"Kushner,.Donn.-.A.Book.DragonUC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

All that could be burned was burned, and the walls were
blasted away with gunpowder. Nonesuch watched from greater
and lesser distances, gliding through the maze of caverns in
his hill, Hying out at night - for at this time, he felt it more
seemly not to show himselfЧto survey the scene at dawn from
a distant vantage point. And now the castle had stopped
smoking; a few scorched and meager peasants were setting up
huts in the shadow of its ruined walls.

During all this time, Nonesuch ate very little. In fact, he
had eaten nothing since removing the treasure; but strangely,
he did not feel hungry. His stomach didn't shrink, as it used to
do when food was scarce. In the past, even if his insides didn't
tell him so, he had always known it was time to eat when,
without craning his neck, he could see his large hind toe with
its gold nail, normally hidden by the swell of his belly. But now
his toe didn't appear at all. He had to crane his head to see it;

and he did this so often his neck became sore.

Nonesuch realized the cause of this curious change when
he stopped to scratch his back against a sharp rock ridge with
a hook-like projection that, in the past, had just fit his shoulder.
Now he felt nothing. He looked back: it seemed that the hook
was a foot higher than it used to be! Not believing his own
eyes, he next compared the size of his foot to that of his
footprint, dried in the mud at the cavern's threshold from a
rainy spell two weeks before. He measured the length of his
tail by dangling it over the ledge before his cavern's mouth.
Before, his tail would reach exactly down to the forest floor;

he knew this from the many times he had hung it over that
ledge to beat out the twigs caught in the scales, for Nonesuch
was a tidy beast. All these measurements confirmed that he
had shrunk proportionately all over.

Nonesuch soon decided that he had changed because he

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had not been eating. He was able to test this quickly: though
most of the regular flocks had been eaten or driven away, the
wild boars had become bolder and were roaming out of the
forest and invading former pasture-land. Nonesuch had some
good chases and some delicious meals afterwards on the gamy
flesh. His long fast had not weakened him. On the contrary, he
found that he hunted with more vigor, that he was more agile
for being smaller. After he ate, he grew again. And when he
stopped, he shrank. He took his measurements carefully: there