The geezer croaks out his last rattle, the wrinkled, translucent skin turns hard and cracks, and a baby dragon cries its first among the broken shards of his chest - perhaps a thousand years hence he will crawl from the rib-caged sac of his dragon-form, reborn a young man.
"People turn into dragons when they die"
Dragons must be slain on stone, the stone encased in a wall, that encasement exposed to the sun until the dragon's blood dries, the dried scabs chipped away into metal urns and chained and buried deep in the wasteland. Else the blood drains away into the earth and mixes with the waters below, and when people drink from the wells and rivers thereabouts they will shudder and wrack and breath screams mixed with flames and take flight.
"People turn into dragons when they die"
The dead are taken to the ziggurat - they bloat and putresce, run thick through channels in the stone, coalesce around armatures of fossil-bone bound by golden wire into terrible shape. The liquid rot reforms into flesh, the gestalt blinks and claws at the air, and clambers its way into the sky on its way to heaven. For men can't reach the land of the gods, not alone, and not as men.
Very good.
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The geezer croaks out his last rattle, the wrinkled, translucent skin turns hard and cracks, and a baby dragon cries its first among the broken shards of his chest - perhaps a thousand years hence he will crawl from the rib-caged sac of his dragon-form, reborn a young man.
"People turn into dragons when they die"
Dragons must be slain on stone, the stone encased in a wall, that encasement exposed to the sun until the dragon's blood dries, the dried scabs chipped away into metal urns and chained and buried deep in the wasteland. Else the blood drains away into the earth and mixes with the waters below, and when people drink from the wells and rivers thereabouts they will shudder and wrack and breath screams mixed with flames and take flight.
"People turn into dragons when they die"
The dead are taken to the ziggurat - they bloat and putresce, run thick through channels in the stone, coalesce around armatures of fossil-bone bound by golden wire into terrible shape. The liquid rot reforms into flesh, the gestalt blinks and claws at the air, and clambers its way into the sky on its way to heaven. For men can't reach the land of the gods, not alone, and not as men.