[h1][center]Dragon[/center][/h1]

The dragon's inhaling stopped suddenly, as each of its orifices was blocked in turn. With a noise somewhere between a huff, a hiccup, and an engine failure, a puff of feathers flew from its nostrils. The dragon's eyes widened, and its snuffling and puffing grew panicked. The dragon's tremendous ribcage expanded and cracked along its underscales to a frightful rumbling sound churning deep within its guts.

Like an overinflated balloon made of pork and sulfur, the dragon's torso exploded spectacularly. A gout of white-hot flame shot out from the hole in its neck, sending Kodor on a parabolic arc straight into the inn. A rush of dragonfire shot out of the dragon's mouth and nose, neatly cooking the pigeons in its nostrils, partially melting Welt's armor, and blowing most of the flesh off his bones. A wave of white-hot dragon teeth and bones embedded themselves in anything within a twenty foot radius, and a wave of fire as thick and sticky as napalm splashed the ground nearby. After only a few seconds, the only remaining evidence that a dragon had even existed here was a spreading pool of dragonfire, several dozen pounds of dragon bone fragments, and a few rapidly-disintegrating shreds of dragon skin.

The aftermath of the dragon's grisly backfire brought a brief respite, and a chance to survey the damage done. The inn was in ruins, of course-- not even the finest establishment could withstand such a blow, and this inn was not very structurally sound in the first place. Several people were wounded, either by the dragon's bony shrapnel or by its still-burning bodily fluids. Though the dragon was obviously dead, the havoc it wrought was very obvious. Stranger still, a set of five metallic boulders lay right at the epicenter of the explosion. Though they were still dangerously hot, each of them were about the size of a man's head and each of them gleamed like polished gold in the fading sun. Perhaps they held some power, or some value still?