Dragon's Land Book 2: The Lost Library

Thirteen days past

Cael’s eyes were burning. Everything he saw had been terrifying; he saw blood, death, and pain. All parts of the history of the Noble Clans of Orcion. As terrible as it had been when it started the pain receded quickly. He sat up and rubbed the tears and last traces of blood from his eyes and looked around.

He squinted at the blurry forms of his friends until his eyesight returned to normal. He shook his head, wondering what exactly he had seen. Soran snapped him out of his reverie.
“Cael, what happened? Your eyes started bleeding and you fell over, are you alright, can you see me?” Cael turned towards his friend and nodded causing Soran to let out a huge gasp of held-in air. “Whew! I thought that maybe your eyes had been damaged, can you see everything clearly?” Soran waved his hand in front of Cael’s face but drew it back when his friend waved him away and tried to stand up.

His attempt was a failure as his knees buckled, causing him to once again fall onto the hard stone floor. Brenna gave him a light smack over the head. “You shouldn’t try to move after what happened you idiot.” She said. Her concern was obvious, but Soran didn’t joke about it this time, this was too serious to joke about.

“Cael, you’ve been laying there for almost a day, you weren’t moving, we thought that you were dead, or something.” Cael stared at Soran in confusion. It had felt like an instant, but Cael knew better than to distrust his friend’s words, but a full day?

Cael forced himself to his knees, feeling shaky at best. He didn’t feel rested as he should after apparently sleeping for a day, his eyes still hurt and he hadn’t liked the blurriness that had occurred when he had opened his eyes. It had felt like his sight was failing, and even though it had returned, he still feared the feeling.

He began to stand up when the burn on his wrist that he had received in his fight with Lavin began to draw all color around it into itself. It pulsed with the same beat as his heart and he screamed in pain. He collapsed, clutching his wrist and writhing in the sudden flash of pain.

 The others all grouped around him, frantically asking him what was wrong, but he couldn't hear them, and he couldn’t answer, his world had become one of pain, and pain alone held his conscious mind.
Soran and Brenna knelt by Cael, trying to comfort him, but they could do nothing. A sudden rumbling roar took stole their attention. The wall on the opposite end of the room was torn through in a shower of stone and heat.

Three dragons entered through the gap, two were the stocky forms of the Venom type that Sena and her men were quite familiar with, the beasts slithered forward and hissed at the assembly, but it was the third dragon that caused the gasps of fear from the crowd.

It was a hulking beast with scales and wings that glowed from within as heated iron does in a forge. Its huge frame dwarfed the other dragons twice over. It had neither the lithe, and slender but menacing grace of the lightning dragon, nor the stocky, compact form of the Venom dragons. Its legs were long and they bulged with muscle and sinew, its body was lean, it seemed that the beast was all muscle, its monster strength evident from a single look at the gigantic body and the enormous tail that twirled behind it at is stalked into the room, its feet crushing stone easily beneath its long and vicious claws.

The head was the stuff of nightmares, it had old scars tracing its entire body, but it seemed that most of them centered on the head of the beast, with the biggest being one that had taken the dragon’s eye long ago. It had a myriad of horns sprouting from the back of its head, all deadly sharp. Its other eye flashed with deadly menace and glowed like a coal in a furnace as it stared down the humans before it.

This creature had a name, but none alive knew it, it had been through countless battles and had won every time, except for once… And that is why it now sought revenge.

After Image

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”… What does that mean? Well when we think of pictures what do we generally think of? Perhaps you think of a photograph, a memory, or an image.

                The word image has come to mean many things connotatively, but I believe that it has lost its most important meaning. Yes, sometimes it can mean something as simple as a picture or a photograph, but is it really worth a thousand words? Well I’m going to do some digging so to speak, an honest man’s work and time spent in God’s Word to remind of the truth.

So if a picture is worth a thousand words, than an image, specifically God’s Image, is worth an infinite amount of words. But I do not have the time, or the energy for a task so large, so in less than infinity (but maybe more than a thousand) I will speak of this Image.

God’s Image in Scripture is defined as His essence, who He is. If this is hard to understand think about looking in a mirror, what do you see? You obviously see an image of yourself, and you see yourself for who you are (at least on the outside). Here the metaphor breaks down, for the comical vastness of such a mirror as to be able to even barely reflect who God is laughable. God is God, and His Image is what reflects Himself.

If it were left there this would be a short diversion, but it does not. For God decided in the mystery of His Will to create creatures after His likeness to give, and to some extent, share in His glory. The Scriptures are clear, for all the wondrous things our God created when He fashioned this world from nothing, the crowning jewel of His Creation so to speak, were the creatures that He placed His image upon.

Genesis 1:26—“Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

Man alone was given this privilege, and with it a task: to govern over the rest of creation and to relate with God personally like none of God’s other creations could, by this I mean with a willing spirit. God gave man something no creature had, a soul, a spirit, a heart. The ability to think, feel, rationalize, communicate on a higher level to relate to God Himself and even to share in some of His attributes. We can love because God is love (1 John 4:8), we have a will because God Himself has a will.

We were created to share the lovely communion of the Three-in-One God of the universe. And we can only do this because He stamped us on the day of Creation with His Image.

[A brief aside for those who may not understand: Us bearing God’s Image does not make us equal with Him, for He alone is God. It simply means that we can be in relationship with Him personally unlike any other part of Creation.]

At first, this likeness of God in humanity was as perfect as He is and always will be Amen. But something happened… Something that in the mystery of God’s plan for the world He created for His glory, we cannot truly understand.

In the Image of God in us there was contained something, in order to allow us to relate to Him personally, and most importantly, willingly we had to have a will--A will that could freely look at every alternative, comprehend the choices and choose God every time, because He created us to be completely dependent (and to those who understand, blessedly so) on Him.

So happened the first rebellion (See Genesis 3). At the behest of the first tempter and the father of liars the first sin was born in mankind’s hearts, the sin of pride, of thinking that somehow, we who were created in God’s Image to relate to Him and find all joy and satisfaction in that, that somehow we could make our own way. Adam and Eve thought that they could be equal with God, having knowledge as He did over good and evil.

But in their rebellion (this is what sin is, any rebellion against God who created us), they chose something besides God. And sin was born into the human heart, and the Image of God in us was skewed, twisted, almost unrecognizable. For the only representative we had before God in the Garden of Eden (the first man, Adam) failed to fulfill the purpose for which he was created, and indeed rebelled against it, welcoming sin and death into God’s perfect creation.

Romans 1:21-23 “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.”

One must only look around to see how we as humans have since perverted the once perfect Image of God in us. Instead of love we hate, instead of joy we grumble, instead of purity we lust, instead of…. Fill in the blank if you dare. Murder, theft, adultery, all products of human rebellion against God, trying in vain to find satisfaction and meaning in anything but Him, because of our sin.

But God did not leave it there…

God did not leave humanity in that state!

My dear friend…

Do you understand what that means? Which of you after making something and finding it useless would throw it away and start anew?

God did not do so, for He had a plan to save us. Though we deserve His righteous wrath for our rebellion, though we don’t want His help, though in our sin we are blinded to who He is, and we hate Him.

Instead, He sent another Imagebearer to us… In the form and likeness of His Son, Jesus Christ.

Colossians 1:15-20 “He [that is, Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by[f] him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”

We were given a reflection, a shadow of God’s Image at our creation. But in Christ Jesus the full Image of God is displayed, in perfect purity and holiness. He became a man, a true man (fully man and fully God) and lived for 30 some years among sinful humanity and then bore the full wrath of God against sinful humanity on Himself, becoming the only sacrifice worthy to God to forgive our deathly debt before Him.

Christ Jesus bore the Image that we, in our sin, perverted and twisted. He did so perfectly. He did not once, ever sin. Thus, only He can mediate between God and us, granting us justification according to God’s law (payment of debt must be made, it is only fair and right), and purification according to God’s holiness (where once we were stained by our sin, Christ’s blood became our covering), and now, in heaven, where He ascended and remains to this day, He mediates before His Father on our behalf.

Oh, and one more thing. Not only did Christ rescue us from the penalty of our perversion of God’s Image, but He is repairing it too.

Dear Christian, do you consider this? That is what the Holy Spirit is doing in you at this very moment if you are in Christ!

2 Thessalonians 2:13-17 “But we ought always to give thanks to God for you, brothers beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the firstfruits to be saved, through sanctification by the Spirit and belief in the truth. To this he called you through our gospel, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.

Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.”

The Spirit’s work will not be done until you see our Lord face to face in paradise. But He is working in you, to make new what was broken in you, the Image of God that allows us to be not only in right standing with God in Christ, but in loving, ever-joyful, all-satisfying relationship with God that will be culminated at the foot of His glorious Throne in heaven with Him.

Be comforted with these final words from the Apostle Paul: 1 Corinthians 3:18

“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord,[a] are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”

A Fellow Image-Bearer with a Fellow Savior,

--The Scribe