Ancient eons ago, before mountains and canyons were born, we
were dragons.

We were mighty creatures with wings of taunt hide, throats
that brought forth billows of flame, and roars that shook the skies. We were
the predators of all, the prey of none. We were mighty, and we were terrifying.

We know this because we have the bones, and because we have
the carvings. We do not know what happened before, anything graven in stone was
lost. Lost to the same thing that took our wings- the storms.

An age of storms came. Whipping, ferocious, endless things
that plucked us from the sky like feathers and dashed us into the ground until
we stopped getting up again, until we dug into the ground to hide and left our
sky behind.

This much we know from the carvings. Our ancestors carved
their tales into solid rock, underground where the wind didn’t reach, and came
back to keep recording even as they delved deeper into the caves. For there
were caves, unknown lengths and depths of them, endless and unpredictable. And
they could not fly, so they delved, seeking ever to ease the need to move.

They were aware of what was happening. This is fascinating
to all who study it; they knew. Rarely does a species understand its own
evolution before written language develops, but they knew. They carved images
of themselves, of their children, of the differences beginning to emerge. Their
children were smaller and smaller, wings shrinking faster than anything else,
until they couldn’t fly even if they wanted to. Their proud necks shortened and
flattened, their spines lowered, their forelimbs lengthened, and their ribcages
became flexible to slip through gaps. Some caves contained explosive gases,
making fire a hazard more than a help, so they brought glowing fungi along and
left their flaming breath behind. They walked on their hindlegs less and less,
and then not at all, running along on all fours through the narrow crevices of
their home. There is a slope on the wall of history, images carved lower and
lower by shorter and shorter artists, and then…

Then it almost stops.

Something dreadful was happening. There was not enough food,
and rather than making us grow even smaller and become too small to catch it, it
tried to take our minds. A smaller brain needs less food, you see. Less food,
but less sapience along with it.

That is how we almost lost ourselves.

The carvings became less and less skilled, less and less organized. The ritual was still there,
every few generations going up to the record-cave to carve, but none seemed to
remember what it was for.

The thing that saved us from mindlessness was the same thing
that had almost sent us there; nature itself. This time, a volcano. One that filled
the lower depths of the caverns with unbearable heat, and in its rising cracked
the ground wide open.

Somewhere not far from the long-blocked first entrances, one
of our ancestors wriggled free of the dirt, stepped onto the surface of our
world for the first time in ages, and felt the wind again.

And remembered.

And the rest followed.

Some say it was the heat that drove them out, now that the
storms had ceased, but we know better. The heat encouraged it, but we are and
always have been creatures of the wind, of the sky, of the open spaces that no
single thing can hope to tame. Even our near-mindless, cave-dwelling ancestors
remembered it, and so they stayed. First near the surface, venturing out at
night,  then living on it once their skin
and eyes became used to the light.

Durable, flexible plating to protect against sharp rock
edges served us well against the blowing sand, powerful hindlegs to help us
scrabble through gaps brought us upright and let us run, and long tails let us
balance as we learned to walk upright again. Large eyes for dim light took
longer to adapt, but changed to let us see long distances, and our males began
to develop bright displays to take advantage of our regrowing ability to see
colors. Our females could never match the deep-chested roars of before,
especially with no flames, but they can out-howl any storm now.

Somewhere along the way, we developed hands, learned to use
tools, and started to write. But we kept carving, next to everything else,
telling our world what we had done and were still doing.

No one seems quite sure how we did this. We think it was
sheer determination. Whatever it was, we learned to harness the winds, the sands-
to bend them to our will. For they had taken our wings from us, and we were
determined to harness them, to steer them, to keep them from ever taking
anything from us again.

Our history is written on the walls of the first cave we hid
in, but, more permanent even than stone, it is written in our very cells.

Our children remember. They are born like we were at our
darkest hour- flat-bodied, feral, predatory and nearly mindless. They barely
recognize us, they often shun the sun, and they seek out animal burrows to hunt
and take refuge in. They remember what it was like to live in the caves, and
they relive it.

And some of them remember even further back. They remember what
it was to be dragons. So, soon after
their birth, they leave us. They run into the desert under the cover of night,
and that is it- we never see them again. Others find this sad, but… not to us.
They suffer no pain, no distress, and they find each other eventually.

The other thing that helps is that not all of them are of
such an ancient mind. The same night some of them leave, the rest look up at us,
understanding for the first time, and pull themselves to their feet.

Some of them may leave us, but the rest see us, and they
stay.