Downscaled

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Everyone, especially Bertha "Bertie" Winters, agreed that it was all former Mayor Greene's fault. While Bertie did owe her very nice cottage to the Stone Valley Retirement Community, she laid the blame for having to replace the thatch roof - three times so far - squarely on the Mayor's doorstep. Some argued that the idea of getting a tax break for the struggling town for agreeing to host a "community for those over sixty years old" and not checking the fine print was an understandable mistake, but Bertie wasn't having it. What kind of ninny didn't read the fine print? She had no less than four magnifying glasses herself.

"Fine print. A fine how-do-you-do, if you ask me." Bertie levered herself from her rocking chair and plucked a knitting needle from her basket. She would not pay to replace the roof again. "Act of the gods, my padded posterior!"

"Oh-ow-oh-oh-oh!"

"Retch!" Bertie flung open her front door and brandished her knitting needle toward the cave behind her home.

"Not now Bertie! I don't feel well!" a voice boomed from the cave. "And it's Tsurech!"

"I'll give you a 'Sir Retch'! If you ate another deer I'll knight you myself! I'll stuff this so far up your gassy cloaca your eggs' eggs will crack! Do not point your foul rear toward my house again!" Bertie stomped her old garden boots onto her feet hard enough to shake the boards of her porch.

"They're tender! My old teeth can't take the sheep anymore, Bertie. I swear they have steel wool anymore." An explosion rocked the cliff face, dislodging several fist-sized rocks. The flames, at least remained almost entirely within the cave, though the same couldn't be said of the stench.

Bertie's sense of smell had been burned out long ago by her dearly departed husband's similar appetite for delicious but gas-inducing foods, but she had as tight a grip on her purse strings as she'd ever had. Well, on the chests of coins behind the pickled beets in her root cellar at any rate. "You keep eating deer and your hind end will fly again before your stone stubborn useless wings ever do!"

A faded red-orange scaled face emerged from the cave, soulful eyes accusing. "That was a low blow, Bertha Winters. Bad show, bad show."

Bertie crossed her arms over a sagging bosom in a faded cotton housecoat and tapped her hobnailed boot. "Don't you give me that! Eat a cow, eat a pig. Deer disagree with you and you know it."

Tsurech's snout wrinkled wistfully, displaying mismatched and broken teeth. "I'd eat goat. They're lovely. But Farmer Johanson stopped carrying them nearly a year ago."

"You ate them all, you glutton."

"I did not. That was obviously raiders! Cattle rustlers!" The glance Tsurech slid her way was met with stony disbelief. "Fine. It was probably a dragon. But, as you so kindly pointed out, I can't fly. Couldn't have been me."

"If you can sneak up on a deer, you can sneak up on a goat."

Tsurech huffed, blowing Bertie's hair back with hot, ashy breath. "If you must know, I didn't hunt the deer. Are you happy? I can't even hunt anymore. Have pity on an old dragon you belligerent harpy!"

"I'm a witch, or are you going blind too? You ate a deer you found dead? Are you trying to catch a disease you damned fool dragon?"

"And another word or two that rhyme with it! No, it was left for me. I don't go out in the forest looking for carcasses. What do you take me for?"

Bertie's overgrown white eyebrows rose. "Someone left a deer on your cave-step? And you ate it?"

Tsurech clacked ungroomed talons rhythmically on said cave-step. "No, it was pinned to the lintel with a lance. That new Meals on Steel program, I think. Damned fine of them to deliver something nice to a poor, laid-up dragon, down on his luck, a bachelor unable to hunt."

Bertie closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Did you sign up for Meals on Steel? Of course not. Beef-witted imbecile."

"See here, harridan, there are fine people out there in the world who care about others!"

"There are also people out there who aren't above killing a dragon too old and stupid to check for poison!" Bertie shook her half-forgotten knitting needle under her neighbor's nose. "Or did you forget that your hoard legally belongs to whoever kills you, however they manage it?"

The dragon's jaw dropped open, then snapped closed with a crunch and a pained whimper as another tooth cracked. "You think I'm being poisoned?" he whispered as well as any sixty-eight-foot creature could.

"You tell me. How often are dragons your age as sick as you are?"