The Dragons of the North

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In the Northern Continent, nestled comfortably between a lake and the tall mountains that provided shelter from the icy winter winds, stood the town of Mantle. The townsfolk lived in homes of stout logs, the thick wood and merrily-puffing chimneys warding off the cold of their winter home. The people made their living either mining in the mountains or fishing the icy waters of the deep, dark lake.

Legend had it that there was an ancient city at the bottom of the lake, a remnant of the Age of Myth, but the fishermen were careful not to repeat that story too often where children could hear, lest they incur the wrath of angry wives. After all, the lake was deadly cold even in the wan light of the short summer season, and it would be all-too easy for a child burdened with a great lust for adventure - and a decided lack of sense - to be lost in the frigid depths while searching for ancient treasure.

It had been ten years since Jaune Arc, one of those foolish boys with stars in his eyes and none of the sense the Gods gave a turkey, had been fished from the lake. Now a strong young man, his desire to see the new and fantastical had not waned one bit. Which was, of course, why his parents were both dismayed and entirely unsurprised to hear that their son had volunteered to investigate the destruction of the village of Lonelywood, on the far side of the lake.

Four nights previous, they had watched with horror as the small town, built by the forest across from the lake, had burned, the flames leaping up to lick at the night sky. Only when the smoke had begun to die down did the mayor call for a volunteer to report on the state of the village, and if possible, identify what calamity had befallen their neighbors. And of course, the ever-curious Jaune Arc had been the first to step forward to undertake the task.

Though his parents worried greatly for their boy, in truth, their son was one of the better choices the village could have made for a scout, for a youth spent hauling rope for fishing boats and chopping firewood for the household had gifted him with broad shoulders and a lean but powerful figure. Combined with his golden blond hair and his boyish charm, he was already starting to turn the head of more than one of the girls who called the village home. But more than that, the Arc family had in its possession a pair of heirlooms, passed down from the mists of distant antiquity. The first was a sword, a long, straight, double-edged weapon of shining steel, which sang as it swished through the air. And the second was a shield, made of the white, polished bone of a dragon that one of Jaune's ancestors had slain centuries ago. It was both marvelously light and utterly resistant to anything that anyone had thrown at it in the intervening years, enduring the centuries without a scratch to its wondrously-polished bone.

So it was that Jaune had slipped the family sword into a leather scabbard at his belt, slung the Arc family shield over his shoulder, and, after being bundled up in scarves and jackets by his mother, set off to Lonelywood.

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Unbeknownst to Jaune Arc, the skies due east of the Lonelywood were home to the mightiest and most ferocious of all beings - a dragon! The young Frost dragoness stretched her wings, enjoying the brisk morning breeze rushing over her glistening white scales. Reptilian eyes the shocking blue of the heart of a glacier narrowed as the mighty huntress spotted her prey. Folding her wings tightly against her body, the dragoness swooped towards her prey, her razor-sharp talons reaching out for a lethal first strike.

The prey never knew what hit it, crashing to the ground with a squeal of pain and fear. The dragoness lashed out once more, her claws ripping out the throat to finish the kill. She spread her wings out to bellow her triumph for all to hear -

And a tiny dragon, roughly the size of a housecat, screeched over the freshly-killed carcass of a rabbit. Her wings, at full stretch, accounted for about three feet from tip to tip. Her victory cry was cut off abruptly, and she crouched defensively over her kill, when she saw a mountain eagle testing its luck. With its size, the eagle could overpower her, but between the resilience of her gleaming scales and especially the killing cold that she could unleash with a gout of her breath, the eagle was well aware that trying to take her kill without an ambush was a losing proposition.

With a screech of its own, the eagle flew off in search of less dangerous prospects for its meal. Once she was sure that the giant bird was gone, the dragoness looked to drag her prize into her lair…only to realize that this particularly fat rabbit was awfully heavy for her. Well, there was one way to lighten the carcass: the young dragoness ripped a chunk of warm meat from the rabbit, lifting it almost delicately to her mouth with the talons of her foreleg. She made happy noises as she gulped down the fresh, savory meat.

She was a queen, and this valley was her domain!

…Now, to get that rabbit back into her cave…

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"Hello? Is anyone here?"

Jaune called out for any survivors as he approached the boundary of the village of Lonelywood. Truth be told, the situation did not look good. Most of the buildings had been scorched down to the stone foundations, with only a few charred and blackened beams occasionally leaning against one another. Jaune, remembering from previous visits to the town that some of the buildings had cellars, hurried to try and clear the entrances to those structures, hoping that someone, anyone had survived.

No such luck.

When the mayor had ordered the people of Mantle to stay in their homes until the fires were out, Jaune had thought it to be a shockingly callous, awful thing to do. Now, looking at the sheer extent of the devastation, he understood the old man's reasoning. Lonelywood was simply gone, and had anyone from Mantle gone to their aid, they could have drawn such violence onto their own town as well.

But who had done this? It didn't seem like bandits - outright razing a village to the ground, wiping it out in its entirety, meant destroying whatever future resources could be raided from it over the future. The only evidence of the arson, aside from the burned-down buildings themselves, was the lingering scent of sulfur that hung in the air. There were no torches, no pitch, no naphtha, not even kindling. Not only were bandit raids extremely rare this far north, but it just wasn't like them to come in, completely destroy a village, and leave without a trace…

Wait.

Jaune straightened, re-examining the site of the village. While there was snow on the ground, it hadn't actively snowed since before the fire. With the exception of his own footprints, which he could account for, there were no tracks, either of the townspeople or their assailants. No footprints, no hoofprints, no cart trails for hauling loot, nothing at all. While Jaune wasn't a master tracker, he had run this area his entire life, and he knew that everything left some kind of trace in this kind of snow. It was like whatever burned down Lonelywood had never touched the ground - and had put the village to the flames so quickly that the villagers hadn't had the chance to flee.

The youth swallowed, his heart pounding in his chest. People didn't like to think about it, didn't want to consider it, but dragons…dragons were real. Jaune carried proof on his back.

If a dragon had done this…Mantle needed to be warned. He frowned. While people generally didn't expect an attack from the air, he'd like to give his people enough credit to think that they would have noticed a firebreathing dragon had it flown over the village, if not before the attack, then surely after, as the entire town watched the horrid spectacle. While it could have come from the north or south, Jaune knew that there was a mountain valley further east, beyond the Lonelywood. Few people ventured out there, and the rocky, mountainous terrain seemed like ideal dragon country. Dragons liked caves and mountains, right?

Jaune resolved to at least go and scout the area. If there was a dragon in the area, it would confirm what had destroyed Lonelywood, and he could go and lead a team of hunters to kill the creature before it burned Mantle to the ground.

When he reached the border of the Lonelywood, Jaune turned to give the village one last look. Mantle needed to be kept safe, and the people who had lived here needed to be answered for. At least he could do his part.

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The next day, Jaune made his way into the mountain valley. Without the cover of the forest, he kept nervously glancing at the sky. If a dragon swooped down on him, he would be like a rabbit to a hawk, and there was precious little cover that he could run for if he was attacked. Still, he diligently picked through the rocks and sturdy roots that defied both terrain and climate with their stubborn refusal to die, carefully searching the rocky ridges for cave openings that might accommodate a dragon.

After a few hours of rough terrain hiking, Jaune found a cavern entrance that looked promising. Walking on the balls of his feet to try to move as silently as possible, he quietly drew his family's sword, peering into the dark depths of the cavern.

"Excuse you, human!"

Jaune nearly leapt out of his boots as he heard the prissy, slightly-nasally voice of a teenage girl.

He exhaled heavily. "Sheesh, you scared the hell out of me. Don't you know there's a -" Jaune went silent, his jaw dropping, as he turned his head to his right to see that he was face-to-face with a living, breathing dragon clinging to the rocks, no more than four feet away from him, and staring at him curiously.

Jaune screamed. The dragon screamed. Jaune drew backwards, half a jerk and half a flinch, and subsequently slipped, falling on his ass. The dragon scrabbled in place for a moment, trying to get a solid grip, before darting up the cliff face and hiding behind a boulder.

With his eyes scrunched tightly closed, Jaune winced, expecting to be consumed in a gout of searing fire. When that didn't happen, he slowly opened his eyes, to see the dragon - a real, live dragon - peering cautiously over the edge of her boulder.

"Hey!" the dragon - dragoness? - yelled at him. "What did you do that for? You scared me!"

Jaune blinked. "You…speak?"

"Of course I speak!" The dragon emerged from behind the rock. She stood steady on four legs, while flapping her wings in agitation. "Don't you humans know anything?"

Now that it was out in the open, Jaune could see that this…was not exactly the terrifying creature of myth and legend that he was expecting. Still, even a small dragon was still a dragon, and it was entirely possible that its small size could've let it slip unnoticed after committing its murderous arson. Carefully, keeping his sword in his hand, he slowly stood back up.

"Did you burn down the village by the lake?" he asked.

The dragon blinked its large, pale blue eyes. "Huh?"

"There was a village on the other side of the forest, by the lake. Something burned it all. Was it you?"

In response to his question, the dragon canted her head in puzzlement, a surprisingly human-like gesture. "There are dragons that breathe fire?"

"Of course there are!" Jaune blurted, completely flabbergasted. "How do you not know that? Aren't you a dragon?"

"Of course I am!" huffed the dragon.

"Well, don't you breathe fire?"

The dragon actually rolled her eyes. "Why would I do that? Look."

Before Jaune could react, the dragon swung her head to the side and exhaled a gout of white frost from her mouth. Rime spread over the face of a nearby rock, solidifying into a thin sheet of ice before cracking and slipping off from the rock. Jaune took note that the icy breath actually had a minty-fresh scent that hung in the air around them.

"See? You may begin to heap praise onto me at your leisure, human," the dragon preened.

"Why does it smell like mint?" Jaune asked.

"Why wouldn't it?"

Jaune shrugged, conceding the point. "Fair enough, I guess," he admitted. "How is it that you speak a human language?"

"How do you know that you're not speaking a dragon language?" the dragon challenged. "We were here first, after all."

"How do you know that?"

"Everyone knows that!"

"Do you have any books on your history?"

The dragon blinked. "What's a book?"

"Ah-hah!" Jaune pointed at the dragon. "How can you claim to invent a language when you haven't invented reading?"

"T-that's just some foolish primate thing that humans do, like throwing their own dung at each other!"

"Hey!"

The dragon stuck out her blue, forked tongue at the boy, a clearly mocking expression. Jaune, being the first human in living memory to converse with a dragon, as well as a paragon of maturity and responsibility, responded in kind, sticking his own pink tongue out at the dragon.

Slowly, Jaune returned his sword to its sheath. He was pretty sure that, between her apparent icy nature, her diminutive size, and inherent derpiness, that this dragon wasn't the being responsible for the razing of Lonelywood. Besides, she was capable of speaking, and wasn't actually hostile towards him, so that would've made just stabbing the little lizard a kind of murder, right? "So, do you have a name?" he asked.

The dragon perked up, apparently pleased to have the opportunity to speak about herself. "Well, human, you have the singular honor to address -" she then proceeded to emit a series of growls and roars that was apparently meant to represent her name.

Jaune blinked. After a moment, the silence began to grow heavy.

"What?" demanded the dragoness.

"Can you…can you translate that?"

The dragoness appeared to deflate a little. "Ugh, fine. Primates. In your primitive monkey tongue, my name translates to The Peaceful Stillness of Moonlight Spilling Over the Fresh-Fallen White Snow."

Awkwardly, Jaune scratched the back of his head. "Can I just shorten that to White Snow?"

"That is…significantly more mundane," griped the dragoness, closing her eyes and turning up her nose in an unmistakable expression of snooty disdain.

"What if I use an old language?" offered Jaune. "Weiss Schnee."

"How old?" the dragoness asked, deigning to open a single, piercingly-blue eye.

"Uh, very old!" said Jaune, thinking quickly. "Yep. Why, it's been ages and ages since people spoke that language casually. It's a name fit for a queen, all right."

"Very well. In recognition of your tragically-limited primate comprehension, I will allow you this special dispensation."

"Thanks awfully," muttered Jaune.

"Now," continued the newly-dubbed Weiss. "What did you bring me as tribute?"

"Tribute?"

"Of course! You went to the lair of a dragoness, surely you must have thought to bring her a gift!"

That, of course, had not occurred to Jaune. "Uh…one moment, let me get my pack." He took off his backpack, a process that Weiss peered at curiously. "Yeah, humans use this to carry things," he explained. "Here, would you like to try some jerky?" he asked, holding out some of the spiced and dried meat that his mother had prepared.

"What is…jerky?" Weiss asked, peering cautiously at the strip of meat.

"Well, it's beef that -" As soon as Jaune said the word 'beef,' the small dragoness hopped towards him, snapping up the jerky in a flash.

Weiss hummed her satisfaction as she chewed on the dried meat. It was beef! Heavy game like beef was a rare treat for the small dragoness. Since she was too small to safely bring down such a large prey, meat like that was usually only enjoyed when The Crisp Rush of Icy Winter Winds brought an elk or reindeer to share with her.

At three times Weiss's own age, it had taken The Crisp Rush of Icy Winter Winds a long time to explain to the younger dragoness that she wasn't actually her mother, but rather, an older sister. But Weiss had never met her mother, The Gentle Rustling of Willow Leaves in the Breeze, and Winter Winds was the only mentor, protector, and family that she had ever known.

After a certain point, a dragon can only grow as she experiences new things in life, and so, when she had demonstrated that she could hunt for herself, Weiss had set out on her own. Winter Winds would occasionally visit to check on her, and when she did, she usually brought a tasty treat to share.

The tasty beef snack reminded Weiss of meals shared with her sister, and her tail swept back and forth behind her as she growled and hummed happily. Jaune watched, bemused, as the small dragon enjoyed the jerky.

"Good?" he asked.

"Your tribute is pleasing, human," the dragoness replied, her tone lofty.

Jaune rolled his eyes. "You're welcome. Say, you wouldn't know about any, you know, larger dragons around here, would you?"

"Well, there's The Crisp Rush of Icy Winter Winds. She comes around from time to time to look in on me."

"And does she breathe fire?"

Weiss huffed. "What is this strange fixation that you have on dragons breathing fire?" She narrowed her eyes at him. "Are you some kind of pervert?"

"What? No!" Jaune sputtered. "Remember the village I told you about? The one that was burned down? I need to know if there's a dragon - a firebreathing dragon - that could be menacing my own people."

Weiss stretched, looking for all the world like a winged, reptilian cat. "Don't be silly, human. The Crisp Rush of Icy Winter Winds is a frost dragoness, like me. We don't need fire to - erk!" Weiss's eye twitched, and she immediately stopped speaking in favor of twisting and contorting, swinging her forelegs around in an attempt to reach between her wings.

"Weiss?" Jaune asked, concerned. "Are you all right?"

"I have an itchy!" whined the young dragoness.

"An itchy?"

"Between my wings!" wailed Weiss. "It's itchy!"

Jaune moved closer to the dragon, kneeling down to where she was rolling on the rocks, attempting to reach a spot on her back. "Hold on, let me help."

Weiss stilled as she felt the human's large, warm hand on her back. Jaune slid his fingers along the smooth white scales of her back, noting how closely each scale fit in an overlapping pattern over the others. Just as she'd said, one of her scales, almost dead-center on her back, between the "shoulders" of her wings, looked loose and out of place. Tentatively, he pinched the loose scale between his thumb and index finger and gave it an experimental wiggle.

To his surprise, the gleaming white scale popped off entirely with only minor manipulation. "It came off! Weiss, are you okay?"

The dragoness slumped in visible relief. "You got it! You got the itchy!"

"Uh, the scale came off," said Jaune. "Is that…is that a problem?"

"Why are humans so silly?" Weiss asked, to no one in particular. "When dragons grow, our scales become itchies, and have to be scritched off so new scales can come in. Look, the new one is already growing."

Jaune looked closely. Interestingly, the actual flesh underneath the scale was a pale pink color, instead of actual white. Underneath the overlapping scale further up her back, a new white scale had begun growing from the skin. Shrugging, he figured that she would know best, and since she didn't seem to be in distress any more, he pocketed the shiny white scale, as a souvenir of this strange encounter.

Weiss considered the human. He was a silly creature, with a lot of strange ideas about the world, but he gave tasty, spicy meat as tribute, and his precise primate fingers had dealt with her itchy in no time at all. Ordinarily, an itchy, especially in such an awkward spot as that one, could take hours of rubbing against rocks or trees to dislodge, but the human had pinpoint targeted it and plucked it free in mere moments. Also, he was very warm, and would make for a comfortable perch.

Jaune started as the dragon crawled up his arm to drape herself over his shoulders. "Congratulations," she proclaimed. "You are now my itchy remover! This is a great honor for you, I'm sure."

"Oh, hooray," deadpanned Jaune. "But as much fun as that sounds, I'm going to need to go back to my people, remember?"

"So, when do we leave?"

Jaune looked at the dragon on his shoulder. "We?"

"Well, I can't let my first treasure just wander off, now can I?"

"You treasure me?"

"No, you are treasure," Weiss corrected him. "The first treasure of my hoard."

"I don't think that's how that works," said Jaune. "Also, dragons really do keep treasure hoards?"

"Humans don't?"

Well, the lizard had a point. "Okay, so maybe we do, but we don't keep people as treasure." Then he thought about it. "Well, some people try to, but we generally frown on that kind of behavior, and stab them for it."

"Why wouldn't you want to be my treasure? I'm delightful."

Jaune burst into laughter. It wasn't what she said, exactly, so much as the complete and utter sincerity with which she said it. "You really don't lack for self-esteem, do you?"

She canted her head, puzzled. "Why would I? I mean, haven't you seen me? I'm me! Look!" Weiss stretched her wings out, posing. "See? Am I not magnificent?"

Jaune shrugged. "For a big gecko, maybe."

Weiss's jaw dropped in sheer, utter shock. "Hey!"

Shaking his head, Jaune picked his pack back up. "Well, this has certainly been…an experience, but I'm going to need to go now."

"Right," nodded Weiss. "So, let's go!"

"No, see, I'm going to go. You should stay here. If your mother comes back, I don't want her freaking out over her hatchling being gone."

"I'm not a hatchling!" cried Weiss. "I can come and go wherever I want to! And Winter Winds isn't my mother, I don't need permission to safeguard my treasure!"

The argument between boy and dragoness was interrupted by the heavy thump of a reindeer carcass dropping onto the rocks in front of the cave.

Looking up, Jaune nearly had his heart stop in his chest as he saw a much, much larger dragon circling overhead. If Weiss's body was the size of a housecat, this new arrival's body was twice again as large as a horse, held aloft by great wings. The dragon pulled into a landing, folding her wings onto her back as she stepped off of the reindeer carcass to loom above Jaune.

With her eyes narrowed into a dangerous squint, the reptilian lips of the dragoness pulled back in a sneer, revealing wickedly-sharp teeth the length of daggers.

"Human," growled the dragoness, her voice low and husky.

The problem with hunting dragons, thought Jaune, on the verge of fainting in terror, is that eventually, you'll find them.