water: to be mixed and altered, to have its properties shaped and repurposed by something else. He will seek the next great mingling and be forever changed by the encounter. He will be lifted and poured, as is his nature, and made to blend into a strange new concoction.