Guests for Dinner (opening)
No one had visited the cave for years. Dust had collected in its entrance, gathering in the footprints of some foolhardy knight of ages past, going in, but never coming out again. He had been fun for awhile; went right to the piles of treasure and started digging through them, leaving his sword right there on the floor where anybody could just pick it up or step on it or kick it into the corner. So wasn’t it his own fault if he had suddenly found himself captive and roasted for supper? Of course it was. He was not going to be blamed for another person’s carelessness and lack of preparation. If he didn’t want to be eaten he should have kept a hold on his sword, maybe even tried using it.
But that had been decades ago, and in the years that collected like shells on the shore the dragon had forgotten what it had meant to have company or fresh dinner that didn’t taste of wherever it had been. Barnacles collected on the gathered chests, and the wood slowly grayed and petrified and fell out of place, spilling gold coins onto the slimy floor, where they collected an eerie, phosphorescent sheen. The dragon would poke at them from time to time, arranging them into patterns to alleviate an hour or two of boredom, but there was only so many times you could build a mound before it just got tiresome. Meanwhile, the knights came less and less, and didn’t even seem to put any effort into dragon-slaying anymore. A spear? Really? Might as well have just brought a stick, for all the good that was going to do. It was like they didn’t even want to marry princesses or be kings anymore.
Life, it thought, was not what it used to be; nowadays you didn’t get adventurous knights every few months or so wanting to liberate the kingdom or impress a princess, and razing the countryside for a tasty meal of brisket just didn’t appeal anymore. Too much work to leave the cave, anyway, now that it had just gotten everything arranged just the way it liked. All it took was one wrong swing of the tail and look; there went the priceless Ming vase it had gone through so much trouble to get from that shipwreck. No, better to sit and wait for someone to come, even if that meant hours of listening to nothing but the surf echoing off the rocks and basalt columns of the entrance, fishing and sleeping for a good five or so years at a time.
The downside to becoming a shut-in, even a comfortable and rich one, was that it never knew what was going on in the world outside or how much time had passed, the general decay of dragondom and the feudal system. It thought that perhaps a little too much time had passed, but people always came sooner or later, and the game had been going on for too many years for them to just give it up now. In the meantime, there were plenty of fish. All it needed to do was wait for someone with a little bit of fight to come along and make life interesting again. And while it waited, the memories of the people of the surrounding countryside began to decay, until the story of the dragon in the cave on the inner isles faded into shadows, so that no one remembered why they had stayed away in the first place.
Which was how Jeremy McPhee came kayaking into the dragon’s lair for a picnic.
But that had been decades ago, and in the years that collected like shells on the shore the dragon had forgotten what it had meant to have company or fresh dinner that didn’t taste of wherever it had been. Barnacles collected on the gathered chests, and the wood slowly grayed and petrified and fell out of place, spilling gold coins onto the slimy floor, where they collected an eerie, phosphorescent sheen. The dragon would poke at them from time to time, arranging them into patterns to alleviate an hour or two of boredom, but there was only so many times you could build a mound before it just got tiresome. Meanwhile, the knights came less and less, and didn’t even seem to put any effort into dragon-slaying anymore. A spear? Really? Might as well have just brought a stick, for all the good that was going to do. It was like they didn’t even want to marry princesses or be kings anymore.
Life, it thought, was not what it used to be; nowadays you didn’t get adventurous knights every few months or so wanting to liberate the kingdom or impress a princess, and razing the countryside for a tasty meal of brisket just didn’t appeal anymore. Too much work to leave the cave, anyway, now that it had just gotten everything arranged just the way it liked. All it took was one wrong swing of the tail and look; there went the priceless Ming vase it had gone through so much trouble to get from that shipwreck. No, better to sit and wait for someone to come, even if that meant hours of listening to nothing but the surf echoing off the rocks and basalt columns of the entrance, fishing and sleeping for a good five or so years at a time.
The downside to becoming a shut-in, even a comfortable and rich one, was that it never knew what was going on in the world outside or how much time had passed, the general decay of dragondom and the feudal system. It thought that perhaps a little too much time had passed, but people always came sooner or later, and the game had been going on for too many years for them to just give it up now. In the meantime, there were plenty of fish. All it needed to do was wait for someone with a little bit of fight to come along and make life interesting again. And while it waited, the memories of the people of the surrounding countryside began to decay, until the story of the dragon in the cave on the inner isles faded into shadows, so that no one remembered why they had stayed away in the first place.
Which was how Jeremy McPhee came kayaking into the dragon’s lair for a picnic.