Salt grit settles on the lips within a minute of stepping onto the Cerovac Flats, and the mud underfoot is warm as bathwater wherever the tide pools steam. The warmth comes from the dragon. A bronze wyrm sixty feet from nose to tail tip lies in the shallows through the afternoon ebb, and at dusk it rises to fish. Its body is stocky and its neck is far too long for it, so it holds itself in a long S, with a chin as blunt and heavy as a shovel blade.
The earliest record is a complaint in the ledger of the salt-pan house at Kovnarsk, which notes that a green-backed wyrm has taken the skate from the stake nets two springs running and left the heads in a pile on the black rock. A later hand adds that the pile was tidy. Some generations on, the lighthouse went up on Kovnarsk Head, and the keepers' logs describe the dragon spending forty evenings in a row with its chin on the waterline, staring at the lamp as if it had been insulted by it. The logs do not say when the right horn broke. It ends in a blunt stump now. Whether this is the animal from the ledger or one of its line, the naturalist could not determine, because every account describes the same sulk.
The animal is easy to read at close range. The bronze of its scales is the dull brown-orange of old church metal, turning to bright verdigris green along the shoulders and spine, where salt has dried in a crust. A dull dent sits in the left flank. Webbed fins run along the jaw and tail. A strand of kelp usually hangs across the remaining horn, and the dragon never removes it. To measure it, the naturalist laid a twelve-foot surveyor's rod across the furrow its tail cuts through the mud and found it three feet four inches wide. One shed scale picked from the pool edge, measured with calipers, ran nine inches across. It eats skate, eels and the occasional stranded seal. The tidy heaps of eel heads on the flat black rock are the surest way to track it, and they show where it has fished that week.
The fishers of Kovnarsk keep one rule: the smallest skate of any catch goes onto the black rock at slack water, and nobody sets foot on the flats once the pools begin to steam. Edyta Voronk, who has netted the Cerovac side for thirty years, says the dragon counts herons, not people, and that the heron is the only creature it ever hurries for. Herons land on the rock anyway. Beside the rock, in the last light, the heap of eel heads sits squared off at its edges, with the largest ones on top.
- Classification
- Metallic dragon, coastal wyrm
- Habitat
- Sea cliffs, tidal flats, salt marshes
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 60 ft nose to tail tip
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Windswept northern coastlines
- Binomial
- Draco aeris tidalis
- Diet
- Skate, eels, stranded seals
- Temperament
- Proud, territorial, petty, patient