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Dragons are a very important natural resource, though most mortal being have no idea of this fact. They just think we're a bunch of flying, elemental-spewing lizards that hoard gold, ravage the countryside, and devour virgins.
Flying yes, elemental spewing yes, lizards no. We dragons are decidedly not reptiles. We were here first, before the reptiles, before the mammals, and they went and stole bits out our design. The reptiles made off with our scales and decided to be silly and splay-legged and belly crawly, while the mammals decided "Hey we want to be able to nurse our young and have nice, straight legs that are good for running and sometimes even manual dexterity. Fuck the long tails and necks though, and we want to be covered in ridiculous, easily pierced fluff."
And you'd ravage the countryside too if, let's go with something comparative in size, a bunch of bunny rabbits stole everything that wasn't nailed down while you were taking a nap. You'd flush out, fill in, and set fire to every bunny burrow in hopes of getting information to getting your personal property back.
But with dragons things are on a much longer time scale, a nap can be a few months, while a good solid sleep can last a few decades, and a chronic oversleeper might stir after a century or two.
We need our nice, long naps, they're very important for the continued health of the dragon, and for the world.
See, dragons are innately magical creatures, which is why when we're slain mortals can use just about every bit of us for some magical thing or another. Arms, armor, magical potions, decorative night stands made out of skulls whose eye sockets glow with inner radiance, etc, etc.
That's because we're all basically walking, talking ley lines. We're living conduits of raw elemental power, and we bring that to the lands in which we dwell.
Of course it's not obvious to mortals because they tend to keel over dead after three centuries, tops.
They see fire elemental dragons residing in volcanoes and ice dragons living in arctic tundras and glaciers and floating icebergs and whatnot and think "Oh, the dragon must live there because it's a comfortable environment."
That is cloaca-backwards. Volcanoes spring up because there's a fire dragon living there. Places freeze over because there's been an ice dragon in residence for a century or more.
You wouldn't like a world without dragons, it would result in an utterly boring landscape created by rules of wind, erosion, elevation, and water flow. You wouldn't have interesting places like my little spot of the countryside, where my neighbors are a steamy rainforest, a bleak salt flat, a frozen valley, some volcanic mountains, and a nasty, stinky swamp.
All this surrounds the forty mile or so diameter circle around my lair, where the land is beautiful and gorgeous filled with good soil for bountiful crops, peaceful and cute animals (like the aforementioned fluffy bunnies), and nice, sunny weather where the rain around like clockwork, and only at night so as not to bother the inhabitants.
I'm a Benedictine dragon, and I bring order and placidness into the world through my very presence.
My element is named after the Benedictine School of magic, where one uses the elements in more sedate, natural ways to accomplish things. Safe, simple, predictable, and clean.
As opposed to the Maledictine School which is messy, sometimes complex, sometimes random, moderately unsafe, and decidedly weird.
My half sister down to the south, the one in the swamp, she's a Maledictine dragon. Her breath weapon is identical to my own fire, except that hers is blue, and instead of heat it throws off cold completely in the violation of physics and thermodynamics and whatnot.
Stereotypically the two schools are labelled "Good" and "Evil" by a lot of mortals, but one's morality is decided through one's thoughts and deeds, rather than one's preferred element and method of spellcasting.
My sister, for example, is just about the most polite and well-behaved dragoness you could possibly every hope to meet. She's also terribly shy, has problems talking to new people, and generally just likes to stay in the middle of her swamp tending to her undead legions.
Umm… she also just so happens to be the dragon equivalent of a crazy cat lady, but with the undead.
She mostly has mindless zombies and skeletons, and keeps them out of trouble by tending to her gardens. She's also a cook and an alchemist, so she's got a lot of interesting plants growing.
And it's hard to do delicate works when your fingers have claws on the end and are as thick as tree branches.
Which was why I was flying out today. Something radiating quite a bit of Maledictine and Void mana had managed to wander into my nice, quiet fairy tale kingdom and needed to be shooed back into my sister's lands before it caused any troubles.
It was already causing nasty black clouds in my otherwise pristine blue sky, and seemed to be providing thunder and lightning in high amounts, but no rain.
Ugh. It was probably holed up in the old church fort that I kept around because I liked the shabby chic aesthetic of the place. But I was starting to think I'd have been better off knocking it down, as mortals seemed to think it was a castle of some sort and that the architecture was decidedly sinister enough to make it an evil lair.
Though I have to admit I'm probably somewhat to blame for that. The stones are mostly black, as I keep having to swoop by and clean the place out of bandits, cultists, slimes, and the occasional infestation of giant rats every so often, and it takes so much effort to scrub soot from my fire breath off the rocks.
So the place is dark, ruined, ominous, and a former church, so all evil-doing within is also blasphemous. Thus a magnet for all the naughty activity in my realm.
Then again I suppose if I knocked it down, they baddies would misbehave in other places, rather than popping up again and again in a nice predictable spot.
I sighed as I spread my wings to slow my descent and land in the courtyard.
I could hear the mad cackling from all the way up here. I couldn't make out the words, but from the way someone had been shouting for the past minute or so it sounded like your typical "They called me mad, MAD! But know I, Professor von Frumpensmergle, will show them! I WILL SHOW THEM ALL! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!" type speech.
They always hold up in the fort's sanctum, where some ne'er do well squatter went and put a dias on the raised altar platform to make it a proper throne room.
I'd kept it like that, since that made it pretty easy to hop in, eat the leader of the offending infestation, and resolve the whole issue.
I'd even had carpenters in to put some hinges on a suitably large section of the roof so that I could just lift it up and pop in without having to wriggle through hallways that were not sized with fully grown dragonesses in mind.
So I lifted up the roof, stuck my head in and saw the wrongest wrong thing in the history of wrong.
The mad cackling was not coming from a skinny, pale, frail wizard, a wild-haired scientist in a lab coat, or a powerful, yet still rotund leader of a band of demi-humans. But rather a young woman in a suitably fairy tale-esque pink dress. But it wasn't quite right, as the pink garment had black accents, and the princess-y vibe was utterly ruined by shiny silver gauntlets, greaves, and a breastplate, as well as scandalous shortness. The dress barely reached her knees!
The lady had a matching silver staff with a skull on top (with the requisite glowing eyes), but she also carried a sword! The noblewomen of the Meadowgrass Kingdom didn't use swords! If they had to battle they were either archers or magicians!
I shook my head at the whole sight. The young lady necromancer definitely had her clothes made around here, as the styles were right, and the craftsmanship exquisite, and the ominous details of all the skull detailing on her armor was nowhere near creepy. The skulls were happy and pleasant and cheerful.
And that meant that she was a local girl, too. No proper evil necromancer would go marching around with a general look that could only be described as "cutesy."
And she had a captive. A huge, powerful, towering man in black leather armor had a chain around his neck that had been attached to the heavy stone altar, which had been set for tea. The black knight calmly polished his monocle, sipped delicately from a cup of tea with his pinky extended and shook his head at his captor's theatrics.
"Madam, I quite understand where you're coming from, but I am quite sure that this has gone too far. Certainly a nice sit down in front of the fire with your father to discuss the matter of your matrimony would accomplish things in a far more civil fashion than abducting the ambassador of your fiance's kingdom." he said in his posh Greenspire Jungle accent.
"My father refuses, REFUSES to see reason! I am the eldest, the firstborn, and yet I am to be shipped off from paradise to your wretched land of chronic rain, mosquitoes, and misery, while my brother takes the throne!"
The knight nodded, refilling his cup from the teapot, and then pouring a second.
"One lump or sugar or two, your highness?" the knight asked politely.
"Two please." she said, accepting the cup and taking a sip before drawing in a deep breath for some more ranting.
Your highness?!
I squinted. Human faces are so tiny and difficult to make out.
"Princess Buttercup?!" I said with a gasp.
The necromancer-princess spun, dropping her cup of tea in shock (which was expertly caught by the Greenspire ambassador and placed back on the table for later consumption), staring up at me with wide eyes.
"Goldengleam!" the princess groaned, "You're going to ruin everything!"
She glared up at my place stuck to the side of the building, peering in through the opened section of roof.
"Ah! That explains the rather dire draft I was feeling." said the ambassador, seemingly oblivious to the situation, "I was just about to bring that up. I wouldn't want either of us to catch cold in this rather dreadful place."
The princess ignored him in favor of setting her staff down so she could motion with both hands.
"Shoo! Shoo!" she scolded, as if attempting to drive grazing animals away from the parsley patch.
I didn't "shoo," in fact I opened the roof all the way and entered the building properly, my landing causing the ground to shake and the princess to fall flat on her backside, and then suffer the indignity of having her own staff of dark magic fall over and hit her on the head.
"Oh dear." said the ambassador, "Must you be so… indelicate, my lady dragoness. Those are some rather pointed horns atop that staff, the young lady could have suffered a laceration."
I ignored him.
"Okay, would someone like to explain why the princess of my nice, perfect, happy little fairy tale kingdom has taken up necromancy, kidnapped a knight, taken up residence in a known bastion of evil, and has been getting in a large amount of decidedly mad, sinister laughter?"
"Oh it's horrible!" the knight wailed, "My lord Prince Graystone is set to wed Princess Buttercup in the summer, securing a political alliance between Greenspire and Meadowgrass. But rather than being a proper lady and learning her sewing and letters, the princess has been spending her time down in that dreadful swamp learning all sorts of blasphemous magics from that vile witch-lizard Leechclaw!"
I snorted angrily, venting a jet of flame that was three, maybe four feet tops.
"Speak not ill of my sister, sir knight!" I growled, baring my fangs.
The ambassador let out a little "Ooo-woah-woah" sound, had his eyes roll up in his head, and fainted dead away.
Despite the dreadful sounding title, my sister was so named because she was a snuggler. Once she started hugging you, she was on you like a leech until a time that she felt she needed to cease hugging, or until you could politely extricate yourself.
I usually escaped her clutches by asking her to show me the latest thing she'd been working on.
"Ugh! Sewing is BORING! And all the noblewomen just want to sit around and gossip like a flock of gabby hens! And my father approved of Miss Leechclaw tutoring me. I was down there to learn the culinary arts. It's just that with her cooking, alchemy, and necromancy all kind of blend together."
"She does make a lovely boar roast that will literally walk itself down your throat." I agreed.
"So I picked up a few things here and there, took my Mage's Guild test when I turned 18 last month, and tested as a necromancer! My dad went apoplectic at the news."
"What shade on the scale did King Lyle hit? Husky rose? Cherry red?"
"Dad hit full on plum."
"Wow."
"Meadowgrass women are always healers or beastmistresses, rarely we'll have a sorceress or enchantress, but I'd be the first necromancer since…"
"Queen Violet and her reign of terror 400 years ago. I missed that whole incident, I was napping."
"So my dad cut me off from the royal succession, after I've spent my whole life groomed to be queen, and then decided to ship me off to Greenspire! With all the rain, and the canopy making everything so dark, and all the rotting vegetation. It'd be WONDERFUL for a necromancer, if it wasn't for all the damned bugs!"
Buttercup made a disgusted sound and flailed her hands about as if shooing away a cloud of gnats. "They're horrible, they get everywhere, they suck blood without being properly undead, and because they don't have any skeletons they're utterly awful for reanimation. And they're huge! The mosquitoes are terrible!"
"I'm sure that's just an exaggeration."
"THEY TAME THEM AND RIDE THEM INTO BATTLE!"
Blink blink.
"Wait what?"
"Yes! They have mosquitoes that are literally large enough to ride on."
I wrinkled my snout. "Eww. It sounds like my cousin and my sister have been conspiring with their biomancy and alchemy again."
"Anyway, Greenspire itself might be okay, but the Prince? Ugh! As bad as Ambassador Beachnut is, Prince Hazel is ten times worse! The Prince isn't even a proper knight! He's had zero arms training. He's a tiny, cute little china doll that you look at through the protective glass of a curio cabinet because if you pick him up and do something with him, he's liable to shatter into a bajillion pieces!"
Princess Buttercup sighed and flopped down into a musty overstuffed chair that let loose with a mighty cloud of dust and what were probably fungal spores.
"So I… uh… kidnapped the ambassador, fled Meadowgrass castle, and demanded that the wedding be called off or else Ambassador Beachnut was going to get it!"
"Get what?"
"I hadn't figured that out yet. But as obnoxious as he is, what he was probably going to end up getting was a swift kick in the rear."
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my snout with a foreleg, "This is totally ruining the whole atmosphere of my nice, happy little fairy tale kingdom, and it needs to be fixed."
I thought for a few moments, "I'll talk to the king and see what he's willing to do. You head for Leechclaw's and I'll drop by."
Another sigh as I prodded the ambassador's unconscious form with a foreclaw, "And Ambassador Beachnut ought to probably be sent back so that Greenspire doesn't take extreme offense and send a military unit to rescue him."
Buttercup shuddered, "Ugh, bug calvary. Yeah, okay, take him."
I shuddered, "I just hope this ponce doesn't think I've saved his life and swears a life debt to me. I can't imagine anything so useless as a knight that faints upon seeing a dragon displaying anger."
"Then be glad you're not a noblewoman in this kingdom, because I can name about a dozen utterly useless bits of attire that only make things MORE uncomfortably."
I chuckled, "I think I'd bankrupt the kingdom if I tried to have a dress made for me."
I scooped up the unconscious knight, breaking his chain with a quick chomp.
"Now I'm just going to take him back to the castle. Head for my sister's and DO NOT get distracted. I don't want you wandering off into some graveyard and raising an army of darkness on me, okay?"
"Okay." the princess said with a sigh.
"You can raise one once you're over the border, just not here."
"Yay!"
I snorted and took off, slapping the roof closed with my tail.
Having a pet kingdom is a big responsibility sometimes.
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