Quoth The Dragon
by David A. Gray
"You have slaughtered my entire species, except for me," said the ancient dragon, leaning its head on taloned forelegs, "and now you've come to finish your genocide, and twist the tale for your so-called histories."
"'I am the last of my kind,' quoth the glittering emerald-scaled Dragon King," the bard said smoothly, from the edge of the little clearing in the nameless wood. " 'So we must do final battle, here in the legendary Misty Forest. Because bold striving mankind and cunning lizard can never share this land.'"
"We had no quarrel with you," the old knight grunted through the pain of arthritis as he drew a nocked and rust-spotted blade from its scabbard, "until you burned our towns and farms."
The bard coughed discretely, speaking quickly as he scratched quill on parchment. "'I seek revenge, oh monstrous lizard, so my people can forever be free of your tyrannous flames and cruel whimsy,' declared the Silver Knight, hefting the legendary blade, Wyvern-bane. 'I have chased and killed your malevolent brethren throughout these long years. And now I will have my revenge for the ashes of human innocents.'"
"We attacked your cities only after one of your kind butchered every egg in our hatchery on the Ferrous Mountain," the dragon snapped, little puffs of sulfurous smoke jetting from its fist-wide nostrils. "He and his assassins came disguised as men of science and wonder, with blades hidden in their satchels."
"Ahem," the bard interjected, "'Enough of your twisted poisonous words, Dragon King. You have lied for too long already, and the story of your last moments will be the most famous chapter in the greatest tale ever told,' quoth the Silver Knight. Then he dusted a speck of dragon soot from his glittering breastplate, and strode forward, determined to put an end to the cowardly lizard's falsehoods before the honeyed words bewitched him."
"We had no choice but to put an end to--I mean, kill--your army before it hatched," the old knight said, lowering his sword a little, in order to use one gauntleted hand to straighten a dented, moss-stained pauldron. We knew they were war dragons, ready to hatch in their thousands."
"War dragons?" The dragon laughed, then, bitterly, raising its massive head to look directly at the old man facing it. One eye was white, with scar tissue crossing the socket from bottom to top. "There never was such a thing. They were just dragons. Some would have become teachers, some mothers, and some warriors, as need dictated. Why do you feel the need to lie to justify their murder, now, at the end? You are about to have what you always wanted."
The bard's sonorous voice startled birds from the trees, "The Dragon King hissed, 'We swore to rid the world of all humans, and would have, had not the brave Bronze Knight and his squires given their lives to destroy our war dragon eggs 'fore they might hatch and wreak havoc.' And at that, the mighty dragon kind took a breath to fuel the fire that would melt the Silver Knight to ash, were he not to act with urgency."
"It's no lie, dragon," the knight said wearily. "A trade mission overheard a cabal of dragon nobility swearing to hatch an army to devastate humanity. It was witnessed and writ in The Dragon Army, a chapter of The Human Dragon War known to everyone in what's left of the eight kingdoms."
"Witnessed and writ by who, human? Was it your king's fiction, created as an excuse to seize the iron-rich lands we owned? Was the mining treaty and trade deal we offered not enough?"
