The Dragon Book

The Dragon Book is a compilation of short stories that was released in 2009, each involving a Dragon to some extent. It was edited by Jack Dann and Gardener Dozois.

It should be noted that out of all of these stories, only one; Vici, was written by Naomi Novik, and takes place in the Temeraire universe. The other stories are listed here for context purposes only.

Vici - Naomi Novik

See "Vici" page for detailed synopsis

A Stark And Wormy Knight - Tad Williams

After her son Alexandrax is unable to sleep, a dragon mother tells him a tale of his great-grandfather, also named Alexandrax, who was alive when knights existed, and were a threat to dragonkind.

In the story, Alexandrax, normally a sensible dragon who normally avoids eating humans who could prompt the summoning of a knight, one day becomes curious as to why royalty are considered more valuable than other humans, and abducts a princess from a castle rooftop to find out why. However, she struggles to escape him, causing him to drop her to her death. He takes the body of the dead princess back to his cave.

The next day, Alexandrax wakes to find a knight, Sir Libogran the Undeflectable, has been dispatched to rescue the princess and kill him in the process. Alexandrax attempts to fool the knight by using the princesses' corpse as a puppet, but this fails when her head falls off. He then attempts to scare the knight away by claiming that the princess died from a disease in the cavern, but Sir Libogran is prepared to enter anyway to do the princesses' family honour. Finally, Alexandrax spins a tale that he is a magical wishing dragon, and that he will grant Sir Libogran a wish, prompted that he leave the kingdom shortly afterwards. Sir Libogran agrees, and reveals his wish by decapitating Alexandrax as he leaves the cave.

Despite this, Alexandrax is alive - really being a two headed dragon, his second head was sick, and he was hiding it under his wing - and his head grows back over time. As time goes on, Alexandrax meets his future wife, and when heading out one day to court her, he discovers the castle of Sir Libogran, and defecates down the chimney in revenge, before fleeing. Sir Libogran, assuming a bird flock to be responsible, sets traps on the roofs, before falling and skewering himself on one of them.

The mother dragon ends her story, telling her son that they no longer fear knights or humans because they are no longer believed to exist, having been replaced by the far deadlier creature "Statistics".