The dragon's scales are its armour, its beauty, and — in one strange witness — its writing. When a white horse is transformed into a dragon in a compilation of Chinese myth published in 1922, the change is certified partly by its skin: it rises "a four-footed dragon", the served text says, "with horns, scales", claws, "and wings complete". The scale is proof the beast is finished. Elsewhere in the same collection the scaled hide is worn like a garment of office: Yü Shih, the "Master of Rain", stands on a cloud pouring water on the earth, "clad in yellow scale-armour" — the dragon-stuff has become the uniform of a weather-god, plate that both shields and signifies.

The most unexpected witness on this shelf turns each scale into a word. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, the philosophical fable Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) composed between 1883 and 1885, given here in a 1909 English rendering, the human spirit must do battle with a great dragon that lies across its path sparkling with gold — "a scale-covered" beast whose every plate is a commandment, for "on every scale glittereth golden" the demand that one shall obey. "The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales", the beast boasts, claiming every worth already created is inscribed upon its own hide. Here the scale is neither shield nor mere finish but a surface for law: to face the dragon is to read the accumulated commandments of the past, plate by plate, and refuse them. Whether it is the sign a transformation has completed, the armour of a rain-god, or a ledger of inherited values, the scale is the dragon made legible. Thompson filed the scales of the dragon as their own recorded trait, anchored on a Chinese authority.

If every scale can be stamped with a word, is a dragon's hide a defence, or a text the hero is meant to overturn?