[Abandoned] The Dragon That Is Most Certainly Not a Prince

In Which He Has More Realizations

I sit on the ledge of the cave. I've already checked and double checked and triple checked that something hadn't already claimed it for itself. The wind howls around me, and I look back over my shoulder at the glimmering in the distance, the sun reflecting off the huge stained glass windows of my home. Well, my old home.

Something that Gwendolyn said still sticks in my mind, even though it's been a few weeks since I left. Something about me being noble and saving princesses from kidnapping dragons, and about me being kind. Maybe it's the way she said it, so hurriedly tacked onto the end of her previous words accompanied by a worried look, that makes me uneasy every time I look down at my claws. The witch could have cursed me to become a dragon in more than body. I'm worried, now, that maybe I'll actually end up stealing princesses and keeping them for myself until a knight swings around to kill me. That maybe I would end up killing knights for doing something I always thought I'd do to find my own wife.

But now my wife has probably been sent back to her own kingdom, and she isn't even my wife. My parents probably have knights searching the surrounding lands for me, searching high and low, but not high enough. I know that this high up it gets too hard for humans and horses to come searching for me. With my dragon lungs, it isn't all that hard to breathe and live up here. I just have to swoop down to the forests below once in a while to find something to kill and eat.

The stories of villages terrorized by a dragon that scares away all their livestock and the wildlife from the woods, leaving them to only farm and hoard their chickens, echo through my head every time I go out to hunt. There's a small village that I hadn't known existed at the bottom of my mountain (when did I start calling it my mountain?) and I stay as far away from it as I can. Sometimes I'll fly around to the other side so that I don' t hunt in the same place for too long, so that the animals come back and I don't have to chase them closer to the village and, consequently, away from the village.

But I know I can't hide here forever. Padding back into the deeper recesses of my cave, I curl up in the furthest corners and curl up as tight as I can. If I lay like this, I look just like a rock, and anyone that chances to come into the cave while I'm sleeping won't find me like this. The scorch marks around the cave entrance remind me why I have to secret myself away while I sleep.

The sun is cold, in the mountains, this high. It isn't very warm, and I remember how warm it was in the courtyard, my first two days as a dragon. I want to fly lower, to bask in the warmth instead of the snow, but I don't trust myself to remain hidden. Instead, I climb up the peak of the mountain and perch in the snow, feeling the sun beat down on my scales but not soak in like it used to. So I climb back down to my cave. I've done the same thing every day since I found this cave, and it hasn't changed. Today is a hunting day, though.

Sitting in the dark forest is much easier than crouching in the snow and hoping for some warmth. It still isn't exactly warm this far up the mountainside, but it's much better than being up to my wing-joints in the white powder. Today, there's a group of deer by the lake fed from melted mountain snow. I can't hear or smell any humans, but that doesn't really mean much; I haven't really had time to categorize smells, like dragons that have probably had a lifetime to do it. Some smells are vaguely human, but that's just because I associate them with my human life, and it's hard to differentiate them.

Two deer dead, one a buck and the other a doe, I settle down by the lake to eat. The other deer had run off toward the village, but I'm not worried about that right now. I had taken the thinnest deer, the ones that looked the least likely to survive the coming winter. Why make them wait for certain death when I can just snap them up now, saving them from a horrid death and me from being hungry for another couple of days.

I'm licking the blood from around my jaws when a gasp catches my ears. What's a human doing up this far? Turning quickly enough to almost make the world spin around me, I crouch above the bones of my meal, and take a step back into the freezing lake water, wings half-spread for flight. Scanning the trees around me doesn't reveal anything, but baring my teeth while doing so causes a bush to shiver. Without waiting for further confirmation of my being seen, I take to the sky and retreat back up to my cave.