Stryggid

The light of an early November sun drifted lazily through the trees of the grotto, casting it in shades of ochre, yellow and umber. Its crisp, cold light seemed to dance as the trees swayed in a wind that smelled of ozone and overripe apples, heralding the arrival of a storm in the next hour or so. Styrggid sighed to himself, unwinding his body from the aspen he had been resting in. The rain wasn't dangerous to him, not like it would have been if he were a few centuries younger, but that didn't mean he enjoyed being caught in it. It was time to return home.

The scales on his back ranged from a feathery sky blue to deep cobalt in color. They flexed and rippled as an orchestra of muscles and ligaments performed in unison to guide his slender form back down to the forest floor. Stryggid had been hoping his position in the aspen would give him the vantage point he needed to catch something to eat. A badger, maybe a stag or a young bear if he was lucky, but this area of the forest was bare. Over-hunted. Most places were, these days.

Stryggid made his way home with a huff, the corpses of countless leaves rustling beneath his talons. "Humans." He grumbled to himself. When he had been younger, three of four hundred years ago, game was plentiful. A dragon could have eaten well, grown fat even, on the prey that lived in just the small territory Stryggid claimed as his own. Going for weeks without a meal had been unheard of. That had all changed when the humans arrived.

They were crafty, bloodthirsty, and perhaps worst of all, fertile. One human female could produce droves of offspring in the span of just a few years, whereas it took dragons nearly a century to produce just one child. Though their life cycles were much shorter than his kind, that meant they reached maturity faster. They became a threat faster. A dragon two hundred years of age was more or less still an infant. Weak enough to be sent back to the Maker by just a few well-placed arrows or a lucky thrust of a spear; a vulnerability the humans had discovered quickly. Now, his kind were rare. Rare and old. The humans had hunted them. Not without reason, Stryggid mused, by his own estimation he was responsible for the deaths of five hundred men or more. However, in the span of a few centuries humankind's numbers had won out over all but the strongest, the fastest and the most cunning of Stryggid's cousins.

Now, their once proud race had been driven into hiding: sheltering themselves in caves, deep woods, or the abandoned dwellings of men. Stryggid himself had lived in one such place, a "castle" as it had been called in the humans' crude tongue, for nearly fifty years. It was an excellent place to hide. The humans in the surrounding area had decried the place as "haunted", a strange human concept that Stryggid did not fully understand, and had avoided it entirely. Unfortunately, the human-stench had hung about its halls like a cloud of foul-smelling smoke. After half of a century Stryggid thought he would have surely gone mad if he had to smell it any longer. Back to the woods he went. The trees didn't offer quite as much protection as stone walls and superstition, but they came close if a dragon knew what he was doing.

They didn't offer nearly enough protection from the rain, though. His lips twisted into a grimace as the first few drops of a downpour connected with his brow, redoubling his pace. He was almost home. Well, home may have been the wrong word. A small rock outcropping near a stream. It was deep enough in the woods that he rarely had to contend with curious humans (come to think of it, how many years had it been since he'd seen a human?) and a few days of digging had produced a serviceable burrow beneath it: more than enough protection from the elements for a dragon of his size. His mind drifted to the familiar contours of his burrow; molded by years of use into the perfect shape for cradling his form. He could almost hear the soft drumming of the rain droplets on the stone that served as the roof of his dwelling. He could think about his empty stomach another time: what a nap he would have! He could almost smell the crisp November wind, the dead leaves, the human-stench...

Wait.

Immediately Stryggid dropped, flattening himself to the ground and using his tail to cover himself in dirt and dead leaves. His eyes were wide with fear, feverishly scanning the trees around him for any sign, any hint of human presence. What a fool he had been! Lazy, complacent fool! Not covering his tracks, not disguising the carcasses of his hunts. He had thought his dwelling had been deep enough into the woods, far enough from human interest that it wouldn't matter. He should have known time would prove him wrong. His ears purposefully scanned the woods around him. There was a muskrat snoring in its burrow a little less than a hundred yards to the east, a small family of wild dogs was eating together some distance to the south, various birds flitted about in the trees above him, but no humans. Not that he could hear, anyway. Stryggid was in the process of convincing himself he had imagined it when his ears picked up something new: a high, keening mewl coming from the direction of his burrow. His brow furrowed with confusion: it sounded almost like a fox pup, but the resonance of it was wrong. The cries were too high and long for it to be a bear cub and lacked the rhythm of a wolf cub's pleas for its mother's aid. In all his years, he had never heard anything quite like it. This was truly disturbing.

Summoning as much bravery as he could, Stryggid rose from his hiding place and made his way towards the source of the noise. He drew the light of fire into his belly, ready to immolate whatever had the gall to sneak into his burrow. Images of his victory over the strange invading human creature filled his mind, spurring him towards his home until he was practically sprinting. Smoke trailing from his nostrils like a pair of grey snakes in the wind behind him, a whisper of the cleansing fire that would expunge the human filth that had dared to take up residence in his home. His front feet found purchase on the lip of his burrow, and he raised his head in a regal "S" curve as he glared into the dark of his home. He was Stryggid, son of Yrgzul, slayer of men and father of nightmares. No puny man was going to oust him from his burrow.

However, it was not a man that greeted Stryggid's eyes once they had adjusted to the dark of his hovel. It was much too small for that. It was tiny, with a bird's nest of dark hair crowning its head. Two tiny gray eyes, full of tears, gazed back at Stryggid with a kind of dumbstruck awe. It was wrapped in some brightly colored cloth. "Clothing", he had heard it called, and clutched a small effigy of a sheep in its left paw. The being was only silent for a moment, however, and soon began its squalling anew. From the vast depths of his memory, Stryggid summoned his knowledge of the human language; willing his vocal cords to move in the unnatural vibrations of their speech. "Stop that." He growled. "Stop that noise immediately." It did not stop. Stryggid wondered if the speech of the humans had changed too much in the time since he had last spoken it, or indeed if the creature was human at all. It was far smaller than any of the ones he had seen. Not even big enough for a mouthful, really. He tried again. "Can you understand my words?" This seemed to have an effect. The creature's wailing quieted somewhat, and it nodded. This was encouraging. "What are you? What is your name, creature?" Haltingly, it answered. "M-M-Matthias... I'm a boy. Please don't eat me."

"You are too small for that to be worthwhile." The dragon grumbled. "What are you doing in my burrow? How did you come to be here?"

"I ran away from home," Matthias's voice was still quavering, threatening to break into new sobs at any time, "Mama wouldn't let me go to the market on my own, she s-said I was too little. I wanted to go anyway, but I g-got lost and I walked for so long and, and then fell down this hole! Now I can't get out! I can't climb up!" Matthias's crying began anew. Internally, Stryggid decided he had never heard anything quite so annoying. "Creature!" Stryggid shouted, frightening Matthias into silence, "If you promise to stop making that sound, I will aid you in leaving my burrow and returning to your...mama. Are these terms agreeable to you?" A look of bewilderment settled upon Matthias' features. "What's an agreeable term?"

Stryggid groaned. "It means 'does that please you?'" Matthias considered this for a moment, then nodded. "Then keep still. I'm coming down there to get you."