Needing a Good Home

Well, it happens… I suppose….

But I don’t know, really, how it happened.

It wasn’t anything I really expected, not even in some of my more… er… imaginative dreams, and I do tend to have some odd dreams. My dreams are so odd I’ve stopped telling other people about them. There were too many times when, if they didn’t quite back away suddenly remembering an urgent appointment elsewhere, I have seen that look come into people’s eyes as I tell them just what the penguin was doing with the pogo-stick and why the vicar was fleeing in panic, his vestments on fire.

Anyway, as I said… not even in my wildest of dreams….

Although, it is a national symbol and all that. There is a red one on the national flag, after all.

But, I’m not even Welsh though.

The old man, white beard, wild wind-swept hair, who came over the brow of the hill as I sat cradling the cold, trembling, mite in my arms, did tell me though that when one of them adopts a human, you are theirs, and it is yours, for as long as you both live.

‘It is…’ he said, staring off towards where the horizon would be if it wasn’t in Wales and therefore shrouded in mist and rain. ‘… a pact that cannot be broken.’

Just then the baby dragon I was holding looked up at me, with its eyes the amber of deep flame, coughed up a tar ball and set fire to my sleeve.

The white-bearded old man looked down at the tiny dragon in my arms and smiled. ‘You’ll get used to that,’ he said. ‘I’d recommend getting some burn cream.’ With that, he strode off into the mists, leaving me with my new charge slowly furling and unfurling its delicate wings as it lay contented in my arms.