Walking Down The Dragon's Back

It was a dream.

I was in the mountain, in a jungle, in a village, in a tribe, my tribe. All of these.
I had been living with them for a while, I knew them and they knew me; we had, since a long time ago, accepted each other.  That noon, as the sun was high and burning, I was lead, among others, to a clearing at the start of a steep, short, downward path.
Where the rite of passage was performed.
Vested with no more than a short cloth covering us from the waist down to our thigh, barefoot, we gathered around the way, and they explained me.

You are now about to become a man, following out tribe's tradition.
You will simply have to, along with our young ones, walk the path, from end to end.
Just walk, do not run, do not jump.

I saw the first boy walk forward, and only then I noticed the ground under him, paved with stone scales similar to a giant snake's skin, pointing toward the entrance, slightly lifted... and sharpened. My turn came and in engaged myself, stepping on the scales.
As I went down, they bit into the sole of my feet. Lightly at first, leaving no more than shallow cuts.
But the further I went, the deeper they dug into my flesh, thanks to the steepness of the path.
It was a dream, that bears repeating, but I remember the pain as if it were real, digging, sharp, lancing up to my calves.
The last steps were a torture. Blood spilled from my feet when I finally managed to step out.
Then they told me

You felt the scales hurt you, and you know now that the last steps are the most difficult.
Yet you carried on, endured its whole length.
You just walked down the dragon's back.
You are now grown.

I woke up hurting and feeling my feet, with the dream still vivid in my mind, regretting that I was back in bed and missing the cheers of my fellow tribesmen.
But hey... as every morning usually greets me, that one said: welcome back to life. Stand! And keep on walking down, to grow up.


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Walking Down The Dragon's Back by Danny Hefer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.