"Safe from Dragons"

This is our dragon, a.k.a. our furnace. Lately it hasn't been behaving the way we'd expect a furnace to behave.

Oh, how the villagers hated that fire-breathing dragon. Loud it was, and smelly--its stink seeped from deep within its mountaintop cave and flowed all the way to the valley below like a river of vaporous sulfur. The villagers gathered in the inn to discuss the dragon and often were joined by foreign mercenaries and quest-bound knights, all of whom asked the same question: "What should be done?" The mountain was the tallest in the land, and the mouth of the cave poured forth dragonfire almost constantly, great geyser plumes of flame that could be seen in the village day and night. Danger lay in wait on the mountaintop. Surely that danger was waiting to invade the village.

The people assumed their time had come the day the dragon left its cave and flew over the valley. They ran inside their homes, not knowing what else to do, except for one small boy who stayed outside while the dragon, so close to them all, neither roared nor breathed fire but simply glided overhead on its thin wings like a parchment kite. The boy was confused, amazed, and humbled. He was also, however, deeply human. "Go away, dragon!" he screamed. "We don't want you here!" He never told anyone that the dragon looked at him.

Not once in all the days after did any of the villagers catch the torturous odor of dragon flesh on the wind or hear a wild, clawing bellow tumble out from the high-up cave, and it was for the better, they said. Who knew what that dragon had been up to? And now they were safe. The inn began to close early. The mercenaries and knights who still passed that way left town with a quick nod, there being nothing else for them to do. And the villagers, instead of gathering to talk, went to bed every night not long after supper. They slept in a place that was dark all around, as any place without a dragon is bound to be.