Writing

The dragon slept. For eons he had slept. All around, a glowing-red blackness engulfed him and warmed his scales. Currents of molten rock swirled around his body and gently supported him deep deep inside the mountain.

It is true that dragon's lairs are often large chambers deep inside volcanic mountains. But dragons don't sleep in large caves atop piles of gold coins. Dragons sleep in the warmest reservoirs of magma. The fact that molten gold plates to their scales while they sleep is simply a trivial point of interest. The dragon rarely cares how it appears to mortals and is neither helped nor hindered by the extra layer. (Dragons have also awoken to find themselves plated with cooper, platinum, diamonds and more.)

Garshm had chosen his most recent hibernation spot for the warmth and the peace. He had had to punch through a particularly thick crust of rock to reach his liquid bed chamber. And he knew that it would be a long while before the volcano finally told him his welcome had worn thin. Eventually the mountain would spit him out in a flow of lava, or perhaps more spectacularly an explosion of rocks and soil and ash. Either way, waking up was a rude experience at best.

By and large, dragons are happiest when they sleep. Or looked at from the other perspective, dragons are terribly nasty creatures when they've just woken up.

As it turns out, Garshm would be soon awaking in a very nasty mood. And his ire will be all the worse when he discovers that Unicorns, his primary source of nourishment, have been wiped from the Earth by something called people.

Indeed unicorns and nearly all magical creatures had been gone from the Earth's surface for quite some time. The platypus and dolphin remained, but they had evolved and become as "real" as animals and fish and even people. No longer creatures of energy, they lived only in the world of the physical and material.

Dragons are "real". But they exist in more than a single reality. They are creatures of both mass and energy. The mass of their bodies, as yours, is simply condensed energy. But unlike you and I, dragons retain control of that energy and can direct it with a mere thought.

This leads to some pretty spectacular feats of power. For example, Pangaea, the planet's one and only continent was fragmented and sent adrift one night during an argument between two dominant dragons. A similar incident a few million years later left a crater in the Earth worthy of a giant meteor strike. Ninety-eight percent of the species alive at the time were lost.