Dec 06 2019, 07:14 PM
When the word "market" came to mind--for those who knew its meaning, at least--they probably did not think of a dragon hulking over a haphazard pile of knick-knacks and eclectically-gathered nonsense. Dragons took what they wanted. They dominated. They stole. They killed.
...This dragon, however, had been taught to say "thank you." (Please was a lesson that had eluded him; but "thank you" seemed to serve the same purpose, in his mind, so that was okay.) And although he was not, growing up, the sharpest fang in the maw, he'd gradually matured into a beast with something resembling wisdom.
He'd slept through Raheerah's distant roars, and when he woke, the idea of a bellowing dragon with dominion over the caves stuck with him. And he'd thought, and thought, on how to get what he wanted.
He wanted two things: power (so as not to be in danger) in Monoceros, at least; and gold. Gold was, in fact, ninety percent his priority. And as he had looked over his hoard, he realized--picking at it with an absent wing-talon--that he didn't want a lot of this stuff. Or rather, he wanted gold moreso.
Dread now mantled, like a bird of prey over a kill, except his "kill" was a huge pile of stuff strewn out near the entrance to Tunnel J. It was his hope that anyone entering or leaving would see him there, and maybe approach, and ask what it was all about. It didn't occur to him that anyone might be too frightened to try. He was big, sure; but he was not (though he didn't know it) Raheerah large. ...He was not even the weight, most likely, of the great dragon Master's head.
The pile included such gems as:
Actual gemstones, of a wide variety of colors and shapes (though he'd left his prized singing crystal back up top).
Bones. He had lots of bones, from his kills, as well as scraps of hide and hair, and many feathers. Some of the feathers had been shed; some were from the cave's Lesser denizens. There were claws, too, and talons and hooves; all the makings for a craftsman's work.
Scraps of armor, taken from the tunnel itself, rooted out and carried off over the cycles. There were all sorts of metals there, some bent, some burnt; some were chipped or rusted. They came from creatures of all sizes, too.
Charcoal. Pieces of coal, large and small. There was rather a lot of this, since Dread tended to burn things to, well, coal when bored, or hunting too enthusiastically.
Rocks. Caves knew why he had these; but there were dozens of them, of different sizes and shapes, as with the gems. Anything with flickers of mica, or a unique color or an interesting sheen, he seemed to have collected.
There was even meat, there: two cave deer, one hours old, one a few questionable, fly-buzzing, blackening days. They were still with their hides on, too, and Dread occasionally picked at one, as if trying to restrain himself from just eating it outright.
And last of all, the foliage. For whatever reason, as he'd scoured the cave for things to add to this new idea of his, he'd decided that the only thing he'd left untouched--plant life--should probably not be untouched at all. There were long bits of smooth, dead wood, and sheafs of sharp, dry grasses, and clusters of branches with yellow-green pine needles still attached. It wasn't clear why these were here, but in truth Dread had just added them for the sake of completeness. Who knew what people might like, or not?
He couldn't trade for power; but he could built up influence. More than that, he could trade things for gold; or trade things for other things, which he could then trade for gold.
The question was whether it would actually work, at all. And whether other Gembound wanted his... rocks, and meat, and branches.
