Dragons are delicious, and it’s a problem.
The Kingdom had already been gripped by a thousand problems involving the consumption of Princesses of the Blood Royal by Great Wyrms. Sure, Lizards can eat mammals, but their stomachs are rarely so…rarified. It doesn’t happen often, but, should it take their fancy, they do have a tendency to explode.
Quite a number of philosophers had attacked the problem. Those who lived within ivory towers found, to their chagrin, that ivory towers are the new toothpicks of status among megalithic cold-blooded semi-magickal creatures. Others attacked the problem via books, only to find that, in Dragon magic, books attack back.
And meanwhile…
…let us not speak of the theory-of-mind of Dragons, and let us not overmuch stretch ourselves to figure out their motives. Let us say simply that complying with the whole “random a Kingdom, eat a fertile and (Feudally) mal-used heir seemed, at least, most amusing. Until swords grew sharper, Dragons grew less wary, Dragonscale armour was noted to have certain deficiencies, and Heroes had more leisure time to prong at peasants and practice their aim.
Oh, a Dragon can still take a castle, but even an idiot Dragon, of which, like idiot Humans, there are far too many, will ask that the Princess be staked out on some very large and difficult-to-defend rock. Which is fine, as far as it goes; but it did mean a disturbing likelihood of success among Tyrant Lizards, and a superabundance of screams.
And when this Princess, oh, this PARTICULAR Princess realized that Wyverns scarcely chew the insignificant, and that she could wreak havoc from inside the (haggis-to-be) mighty stomachs, ah, what intellectual indigestion emerged.
There is a Land where Dragons took over, and insisted on sensible diets, and lost weight, and flamed better, and flew higher, and eventually conquered the world, because they simply did not want to deal with this woman.
There is a Land where Dragons worked out an accord with Princesses, and what they serve at their Beds and Breakfasts, I would not ask, were I you.
And as for THIS land…
…have YOU seen a Dragon lately?
Oh, they’re extinct from indigestion, and thus do great wonders pass from Reality among unpleasant gastric distress.
Don’t we live in the Best of all Possible Worlds?
