OVERTURE — The song of water

She went to the nearby stream and bent down. Before her mouth reached the surface, she heard a song. It was coming from the water.

Her wings sprang open in alarm. She jumped backward and landed on her bottom in the grass.

There she sat, legs splayed, wings askew, paws still wet. She began to laugh. The harder she tried to stop, the harder she laughed, and it seemed to her that her laughter was telling a story of its own.

‘Now I really am losing my mind.’

She couldn’t tell anyone. The other dragons would only take it as proof of what they had been saying since she was small.

“Who names a dragon Skyblue?” they whispered as she passed.

Her mother had chosen the name despite her father’s pleas, objections, and attempts to insist on another.

“She asked me in a dream,” her mother had explained. “She said she needed that name so she wouldn’t forget where she came from.”

And so Skyblue she remained.

More than once, she had come home from school in tears and complained:

“I can’t believe I asked you to call me that. Everyone makes fun of me!”

Her mother would look at her lovingly and lift her wings a little, as if to say, ‘I’m sorry. I only did what you asked.’

Now, sitting beside the stream, Skyblue remembered those moments and laughed again. She wanted to dance, to celebrate something she couldn’t yet put into words. She knew this place, and yet she had never seen it like this. For the first time in a long while, she felt completely alive.