The autistic princess and her beautiful dragon
- Catherine Flynn
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Fairy tales for the late-diagnosed/identified - how the passions of autistic people are often rejected and exiled, inspired by Paolo Uccello's St. George and the Dragon
There once lived a princess who loved a dragon.
She had raised it from an egg she found in the cave beyond the castle walls—a cave whose arching entrance matched exactly the curve of the dragon’s spine, the sweep of its tail, the dome of its skull. The princess would sit for hours tracing the patterns of its scales, counting them, learning the contours of its body. She knew every ridge and hollow. She fed it by hand and slept curled against its warmth. The half-light darkness of the cave, with its muted sounds and a thousand blankets was a nest of peace and joy.
“It’s my home,” she told anyone who asked, though few did. “The dragon and the cave—they are the same thing. They are where I belong.”
The kingdom did not understand. Dragons were monsters in their stories, dangers to be slain. They saw the princess’s devotion as a sickness, a spell, an unnatural obsession.
“She wastes her time with that creature,” they whispered. “She should be thinking of marriage, of courtly gatherings, of normal things.”
But the princess only smiled her careful smile and returned to her cave, where the dragon’s breathing echoed like the sea and she needed to explain nothing.
One day, a knight arrived. He was golden and certain, as knights often are. He had heard of the dragon and came to free the princess from what everyone assumed was her captivity.
“Stand aside,” he told her, lowering his lance. “I will save you.”
The princess extended one small hand—not a wave, but a protest. A gesture that said wait and stop and you don’t understand. But it was a small gesture, the kind a woman learns to make when she knows that large ones will be called hysterical or too sensitive. The kind that can be easily ignored.
The knight’s lance found its mark.
The dragon fell, and with it fell the cave—for they had always been the same thing, really. The home collapsed into rubble. The princess stood in the ruins with her hand still raised, that small hand that had not been enough.
“You are free now,” the knight declared, and everyone celebrated.
The princess said nothing. What was there to say? That they had killed the architecture of her soul? That she was not saved but hollowed? She learned to smile at feasts and sit quietly at tables and never speak of dragons again.
Years passed. The princess moved through the decades in a world that had no caves.
Then came the war.
It was a terrible war, and terrible men stole all the beautiful things and hid them away. They took paintings and jewels and locked them in salt mines deep beneath the earth, in banks behind thick walls, in castles on mountaintops. They took a particular painting—one that showed a princess and a dragon and a knight—and buried it in darkness where no one could see it. There it stayed, year after year, hidden and forgotten, its colours unseen, its story untold.
But eventually, the terrible men lost their war. And people went searching through the salt mines and the bank vaults and found the beautiful things again. They brought them back into the light.
One winter day, the princess travelled to see the painting that bore her story. She stood before it in the quiet gallery. There she was, hand extended. There was her dragon. There was the cave that matched its shape.
“I had forgotten,” she whispered, and something cracked open in her chest—not her heart breaking, but her heart remembering.
She had spent so many years without her cave. So many years pretending that she had lost touch somehow with aspects of her soul that needed her. She had hidden her dragon-love in the salt mines of her own mind, locked it in the bank vault of silence, because the world had no place for such things.
But here it was. Here it had always been. The painting had survived its burial. The truth had survived its hiding.
The princess reached out and traced the air before the canvas—the curve of the dragon’s spine, the arch of the cave’s entrance. The warm blanket comforts of home.
She wondered if dragons still existed, if caves could still be found. And something shifted, a realisation that perhaps, she could stop pretending they had never mattered. She could visit this painting. She could remember without shame. She could finally say aloud: That dragon was not a monster. That cave was not a prison. They were my joy, and it was not wrong to love them.
And perhaps, she thought, there were other princesses now who kept dragons in caves. Perhaps they too had their hands raised in small protests. Perhaps if she spoke, if she named what had been taken, some of them might learn to protest louder. Might save their caves before the knights arrived.
It was late, yes. But even late recognition casts light backward. Even things buried in salt mines can be brought back into the world.
The old princess left the gallery as snow began to fall. She did not have her dragon anymore. But she had stopped pretending she had never loved it.
And that, she discovered, was its own kind of homecoming.
The painting’s journey
During World War II, the Nazis seized this painting from the Lanckoroński residence on Jacquingasse in Vienna and hid it in the Alt Aussee salt mines or Immendorf Castle, intending it for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz. American forces later retrieved it and brought it to Munich’s Collecting Point. It spent time at Hohenems Castle before being stored in a Zurich bank vault from 1946 to 1959. (Info sourced from National Gallery, London).
The Uccello painting’s journey through salt mines and bank vaults mirrors the fate of thousands of artworks stolen during the Nazi era. This particular work was taken from the Polish Lanckoroński collection, but it was part of a vast campaign of looting that devastated collections across Europe, particularly those belonging to Jewish families. This painting came back into the light. Countless others did not, and countless collectors—especially Jewish families—never survived to reclaim what was theirs.
Behind each looted artwork was a person, a family, a home unmade. I pay tribute to both what was returned and what could never return.
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