His notes were a mess, but he found the sentence he was looking for.   That was the standard though for someone who had spent most of the day scratching incomplete thoughts into a pad while they were out in the field.  He couldn’t be too bothered with completion, that would come later.  For Thaddeus O’Sion, the real work, the actual legitimate part of his expertise, happened in the wild.

But he was open to inspiration when it struck.  Thaddeus took his pen, a vivid cherry for this part of the note reviewing process and underlined something with a heavy back and forth stroke.

But who, truly understands the dragon?

That was it.  That was the whole thought, the reason that he had spent the last minute or so in a manic flipping of his trusted notepad.  Thaddeus thought it was strong enough to stand on its own two hind legs, but concise enough to make his point and feed what was likely going to be his most riveting research paper. The question itself wasn’t asked to anyone specific in mind.  But the thought had weight to it.   As all academic conjecture that one asks themselves in the rough draft that is their internal monologue did.  Even when Thaddeus first thought it, he knew it was inevitable that he was going to think it again.  He was his own captive audience.

After he was done thinking again, Thaddeus picked up his eyes from his notepad just as the heat of an exhale began to encase the academic and trapped the warmed air in the starchy linen of his adventure attire.  As the hairs suffocated beneath the fabric, two orbs radiating yellow that encompassed velvet vertical irises fell upon him.  The dragon, tinted with a mellow shade of crimson, raised its neck. The beast’s eyes now slanted forward down the snout.

Thaddeus, aware of the gaze on him, turned his eyes back to his pad and, with his red instrument once again in his hand, scratched out the underlined ‘understands.  He began to etch in heavy block letters the new, more urgent thought that came to him in the gaze of the dragon.

His notes now read:

But who, truly understands HAS EMPATHY for the dragon?

The thought was now final.  To truly understand the beast, a man needed to feel what the beast felt.

Now, the beast must have felt hunger as the gaping jaws had surrounded Thaddeus just as he had finished the note.  Thaddeus wasn’t sure what he himself was now feeling as the early seconds of the sloshing of the beast’s saliva pulling upward into the throat had begun to happen around him.  He had never had that specific thought before and he didn’t have enough time to truly dwell on it either. 

The red pen bounced back up against the softened dirt where the imprint of Thaddeus’s boots had left their mark.