They lived happily ever after.

But that’s not the tale, is it?  First you have to have the wedding – a posh affair, because he was a prince and she was a…

Well, anyway, he wasn’t all that much of a prince.  You could ride across his princedom in a leisurely day, even if you stopped to take a nap around noon, and it was mostly rocks and the wastes of what had once been a fine land. But he was still a prince, son of a king and a queen – and because of the nature of this little area where our story is, both of them had royal blood. He had a cousin who’d been eyeing him speculatively since he’d reached his full growth – but she has her own story.

They had a wedding, posher and fancier than their little nation could afford, because he was a prince, and he’d finally found love.  But oh, he’d found it in such a strange place!

Everyone at the wedding whispered about it, but none of them knew the real tail – ha, you see what I did there?  The real tale. You and I, we’ve seen the logs they passed on to the King and Queen.  We’ve seen the old tower.

Before the Prince could become a king – not that anyone wished or wishes the King to pass on, but it’s best to plan ahead for these things – there would need to be a quest.  And the quest, in those days, was to find the truth of the rumors, the dragon in the tower.

His cousin, the one with eyes only for him, she wanted to come along.  I think we can agree it’s best she didn’t.

After all, I like the new Princess, and if you look at things the right way, she has royal blood, too.

There’d been a dragon in that tower since the land around it bustled with traffic and sang with commerce.  There’d been a dragon since before there was a king, and their bloodlines were every bit as unbranching, as “pure.”

She looked lovely, didn’t she, in that wedding dress?  I think long trains will become quite the thing.  And veils.  The one to cover her tail, and the other to cover that pale, pale skin, to protect it from the sun.

Nobody said the prince had to slay the dragon, especially one who’d been stuck in that tower for oh so long.