The dragon (Persian azhdah?) is among the most defiantly non-anthropomorphic of monsters. Unlike giants, ghouls, or shape-shifting wizards, it does not readily evoke the human in its form or behavior. An ultimate alterity, it exists primarily to be encountered and defeated by the chivalric male hero (such as Fereydun, Rostam, or Bahram Gur), whose victory reaffirms the values of truth and civilization. Most scholarly work on Persian dragons, indebted to broad comparative models of Indo-European mythology, continues to assert this fundamental dichotomy of the chaos serpent and the culture hero. Yet close readings of medieval Persian texts challenge the stark division between reptilian beasts and their conquerors. Similes and metaphors constantly align the murderous work of war with the depredations of snake-like monsters. The word azhdah? itself is closely related to the hybrid figure of Zahh?k, whose body and exploits exist along an uneasy border between the human and the draconic. Fereydun assumes the shape of a dragon to test his sons’ fitness to rule; Rostam, clad in a sea-monster’s skin, fights a dragon fully capable of thought and speech. In the Bahmann?ma, a sexually rapacious dragon menaces a feudal princess, while the monstrous central figure of the epic is himself eventually devoured by a justice-serving dragon. In each of these cases, the supposedly clear delineations of human and monster are shattered by texts less interested in repeating ancient myths than in interrogating vital questions of power and nature. At the same time, the azhdah? is an almost purely historical monster. Unlike other beasts, it can no longer be encountered in Ir?n-zamin. By relegating the dragon to the past – or, occasionally, a distant east suffused with anteriority – epic narratives reframe the relationship between ancient and contemporary experience. Denied access to the present, the dragon is left to operate on the margins of history. At the same time, through its deep imbrication with origin stories, heroic genealogies, and language itself, the azhdah? asserts a haunting presence that far outlasts its local extinctions. Drawing on the posthuman monster theory of critics such as Patricia MacCormack as well as Mark Fisher’s explorations of weirdness, eeriness, and horror, this paper seeks to reconsider the azhdah? as a crucial site of tension between human, nonhuman, past, and present.