A Fairly Fairy Tale

A Fairly Fairy Tale
By Davin Kimble

Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land far, far away there lived a beautiful princess who lived in a tower that was guarded by a vicious man eating Dragon. The dragon thought her the most beautiful being in the world so had captured her and locked her away so that only he might gaze upon her beauty….
“Okay, now stop! I absolutely refuse to sit here and listen to this droll tale yet again. Truly you humans are full of yourselves and I am done letting you get away with it. You want to know what really happened ‘once upon a time, a long time ago’ I am going to tell you.”
The truth is that it was a long time ago, 1250 AD according to your ridiculous calendar; the Year of the Sundering Moon according to our much more accurate one, and it was not that far away. It was on this very planet, which I am sure you have learned by now is not really all that big. The moon is pretty far away, Sweden is not. There did live a princess, quite a few of them actually, and they seemed to wind up imprisoned in this old run down tower that sat above my spacious, and comfortable cave system. Now the story tellers would like you to think that we Dragons take an interest in your pitiful, filthy, short lives. The fact is that you are mostly beneath our notice the only time we even register your existence is when you come tromping through our habitat, something I have noticed you are exceedingly good at. As far as the supposed beauty of this princess I leave that up to your imagination. You all look sort of gross to me, naked and weak, short, slow, vaguely repulsive creatures. The last thing I would want is to have to look after one of you, day after day. I would forget to water you once something interesting caught my attention and you’d die of thirst, or hunger, or something else. One good thing about you, you die easily.
This princess did not end up in the tower by my doing. At the time I was laying my first catch of eggs and I was not really paying much attention to the goings on in the tower above my head. I chose this particular cave system largely because it was isolated and remote. I know what you are thinking; the tower was an over grown, long abandoned relic of the very distant past. I never thought that the humans who lived more than one hundred miles south would find any use for it. It had been built over the entrance to this cavern system in the distant past by some religious group or other that apparently sacrificed many of their own. It took me a whole month to pile the skills and bones neatly away.
One day there was the ruckus of horses and raised voices. One was particularly piercing, and pleading, rising above the others so that I had to hazard a peak. What I saw was robed and hooded men leading a half naked, dirty looking, female into the tower and up the long flight of stairs to the top. Shortly after the men left and there was only the soft sound of sobs from the highest room in the tower. Thinking nothing more of it I returned to my nest and forgot about the subject all together.
That was until I heard the first of the knights tromping around the tower. Foolish man was bellowing and hacking away as if he were in the midst of a battle field surrounded by enemies. I went up to see what all the noise was about and blundered into the fool on his way down into my caverns, rather than up into the tower. Now in any other situation I would have simply allowed the idiot to leave after giving him a good scolding about waking sleeping dragons. But this moron began brandishing his sword, yelling about the princess and how I had better free her or suffer the righteous wrath of god, blah, blah, and blah. My concern was that he’d found the entrance to my cavern system. I had eggs that were near to hatching, and while new born dragons are pretty dangerous by your mediocre standards, they are babies and need protecting. So I did what any concerned mother would do, I promptly swatted the metal maniac into the wall and crushed him until he quit squirming. I had no intention of leaving him there to rot away so I took his body, and arms, up into the surrounding forest, where I made another mistake.
There in the little clearing in front of the tower was a campsite being tended by a boy of likely no more than ten or twelve summers. He was frozen with fear at the sight of me, which was amusing, so, instead of making short work of him as I had his knight friend, I handed over the body of his leader and sent him scurrying off with a mighty roar. I was certain that that would be the end of the intrusions; was I ever wrong. I will say that you… things, can be quite determined when you get something into your heads. In this case it was the lame story that we started with. Apparently I had captured a princess and she needed to be rescued. That would have been simple enough if any of her would be rescuer’s would have simply climbed the stairs and bashed open the door. Instead they decided that the dragon must be destroyed. The pile of human bones I had cleared from my caves did not help matters any, but I did not perceive something as silly as this happening when I cleaned house all those years before. Knight after knight tromped up to the tower and down into my cave. I, of course, crushed, bashed and chomped them all. At one point there was a whole troop of them, yelling and waving their swords around. That time I breathed fire, which in hindsight was another mistake.
Breathing fire is not something we do often. For one, it hurts and it takes a long time to recover from the effects of spitting up stomach acids and bile. The effect is quite marvelous and awe inspiring if I do say so myself, but it led to the belief that I was in league with someone called Satan, who ever that is, and it seemed to revitalize the efforts of the knights to kill me. The princess had long since been rescued and these knights just kept coming, at least one every six months.
At any other time I would have simply flown away in the night and left the fools to their ruined building, but as I said I had young ones to care for. I thought to call on one of my brood mates, he would be my brother, but I decided that this would only make matters worse. My brother is about half a step from certifiably mad. While he would have done a fine job of securing my nest he would also have leveled most of the surrounding country side in the process. I decided to bide my time until my wyrmlings were ready to leave the nest.
Quite a few knights were killed in the intervening time, and I took a nasty cut but all if my young ones remained safe. Eventually we moved on to safer pastures, so to speak, and I raised them to be fine young dragons. I forgot all about that old tower until I came across a story book that mentioned the tale I just told you, a bit skewed for effect I assume. You have heard that one, now you know the truth. One thing I have always despised about your kind, your ability to alter the truth.