The Ant and the Dragon - An Allegory on Humility

There once was a magical, but devastating dragon who destroyed an entire kingdom. It swooped in from the sky one sunny morning and breathed its fiery breath upon stone, steel, flesh, and bone. The dragon annihilated all of it's visible enemies and rested on the plunder that it took from the kingdom's golden vault.

Beneath the ruins of this visible kingdom resided yet another kingdom, a kingdom of lowly Ants, suffering from the unbearable heat brought on by the fire above. With their home in danger, the Queen Ant surfaced out of her colony into the ruins to come face-to-face and speak to the dragon. Her tiny body was barely seen by the monster as she stood on the tip of it's nose. She told the dragon of the carnage he was ensuing on a species who had nothing he wanted and plead for him to cease his torment.

The dragon did not listen. He sneered and told her that an Ant was too small a creature to concern itself with the affairs of war. Out of spite, he pierced the soil with one of his thick claws and blew an enormous fireball into the ground destroying her kingdom before her eyes. With the Queen Ant holding onto the thick scale of the dragon's nose, both eyes menacingly turned to her tiny body as he said, "I think you should tend to your dead your Majesty."

The queen scurried off the dragon's nose and returned to her kingdom only to find it now resembling the ruins of the human kingdom above. Looking upon the incinerated bodies of her children and people, she gathered the 12 tribes of the underground Ant Kingdom which stretched forth 2,000 miles in all directions. There she pitched her plan to remove the dragon.

Several weeks passed by and the dragon rested in a deep sleep. It did not notice the army approach because it came from beneath. Five million ants from each tribe positioned themselves under the dragon and lifted with the indelible strength only a creature like themselves possessed. They marched 300 miles south with the dragon upon their backs until they reached a steep bank with a cavernous ocean below.

As the dragon continued sleeping the ants waited for the sun to retire and the moon to show its full face. The ants knew that magical dragons hid from direct moonlight. When the moon was at it's brightest the ants carried the dragon off the bank in solidarity. The dragon fell hitting rock and stone on the way down. It awoke mid-fall, but upon making contact with the moon it became paralyzed and could not flap it's wings.

It crashed into the water and was pinned under the current. The dragon struggled to escape the moon's rays, but it did not let up as it shone thicker through the water. There it drowned within the confines of its watery prison. One by one, the ants that had fallen over with him began to emerge from the water and make their way back up the steep bank to praise their queen for destroying the dragon.

The Queen Ant gathered her community that night and told them that all praise goes to the moon for its natural defense against the enemies of the earth.

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