Pyreheart

Chapter I

This story has the unusual circumstance of beginning and ending in a cave.

Perhaps that's imprecise.

This story, like all stories about human beings if you go back far enough, begins in a cave. One could argue the point that the story should really take place on a beach then, since evolutionists like to dispute this point, but fish with legs are not human beings. Or at least not yet. Or perhaps not at all, ever. That's not the important part. The important part is that this story begins in a cave and it has nothing at all to do with human beings.

Or at least it won't for another sixty centuries or so, but there's no need to be splitting hairs over a handful of years.

(But in the interests of correctness, human beings would not really enter the story until six thousand three hundred sixty seven years and four days later.)

For a cave, it was a rather nice cave. It wasn't particularly dank nor damp nor prone to caving in at inopportune moments. Its opening began very high up on a particularly steep mountain, so it was prone to drafts, but that was a negligible flaw when its occupant was immune to most fluctuations in weather and the passing of time as a general rule.

(He was not actually immune; he was just apathetic enough about time as a general construct after bending to its whims for six thousand three hundred sixty seven years and two days.)

The occupant of this rather nice cave was a dragon. He was a very distinguished sort of dragon and immensely large. Dragons never truly stop growing for as long as they live, but even he was enormous for one of his age and always had been. If one were to take a very large male elephant (one around four meters tall) and stack him atop ten other very large male elephants of around four meters tall, they might just barely brush the underside of this dragon's chin. Fortunately for the animals involved, the dragon would've been far more amused by the sight of elephants imitating tiddlywinks than feeling the inclination to eat them.

But eleven elephants is rather excessive.

Just a bit.

The dragon's name was Yuriy and he was currently preoccupied with two things: one was the amount of sunlight pouring over the backs of his wings.

The second and more absorbing preoccupation involved him squinting through a pair of pince-nez spectacles perched on the end of his nose and fashioned from magnifying glasses as he peered down at a very small (proportionally) book written in human script that he held carefully, turning the thin pages with a set of tweezers so as not to tear the pages.

He'd been attempting to read this book for the better part of thirty five years (it had had fantastic reviews three and a half decades ago), but it had been difficult going when the text was so small and the typesetter had been very obviously drunk.

Yuriy gave a rumble of discontent when he turned the page and saw the minuscule text rambling over the page in untidy rows. His gusty sigh was littered with sparks of fire, one of which landed on the page and that he hastily extinguished with the back of one huge knuckle.

This, he thought to himself as he stared at the book lying abandoned on the carpet, was really getting to the point of being absurd.

Actually, this whole business of living in self-imposed seclusion up in a cave like some kind of odd species of hermit crab was absurd, but Yuriy was far too comfortably set in his ways to do something sensible like call in a realtor to appraise the place.

But, he mused, glancing about the richly furnished abode, it could do with some tidying. The library had been out of sorts for nearly eighty years since Yuriy's last growth spurt, the hoard had become horrifically unorganized, moths and rodents were nibbling through his large collection of exotic fabrics, and the larder was completely bare of everything except an old tin of beans that had gone off around seventeen years ago (or whenever it was he had last attempted to go down the mountain to do a shop).

What he required, he decided, were the services of a caretaker. A cleaning person. Factotum. A maid.

Or if nothing else, at least someone to read these damnable books to him before he turned them into very rare and expensive kindling in a fit of pique.

But the question remained: how would he find a maid when he was very decidedly Up Here and they were very pointedly Down There?

So he decided to put an ad in the paper.

The first few sounded far too much like desperate personals, so Yuriy shredded them idly beneath his claws as he mentally composed his next draft. It took six hours and enough shredded paper to fill a hamster cage for a decade (though God forbid one ever live that long in the first place), but he at last had an advertisement that didn't sound like the metaphorical lowing of a cow from loneliness.

There were two flaws in this. Firstly, it was unlikely that any newspaper advertisement division would be able to read draconian script (if, of course, they could read in the first place). Secondly, the size of the paper was rather large and domestic mail was not up to the standard it had been a thousand years ago, new expenses aside.

So Yuriy then painstakingly rewrote his letter into a (somewhat) passable attempt at the local human language upon a size-appropriate scroll and sent it off when his butcher (who didn't ask too many questions as long as he was paid, bless the man) arrived with his next cartload of meat.

It was perhaps a slow method to having an ad placed. But the post was always slow when there was another war on and there was always a war on. You could set your watch to human predictability insofar as warmongering went. The well-off ones treated it as a game for their honour and the poor treated it like a disgusting puddle of vomit that had to be continuously mopped up and that they were obligated to clean out of professionalism.

It was admirable, he thought, that kind of diligence in such short-lived creatures. Personally, if he only had roughly five decades or so to live in (give or take a year or two), he'd likely spend it in debauched hedonism—probably. Only if it weren't too much effort, which it might very well have been.

Either way, as long as one of his soon-to-appear interviewees had some semblance of a work ethic and book-reading ability, he'd have little enough to complain about.

But sixty centuries is very sufficient to cultivate patience, and that virtue he had in excess.