Don't Count Your Coins Before They're Stacked

Walter placed the last gold coin from his pile onto the stack, carefully lined up against the cavern wall.

“One million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five.”

His tail twitched. The number of gold coins was so, so close to a nice, round number. The other nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine stacks of one hundred coins each mocked him from their nearby columns. The silver was at three billion, which was delightful, and the copper was at four trillion and eight hundred billion, which wasn’t great. But it was better than this eighty-five nonsense. Perhaps it was time to make another donation to the Fund for Treasureless Dragons.

Walter’s sister always said, “What’s the use of counting it, as long as it makes a big enough pile to sleep on?” And his father always said, “Gold doesn’t grow on trees, son.” How was that even relevant?

His mother understood better than the other two, but even she thought giving the excess away to charity was simply a waste. “Maybe if you found another nice young dragon to settle down with,” she often said, “you’d have someone to spend it on. You know, the Naga has a very sweet son.” But Walter was five hundred and fifty-five. Which was a great number for an age, but it was also quite old enough to be finding a boyfriend on his own. And besides, it made him feel safe - settled - when he knew he was surrounded by treasure that added up well. 

Walter scraped the last ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five gold pieces into a small cloth bag. He’d have to see if his sister would give him the extra fifteen he was missing. If not, maybe he could exchange it for ten diamonds and give the rest to charity. He stood up, arching his back and letting his wings stretch until they spanned his coin cavern. 

A crash resounded, bouncing off the cavern walls until the echoes merged. 

Walter retracted his wings with a snap. He took a moment to reassure himself that he hadn’t toppled one of the carefully labeled towers of coins, before walking gingerly along the path he’d left himself to the entrance. Every once in a while a mouse or an especially stupid sparrow managed to find its way into his caverns and get trapped. Small creatures tended to panic when surrounded by the stench of a dragon - though Walter did his best to take the trash out regularly, there was really no hiding the smell of raw meat for dinner every night. Occasionally one of these creatures knocked over a jewel or a stack of coins on their way back out of his labyrinth of systematic storage caverns. No matter, it would hardly take a - 

The sound of three more crashes, followed by a distinctly human yelp had him lumbering through the hallways. It took him a few tries to locate the correct cavern. When he did, he almost cried. 

A knight - a man from the sound of the noises coming from inside the suit of armor - was pinioned under a heap of jewels, surrounded by utter destruction. At least three separate shelves of trinkets had been knocked over, as well as the whole pyramid of rubies, which were still in the process of rolling about the floor like drops of glinting blood. 

“Are you an idiot?” Walter roared, quite forgetting in his fury that he could roast the knight to a crisp. “Did you come here simply to destroy years of careful cataloging? Scoundrel! Rogue!” He hadn’t been this incensed since his sister had playfully tipped over a stack of his allowance coins, back when they were children. And that had been just one stack.

“Well you might think about putting this stuff a bit more out of the way,” the knight said, groaning under a pile of rubies. 

“There are signs and labels. ” Walter jabbed his tail at the signpost in the middle of the cavern that said “Jewels, Trinkets, Misc.” He hated that word, miscellaneous - everything should rightfully fit into a category. He had tried listing out all of the one-item categories that he kept in this room. The sign had gotten so big as to block the doorway before he’d given up.

“Well, there wasn’t a sign saying “dragon this way” was there?”

Walter thought for a moment. “That’s true. But I’d have to move it every time I was counting in a different cavern. Perhaps a series of lighted tracks, which lit up when I walked by...” 

As he mused, the knight managed to wiggle out from under the last of the jewels and sprinted for the entrance, clanking as he went. “I’ll just be on my way then, didn’t mean to disturb.”

Walter turned his bulk slowly, cautious of the few remaining undisturbed shelves in the room. From the hallway, he heard another crash and millions of metal things rolling along the floor. 

“No,” he groaned. “No, no, no not the coin room. Can you not read?” he thundered. The diamonds wobbled on their shelves. A glass trophy case shattered. He galloped after the knight as fast as he could, pulling his wings in tight to avoid hitting any signs. 

The edges of his vision darkened as he surveyed the coin room. The knight was edging backward, facing Walter, heedless of each stack that he stumbled over in his desire to keep away from the dragon. Piles of gold, silver, and copper crashed into one another and intermixed - intermixed - as the knight clumsily attempted to climb the stacks or hide behind them. Walter tried to avoid furthering the damage himself as he stalked the knight around the room, grabbing at him with his claws and wincing as he brushed against the few remaining columns. 

“Why are you running about and knocking everything over, you blathering idiot?” Walter said, striving to make his tone friendly. “Can’t we do the whole ‘kill the dragon’ thing out in the open? Away from the treasure?” 

“That seems like a losing proposition at this point,” the knight called. “Maybe if you could just put up an exit sign.”

Walter swung his tail around to block the door. “Oh, you won’t be leaving here any time soon.”

The air was growing thick and hazy from the smoke tumbling out of Walter’s mouth, and he desperately wanted to melt this idiot to mush. But this was the coin room - the heat of Walter’s fire would also melt whatever piles of coins it touched, and one couldn’t count gold slag the way one could count coins. It was simply a disaster. Walter roared his frustration, gave one last, longing glance at the few still-perfect stacks that now hid the knight from view, and crashed blindly forward. 

He could literally feel the mess he was making - coins washing over his forearms, rolling down his back, collecting in the hammocks formed by his closed wings. But he could also feel the distinctly larger metal heft of a body encased in armor, as it scrambled away from the tide of coins he was pulling towards himself. 

“Got you,” he said, hauling the knight up by the collar of his breastplate. “You’ll pay for this now, you clumsy buffoon.” He backpedaled, using his wings to bring himself to an upright position while still keeping a grip on the knight. He couldn’t see the man’s face due to the helmet, but he could hear the blubbering. They all blubbered when they were caught. Bravery was a fairy tale.

“Please don’t eat me. I’ll give you all the money I have - just - “

“I don’t eat - “ Walter started to say - he never ate humans, the taste was terrible. He’d intended to make this one spend the next ten years of his puny mortal life putting his caverns back in order. But he hesitated. “How much money do you have?”

“Um,” the knight said, clearly reluctant to lower his sword or take his eyes off of the steaming dragon in front of him. “Maybe fifteen gold?” 

The slits in Walter’s eyes narrowed to pinpricks. “You’re sure?”

“Well, I’d just gone to the bank after giving the rest to my kids, so, I think so?”

“Mmmm,” Walter couldn’t help letting out a rumbling purr of satisfaction, shaking the casements. But the glass was shattered already, anyway. 

He snatched the knight up, knocking the sword out of the man’s hand with a flick of his claw. With one arm he shook the knight out upside-down, hard enough to elicit a whimper, as he began moving back towards the entrance to his cavern. Several coins rattled out, bouncing off the bits of armor until they landed on the floor. Three rubies also fell out of the knight’s pockets, Walter noted with a disgusted snort. Not a knight then, but a thief pretending to be a knight. He’d almost lost his beautiful system and had an uneven number of rubies. 

Walter tossed the would-be thief unceremoniously out of his cave, ignoring the clanking and moaning as the man hit the landing below his own. He wasn’t particularly worried - it was a roc’s nest and therefore relatively padded with fledgling feathers. The man would have to work to get out of it before the mother roc returned and decided he made delightful baby food, but that was none of Walter’s concern. 

Sweeping up the abandoned coins as he went, the dragon retraced his steps back to the coin room and surveyed the damage. 

“Cancel my plans,” he said to the coins. “The Fund will just have to wait.”

Six years later, when he’d finally finished re-shelving, re-stacking, and recounting it all, Walter smiled. Twin curls of smoke drifted up from his nostrils to the ceiling of his cave. Two million. Flat.