All Creatures Great and Small

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. There had been dragons, real giants, in the before times. But that was ages agone. All the people remembered of those dragons was burning and wasting and daughters sacrificed. Not the good times, those weren’t.

No dragons in the Valley now.

Leastways, none that we can’t manage.

Back in the Medieval times, we had quite a mess with the giant lizards. Blood-thirsty. Greedy as sin. For awhile it looked like we humans were going to be run out of here. That was back in my great-great-great…many times great-grandparents’ time. Big as houses, those dragons were. Bigger, even! And territorial. They didn’t like other dragons moving in on their sweet spot.

And the dragon fights! Something fierce they were, when a new dragon tried to move in. The entire Valley would shake from the struggling and crashing and smashing. Everyone would just have to hide in their cottages until one or t’other was vanquished.

Problem with that was, big as their appetites are, dragons don’t eat their own kind. You know about those big whales that end up beached, dead and rotting on the sand near Woolacombe and Falmouth and Brighton? Well, that’s what it was like in the Valley, but with a dead dragon instead of a dead whale.

What a mess that was to clean up!

The town butcher would lead a line of wagons out to wherever the defeated draco had fallen and the men would chop it up as quick as can be. They never knew when the surviving lizard would wake up from its nap, exhausted from the fighting, and come looking for a nice, juicy man to chomp down on. So they had to butcher the carcass and haul it back to the village in their handcarts. Because, of course, horses won't go anywhere near where a dragon is. Or has been. The men hauled back their heavy-laden carts to the big yard at the granary to do the final work, removing all of the scales and claws and cleaning the bones. They turned a good profit, you have to give ‘em that, selling on the usable bits to magicians and wizards. There was even one family, Mellicute by name, that took the rib bones and made jewelry and windchimes and such like out of them. Made a big profit. They built a big manor house back up in the hills and left dragons behind for good. You won’t see hide nor hair of a Mellicute in the Valley these days.

Well, then, after the fighting and the butchering of the loser, we’d have peace, for a while, anyway. But as soon as another out-Valley dragon heard about the easy pickings, why they'd show up and the ruckus would start in all over again. Folks were getting pretty goldarned tired of it all. It was my very own great-great-great Aunt Pepperonia who solved the Valley’s dragon problem, not that she really meant to. A happy accident, you might say. But when the opportunity presented itself, well…

What’s a good Valley girl supposed to do?

Aunt Pepperonia was sent away to the City when she was just a wee girl, so’s she wouldn’t end up being sacrificed to whatever dragon was nested down around here someday. While she was there, she ‘prenticed to a toymaker, a miniaturist more specifically, and learned how to make the most exquisite little pieces for dollhouses and such. Tiny little sofas and tables and rugs and bedsteads. She was just about ready to come back home to the Valley and get herself married, since she was over the age of twenty, when girls become women and stop being so succulent-like to dragons. But she was the best ‘prentice the toymaker had ever had, and so the woman tried to get Aunt Pepperonia to stay. Said she’d leave her entire business to Pepperonia in her will.

The greatest enticement—the thing she threw in at the end when it looked like Aunt Pepperonia was heart-set on coming back here—was that she’d teach Pepperonia her secret formula.

Now, Aunt Pepperonia took that secret to her grave, so I can’t tell you the specifics. But I can tell you the story of it, as was told to me by my mam, and her by her own mam, all the way back to great-great-great Aunt Pepperonia herself.

You see, this toymaker was a witch. She had a side business, and a very lucrative one at that, in miniaturizing pet dogs and cats and suchlike. She’d mix up a batch of her secret formula and add some of it to the food of whatever stray dogs and feral cats, or even good-for-naught horses and cows, someone wanted to buy for a pet. She even fed it to the animals from a circus once, so I hear tell, when times were hard and those big elephaunts and giraffen and goriellas and leonines were costing too much to feed.

What this formula of hers did, this toymaker-witch, was to shrink the animals down real small-like. Miniaturize the beasties till they was no bigger than dolls. Made a lot of sense, too, for the kiddens in those tight little City houses. They didn’t have a lot of stretching-out space, did they, for a full-size pet. So a miniature pet was just perfect.

I heard there was one time this witch left some of that formula out and the mice got into it. Shrank down to the size of ants. Real bother that was, too! Just imagine...

Anyways, once Aunt Pepperonia learned how to make that secret formula—oh, herbs and powders and some other stuff, no doubt—nothing doing but that she hightailed back to the Valley lickety-split. She mixed up some big barrels of that formula, and threw in a bunch of fresh meat she got from the butcher, and left the barrels out on the riverbank where the Valley dragons—three or four, there was then—always came down to drink.

No, the dragons didn’t go there all at the same time, or exactly in the same place. She spaced those barrels out so that every dragon got some. And within a tenday or so, the folks in the Valley began to see the results.

It wasn’t an instantaneous process. It takes time for dragon bones to shrink, after being big for so long. And you know how physics works. They had to shed all the extra cells and blood and meaty bits, kind of sloughed it off when they peed and pooped. Yes, that’s the way elimination works for all living species. Even for dragons. But by the end of the week, those dragons were about half the size they’d started out. Of course, that left space in the food chain, as it were, for new dragons to move in. Our old dragons had gotten too small to win in a fight, so they hid away while the new dragons ate that special food, too. And they began to shrink. On and on it went for nigh on a year, with the dragons getting persistently smaller. By the time all of the dragons for about five hundred miles around had flocked to the Valley and gotten shrunk, there were at least two-three hundred of them.

Of course, Aunt Pepperonia was declared a national hero for that, and she was knighted by the king and everything. But she didn’t stop there. She started setting traps for the tiny dragons, some no bigger than my thumb, and sending them off to the City for her old mentor to sell. They split the profits. Both of them made a boatload of money. You see, everyone wanted a pet teacup dragon. That’s what they sold them as, “Teacup Dragons.” 'Cause the wee things could fit inside your teacup. In fact, the potters had had to make a new style of teacups with special lids on ’em, the ones everyone uses today whether they have a pet Teacup Dragon or not. ‘Cause dragons loved the taste of tea, you know, and they’d climb right in your cup. High Tea was a bit of a bother for a while until they worked out how to keep the tiny dragons off while they poured out the boiling water...

But as you can see, Aunt Pepperonia kept the very best breeding dragons for herself. That’s how my family got so wealthy. This here is the best breeding farm in the entire Valley. Now, if you’ll just step this way, I have a newly hatched set of our rainbow basilisk-types that I think will suit your little girls just fine…

Thank you for reading! Likes, comments, shares, follows, tips, and pledges are always cherished.

Author's Note: This story was inspired by a line from Frédéric Clément's book The Merchant of Marvels and the Peddler of Dreams. On page 15 there is the verse:

Amazingly enough...

I also have a troop of elephants

all as small as specks of sand

who come trumpeting from time to time

into my teacup.

I've always wanted "a troop of tiny elephants," but once I started writing the dragon stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue challenge, it seemed a natural progression to turn those tiny elephants into tiny dragons. I still need to get to the Valley and find that farm...

Someday.

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I have challenged myself to write twenty-seven dragon prologues/stories for the Vocal.media Fantasy Prologue Challenge, one for each day the challenge runs. Here's a link to my next entry: