Rising Dragons

Ode For Nobody

We're taught and we have normal classes – math, history, navigation, flying, magic, and so much more. We have normal classes. Normal when you consider the fact we all have dragons bonded to our minds. But, here's the thing, we don't stand out. We're everyone and no one. We're the ones in the back of the classroom joking about, the ones in the front jotting down notes, the ones in the middle caught in between.

So, yes, we're taught and we learn and we don't stand out. But our society has made violence an intrinsic trait, war has value and those who fight in it are praised; those who fight are praised. The Academy taught that strength is in winning spars, but strength was written into our bones. We survived and that is our strength. It is not their strength, but it is ours. In this, we could not meet their standards. In this, we were average. In this, we are everybody who have never been viewed as something other than part of a collective.

We learn and we grow with each second that passes. We change, our identity shifting with our decisions and actions. We are who we are, and maybe we hide it, but maybe we don't. Maybe we lie about it or maybe we say the truth. We are everyone, but simultaneously, we are no one too. We go out to fight, you know. We go and fight because our civilisation has engraved the need into our bones. We go to war and we die.

We're born, like everyone else. In one way or another, we go to the same place – we're all found and we all bond. We learn. We grow. We die. The wheel turns constantly, never-changing, always forward, always the same; continuous, ceaseless. It moves down the slope, road worn beneath its steady revolving; flat and steady; predictable and calm. Surprises aren't excepted, and they don't occur. This is what we are – predictable, normal, ordinary. The same as everyone everywhere; what else did you expect?

It all comes down to this in the end, doesn't it? A war between two forces. A war that was always going to come even if the participants change. A war that could have been foretold by those who realised that our society has violence as its foundation. A war that ends in our death. A war with child soldiers under the bright light of day. A war where we easily declare one side is evil and one side is good. A war we go to fight in and full-heartedly believe we will come out alive. We die, and die, and die. We die in pain, screaming and crying and begging. We die in fire, in agony, in blood pouring from cuts, in kills that aren't mercy but something worse. We die and maybe it was always going to end this way.

We die and we died. We died. And we will be forgotten, unknown. For everyone ignored because they are average. In not standing out, we bring our own death. We die, both physically and in memory. We die because we don't stand out, and in being average, memories of us would never last.

Group us together and mark us as normal. We are not leaders, we shouldn't have been soldiers either, but we were nevertheless. In blending in, we become lost. Without families, and occasionally without pasts, we were killed without mercy but also without discrimination.

In the Academy, our world is what we are being taught, it is restricted to our friends, our insecurities, our pride, our achievements. It's our emotions and our attachments to others, and – of course – our dragons. It is a small world, but it is our world nonetheless. We never had the chance to expand our world, killed too early, died too young. It is a travesty, but this is not the tragedy here.

Our tragedy is that we have been forgotten, for we are nobody and everybody, everywhere and nowhere.

When you think of the battle, of our war, try to remember us. We know you'll forget, that you'll remember the heroes and the martyrs first and always. But try to remember us, we who fought and died and never had the chance to be more. We won't be disappointed if you forget, we're nobody after all.

Poem: The Unknown Dead by Henry Timrod

The rain is plashing on my sill,
But all the winds of Heaven are still;
And so it falls with that dull sound
Which thrills us in the church-yard ground,
When the first spadeful drops like lead
Upon the coffin of the dead.
Beyond my streaming window-pane,
I cannot see the neighboring vane,
Yet from its old familiar tower
The bell comes, muffled, through the shower.
What strange and unsuspected link
Of feeling touched, has made me think—
While with a vacant soul and eye
I watch that gray and stony sky—
Of nameless graves on battle-plains
Washed by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest.
Ah! not the chiefs who, dying, see
Their flags in front of victory,
Or, at their life-blood's noble cost
Pay for a battle nobly lost,
Claim from their monumental beds
The bitterest tears a nation sheds.
Beneath yon lonely mound—the spot
By all save some fond few forgot—
Lie the true martyrs of the fight,
Which strikes for freedom and for right.
Of them, their patriot zeal and pride,
The lofty faith that with them died,
No grateful page shall farther tell
Than that so many bravely fell;
And we can only dimly guess
What worlds of all this world's distress,
What utter woe, despair, and dearth,
Their fate has brought to many a hearth.
Just such a sky as this should weep
Above them, always, where they sleep;
Yet, haply, at this very hour,
Their graves are like a lover's bower;
And Nature's self, with eyes unwet,
Oblivious of the crimson debt
To which she owes her April grace,
Laughs gaily o'er their burial place.

Song: Disappear from the Dear Evan Hansen 

I've got my first exam in two days, but look at all that studying that's not going on. Guess I should possibly get back to it. 

Update: first exam is over now and I've got five left to go - enjoy these guys! 

Also, A Dragon's Retribution got a new chapter yesterday (on the 30/10/18), but I'm not sure if anyone got the notification. 

Edited: 3/02/2021