The Dragon

In Greek mythology, the dragon — or drakon — is above all a guardian. Unlike the fire-breathing Western dragon, the Greek drakon is a giant serpent, sometimes winged, endowed with infallible vigilance and divine longevity. Several origins are attributed to it: one was the adversary of Athena during the war of the Gods and the Titans; another was slain by Cadmus, king of Thebes, whose teeth sown in the earth gave birth to warriors.

But the most famous figure is Ladon — the hundred-headed dragon who guarded the golden apples in the garden of the Hesperides, at the edge of the known world.

Born of Typhon and Echidna — the two primordial monsters of Greek mythology — Ladon is a creature of absolute power and vigilance. Its sole mission: to protect the golden apples given by Gaia to Hera at her wedding with Zeus, grown in a secret garden at the far west, beyond the ocean, under the care of the Hesperid nymphs.

Descriptions vary according to the sources: some credit him with a hundred serpent heads each speaking a different language, others simply a prodigiously large body coiled around the golden apple tree. What doesn't change: Ladon never sleeps, watches eternally, and constitutes the most formidable obstacle any hero could encounter.

For his eleventh Labor, Heracles is ordered to fetch the golden apples of the Hesperides. Two paths open before him. In one version, he turns to the Titan Atlas — condemned to hold up the sky — and offers to take the world on his shoulders while Atlas goes to pick the apples. Heracles' trick to reclaim his burden is one of mythology's great ruses.

In other versions, Heracles himself confronts Ladon and slays him — using his poisoned arrows dipped in the Hydra's blood — before picking the apples. Zeus, in tribute to the faithful guardian, placed Ladon among the stars as the Dragon constellation, coiled for eternity around the celestial pole.

Shiryu of the Dragon perfectly embodies both aspects of the myth: absolute defense and devastating striking power. His shield — one of the most resistant among the Bronze cloths — directly recalls Ladon, the invulnerable guardian whose guard nothing can pierce. But Shiryu is also a formidable attacker.

His signature attack, Rozan Shō Ryū Ha — the Rising Dragon — is a column of cosmos shaped like a dragon rising toward the sky, a direct image of the circumpolar constellation that never sets, always visible, always rotating around the celestial north pole. Like Ladon who never sleeps, Shiryu never yields, even at the cost of sacrificing himself to protect his allies.

The attack/defense duality is at the heart of the character, an echo of the myth: Ladon is both the relentless guardian and, in Heracles' eyes, the ultimate obstacle to overcome.