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Now that you and your valuables are safely hidden away, at risk from neither the elements nor treasure hunters, and the reminders of the affairs of two-legs are out of sight, you suddenly realise how tired you are. There is a weariness in your limbs and your eyelids have a weight to them, such that you blink sluggishly and struggle to open them again. The wind howls and whips outside, but sheltered so deeply in rock it sounds no louder than a light breeze.
The gold’s sweetness is even more intoxicating than before, and you do not expect you could resist its allure even if you wished to. You circle your palm-sized pile of treasure, giving it a last appreciative once-over before coiling around it and finally allowing sleep to take you.
—
Biting cold, yet accompanied by a pleasant, dry warmth hanging in the air. A mound of shimmering treasure of every variety. A low, rumbling growl shakes the mass of ice above you and smoke fills the air, and you know where you are. You can see vividly your mother’s scales, pale and frayed at the edges with her great age, and the heat pouring from her vast hide is such that you can almost believe you never left her. She exudes easy confidence befitting her sheer enormity, and she appears to you as the unassailable mountain of flesh and armour she has always been. You feel her underbelly grinding into the golden mountain, you feel her claws carving furrows into the ice beneath her as if it were your own, and for a moment you understand what it means to be a great dragon.
Yet the world swims and fades, and there is something else further off. Hazy visions of iron-hard scales dance before you, of searing red flames flickering in the dark, reflected in a sea of gold and silver and precious stones. Screams of terror swim through your ears, but they are muffled as though from a great distance or underneath a great layer of stone. A mighty impact causes the very earth to fracture, followed by another, and another, and then a wave of sheer stunning malice pervading every last bit of its - your? - being. It is a force, the likes of which you have ever felt. Then there is only darkness and the slow, heavy breathing of a slumbering dragon.
—
You do not know exactly how much time passes before you emerge from your sleep, but you eventually manage it with some effort. Your eyelids crack open and send faint shafts of light over the roughly carved stone of your chamber, across which shadows dance and stretch as you look this way and that. A wide yawn sends a swirling plume of smoke to the top of the cave as you stretch the lethargy out.
