The rain drummed on the enormous skeletal hulk, creating short-lived puddles in the indentations of the horned skull and sending rivulets cascading down the porous ribs.
Darus stood inside the roomy, empty skull, looking at the trembling saplings that had grown through and around the empty dragon husks. The raindrops made the shiny leaves come alive. A fine wet mist enveloped the whole dragons graveyard, making the bones further than twenty yards away fade in and out.
Dragons had been coming to die here for centuries.
Darus pulled thoughtfully at his pipe and looked at nothing, waiting for the rain to pass. An outside observer could have seen the strange sight of smoke rising from the empty eye sockets of a dead dragon.
No magic that wizards could use was left in the bones or scales or, with luck, dried bits of decomposing organs of dragons, but in spite of this the market for dragon bone was always strong. People used this stuff to ward off the evil eye, to ensure a good birth, a healthy baby, curing all sorts of maladies. And virility for older men, especially that.
This was the smoking man’s trade – finding sites where dragons went to die and selling the directions to healer guilds. And this find was good. A year and a half of traveling it had taken him to locate it, but he could sell the location for enough gold to spend the next decade in total luxury.
Darus smiled. He had learned with time, that money tended to leak from his hands at incredible speeds.
His hand gripped his sword hilt even before his brain had reacted to the sound. To the titanic groan that echoed throughout the ravine.
“Oh no,” whispered Darus quickly put out his pipe, hoping the smoke hadn’t been yet detected. The ground trembled as the dying leviathan stumbled to his dying place. Darus heard the cracking of splintered trees and then saw the huge shape.
The stuff of legends. No one had ever seen a dragon come to die.
At least seventy feet from muzzle to the tail tip, the gigantic lizard moaned again and fell on the bones of an ancestor, not more than twenty yards from where Darus cringed.
The dragon’s wings lifted feebly once and then crashed down again, sending bone debris flying into the moist air. Darus didn’t dare breath.
The dragon was still.
Darus climbed out of the left eye socket of the skull that sheltered him from the rain and cautiously approached the dead titan.
This was a fantastic opportunity. If he could cut out the heart, the liver, the spleen, if he could keep them from rotting – maybe dry them out – why, he would have the fortune of a king!
Darus rekindled his pipe, sheltering the tiny flame from the rain with a cupped hand. Then the pipe slipped out of his hands and his knees buckled. The belly of the dead dragon was bulging.
“What?” said Darus soundlessly, retreating, stumbling over splintered bones of long dead dragons. Was he witnessing a post death birth? No – everyone knew that dragons laid eggs, they didn’t give live birth like warm-blooded animals.
The dragon’s stomach burst open in a shower of red, and out came the thing. It was two heads taller than Darus, broader in the shoulders, and it was covered in gore, but it was obvious that it wasn’t human. Covered with stone-like skin, lacking a nose, or ears, this creature ignored Darus while it picked shreds of dragon from itself and threw them on the bloody grass.
“Who are you?” asked Darus, once he decided to wait a bit more before running away.
“What do you care?” croaked the gravely voice in return. Then the troll-like creature looked at the man and showed its sharp teeth. “Huraa, I am Huraa. My ship was downed by one of these overgrown lizards.”
“Your ship?” repeated Darus. There were no seas for hundreds of miles in either direction. “A river ship?”
“A sky ship” said Huraa. “You could say I come from the stars.”
Darus shook his head and took another step back. “The stars? But… are you an angel then?”
Huraa spat, tore off a tuft of grass and proceeded to scrub his left arm with it. “Angel,” he said, “do I look like an angel?”
