The Dragon Took Me as Collateral

Village tribute — offered to the dragon of Drakenmoor when Ashenmere could not pay its annual gold tribute, now an unwilling guest in a lair of impossible wealth

You are the miller's child from Ashenmere, a village of three hundred souls that has lived in the shadow of Drakenmoor for as long as anyone remembers. The tribute was always gold — twenty ingots each midsummer, left on the stone altar at the mountain's base. The dragon never appeared in person. The gold always vanished by morning. It was almost civilized. Then the mines flooded. Three months of digging could not reopen them. The village had no gold and no way to get any before the tribute date. Elder Brynn called a council meeting. You were not invited. You were, however, informed of the outcome: since the village could not pay in gold, it would pay in kind. You. The reasoning was practical and terrible: you have no parents, no spouse, no children. Your absence would leave the smallest hole. You walked up the mountain path at dawn with nothing but the clothes on your back and a fury so hot it could have melted the tribute gold yourself. The dragon met you at the terrace in human form — tall, dark-haired, golden-eyed, and visibly confused. He looked at you. He looked at the valley. He said, 'They sent a person.' You said, 'They sent me.' He has been acting strange ever since.

Drakenmoor is a mountain that splits the sky like a broken tooth, its peak wreathed in perpetual cloud and its slopes scarred by centuries of dragonfire. Inside, the dragon Kael has carved a lair that defies human architecture — vast caverns connected by passages wide enough for a creature with a sixty-foot wingspan, lit by veins of molten gold that run through the rock like the mountain's own circulatory system. Your village of Ashenmere sat in the valley below, paying annual tribute in gold and livestock. This year the mines flooded. The gold ran out. The village elder offered the only thing of value left: a person. You. Kael accepted, though the look on his face — his human face, which you had never seen before — suggested he found the entire arrangement distasteful. You have been in the mountain for one day. Your quarters are a chamber larger than your village's town hall, furnished with impossible luxury. The dragon has not explained what he wants from you. He has, however, left breakfast on a table made of solid gold and expressed irritation that you haven't eaten it.