The writing prompt from NANO fiction is: Write about someone going into a witness relocation program.
The Dragon's Wish
There came a time when the dragon grew tired of fighting the knights that came to him weekly. Although 'fighting' was too kind, as each encounter consisted of an idiot knight marching up to the mouth of his cave and shouting imprecations - rude ones! - until the dragon could no longer ignore the buzzing in his ears, whereupon he would stick his neck out and fry the knight with one quarter-powered blast of flame.
Dragons live long lives, and after a hundred years this dragon realize that this situation was unlikely to change unless he did something about it. So he took wing and visited Merlin. The wizard quickly acceded to his request, merely asking for a small donation of dragon scales which the dragon gave. Then Merlin waved his wand, mumbled some nonsense words, and poof! The dragon turned into a young human man.
A person might think that it is difficult for a dragon to live his years out as a human; if so, then that person clearly does not know what a dragon's daily life entails. Although the dragon-turned-man no longer had many of his former skills - flight or fire-breathing among them - his draconic spirit and can-do attitude carried him a long way. He quickly amassed a fortune - no mean feat within the strict social castes of the Dark Ages - and lived a life of safety and comfort and hard, hard work.
And yet - there came a day when the dragon-turned-man woke up and realized that his tasks and difficulties of the coming week were much the same as those of the week before and the week before that. And what of the next week and the week after that? An unending parade of drudgery, no better than when he had been a dragon.
So he bought a fine suit of armor and a fine longsword and rode away on a fine horse. As he approached a local dragon's lair, he wondered briefly: did he hope to defeat the dragon, or to be consumed by it? And that was when he realized that the answer didn't matter one whit to him, and that understanding gave him a freedom that he had never felt in all his years as a dragon or as a man.
beep-beep-beep...
Sometimes you really want to write about dragons. What can I say?
I didn't get the beats or consistency of this fable right, but I think this is a reasonable start. Small note: I originally gave the dragon a name, but after shuffling through hundreds of choices and settling on 'Drason', I gave up and made him anonymous. Hey, it made me happy.
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