Now theres a legend about the Mordiford Wyvern.Basically a young
girl finds a baby wyvern and raises it to adulthood.As it gets older
and bigger it gets nastier and hungrier,and it a menace to everyone
but the girl who raised it.Eventually a knight comes along and learns
that the beast is friendly to its mistress.The knight dresses up in
the girls clothes and heads off to slay the beast.The wyvern is
expecting honeycake and milk,and it surprised to recieve a sword
thrust through the heart instead.The knight then rides off to claim
his thirty pieces of silver,and the sobbing Penelope rests the dying
creatures head on her lap.
Now the dragons in Never Never land had a similar behaviour
to that wyvern,cute and cuddly when they're young and cruel and
carivorous when they're older.However the wizards,knights and others
had taken to killing the dragons while they were young,and this
led to a situation where only dragons which matured quickly survived
to pass their bloodline into the next generation.Over the millenia
this maturation process had been speeded up so that though a dragon
was hatched out of the egg as a small dragonet after anywheres from
10 minutes to 10 hours later it had grown into a big nasty beast which
no knight would be able to take down.
Dustin naturally enough had the bloodline of the modern dragon
race in him,if not the knowledge of dragon biology.Thus it came as a
bit of a surprise to him when he began to hear the cracks of
lengthening bones within him and the excruciating pain of nerves
and muscles starting to stretch and tear as he began to mature.