Trial #9 {Challenge Accepted}

Day 11

You are now a dragon. Describe your hoard.

***

My ancestors had hoarded gold for centuries. Robbed from ancient explorers, treasure hunters, and the like, they were of no use to my family other than mere trophies of their exploits. And so, that's what my mother taught me to do as well, to detest humans and to treasure gold.

Now, I've got to tell you firsthand that I have never been like my brothers. I've always had a rather repulsive attitude against any form of violence, and in a family of dragons, that's not hard to find. My brothers saw me as the runt of the family, if you will, even though I was just as physically strong and developed as them, if not better.

As we reached adulthood (if I knew how much that was in dragon years, I'd tell you) all of us were sent to guard forgotten islands around the World. I was sent to the Puna ridge island in Hawaii, which had been undiscovered until recently. People rarely came there, so I had plenty of time to laze around and do nothing.

Eventually, someone did come, though. It was the morning after a storm, and I was out to go get some breakfast. When I came back, some guy was curled up on one corner of the cave.

Now, as a dragon, I've had no prior experience with humans until now, but I had been shown enough pictures of it by Mother that I had a fairly good idea of how they looked. This one wore a simple shirt and pants. He wore a spectacular contraption around his eyes which I later learnt were called spectacles.

I did the basic protocol I was supposed to follow (scream, evil grin, and breath fire), and he started screaming like a little baby. Funny. Weren't Humans supposed to be all brave and fierce?

I motioned to him to give me everything he had, instead of telling it to him in words. That's right, most dragons know how to speak in the human language. My uncle, for instance, was a guard at the famous Bermuda triangle, so plenty of humans used to end up there. He ended up picking up on the language on his stay there, and that's how I learnt it from him. At the present, I know English, Hawaiian, and a little bit of Animal language as well (I'll tell you what it's called if I get any info).

So, back to my autobiography.

I tell him to give me his valuable possessions, but he,told me that he didn't have any. At the end, I got exhausted with signing for so long, and told him,
“Look, Dude, this isn't just a matter of me holding useless possessions. I've got a family to make proud of".

His eyeballs looked ready to jump out of its sockets. “Y-you speak?” he stammered.

I rolled my eyes. “Yes, I do".

The man broke out of his stupor, and began checking his bag. After a while,  he got up.

“I may not have gold to give you, but I do have something even more valuable than that,” he said.

“And what's that?” I asked.

“This,” he said, showing me some kind of a book. When I opened it, I saw many unknown symbols painted in the book. In other words, it was all Greek to me.

“What use am I going to have with this?” I asked him.

“That book is not the only thing I'm going to give you. I've got something far greater than that. I'm going to teach you to read".

It was the nicest thing anyone had done for me. The book he gave me was an English primer, a beginners’ book to learn the language, he told me. That's all it took. I broke down into tears.

Later, I learnt that the man was a teacher, shipwrecked on his way home. That night, the man taught me each letter with patience. I repeated everything with him. By morning, I had begun to read simple words.

The man finally departed before giving me another gift- another small book. I read through every single word laboriously, slowly figuring out its meaning as I read it, for months, until I met my next visitor.

Ever since then, I stopped asking people for gold. Instead, I asked them for any kind of literary works that they had. If they didn't have that, I'd settle with anything that they considered valuable enough to give to me.

One time, there was this little boy, who gave me seven whole books. And at the end of it, I had traveled to someplace else other than this little island I lived in. Even now, I wish that I could go to Hogwarts.

I guess the man was right, this was far more valuable than the gold that would've been of no use to me.

My hoard is my personal library.

***

Okay, okay, that was the weirdest prompt I had ever written, and one of the worst. I sort of ran out of ideas, Hehe.

Anyways, I'm going ahead with this.