Every story says dragons are enormous.
This one was the size of a pencil.
He lived high on a tree trunk in a warm forest in Southeast Asia, and he almost never touched the ground. His world was bark, branches, and sunlight. His menu was ants and termites, which marched up the trunk in neat lines, like tiny trains running on time.
Until the morning the trains stopped coming.
He waited at the old ant road. The bark stayed bare. The column had moved on, to a tall tree across a wide, bright gap of open air.
"Walk down and go around," said a passing beetle. "That is how everyone crosses."
"I have a better way," said the dragon.
The beetle looked him over. Thin as a leaf. Light as a whisper. "You? You are barely a lizard, let alone a dragon."
"Watch," said the dragon.
And he climbed.
Higher and higher up the trunk he went, because he knew the glider's secret: height is treasure. Every bit of up can be traded for forward.
Near the top, he paused. He felt the air moving through the leaves and waited for the breeze between the trees to soften.
Then he leaned out over all that empty brightness.
And let go.
For one heartbeat, he simply fell.
Then his long ribs swung open like a fan, the skin between them snapped tight, and falling turned into flying. His wings held the air. He tipped and steered with his long tail, trading height for distance, down and across and down.
The gap slid away beneath him, the way a floor slides under a paper plane.
The far trunk rose to meet him. He lifted his nose, swooped up for the last little bit, and landed head-up on the bark with a soft tick of claws, exactly the way flying dragons always land.
His ribs folded. The wings vanished against his sides. He was a slim brown lizard on a tree, ordinary as a shadow.
Except the new tree was full of ant trains, and breakfast was everywhere.
He did one more thing first. Under his chin, he carried a little flag of bright yellow skin. He flicked it out, once, twice, a flash of gold in the green light.
It was a message any flying dragon could read: a dragon lives here now.
Far away across the gap, the beetle was still staring at the empty air.
Big is one way to be mighty.
Brave is another.
And the sky has room for both.