Happy the Dragon and the Shape of Time : The Discovery
This is a story about a dragon named Happy.
Happy is a goofy little dragon who loves to play with his friends, but his mind is a curious one. He was never satisfied with “now”. He always wondered why, every second, the world slid forward.
Trees grew. Mountains wore down. Dragons grew old.
Happy could feel it in his wings and bones.
He knew, long before anyone explained it to him, that he was travelling through time at exactly one second per second, just like everything else in the universe.
That bothered him.
He wanted the past.
He wanted to see his extinct cousins, the dinosaurs, not as fossils but as living giants shaking the ground. He wanted the future too. Would dragons disappear, or would there be space dragons drifting between stars, or robot dragons forged from metal and light?
The elders told him time was a river. You could float with it, never against it.
Happy did not accept rivers that could not be questioned.
So he studied.
He learned that the universe was not made of space alone, but spacetime. Three directions to move, and one direction that dragged everything forward whether it liked it or not.
Nothing truly stood still.
Everything moved through spacetime at the speed of light.
If you rushed through space, you slowed your movement through time.
Years passed.
Happy grew old. His wings grew heavy. His curiosity did not.
One quiet afternoon, while shaping bits of glass he had collected, Happy stacked two curved pieces together and saw the world swell.
Distant hills leaned closer. Small things grew large.
That night, he pointed the glass toward the stars.
What he saw made his breath catch.
The stars he had seen since childhood suddenly looked bigger, closer, and more understandable.
Excited, Happy instinctively called an elderly professor named Dr Ash, who had taught him many things over the years. Happy explained what he had seen: the stars, the galaxies, the way the sky itself seemed to change.
Dr Ash smiled.
He told Happy that he owned a giant machine called a telescope and invited the young dragon to take a closer look. That was how Happy gained access to one of the world’s largest telescopes.
Day after day, Happy peered through the enormous machine.
Then one night, he saw it.
A darkness so deep it bent the stars around it.
Light curved as if pulled by an invisible weight.
Happy asked the professor what it was.
Dr Ash reached for a large book from his library and began explaining a strange idea called a black hole. He asked Happy to read and learn more about it.
Happy spent several weeks trying to understand this massive object in space.
And then he laughed softly.
Not because it was funny, but because it finally fit.
Speed was not the only way to stretch time. Gravity did it too. The heavier something was, the more it slowed the passage of time nearby.
This discovery did not answer all of Happy’s questions, but it gave him a beginning.
His understanding of time and time travel was only just starting.
The question of why we move only forward through time still lingered.
Happy knew his journey was far from over.
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