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Dream of Dragons

Every lore of every clan, across time and space, dreamed of dragons. Did you ever wonder why?

Lizzy did.

She’d been dreaming about dragons since she first came into this world. At least, that’s what it felt like. She couldn’t recall a time when she hadn’t been fascinated with the mythical creatures.

But that wasn’t all.

She dreamed of other gods and immortals as well. Long before her parents read her bedtime stories and before she picked up her first book. After all, Dr. Seuss talked about green eggs and ham, not elves, vampires, animal shifters, fairies and elemental magic.

She dreamed of gods existing far beyond the human realm, primordial beings that represented heaven, earth and sea, light and darkness, day and night. She dreamed of an age, tens of thousands of years ago, before the first humans came into being, of advanced civilizations lost to time, erased from history.

But in Lizzy’s imagination, they truly existed. They were just as real as the world she lived in now—

As a thirty-year-old archeologist renting a one-bedroom apartment on Jones Street in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, while her parents lived on a small farm ranch in the suburb of Elkhorn, an hour away.

“Hey Howie,” she greeted the moment she came through the door after work.

A gigantic ragdoll cat bounded toward her on silent paws, his belly swaying with each step.

She scooped him up like a baby and nuzzled his face, chest and stomach while he splayed out in her arms on his back, purring so loudly he sounded like an old Buick with a damaged muffler.

“Look at yourself,” she cooed in the babying voice she used only with her favorite felines, “all fattened on those treats. The doctor said you’re overweight, mister. And not just a little. So stop begging me for things you shouldn’t have.”

He blinked up at her with those big, beautiful blue eyes, his face all angelic innocence.

Who me? he seemed to say. I’m just a little plumpy, not fat. It’s all this hair that’s making me look big. I’m mostly muscle underneath.

The significant weight straining her arms said differently, but she was inclined to overlook the fact as she blinked back slowly at her favorite child, in the way that she’d read cats communicated love.

“All right,” she murmured, snuggling him close.

“Just one treat after dinner, okay? And you need to play in the backyard later, do a few laps around the fence.”

Just as she put him down, his constant companion and shadow meowed plaintively from the safety of a few feet away.

“Hey Carter,” she acknowledged. “You’re due for a brushing and you know it. You’re not getting food until we get it done.”

Carter was a year younger than Howie, also a purebred ragdoll, but with different coloring. Whereas Howie was a seal bicolor, Carter was a blue mitted. She splurged her bonus on the two of them from the same breeder two years ago and hadn’t regretted a single penny spent. But…

Carter was an asshole.

Maybe it was because she’d gotten them in sequence, not together. Howie only had Lizzy when she brought him home as a kitten. She was his mom and playmate, his everything. Ragdolls needed a lot of attention and were wonderfully affectionate. It was the reason she chose this breed in the first place. She’d researched extensively.

She wanted a feline companion that was the largest, fluffiest, cuddliest available, who was also content living in a small apartment. That ruled out the Maine Coon and the Norwegian Forest Cat, which was difficult to acquire anyway. And the Savannah was short-haired.

Ragdolls checked all her boxes, and they were so very beautiful besides. Those blue eyes alone made her melt when she first gazed into them. They were genetically predisposed to be floppy, lazy, sweet and affectionate.

They had a reputation as “dog-like” cats. Howie even learned to play fetch when he was just a ten-week-old kitten. But as all cats were, being smart and independent, he got bored of it within a couple days, probably wondering why he wasn’t the one making her go fetch.

She walked him on a harness and leash when she could, but “walking” was not exactly what he did. The way he sniffed, observed, and investigated, he reminded her of a feline Sherlock Holmes.

But Howie was a tiger at heart. The “gifts” he brought home from the backyard proved it. Lizzy tended to find lizard carcasses hidden all around the apartment. At least there were no rats in her neighborhood.

Carter, however, was an anomaly. Maybe it was the second child syndrome. Maybe it was because when she brought him home, Howie was there to take him under his metaphorical wing. Howie taught him well; Carter never had an “accident.” He was the best-behaved cat in history.

Except for the cuddling part.

He only cuddled with Howie, and he whined forlornly whenever Howie moved out of his sight for any length of time. Never mind that Lizzy was the one who fed him, cleaned his litter, brushed snarls out of his fur, and in general treated him like a prince. It was clear whom his first love was, by a long shot.

Not that she could blame him. Howie was the very best, if a little chunky. Or a lot, according to his veterinarian. But that’s also why he was so adorable. So much more to hug!

Carter regarded her now with the utmost disdain and suspicion, as if “brushing” was code for “I’m going to hose your butt with water.”

Which she’d unfortunately had to do when he first came home. His cotton-like long fur was prone to getting poop stuck in it for the first month or so. Maybe that was what traumatized him, and he was still holding a grudge. But she hadn’t had to do it in over a year!

This was why most people liked dogs better than cats. Cats held grudges, apparently. They didn’t just forgive and forget.

But Lizzy had always loved cats best.

After she wrangled Carter into submission, brushed his fur, refreshed the kitties’ food and water, she puttered about her kitchen fixing a fried egg and sausage sandwich. And when she sat at the counter eating her simple supper, she stared directly at the large kite preserved in a glass frame on the opposite wall.

It was the face of a giant white Siberian tiger. She’d had it since she was a small child. Got it at the Chicago Zoo on her birthday. Since then, she always reserved a special place in her heart for felines.

Her eyes moved to the handmade shelf her father helped put in. Between the stacks of books sat two special statues. One was an intricate wood carving of a spotted leopard, and the other was the bronze sculpture of a dragon, painted in various shades of gold.

She’d picked these up during an internship in New York City when she was fifteen, at an all-things shop called Dark Dreams .

The moment she saw them, she wanted them. With a single-minded urgency that took her by surprise.

Lizzy was an even keeled, calm, logic-driven person. Nerdy, if she was honest. But when she saw the kite, even at such a young age, and then the leopard and the dragon when she was a teenager, it was like someone else took her over.

She had to have them .

The intensity of the desire was like nothing she’d ever felt. Except in her dreams.

She was a different person in her dreams. Probably because she was inspired by her mystery man.

She’d been having these dreams since that trip to NYC. Some were recurring, others never repeated. The recurring ones seemed like they were someone else’s dreams, not hers, and she was just an observer, like at the cinemas. The new ones seemed like an alternate life she was living, or a movie she was starring in. They felt so real, yet fantastical at the same time.

Because there was always a man in the dreams. A very tall, unearthly beautiful man. Even though she never saw his face and form clearly, she knew this without a doubt. It was how he made her feel in the dreams. So alive and fervent, burning with…

Passion.

Curiosity.

Longing.

Need.

So much need .

He was her first kiss in the dreamworld. In the real world, a kiss from a real boy a few days later couldn’t begin to measure up to his kiss.

She lost her virginity to him in the dream, around the time she was eighteen. And in that particular dream, her alternate self or selves were integrated into dream Lizzy. She experienced his loving for the first time, and it felt so real, she was sore and throbbing deliciously upon waking, her panties wet.

A week later, she broke up with her real-world boyfriend, because he wanted to take things all the way, and she didn’t want anyone to touch her except for her dream man.

So here she was, thirty and single, and technically still a virgin, though she’d accidentally broken her own hymen horse riding when she was seventeen. While she dated occasionally, she stalled at having sex. For that, she was devoted to her battery-operated boyfriend, Mr. Purple.

Mr. Purple was the perfect boyfriend. He was exactly the right size for her pussy, had rabbit ears that vibrated on her clit, and she could control him however she wanted to induce both G-spot and clitoral orgasms.

At the same time. Every two to three minutes.

And he could go on and on for hours and hours.

There were days when she didn’t want to ever get out of bed.

Mr. Purple got the most intense workouts after particularly steamy dreams. The mystery man didn’t always make love to Lizzy. Most of the time they simply basked in each other’s company. But when he did, her whole body became flushed with sex when the dream subsided, and she hastily made do with Mr. Purple upon waking, partaking of his services until his batteries sputtered out.

Which was why Lizzy stockpiled AA batteries.

Hey, don’t judge her. She was willing to bet she’d had more orgasms than 99.9% of the world’s population at this point, which was pretty darn awesome.

After dinner, she spent a few hours working on the speech for a symposium at which she’d been invited to speak.

In Bangkok, Thailand!

She’d never been, and yet, images of the exotic city were so clear in her mind, they seemed like memories. It was an all-expense-paid week-long trip. A gathering of famous archeologists, historians and other academic leaders from around the world.

How Lizzy got tapped for being one of the presenters was beyond her. In fact, after some of her recent publications, she was shocked she wasn’t sidelined as a pariah.

Sure, there was a minority in her field and others that believed in the existence of ancient advanced civilizations of “godly” beings. Who roamed the earth during the most recent glaciation period, often known simply as the “Ice Age,” which peaked some eighteen thousand years ago, before giving way to the interglacial Holocene epoch twelve millennia ago.

She believed that too. Wrote about it extensively.

But she was the only accredited academic, with a Doctor in front of her name and a PhD following it, who believed in dragons.

She dreamed about them too. Elves, vampires, animal shifters, fairies and elemental magic—she dreamed about them all.

Most of all, she dreamed about the man who could become a dragon. The mysterious man who owned her body, heart, and soul.

If only he was real.

If only she could find him.