So here is how it goes. Once upon a time, there lived a little girl. She was pretty, in a sense, and jovial and polite, and had the saddest eyes you ever did see, but that is another story.
She slept in a loft bed, that ingenious invention of astronauts and furniture designers, with her cousin, a girl of much the same shape and age and breath as she.
One night she willed to work late into the night, or early into the morning, as others might say; and come five’ o’clock( or five chimes the grandfather) she shut away her books and pens and bits of charcoal and climbed the metal stairway into bed.
Now as she lay snuggle-warm under the red pelt comforter she chanced to hear a sonorous, saphorous breathing; there was a great WHUMP from the sky outside the window, and a great and noisesome jingling-jangling of a neighbor’s pots and pans.
She with her child’s mind began imagining the most colorful of dreaming-scenes: what nonetheless with wizards and magicians and traveling circus troupes and headless purple dinosaurs.
So she jumped up, paying none a heed to creaking bed or sleeping cousin, and skedaddled down the witching-stairs to look and see for herself.
And beholden there was a dragon wished out of fairytale or storybook, white and scalesome and beautiful and bleeding like death.
How, now, dragon, come you to fall through this roof of mine, into this kitchen mine? Told then the young girl to the dragon, who took up more than a lot of her tiny kitchenspace.
And hence he (I am relatively sure it was HE, for with dragons that sort of thing is usually clear: something about the eyes and the tilt of head or tail) came to answer how; but midsome he gasped and pain betook him, and the girl brought white cloths and hot water and such herb that modern households claim to have, but alas to no avail, and she cried.
Hush now childling, calm you now your eyes and listen: for so sayth the dragon that fell. There is a way for mortal child to perish unto myself the immortal wounds, listen close now; hence if you would see me well.
Modern parents, I am told, tell their offspring not to hearkensay strangers, but the minds of little girls will be the minds of little girls, and mayhap God sends extra legions of angels to watch and guard over these slipshod, overly-open and curious minds, come what happenstance.
Tell you now a story, mayhap fairytale of your own conceiving, and weave now the white dragon into it; and make him strong and hale and hearty, and make him live, not die.
So sat the dragon and the childling, and she wove a tale of dragons and skies and flying and cunning and love, and the drop from the heavens preceding the finding of friends, and in the end come the calming of souls and the healing of hurts, and they all lived happily ever after, or so say the story.
And lo! It was as he said, and the immortal hurts were healed, and the dragonstance gave his thanks. And as thanks for immortal life he gave dragonsight, which few have had and few will come to have.
And come now quickly the dawning, for the gold and red and blue of the sun crept across the kitchenplace, and the dragon came to be gone.
But in her sleep she heard his saying; Sleep and wait for my coming; and I will show you noisesome wonders, and I will bring you stories, and mayhap we will fall into other kitchenplaces, and leap the heavens above. Sleep and wait.
Oh calamity, that brings dragons out of skies to dreaming mortals hence; she woke the next morning many hours past the sun, and her kitchen was in seeming-place, but the dragon was not a dream, as she came to see. Because he came back.
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