The Dragon Keepers Cannot Be the Only Voice

There is value in the ink on a scroll, and even in the phantom text which burns into a monitor, when it speaks of the deep experience that is to be human.

Two feet on the grass, or on the cobbles of a street where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unnamed and unknown people have walked before you. They were drawn there for different purposes, carrying lives you will never know, and now, for whatever reason, you have been drawn there too.

The Guild has always kept records of such things. Names, dates, places, Species, sightings and increasingly elaborate attempts to place some order upon creatures which have never demonstrated much interest in being orderly.

There is something comforting about putting a thing in a box. Once it has a name, a number and a place on a shelf, we can convince ourselves that we understand it.

Last week we wrote about the Six Aspects which recur throughout the Archive: City, Night, Ruins, Season, Sky and Wild.

There are certain things about them which we will lay down as though carved in stone. They exist, they serve different purposes, and they represent different facets which appear again and again throughout folklore and within our own encounters with the Beasts.

In truth, it would probably be more accurate to allow a Beast to belong to several Aspects at once. A creature found on a church roof beneath a winter moon could comfortably be Sky, Night, Season or City, depending upon which part of the encounter you considered important.

But there are more interesting ideas formed by trying to put things into boxes which, broadly speaking, should not be defined so definitively.

If one Hunter calls the creature Night, they have made a decision about what mattered. Another may call it Ruins, and in doing so reveal that they were looking at something the first Hunter barely noticed.

Neither necessarily tells us what the Beast is. They tell us something about what each person saw.

Even among the Dragon Keepers, that difference has always existed.

For all that we are the Dragon Hunter Guild, Mr Risk has never had much interest in dragons and has long suspected that the rest of us overcomplicate matters considerably. His observations are shaped accordingly.

One Keeper notices place. Another notices behaviour. Another remembers a half-forgotten story. Another thinks the whole discussion has become ridiculous and notices the obvious thing everybody else has missed.

Folklore has always worked much the same way.

City, Night, Ruins, Season, Sky and Wild are not six territories with neat borders between them. They bleed into one another because the things from which folklore grows do too. A ruined building is reclaimed by the Wild. A city changes at Night. The turning Season changes the Sky. A road begins among houses and eventually becomes a path through somewhere considerably older.

We could devise increasingly complicated systems to account for every overlap until every Beast occupied six categories, seventeen subcategories and a particularly impressive spreadsheet.

There is more value in asking somebody where they believe a Beast belongs, and then asking why.

For most of the past two years, however, the answers preserved publicly have naturally come from the Dragon Keepers. We know what we intended when something was Forged. We know the stories behind it and the places which influenced it.

That gives us an interpretation. It does not give us the final one.

Once something is made and placed into the world, there is a peculiar point at which the person who made it becomes a passenger in its meaning.

Someone else sees something you did not put there deliberately. A Forged Beast acquires a name you never gave it. It sits in a house you will never enter and becomes attached to people, memories and events you will never know.

The original meaning remains. It is simply no longer alone.

Wild Beasts make the matter stranger because nobody within the Guild can claim to have made them at all. We encountered them and wrote down what we thought we saw.

Someone else may stand in the same place years later and see something different.

There are now 23 Hunter entries within the restored Bestiary, and already familiar Beasts are returning to the Archive through unfamiliar eyes. That is far more interesting than building a collection of people politely repeating what the Dragon Keepers have already written.

So for your next Field Report, we would like you to do something slightly different.

Take one of your Beasts somewhere important to you.

It need not be ancient, famous or particularly beautiful. Perhaps it is a churchyard, a stretch of coast, the street where you grew up, a ruin, a garden, a field, a railway platform or the corner of a city which means something to you for reasons nobody passing through it could possibly know.

Take a photograph, stand there for a while, and tell us why you chose it.

Choose the Aspect which feels closest, even if another Hunter would choose differently. Tell us what the Beast became in that place, or perhaps what the place became with the Beast sitting within it.

There is an old thought buried somewhere beneath much of what we do:

Stone is memory in place and time, voice and bind.

The stone beneath your feet remembers nothing in the way that you do, yet people have always given places memory by returning to them, naming them, telling stories about them and leaving marks behind.

A place becomes important because somebody says, “Something happened here.”

Sometimes the only person who knows that is you, and that is enough.

Submit it to the Bestiary, not because the Guild needs another photograph of a Beast, but because the Archive has enough of our memories in it already.

We would like some of yours.