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I know this is from the middle of whatever it belongs to, but I seem to have a double-armload of fragments and no beginning or indeed a sense of what's going on. I'm amused by it nonetheless, and it's good to have story bits to work with.
It was only a few years before he died that I finally realised that my father was a dragon.
We were having dinner at the long table, he at the head, me to his left; the expanse of space and empty chairs lit by occasional candles was something familiar and ignorable. By that point it was possible to see that his end would come within a decade; his flesh had gone from mildly wrinkled to starting to collapse in on itself, leaving him looking both gaunt and fleshy as the folds of skin deflated around him.
"How do you do it?" he asked me.
"Do what?" I said.
He gestured with his fork. "You barely seem to age at all. You have no grey, your skin is still soft." He had not aged gracefully, had been starting to look old even when I was a child, and his increasing decrepitude was hard on him.
I thought about it for a while. "I killed a dragon once."
"Did you?" He put the fork down and studied me. His eyes, though partially concealed in his failing flesh, were still sharp and dark and piercing. He kept his wits to the end. "How did you avoid getting flamed?"
"I speared it from a pit. It's traditional, after all." I laughed, a little uneasy under his gaze. "Not much of a Fafnir, though, I still don't understand the speech of birds. Back when there were dragons--"
"There were never dragons." His voice came out sharp and clipped and firm.
I stared at him.
"There were never dragons," he repeated quietly, more gently, with a wistful melancholy. "There was a dragon here, a dragon there, nested in remote places. A clutch of eggs eventually turned loose on the world to find new solitary aeries. But there were never dragons. Just a dragon here, a dragon there."
His musing ended, his eyes refocused. "Humans always had better luck hunting them than we did. I think you're the only one I've ever heard of killing one, though there have to have been others sometime in history. Humans hunted them, eventually drove them extinct. Sharp word, that, 'extinct'. It has teeth in it."
He picked up his wine and drank the last of it. "But there were never dragons." He stood, getting up the table abruptly, and plucked his staff up from where it rested against the back of the chair. I was never sure how much he needed it to lean on up until his end.
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(And I want to read more of it!)
--Irina
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