Rivers
Rivers used to be Dragons, you know. It's hard to see now, but if you take the time, look out at a delta, you can still see the shape of them. Wings reaching out to the sea, tails stretching back to the tops of the mountains. We built our cities on their backs, and there we stay, though the Dragons themselves are long dead.
Lot of people say the ocean is where we all came from. I don't know if it's true, but sometimes, I see the way we live by water, the way we die without it, and I wonder. I wonder if humankind has only ever followed the water upwards, gathering where it gathers, reaching out in tendrils, but never straying far from the tributaries, streams, and brooks where our serpentine patrons' influence ends. I look at cities without rivers, those hulking, heaving metropolises, and I wonder if somethung has been lost, in building a city without a heart.
I also wonder, did those Dragons know what they were doing when they laid their necks down to rest? When they sank into the soil, the gravel, their rocky beds, did they know what gift they were giving us? Their blood seeping into the land produced the fertile places of the world, all the verdant forests and rich farmlands and blooming cities and burgeoning empires and nascent art forms and how could they possibly have understood what they were doing?
I don't know, maybe they didn't need to see what came next. Maybe they were just tired. But sometimes I look down at their corpses watering our fields and I wonder if we see their reflection on the surface.