365 Creative Writing Prompts: Dragon

I didn't see the dragon until it was too late.

Jim and I were out for a little midnight grave robbing, as you do on a Friday night after it rains. We slipped through the cemetery gates without a problem; not even the sleeping elk were disturbed. When I tugged my hat down over my brows, I noticed the watching eyes of a pair of ravens sitting on a tombstone. They didn't call out an alarm, so we assumed we had their permission.

I followed Jim down a winding path, under bare branches, over snake holes. He stopped to sneeze once, and a whiff of mist swirled around his boots. I passed him my handkerchief.

Finally, Jim planted his feet in front of an old grave. Judging by the rounded, weather-worn edges of the headstone and the coverage of moss, I guessed this was a 16th-century burial. I crouched down to read the name. Most of the letters had been rained away, but I got the gist of it. Some aristocrat named George.

"Jack," Jim said. "Hand me the pickax. The ground is a little rocky here."

From the pack on my back, I unstrapped a short pickax, still crusted with dirt from our last outing. You don't get a lot of rocky graveyards in these parts, but we usually aimed for the oldest and most protected graves. These yielded the best results.

With my work on the shovel and Jim's work with the pickax, we spent barely an hour before a worm-eaten coffin appeared beneath our feet. Jim smashed through the lid and started rummaging through the contents for gold and jewelry. I was startled when he jumped back and pulled his hand out of the coffin.

"What is it, Jim? Did something bite you?"

"There's no bottom."

"No bottom to what?"

"The coffin."

We usually worked by moonlight to avoid attention, but Jim procured a match and lit it against his boot. He held the flame inside the hole of the coffin lid.

"Look, Jack," he whispered. "There's nothing in there. Not gold, not a skeleton, nothing."

I peered in. Sure enough, the bottom of the coffin opened up to a bottomless pit. I could even see the ragged edges of the sides of the coffin where they had been ripped away.

"Jim, it's like something came up from under the ground and ate George."

"Stop talking nonsense, Jack. Who's George?"

"The man we're trying to rob."

"And you think something came out of the ground to eat him? Like what, a big snake?"

We both stiffened as we heard the slithering of scales on the ground above us. The match burned out--or was blown out. I turned as slowly as I could to see what waited for us up there.

At first, I thought it was the two ravens again. But they had never been ravens. The watching eyes I had felt at the entrance had been the four glinting eyes of a grave-dragon. The tombstone, his enormous jaw. As he stood over us, he grew bigger and blacker than the whole night sky. Bones dangled from his teeth. Dirt fell from his scales. A long tail whipped from side to side like a cat's when it spots the movement of a tiny mouse.

Surely, the legends were true. Surely, grave-dragons only ate corpses. They were harmless to the living.

Surely.