Treasure. When humans talked about dragons, that word was always on the tip of their tongue. The legends spoke of mounds of gold and gemstones gleaming next to magic-made lava pools hidden deep in mountainous caves. They spoke of scorched fields and toppled towers, skies doused crimson with fiery dragon breath. Entire royal treasuries paled in the shadow of a fraction of a dragon’s hoard. Humans used their pitiful arms to gesture the width of a dragon’s shadow, from that part of the forest all the way to that river.

  “No way! Nothing can possibly be that big, can it?” said a child.

  “Oh, but they are. Mountains are that big, so why can’t dragons be? Both are forces of nature.”

  The child tilted their head. “But we beat the dragons.”

  “Yeah! We killed them all!” Another child chimed in. “They can’t be that strong then, right? Or… humans are just amazing! I want to fight a dragon too.”

  “Well, none of you are mages, much less archmages, and even if you were, you’d have to find some good teammates. No one’s ever taken on a dragon alone and lived.”

  Sometimes, the legends were milder and filled with as many mundanities as human ones.

  “Beyond angry, the Dragon King said to his Queen—well, I suppose they’re no longer together, pardon me—said to the Queen and her lover: **May your gold rot before your bones. May you never be claimed by the stars!”

  “This whole thing is stupid and sappy. Who wants to be in love? Yeughck!*”

  "Hmph, wait a few more winters, when you’re all fine, love-hungry lads, and we’ll see who’s calling it sappy then.”

  What was usually not included in these stories were the practicalities of things, the facts. For example, a dragon could only grow to the size of a mountain after forty to fifty millennia—which, in draconic history, only happened six times. Also, dragons never had a royal hierarchy due to their autonomous and prideful nature, and unlike some of their mundane, lizardous counterparts, they also weren’t beholden to a single mate and freely did whatever they wanted.

  Most importantly, not every dragon was rich. Tales of their affluence had been greatly exaggerated. Their greed, on the other hand, had not. Ironically, they shared their most overwhelming trait with humans. Everyone dreamt of having treasure.

  Well, almost everyone. As the rest of the orphans pestered the semi-drunk adventurer for more draconic stories, the boy tuned out the noise, wrapped his arms around himself to protect from the cool hillside breeze, and dreamed about reality. The adults in his life kept saying dragons died out centuries ago. But how did they know?

  That wouldn’t do, the boy decided. If the adults wouldn’t give him an answer he liked, he’d just have to find one himself. Dragons lived in caves, didn’t they? Luckily, his village was surrounded by mountains. Caves were everywhere. There would surely be a dragon sleeping in one of them who had been forgotten by the world.

  ***

  Izkarius was a modest dragon (by draconic standards) with a modest dragon treasure hoard (by his own standards). The total value of his hoard was about enough to buy every mansion in the average human town twice, certainly far from enough to rival even a human king, much less crash the world economy.

  It was in this modest pile of treasure that Izkarius’s eyes snapped open. There was an intruder in his lair.

  Izkarius shifted, his wings cozily covered by the perfect spread of gold coins. Spellwork covered the entire lair around him, manifesting a ritual centuries in the making to its completion. It was all warm and fuzzy, and his own magic was promising him sweet dreams, and Izkarius felt like simply falling back into—No! The intruder! He would tolerate no thieves.

  The dragon raised his head and sniffed the air once, then again in confusion. Yep, just one human. That was very, very strange. And more peculiarly, this human smelled fresh. Not in a "living and blood pumping" kind of fresh but more of a "barely a fetus" type of fresh. Fresh to life. A child.

  Trying to rob him? Izkarius scoffed, sending a few clawful of gems tumbling with his breath. The whelp wouldn't even make it past the first layer of defenses before being ground down into bloody dust.

  Izkarius frowned. Surely, something so harmless wouldn’t have tingled his instincts to the point of waking him up from a particularly nice dream? Perhaps he would check it out, just to make waking up somewhat entertaining. Scaring the wits out of another dumb human before having a mid-century snack felt like just the remedy to his drowsiness. So, like any creature acting in their best self interest, the dragon rose, shook off the lingering bits of gold from his scales, and flew up to the entrance of his lair.

  In the very outermost cavern, barely sheltered from the snowstorm, a human boy with twig-like limbs and a semi-disproportionately large head covered in messy brown hair crouched next to the cave wall. Hidden in the darkness, several body lengths away, Izkarius narrowed his eyes and observed.

  The boy looked uneasily into the cave and muttered something. Due to the innate superiority and glory of a dragon, Izkarius's senses were very sharp, so he caught every word.

  "Anyone home?! Hm, I was sure this time would be it. At least this cave seems rather dry…”

  Though the boy had already entered the premises of Izkarius’s lair, he seemed to have no intention to proceed further inward. Maybe this wasn’t a thief break-in after all. Izkarius held off on his urge to speak and continued observing.

  The boy came to a decision. He turned to the wall, found the softest patch of frozen dirt, and started digging. Izkarius winced. The boy used a makeshift shovel—a very big stick. Even an inchworm would make more progress. The boy shifted and something in his jacket pocket peeked out. Something shiny. Izkarius’s treasure senses tingled.

  The dragon drew back and, rather than greeting the boy with a tremendous roar as originally planned, decided on a low grumble instead. “What do you think you’re doing to my lair? Desecrating it?”

  There. That should be nice enough for diplomacy, right?

  Izkarius caught every muscle twitch as the boy’s mouth contracted bit by bit and then let loose the most high-pitched sound the dragon had heard in centuries.

  “AIEEEAHHH!!!” The boy jumped a full body length into the air and swiveled his head towards the darkness, eyes wider than Thaunlasian pearls. Izkarius internally chuckled, expecting the boy to run off screaming even more.

  But the boy didn’t run. After getting over the initial shock, he seemed... excited? "D-Dragon? Dragon! Lord Dragon! Er, Madam? Mister… Dragon? Was that you?

  Before Izkarius could even decide how to respond to that, the boy kept going.

  "Um, nice to meet you! I heard dragons like to collect treasure. Treasure and tributes! I have one for you!" Reaching into his coat pocket, the boy took out an object.

  Izkarius scrutinized it, then decided it was utter garbage. It was a wooden carving of a human bust, crude and brooding with small splinters around its edges. It was about the size of a human fist, and the wind told Izkarius that it must have been even lighter than that. The dragon supposed the artisanship had some worth, but not enough to be counted as a treasure among his glorious hoard.

  “That’s not treasure,” the dragon growled.

  “It is,” the boy refuted, holding up his statue to let its cheap polish glint better in the fading daylight. It was dark within the cave and the boy couldn’t see anything but a hulking mass deeper in, but he imagined the dragon must have an expression similar to the general store owner whenever the boy tried to pawn something to him.

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  Izkarius eyed the lump of wood suspiciously. He was not fooled—It was just a cheap trinket. Steam puffed from his nostrils. “You would claim to know more about treasure than I, a dragon?”

  “It’s a treasure because it’s my treasure. I made it.”

  “But you are trying to present it to me as tribute, and I do not accept trash.”

  “It’s not trash!”

  The two had a one-sided staring contest as Izkarius debated whether or not to eat the boy and the boy whether or not to say his last prayers.

  “Well, maybe it’s a bit crude around the edges, but it’s still worth something!” the boy said, trying again.

  “Get out of here.” Izkarius snorted and turned back into his cave. Something about the whelp made him smell unsavory. And besides, it was far too skinny to be eaten for the effort it would cost, and Izkarius wanted to return to his slumber.

  Boink!

  Something hard and light bounced on the dirt next to his feet. The wooden sculpture. By the time Izkarius could swivel his head and snarl a warning, the human whelp had already fled. The dragon could feel his excitement and fear fading into the woods and snow.

  He gingerly pinched the wood sculpture between two claws and raised it up to eye level. The urge to crush the damn thing and watch its splinters rain on the ground was strong. The boy was an idiot. Who would throw their treasure towards a dragon, the embodiment of destruction?

  The dragon considered it for a good while before he felt sleep pulling at him. He crawled back into the main cavern of his lair and tossed the wooden bust into his hoard, expecting it to get lost in the piles. Oh well. It felt somewhat good to receive a tribute after all these centuries. If one overlooked the somewhat sacrilegious details of the whole encounter, it was almost like the good old days.

  ***

  The dragon spent a week fitfully drifting between dreams and wakefulness, unable to fully return to his hibernation. Muffled visions of vast caverns and brilliant purple scales, close enough to see and smell but always too far to hear or touch, flitted through his mind. Finally, his subconscious decided on a memory to dream about. Good dreams were those of vast plains filled with grazing sheep and forested hills. Bad dreams were always those of the Song.

  Izkarius’s first memory was of music. Before gazing upon his own hatchmate or mother, it had been the Song that flew over the mountains and into the rocky crevices which first touched Izkarius. When the Song came, the familiar, enormous presences hovering around his egg had left. But when the Song faded, those presences never returned. Days later, when Izkarius gnawed through his egg, he was greeted with a bed of cooled lava, an immense cavern of gold, and marching torches—his first rays of light—reflecting off the distant rock face.

  “Dragon! Dragon!” Someone was calling him from someplace better, summoning him.

  Izkarius awakened, unsure of whether to feel gratitude that he had been pulled out of the dream or annoyance because of the voice echoing in his lair. The human whelp was back.

  ***

  The tribute this time was another wood carving, significantly more detailed than the previous. It was some kind of deformed, curly-haired wolf, with floppy ears and a shaggy tail. A dog breed, perhaps, though Izkarius did not remember such a breed existing a thousand years before. The fact that the curls were clearly curls was mildly impressive to Izkarius. For a human so young, the whelp certainly had some skill.

  Izkarius magically plucked the carving from the boy’s outstretched hand.

  “Is it an acceptable tribute, O Great Dragon?”

  “Pitiful, but I suppose for a mortal, it is good enough. You may go.”

  The boy hesitated a bit, swallowed, then called into the darkness one more time. "Uh, are you really a dragon?"

  His pride wounded, Izkarius blew some steam from his nose, took a deep breath, then let out a guttural roar.

  The boy saw flames suddenly erupt deep inside the cave, then the wave of sound slammed into his ears and he dropped to the ground. He did not move. The dragon squinted, stretched his mighty wings, and flew to the cave entrance. He nudged the boy with his nose. He was fully unconscious. Worse still, the wind was picking up, and a few flakes of snow landed on the boy’s head. The cold was barely a tickle for Izkarius, but the boy’s lips were already growing blue.

  “Ah fuck,” the dragon said gloriously.

  ***

  The boy woke up warm, which was why he knew something was wrong. In Elmswood Village, no matter the season, you always woke up cold unless you were rich enough to afford servants who could keep a fire going all night long. He was forgetting something. Something very important. But the remnants of slumber tempted the boy still, and he snuggled deeper into the warmth around him, mumbling incoherently. He would ignore that sense of danger a while longer if it meant sleeping in the coziest—even if it wasn’t the softest—bed of his life some more.

  An incredibly audible slurp cut through the haze of his mind. Someone was salivating near him and the boy slapped the noise away. A sharp pain sent his hand jolting back on reflex and he opened his eyes with a yelp.

  A bona fide dragon with its mouth hanging open and salivating welcomingly across rows of razor-sharp teeth perched right over the boy. The dragon was so close, it could've swallowed the boy whole before he could blink.

  The boy spent a couple of heartbeats digesting the situation before equal amounts of terror and awe took over and he blurted, “You are a real dragon!”

  “And you are a real fool,” the dragon rumbled, and drew back, closing its mouth. “Or you just don’t want to live anymore.”

  The dragon still towered high above the boy, staring down at him through half-lidded eyes. Its pupils were bright green, like young spring shoots, vibrant and wondrous even in the dim cave light. The rest of the beast’s enormous body was covered in glimmering golden scales so sleek and polished they looked almost translucent. But the boy’s gaze was drawn most to the black horns on its head, which didn’t spiral like the legends; they seemed to extend like tree branches. The boy squinted before it dawned on him—that sense of familiarity. The horns were, strangely, shaped like a deer’s antlers, only luminescent and far more majestic.

  The boy realized he had been gaping too long at the dragon, and hurriedly pushed himself onto his knees. “Hello, great dragon! I apologize for my insolence, and I thank you for your generosity!”

  "You were taking a long time to wake up,” the dragon said, the annoyance in its tone tangible enough to send any smarter human fleeing. “Any longer and I might've eaten you out of boredom. Not that you would’ve made a good meal though, half frozen as you are."

  The boy gulped. “I thank you for your… self-restraint?”

  Snorting, the dragon rose up until he was sitting on his haunches, much like a dog would if they were taller than 5 houses combined. Oh, the dragon was lying down earlier? The boy suddenly realized just how small he was, and he looked around.

  If the dragon had blinded him to the treasure before, the treasure blinded the boy to the dragon now. All around him, beneath his butt, his fingers, and piled way higher above his head, were gold, silver, and other artifacts or gemstones of seemingly incalculable wealth. They dazzled, glowing with magic of their own, and the boy snapped out of his trance just in time to swallow the saliva dribbling at his lip.

  “Greedy, human?”

  “N-No! I wouldn’t dare! Your treasure hoard is truly magnificent, O Lord Dragon!” The boy quickly waved his hands and focused back on the predator of all predators still staring down at him. He bit his lip. “Um, Lord Dragon, would you happen to know how long I was… asleep for?” The boy wisely refrained from mentioning who put him to “sleep” in the first place.

  “A day.”

  “A day?!”

  “Probably less.”

  The boy paled and scrambled to his feet, all awe forgotten. He was so dead.

  “I have to return to my village! Matron R—I have people waiting for me.”

  “You are very bold, has anyone ever told you so?”

  The boy shifted on his feet. “Sometimes?”

  “Does anyone else know of my presence here?”

  “No. I wasn’t sure if you were truly a dragon last time, so I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing.”

  “Keep it that way, for your sake.”

  The boy nodded vigorously. “I swear on my soul! May the gods smite me with golden lightning if I break my vow!”

  The dragon snorted, though to the boy it was more of a terrifying growl. “I doubt the gods have the energy to spend golden lightning on you.”

  “So… does that mean you’ll let me go?”

  The dragon stared at him for a few more seconds, and the boy had the distinct, impending sense that he might become dinner. Then the beast raised a claw and pointed upwards. “The exit to my lair is right there. You’ll have to do a bit of climbing, perhaps.”

  The boy turned. A long cavern stretched in the distance, and the dragon was right—he would indeed need to scale a few piles of gold to get up to the ledge.

  “Thank you for your generosity, Lord Dragon! I will make sure to return with an even greater tribute soon!” Without seeing the dragon’s reaction, the boy rushed away. He slipped and slid around as he climbed, because coins weren’t exactly solid footholds. He didn’t dare take a single one because the dragon’s gaze bore into his back the entire way. And maybe it was just his imagination, but the dragon seemed rather amused by the boy’s clumsy showing.

  The boy reached the ledge and hauled himself up, relieved that he could see a faint hint of sunlight around the bend. He turned back to the dragon and bowed once more.

  “Um, may I have your name, Great Dragon?” He asked, half-shouting.

  A pause. Even from much higher up, the dragon coiled in the pile of treasure below still had the presence of the sky. “You may call me Izkarius.”

  “Thank you, Lord Izkarius!” The boy waited for the dragon to reciprocate, as per common courtesy, then remembered that he was talking to a dragon, who was anything but common and most likely uncourteous.

  Nevertheless, the boy rode the high, feeling the warmth of gold still deep in his bones, and he sang, “I’m Finnian Summer! But you can just call me Fin!”

  “Get out.”

  “Yes, Lord Dragon!”

  And so, the fool survived his second encounter with the dragon.