In a dark cave, in the depths of a forest, on a very tall mountain, Gortox awoke one morning and noticed that she was very hungry. She came out of her cave and shook her wings and spat a torrent of violet-white fire to clear her throat, scaring away all of the birds in the forest, and thought to herself – It had been so long since I last devoured human flesh!

Luckily Gortox, who was very clever, had set up a system to take care of such matters. It had been, to Gortox’s counting, the 4×4+2 day out of the cycle of 4x4x2 days. Which, if her memory was not mistaken (and it never was), meant that today’s sacrifice would be provided by Walled City on a Hill by the Sea, a human colony relatively close by the mountain on which she resided. Gortox spread her wings and took to the air, and as she flew she busied herself with her third favorite activity (the first was learning new things; the second was eating) – reviewing her own brilliant ideas. 

Here are the principals that Gortox had discovered are crucial when conditioning a human colony to offer sacrifices to her– the first and most important one is consistency. Once every 4x4x2 days she should arrive at the colony, preferably when the sun was at the same height in the sky, and eat exactly one human. It was very important that she ate exactly one at a time, even if she was hungrier or not hungry at all, because humans get easily confused. It was also very important she spat some fire around, burning humans and their stone mounds, creating what Gortox recently named Bad-motivation.

After two or three such visits most colonies would start offering sacrifices for her. At that point, it was very important that Gortox stopped spitting fire at them, and ate only the sacrifice the humans left for her. That was important to create Good-motivation.

That, of course, was assuming they left a human of the tastier kind, which they didn’t always do. If they didn’t, Gortox left it on the stick on which it was spiked, and went to get another one from the colony, of the type she does like – the softer, smaller kind of humans that smelled and tasted better.

The second principal of conditioning is moderation – It is important that Gortox takes only one sacrifice at a time, two at best if it is an abnormally large colony. When Gortox was younger, Gortox had once taken too many sacrifices, or came to visit too often, and the colonies on which she had performed these early experiments stopped nailing their sacrifices to a stick for her and just dispersed. That made sense to Gortox – Colonies that wouldn’t have done that, would not have survived. As she flew, Gortox wondered if that idea should be developed further.  

Gortox’ eyes were sharp, and sharper every year, and even among the clouds she could see the sacrifice Walled City on a Hill by the Sea erected for her that day on the top of a stone hill – a plump human with sunlight-colored fur on the top of its head and pale skin, very similar to the type of sacrifice this colony always provided for her, as colonies usually settled for one sacrifice style.

Just as Gortox landed in front of her meal, among the herd of humans kneeling and bowing to her, the sacrifice start making sounds, it’s tiny blue eyes looking directly at Gortox, as if it was talking to her. Gortox had spent a lot of time listening to sounds like these, trying to hear in them some shred of communication, but they were never proven to be anything more than animal sounds, too soft and inconsistent to have meaning. Gortox was clever, and growing cleverer every year, but that meant that there were times she was not so clever. “I wish you could understand me,” said Gortox to her meal, but of course, there was no meaningful reaction aside from a few humans urinating on themselves or watering from their eyes. Is that something that an intelligent being would do?

She let out a yellow-blue flame, roasting instead of scorching, and listened to the noises the animal made is it roasted, lamenting that they meant nothing.

Gortox ate her meal and flew away. Even though it was delicious, Gortox was very sad, because Gortox had a problem. Despite how clever Gortox was, she was very lonely.  

All of her attempts at communication failed, whether they were with humans or other animals. For a long time she staked her hopes on the humans being different – for their use of stone and fire in particular – but the more she researched, the more it seemed that humans imitated each other without thinking of anything new. It should not have been a surprise; humans were made just of the same four elements as the other animals – red-tasty, dark-not-tasty, white-very-tasty, and crunchy – so why should they be different?

Gortox usually ate animals whole but the question of why different animals tasted differently had to be solved, and so she had torn apart several animals in order to put that nagging question to rest. The fact that some humans tasted better than others seemed to be easily explained by the higher ratio of white-very-tasty compared to the other elements, which also explained why bears tasted in autumn better than in spring. On the other claw, spring bears were easier to find as they were hunting for salmon at the origins of rivers. Bears were better tasting than humans any time of the year, and so were elks, but they could not be conditioned like humans were, so she got most of her nutrition from the 4×2 human colonies she conditioned, visiting each one 4x4x2 days, which meant she ate a human every 4 days, and picked up the errant bear or stag here or there.

How beautiful it is, Gortox thought, to make order out of the world with numbers. They were the invention she was the second most proud of, and not just for how it made it possible to cultivate humans to feed her, but because of the amount of Good she felt shuffling them around. Her most favorite invention was words, which she had used to carve out chunks of meaning from the world. She could not even remember the days before she thought of that brilliant idea, but vague impressions and colors – the cracking of her egg, the breathing of the world’s air. The first breath of fire, the taste of her first kill, driven only by instinct. That was the word Gortox chose for the force that drove actions made wisely, but without thought, like knowing that she should roast animals before eating them. Instinct was what humans used in order to survive, what a younger Gortox had mistaken for intelligence.

Although instinct was crucial for things like flying and eating, Gortox needed reason in order to solve the really hard problems. Here’s one – Humans were getting smaller, which meant that they were less satiating for her. The solution? She will fly further and start the process of conditioning more colonies, thus providing more sacrifices.

It wasn’t just humans who were shrinking, of course – bears and elk and the mountains themselves were growing steadily smaller. Gortox would soon have to find another cave, too, or come up with a way to dig deeper into her own. She didn’t like that – she liked being in the same cave she hatched in, even if instinct drove her to burn her own eggshells as soon as she could, though she never reason why. Perhaps not everything could be understood.

But a lot could, if Gortox tore it apart the right way.

Understanding things was Good (one of the words Gortox was most proud of), sometimes because it actually got results, but mostly because she liked it. Gortox found that the principle of her actions was that she was trying to do things that would make her feel Good. Actions that made her feel Good were good, and the opposite was bad. So, she had chosen human meat over bear, losing the Good of tastier meat but gaining even more Good by having time to think and observe.

Gortox knew that the universe could be divided into two materials – self-moving and not-self-moving. Self-moving matter included animals, and was the only thing Gortox could eat, and also Gortox herself, even though she was no animal. Not-self-moving was, well, anything that didn’t move itself, and only fed or got moved. Rocks, water, parts of Gortox’s body she has shed, like skin and the teardrops that come when she thought too long on the wrong thing. Gortox hasn’t made up her mind yet about trees.

Three processes seemed to constantly progressing in the universe. One was the constant shrinking of the world; The second was an increase in the amount of pain that came every time she thought about how alone she was. Here it is now, that pain going all the way from the bottom of her abdomen to the top of her head, when she goes over the most probable hypothesis, that she is the only sentient creature in all that exists, a pain that can only relived by howling, by raising her mouth and letting out a sound so loud it scares the birds out of their nests, even at night, and trying to think of something else.

The third one is the dreams. Gortox’s ability to decipher meaning out of the world depends on her having been born with prior knowledge with which to interpret her sensory input, obviously. This is how would Gortox explain it, if there was anyone to explain it to – if Gortox perceives the world through her senses, whether real or dreamed up, then that means she came into being with some component letting her process such information. Yes, she had given meat its name and chose to devour it, but she was hatched with the innate sense that meat was Good, that loneliness was Bad, that she should flap her wings like this and not like that. And if she hatched with prior knowledge, then dreams could also be a manifestation of such knowledge.

But where would that prior knowledge come from? Gortox had used her sharp eyes to watch the ways of animals, looking for any clues of intelligence. And she noticed that everything that is made out of self-moving-matter comes out the backside of another animal. (She also had a theory about the strange things animals did together in order to make their offspring, but Gortox didn’t like to think about that.) So, if Gortox assumed that she, too, was self-moving-matter, she must have at least had a mother, from which the dreams could originate.

Gortox remembered spending a whole night looking at turtle hatchlings making their way from the shore to the sea on a small island, and thinking that no one taught them how to navigate the sand. She had placed her head on the beach before they hatched, and so the hatchlings ignored her entirely, knowing that for their entire lives Gortox’s head had just been there, so it was probably no danger – until she burned them all in a furious rage, leaving the shore glassed over. Three emotions made her choose that action (Gortox was very careful to categorize her emotions, for they were the landscape on which she cultivated Good) – envy towards the hatchlings for knowing which way they should go, anger at the turtle-mothers for leaving their eggs alone, and the strangest of all three – a fear of the eggs which she could not explain, no matter how long she thought about it. She placed that open question in the “cave” in her head where such questions waited for the right answer to come for them, and make them whole.  

Looking at the glassed over beach, thinking of the trick she had pulled on the turtles, Gortox wondered if the sun that had moved the same way since Gortox has first opened her eyes, had hidden away some complicated emotion that will one day drive her to abandon her trajectory and scorch the world whole.

That question, on the other claw, belonged in another “cave”, with other questions Gortox had to learn to stop thinking about lest she forget to come collect her sacrifices in time. Did she know that she was awake, and not dreaming? And if she were dreaming, could she know that she was even Gortox, and not a bear or tree, dreaming that they were flying high? What if humans were actually sentient, but couldn’t communicate? What if rocks were?

Usually these questions brought no pleasure, except for that when they did – For instance, the pain in her head lessened when she imagined generations of generations of her ancestors crawling through the same thought process that she was going through, the sand of solitude in their eyes. Gortox giggled with joy. There wasn’t really sand in her eyes, but there was a similar structure to Gortox applying mental effort to achieve reason with sadness making it harder for her to think, and the turtle applying effort to crawl while being disturbed by the sand. Such an aesthetic Good Gortox derived from the usage of words, even if she had to make them all up herself.

But here’s the thing – if she were an animal, albeit a mighty and clever one, if she had or had had a mother, that meant that her mother had perhaps chosen to leave her, which made Gortox feel Bad, but also that there were others like Gortox, which made her feel Good. The dreams also made her feel Bad and Good at the same time. This is the dream Gortox had –

Gortox is standing in a meadow, and she sees a raging fire that she did not start, and she sees an animal she never had before – She is green like Gortox, and flies like her, and breathes fire. It is not an animal, but an other. And Gortox says to her – “I see you. I am here.” And the other answers in kind.

Then Gortox kills her. The other tries to kill Gortox, too, but Gortox manages to kill her first, of course. Afterwards, Gortox claws open the other’s chest and eats her heart, lightly roasted. The dream made her feel so much Good that at the nights of such dreams Gortox woke with her cave full of smoke and her body feeling strangely tender. At nights when Gortox slept particularly well, perhaps after eating more than one human, she dreamt of the eggs that would blossom within her, and flying in search for caves to lay them in, each one in her own cave.

Gortox has two hypotheses – Her favorite one is that the dream is sort of generational memory, preparing her for something that will one day certainly happen. Thinking about that makes Gortox feel Good, but also very impatient and anxious. The second one is that the dream and all of her reasonings are nothing but a way to feel more Good in a world that has in it neither a companion nor a central principal to understand.

After Gortox thinks about the second hypothesis, she often decides to continue her experiments trying to prove her theory of “animal-selection” – burning one forest over and over again to see if the animals within it become more flame retardant when compared to the animals in another forest, or faster. The results were inconclusive, but the experimentation made Gortox feel less Bad.

The sun went around and around, and the world got smaller and smaller, and still the only other Gortox met was in her dreams. The more time passed, the more she was excited to see any traces of her own kind: A burnt city, even the smell of fire; a thunder sounding somewhat like Gortox herself; even the shape of a whiff of a cloud, looking like a wing or tail.

#

One spring day, after eating a couple of bears, Gortox lies down by the river’s origin and watches salmon lay eggs and die. She finds solace in their dying – if they did not choose to abandon their eggs, then perhaps her mother had not chosen also. Perhaps after she had laid Gortox as an egg, she had no choice but to die; Perhaps she wanted to stay with Gortox more than anything else in the world, Gortox hopes. Hoping was a strange kind of thought that came not out of reason, but because thinking it made Gortox feel Good. She used to be very careful about hoping, but the more time passes, the less she cares about thinking things that might not be true.  

When she sees a cloud twisting in the corner of her eyes, as if wings have beat inside of it, it is mostly out of habit that Gortox raises her head from the dirt to look at it, bracing for the pang of disappointment that is bound to come, but doesn’t. First she sees the green wings, then the red, slitted eyes and the mighty jaws and the burst of white-violet flame coming from them. An instant later she hears a roar, one that is clearly not thunder. And Gortox is no longer alone.

Her scales are green, just like in the dream, and she is bigger than any other being aside from Gortox herself, dwarfing the world even further. When she dives low, the bursts of force she applies with her wings bend the trees below her and bring a smell to Gortox that is like meat but better than any other meat Gortox has ever smelled. She is so very beautiful.

“I see you!” Gortox cries out. “I am here!”

“I am here!” The other calls back, her head turning towards Gortox. “I see you!”

Gortox notes that there must be a prior language etched into her mind if this other can make sounds she understands but even that interesting deduction is pushed aside by the grand Good flooding Gortox’s emotional landscape. She spreads her wings and takes flight toward the valley.

“Here I will kill you!” Gortox declares, just like in her dreams.

“Here I will kill you!” The other answers with glee as she lands and begins burning the forest she has landed in.

Will they really kill each other here? She wants to kill the other, to lay eggs, but she has so many questions, so much loneliness to quench, which is also a Good usage of words. She wants to tell the other about it. “Wait,” Gortox says. “Do we have to?”

The other raises her head from her flames. “What does that mean?” Her voice is annoyed, which by itself is remarkable.

“Why do we have to kill each other? Why can’t we just continue living?”

“This is what we do. We kill each other, then lay eggs.”

“Do you mean that this is what our ancestors have always done? That it is Good to do?”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, and I don’t want to. Are you sick?”

“I’m not sick. One of us will die, and the other one will either die or be alone again. Do you understand that?”

“No. You will die and I will eat your heart and lay eggs.”

Gortox would have suspected that this is another, dream, if not for how much Bad she feels. “Why do you think I will be the one to die?”

“I know you will die because I’m stronger than you and I will kill you.”

Gortox looks down at the other member of her species, at how smaller than Gortox she is. All other animals grow with time. Perhaps Gortox just had more time to grow? What an idiocy Gortox has committed – it was never the world that was getting smaller. Is the other making a similar idiocy? “But what if you’re wrong?”

“I’m not wrong.”

“Ok, you’re not wrong. Can you imagine for a second, what if you were? That we are going to kill each other for nothing, when we can just stay here and talk?”

“If you don’t fight me I can still kill you and eat your heart. But I’d rather you fought me.”

“I hear you and understand. My name is Gortox. What is yours?”

The other gives Gortox a long look whose meaning she doesn’t know, and Gortox is suddenly more alone than she’d ever been. Should Gortox fly away and return to her lonely musings, to her lonely project of constructing an understanding of the world? Or should she stay here, give herself fully to the sensual urges that her mother had left in her?

The other turns away and starts burning through a forest and a little human colony at the edge of it, ignoring which animals run faster than others and how the humans react to the fires. She just burns it, and as the flames burst out of her mouth, Gortox feels a great desire ignite in her loins, to kill and eat heart and lay eggs, and seeing that the only alternative is a loneliness even more profound than the one she felt before, she succumbs to it.

#

The second egg is harder to lay than the first one, for two reasons – One is that Gortox knows how much it hurts to get it out of her body. The second is that she remembers having abandoned the first one and knows that she might abandon this one as well. She will stay this time, she hopes, and hopes that if she hopes hard enough it might become true. But when she finally gets the egg out and looks at her, marble white but for the sheen of pink mucus, she is struck with that same fear she was with the first egg, a rejection so powerful, a thousand times stronger than what she felt for the turtle eggs, and she wants to either trample them or be far away. She chooses the latter, again.

Oh how she wished to be like the salmon and not like the turtle. But she should have known. Oh, she should have known. That is the principal of animal-selection – which mother will keep having offspring, the one that dies, or the one that keeps living and keeps meeting other dragons whose hearts she could eat and leave eggs?

She cries out, a call so loud she hopes her creator would hear. But he does. She was not created by her mothers, not truly, but by the principals that drive the world, that determined what kind of being Gortox was allowed to become. She hopes, against all reason, that somewhere out there are beings who can battle their creator, and triumph over him, and carve as much Good as they want out of this lonely, reason-less world, and she hopes that they can hear her roar, and understand it. If they do, then Gortox was truly not alone, after all.