Every culture has its own mythical beast， and most of them are terrifying. The dragon guarding the hoard， the chimera with its mismatched parts， the thunderbird whose wings make storms—these aren't cute. They're forces of nature with teeth. Yet we keep them around。embroider them on flags， name sports teams after them， tattoo them on our arms. That's not nostalgia. That's a confession.I once spent a rainy afternoon in a museum in Lisbon， staring at a 16th-century Japanese screen painting of a tiger drinking from a river. The tiger wasn't real—Japan has no native tigers—but the artist had painted it with such conviction that you could almost hear the lap of water. The mythical beast here wasn't the tiger itself but the idea that a creature from a foreign land could become a local spirit. We borrow monsters the way we borrow gods: to fill a gap we can't name. The tiger became a symbol of courage and protection， a beast that walked the edges of the known world and came back with stories. That's what a mythical beast does. It lives at the boundary.Consider the kraken. For centuries， sailors swore they saw it—a squid so vast it could drag a ship under. Today we know giant squids exist， but they're not ship-sinkers. They're deep-sea creatures with eyes the size of dinner plates， and we've only recently filmed them alive. The kraken didn't vanish when science arrived. It just moved. Now it haunts our imaginations as a reminder that the ocean is still mostly dark， still mostly unexplored. The mythical beast is a placeholder for ignorance， but a noble one. It says: here be dragons。not because dragons are real， but because the unknown deserves a face.What bothers me is how we've sanitized some of them. The werewolf used to be a man cursed by the moon， a creature of guilt and violence. Now it's a romance novel cover model with abs and a tragic backstory. That's a loss. The mythical beast should unsettle us. It should make us check the shadows. When we turn every monster into a misunderstood hero， we lose the frisson of the original terror. Not every beast needs a redemption arc. Some should just be beasts.So why do I keep a small clay dragon on my desk?
Not because I believe in dragons. Because I believe in the need for them. A mythical beast is a story we tell to keep the world large. It's a refusal to let the map be fully filled in. And in a time when everything is measured， catalogued， and explained， that refusal feels less like superstition and more like survival.
