To My Baby Sister (Troccol)

The dragon lived for hundreds of years.  The scales were so big that when he shed the towns people would gather them up and add them to their kitchens.

Every scale was the size of a dinner plate and shined like ocean water when sunlight struck.  Sometimes he would shed whiskers when he managed to make it beyond the high grass along the tops of dunes to tan his broad belly.  The whiskers, fifteen feet long, washed up days later and the towns people would put loops on them and use them for fishing rods.

The dragon was named Troccol, because every day when he would wake up he would yawn and his trill was so large it shook the air.  "troccollllll" his voice would boom and then stretch and roll over and tree trunks snapped beneath the barrel of his body.

He would get up on the stumps of his four legs, tail whipping to and fro like a fly wing, and ramble to the shore.  He breathed fire when he could put his mind to it.  If he was really hungry, truly, everything inside Troccol would grow and mix and belch through him and lick a light from his flint teeth and scorch the ground.

Every season he would wake and make his trek to the sea to swim and eat and be.  Villages stood between his cove and the sea and he trampled them each year to feast.  The towns people would scatter when they saw the fire on the horizon.  They knew Troccol was coming and they knew he would spare no one along his path.

But there was one knight foolish and headstrong enough to believe he could be Troccol's match.  On the fifteenth year, the two hundredth day, he stood before the pool of Troccol's cove and witnessed his rise through the water from the mouth of the under water cave.

His scales shimmered bright green, his whiskers, mud brown waved like branches of an oak.

As he rose and planted one hut sized foreclaw and then another, water washed from his sides on silver drops of dew.  His jaws opened wide, fire from his nostrils spewed.  He yawned and the knight's iron helmet rattled against his ears.  Troccol's black eyes opened and saw the knight in his silver clad leather boots, his voice still booming back against the distant hills.  And to the knight it came "I am Troccol, who are you?"

Sent from my Windows Phone