2025 Mar 31: Old Man Death

 Old Man Death is the colloquial name of an huge and ancient dragon that lives near the eastern side of the mines of Caeledor. While the old beast is quite temperamental, he has been known to on occasion help the locals in exchange for vast amounts of gold and iron. This help comes usually in the form of him sniffing around for new tin deposits (he boasts that his nose can smell all sorts of metals, and judging by the fact that he can tell the grade and purity of metals offered to him without even looking), but he sometimes lets humans use his fire for melting metal. On at least one occasion he even used his gigantic claws to dig around for tin, but that came at such a gigantic price, that no.one has attempted to ask such a thing from him ever again.

 Of course dealing with a dragon is never easy, but especially one as old and bad-tempered as Old Man Death. The locals will tell you that even if you bring unimaginable wealth to his doorstep, he's just as likely to eat you then to hear you out. On the off chance that he agrees to cooperate, he will often demand more than what was initially presented. Of course he wants it immediately, but if he gets it too fast, he thinks the negotiator was holding out on him, which results in a very abrupt and violent end to the negotiations.

Living next to the territory of such a creature is also not very pleasant, as the dragon doesn't really care for the difference between wild game, and somebody's farm animals. As Old Man Death mostly hunts at night (his eyes are old and sensitive to sunlight), the locals have figured out some quite ingenious ways of building barns in such a way, that getting to the animals is frustrating enough for a dragon for Old Man Death to not do it too often, but not so frustrating as to cause him to burn down the village in his anger.

As one might imagine Old Man Death has more treasures in his possession than most kings, and even a few emperors might turn yellow with envy if they saw his hoard. Naturally over the years wannabe heroes of all shapes and sizes tried to take him on, but none quite managed to finish the job. As a consequence there are quite a few non-magical, and even some magical weapons embedded deep into the Old Man's hide. For the right price, he might even be willing to part with some of them.

It is worth noting, that despite being referred to as "Old Man", and the locals always using male pronouns to describe him, nobody knows the dragon's actual gender. Apparently the first person to successfully negotiate a deal with the beast addressed him as male, and since then nobody has tried to verify if he truly identifies with that gender, or if he just doesn't care. After all why change something, that is working.

Image by Pandadrake