My story, “A Truer Account of Sir Geoffrey and the Dragon,” is out now in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine No. 40! It will be free to read there from now through October.
Two or three years ago, while teaching The Hobbit, I was talking with my class about Smaug and dragons in general, and their propensity for hoarding gold, and how it might symbolize (among other things) the greed of a bad king. You can certainly see this in Beowulf, and it also resonates in The Hobbit, where the real antagonist turns out not to be Smaug, nor even really the goblins, but the dragon hoard that the good guys nearly come to blows over.
In the course of that class discussion, I quipped that it might be funny if there was one dragon who had actually earned all his gold legitimately, but knights-in-shining-armor kept challenging him anyway. It got a chuckle from the class, but the idea stayed with me. Eventually it turned into this story. Whether or not the dragon narrator actually has earned his hoard legitimately…? I’ll let you be the judge!
Hope you enjoy!