Tribal dragon with coiled tail design

Her name was Orla Vane and she kept the high meadows above Scarrow when the valley still had a tithe barn. The beast came down in the hungry spring, wings raised like a pair of black gates, and it took the sheep but spared the children, which the vicar said was a sin in its own right. Orla went up after it with a tinder box and a ladle of tallow. She found it coiled round the old standing stone, its tail wound so many times around the rock that the stone looked like a spindle.

They talked, the way such creatures do in stories, though I will not swear to the words. The dragon told her the tail was a count of every winter it had outlived, and each spike at its end was a winter still to come. Orla asked how many were left. It lowered its head and showed her the thin dotted tip, where the spikes grew small as seed. Then it asked for one night in her barn, and she gave it the hayloft and her own bread. In the morning there was only the spiral pressed into the frost on the stone, and the wings gone from the sky.

Orla lived to be an old woman with a crooked back, and she never once let a hearth go cold. That is the whole of it. If you want a moral, go and ask the vicar, he keeps one for every fire. Now bank that coal, Tamsin, and mind the wind at the shutters.