Fifteen dead in less than a century, and not one of them by natural causes. The corpses were always found in some stage of mistreatment, headless being the most common. Occasionally, though, fangs would disappear, and sometimes the right foreleg. Or a wing. And once, just once, the tail.
I collected information on the killings just like I collected sapphires. One corner of my lair was strewn with various death relics--a broadsword, a gauntlet, even a lock of hair found between a victim's back claws.
Something had changed among the humans, something which now made them deadly to dragons.
Fifteen dead in one hundred years was some kind of record. If the killings continued at that rate, we would be extinct within a millennium. Unlike most animals, we didn't breed whenever we glanced at each other. We had rituals, timing, and our own natural infertility working against us.
The infertility concerned the Lair Fathers the most, but it didn't bother me much. It seems logical, if you examine it. Impregnation takes time--and there's often a year between that event and the laying of the egg.
The lairs themselves are the other problem. We're not social creatures; we don't like to live too close together. Only a few caves are large enough to accommodate one of us. If we wanted to dwell in the same area, we'd have to suffer through rock outcroppings or move into abandoned human dwellings--the large stone kind with towers, poorly built because they crumble after a century or two of neglect.
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