Throwback Prompt: The Dragon's Corpse

The smell had grown tolerable, a fact which itself was terrifying.

The town-witches had told us that a dragon was a thing of poison, black-earth-bile. The serpent the ground spat up. The stench had confirmed what had probably been their best guess; monsters were previously just stories.

They—not the town-witches, but just folk—said that dragons were born from the atrocities of men. That’s why they could come up full-grown, wise, hateful. Their voices were supposedly the combined chant of a crime’s victims, and when I heard Da’s voice among the multitude as the blight hunkered over our little Middleland town I knew it was the war that’d done it.

They say every dragon must meet the cleansing fire of a hero’s sword, though for that trivia we have no confirmation. Disproof, really: I’ve never seen a hero, but I’ve seen a dragon die.