Rhyolite
The human stared up at him, unmoving, not even blinking.
He frowned. This wasn’t the sort of reaction he’d imagined. There should have been more screaming and begging and fear. He liked fear.
“Why do you just stand there like that?” he growled, making his way across the cave, ensuring his wings stayed spread wide to block the majority of the sunlight. Humans couldn’t see in the dark, and they were scared of it.
The female’s lips moved slightly, but he couldn’t hear a word she was saying.
“What? Speak up!” he ordered.
“Because if I stay still you won’t see me,” she squeaked.
Cocking his head sideways, he lowered it closer, swinging it back and forth around the area she was in, pretending like he couldn’t see her, always keeping his eyes focused elsewhere. Then when he was perhaps five feet away, he twisted his head sharply and focused one yellow eye on her. Slowly he blinked his triple eyelids, and as they slid back into place he spoke one word.
“Boo.”
Finally, he thought as she screamed. Opening his jaws to expose the razor-sharp teeth behind his silvery skin, he lunged at her with his head, expecting to snap her up and teach her a lesson for stealing from him.
But his mouth closed on empty air as the woman dove to the side and rolled out of his range.
“Oooh goody,” he rumbled. “Game time.”
He chased after her, but once more she managed to evade his attack just in time. Rhyolite roared in anger and spun after her, but she kept running until they’d completed a full circle. He saw her hand shoot out and she snatched another handful of his gold.
“THIEF!” he bellowed and paused to inhaled enough breath to fill the cave with fire.
She somehow sensed what he was up to, and just before he could unleash, something flung out of her hand and hit him right in the top of the snout.
“Ow!” he roared, his voice shaking tiny bits of stone loose from the ceiling as he shook his head from pain. “That hurt!”
Another thing flew at him, this time hitting him in the side of the mouth. His front paw plucked the object from midair, and he realized with a start it was gold. His gold. This impertinent little human was using his own gold as a weapon against him. If he’d been mad before, now he was filled with rage. His tail swept around, batting half of a pile of gold at her. But to his astonishment she managed to hide behind another pile just in time.
“Stay still!” he commanded. “You are worse than a bug that needs squashing.”
“Maybe that’s because I don’t particularly feel like being squashed!”
The instant reply caught him off guard. “Then you shouldn’t have stolen from me.”
“I wasn’t stealing from you.”
“This is my cave,” he said, his tone telling her it should be obvious that if she took something from his cave, that was stealing from him. “I don’t like thieves.”
“Well no shit. I’ve seen the welcome mat you roll out for them, and let me tell you, it’s no red carpet.”
Rhyolite frowned. “What? Why would I use red carpet? What does that have to do with a thief like you?”
“Because…it’s…oh, never mind.”
Was she exasperated with him? He shook his head. How had it come to this? He was the dragon here, the master of his own domain! No puny little human should be talking back to him like this, treating him like an idiot.
“I am going to kill you,” he rumbled from where he blocked the cave exit, eying the pile of gold she was hiding behind.
“Yes, you’ve made that very clear,” she shouted. “It’s a decision you came to despite missing some rather key facts.”
“Oh, such as?”
“I wasn’t stealing from you, for starters!” she snapped.
“You are in my cave. This has been my cave since I claimed it. Everyone knows that.”
A growl of frustration reached him. “Dude, nobody knows that!”
“How can they not know that?”
“Well, let’s start with the fact that you’re a dragon, and those don’t exist!” A small, terrified noise followed up her last words. “I’m talking to a dragon. Great. Perfect. The team is never going to let me live this one down. ‘Oh hey Flow, what did you do today? Oh not much, just got chased by a dragon who thinks I stole from him. You know, no big deal. What about you Kevin? Well, nothing much. Went swimming with mermaids and then took a short ride on a unicorn. The usual. Ha-ha. Okay. great.’”
By this time the tapping of his claw upon the rock floor was swiftly drowning her out. “Are you quite done?” he drawled. “Because I promise you, I am very much real, and this is not a dream.”
“That just proves my point even more.” His respect for this human rose as she stood up from her hiding spot. “I thought you were a dream. I still kind of do. Because dragons don’t exist. They aren’t real. Which means I can’t be stealing from you. I didn’t know it was yours!”
He snorted. “Because gold just stacks itself ever so neatly like this in nature.”
She shrugged. “I was curious about that, yes. But it’s not like there was a big sign on the door that said ‘Here be dragons, don’t take their treasure.’ If it isn’t labeled, how should anyone be expected to know?”
“Turn it over.”
“Huh?”
He gestured with his wingtip. “Turn it over. Read the bottom.”
She snorted. “I’m not falling for that.”
“Falling for what?” he asked, perplexed.
“The ol’ distraction technique. I turn it over and try to read in the dark, and you come and eat me.”
“Eat you? Is that what you thought I was doing?”
“I mean, the part where you tried to snap me up in your jaws was kind of a dead giveaway.”
He let his lips peel back in the dragon equivalent of smile. Despite her verbal barrage, he could still see her wilt slightly at the sight of it. “I am not a fan of human,” he announced. “You’re too stringy. I gave up eating you long ago. So you don’t have to worry about that.”
“Oh gee golly. Thank you! I’ll be so relieved you won’t eat me when I’m dead!”
“I am not going to harm you through trickery,” he said sternly. “That is not how I operate.” To prove his point he backed off, folding his wings tighter to his body and backed away, letting light stream into the cave once more. “Now read it.”
She flipped the gold bar in her hand over, and held it up so that he would be in the background as she read, allowing her to react faster to any move he made. Whoever she was, she was a smart one. There wasn’t much else that he could tell about her. She was tall for a human, especially so for a female. The orange outfit she wore was unlike anything he’d seen before, but it was snug enough to reveal a wide, muscular frame. Her shoulders stretched it, and there was no traditional filling out around her chest section. But there was no mistaking her as female. He could see parts of her hair spilling out from under her white helmet, and her voice was another dead giveaway.
Just another oddity that he had discovered since being unceremoniously dumped out of the side of his cave and onto the mountain. There were a lot of strange things he’d seen, including the way she had arrived. He had been hiding, his silver scales blending easily into the snow, especially once he dug himself deep into it.
“Rye-o-light,” she said, stumbling over the name. “Isn’t that a type of rock?”
“It is also my name. But it’s pronounce Rhy-lite.”
“Oh,” she said, then snickered at her reply as the double-meaning of it registered.
He hung his head. “Perfect. A regular comedian.””
“Well, I don’t want to know how crazy you must be to carve your own name into the bottom of each one of these,” she said at last. “But you can have it back. I’m going to go now. I think there’s a mental facility calling my name.”
Rhyolite didn’t recognize the words. “A what?”
“You know, a crazy person house.”
“I see. Why do you need to go there? Are you losing your mind?”
She laughed. “Oh, that’s rich. A dragon that doesn’t exist asking me if I’m losing my mind. Man, they are going to love me there. They’ll be telling tales of this for ages.”
“I promise you,” he said, letting his voice rumble across the cave. “I am the real deal. Not a part of your imagination.”
“That’s exactly what my mind would have you say if I were going crazy. You know that, right?”
Rhyolite pawed casually at the ground, digging up three long rents in the solid rock with as much ease as a child draws in the mud. “I am not part of your imagination, human. I am Rhyolite, an Earthen dragon, and I exist!”
The cave trembled with his proclamation.