Basically what it says in the title and on the cover, a collection of short stories I come up with occasionally.
Credits for pictures go to rightful owners.
Wondrous but threatening creatures, who terrorized the world hundreds of years ago, now reduced to only a legend, lines between fantasy and reality long since faced. A bedtime story consisting of either big bad flame-breathing villains, or old and wise guardians the heroes turn to for help when they have nowhere else to go.
But what if dragons weren't that, but something much, much simpler?
Not evil beasts breathing fire, not magical helpers of heroes. Not villains destroying villages for the fun of it, not saviors of people in need.
Animals is what they were. Wild, uncontrollable, giant and dangerous, but animals. Doing what their instincts told them to do, acting how nature created them. With an intelligence lesser than that of a human, but strength much greater. Humans saw them as terrifying beasts, but what isn't understood is scary and automatically dubbed dangerous.
They acted more like birds than anything else, to be honest. More specifically, crows. Everyone has heard of a dragon protecting the greatest of all treasures. In truth, they just had a liking for shiny things. Many of them did not hold any worth, they were just pretty. They saw something they liked, they wanted it, they took it, what were those squishy annoying and wingless insects on two wobbly legs to stop them? They weren't scary to the dragons, so much smaller and weaker.
Animals get angry when you try to take something of theirs. So do humans. Why would dragons be any different? Their treasures weren't cursed, blessed, or even expensive most of the time, they were just theirs. And so they hid them. Buried, so no other would feel the satisfaction of having them.
However, as the years passed humans got smarter and smarter, until they finally posed an actual threat to dragons. Animals, when threatened, either fight, or run. Many fought and lost, but those that ran (or rather flew) learned to hide. To hide well, you have to be small. Over time, the big dragons died because they couldn't hide, and the small survived and bred even smaller ones.
And that brings us to now - "true" dragons long since gone and the small ones roaming around human homes, as humans saw little similarities between them and the monsters of old and deemed them not a threat. Majestic predators have turned into small, funny creatures.
That's why, if you ever see a crow going somewhere with a piece of shiny treasure in its beak, you can be sure that you have now seen a dragon's descendant.
========================
A/N: Basically I saw crows hiding away shiny things by burying them and my brain went "dragons". So here we are. Hope you enjoyed!
