Muddle, Part Two

He was a dragon after the singeing of his own hair and skin. The charred village back to carbon from smokey diamond. Under the flames they felt a slow rain, rich with disintegrated flesh. Closer to a grey snow, rich and putrid. The dragon snapped at space made emptier without oxygen. He would smile through all the smoke at an aging outline of a friend, pricking his flushed ears at dry echoes of approbation. All the ruin for love, for nods, for clasp of sharp stern claws. Chasing his scales he had flung through the billowing veil at the other, he could not halt the fiery dance. If there were another village, it followed the first, and another and a friendship, not scorched, but welded.                              


The dragon spit a wide stream from his belly onto the other beast, who was not a dragon but breathed air and brightened up in his own peculiar way, distinguished by aplomb, rather than magnitude of pillage. Strange flames flickered in four eyes, surveying the ash and bone. The flames had waited out the night. Two beasts, not content to moderation. One prone to all the demolition. The other, the charting of his friend's percussion. Their bodies could not be broken that night. Lumps of coal in their mouths sweetened each hour. Villages gone to make way for savage communion.


The other presented two mirrors for his friend. He suggested they mock performance art and attempt transcendence, starting with they know and love best: their own flesh. Both flicked cigarettes over the glass and cozied up to their reflections. They angled the two flush mirrors first at 120 degrees, delighting in the multiplying of themselves, over and over as the angle was drawn back and forth. Enflamed and body engorged, the two bodies lowered and rubbed against the image.


The Dragon kissed his own reflection:
--You know I bring chaos. You ask for chaos.


 He taunted the admonishing approach of the morning, defying a frayed social contract. After more cigarettes and riches taken for granted, the Dragon smashed a mirror over his leg. Drugged, the dragon cut into his leg, foretasting the spoils of unconfined consumption. A claw swiped over his blood and transported the boiling wine to his own mouth. Blood dropped onto the mirrors on the ground the other had unearthed from the rubble of a house. Nothing was spared, but, again, the bodies of the two beasts could not be broken.