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The three new people at the table, Borch, Téa, and Véa, seemed to be hanging on his every word.
"Fascinating," Borch breathed, his eyes shining. "When was this, Harry? How long ago did you observe this magnificent creature?"
Harry tilted his head up, as if searching his memory. "Well, let's see now…" he mused. "It's currently the year 1255, if I'm not mistaken… so, it must have been about… oh, seventy to eighty years ago, I'd say. Give or take five years, of course. My memory for exact dates isn't what it used to be."
"Seventy… seventy years ago!" Borch exclaimed, a little too loudly, drawing a few curious glances from the other patrons of the rowdy inn. "My dear fellow, how old do you expect us to believe you are?"
"Oh, about a century, I suppose," Harry said with his most mischievous, unrepentant smirk, as he casually downed the rest of his drink in one smooth gulp. "Give or take a decade, here or there."
"You have a truly wild imagination, my friend Harry," Borch said, shaking his head, though he was smiling, clearly amused by Harry's outlandish claim.
"It's one of the many interesting things I have, yes," Harry replied, his smirk widening.
"You also said," Borch continued, his curiosity apparently insatiable, "that Geralt and I were both wrong in our thoughts on what, exactly, a Golden Dragon is. So, enlighten us, Harry. What do you think it is?"
"A Golden Dragon," Harry explained, his tone becoming more serious, more academic, "is simply a dragon that got incredibly lucky, a dragon that benefited greatly from its parents' considerable success and longevity."
"You see, when a common dragon, a particularly powerful and long-lived one, is able to absorb and store up truly huge amounts of ambient magic in its body, over its entire, very long lifetime… it is then, and only then, possible for it to give birth to a Golden Dragon."
He paused, making sure he had their full attention. "Normal dragons, you see, have no real other biological use for all that excess magic they accumulate. So, when they finally lay their eggs, their body naturally, instinctively, condenses all the vast amounts of magic they have stored up over centuries, and then it presses that concentrated magic, infuses it, directly into the egg, or eggs."
"The baby dragon developing inside then absorbs that potent, concentrated magic into its own being. It uses it to first strengthen its body, to make it more resilient, more powerful, and then also to significantly strengthen its fiery breath, making it hotter, more destructive. This, by the way, is also why the first-born dragons in a clutch are usually, though not always, noticeably stronger and more dominant than their later-hatching siblings."
Harry finished his explanation, and then he saw that he had the rapt, completely undivided attention of everyone at the table, including, much to his amusement, even the usually stoic and world-weary Geralt of Rivia.
"The problem," Harry continued, leaning forward conspiratorially, "is that usually, dragons give birth to multiple babies at the same time, in a single clutch. The magic that the parent has stored up then has to be distributed amongst all the developing babies. The oldest, the first to hatch, typically gets the most, and the youngest, the last to hatch, gets the least. The sheer, almost unimaginable, amount of raw magic required to even have a chance of creating a Golden Dragon is so immense that there can only be one single, solitary baby to absorb it all, as well as an extremely large, ancient, and magically saturated parent to provide it in the first place. So…" he concluded, sitting back with a satisfied air.
"…you can see now why they are so incredibly rare. The very specific, almost impossible, circumstances required for their birth are just very, very hard to accomplish. Which is why only one, maybe two, are ever seen in any given century, or even two."
Harry explained all this with a confident, academic air. He may have, he admitted to himself, done a little more than simply observe the last Golden Dragon he had encountered all those years ago.
But in his defense, it had actually been no problem at all for him to figure out the biological and magical mechanics of how they were born.
Nundus, back on his home world, were born in a remarkably similar way, though on a much more successful, and frankly, terrifying, scale.
As soon as he had recognized the tell-tale magical signs of that type of singular, high-magic birth with the last Golden Dragon he'd studied, he knew, with almost complete certainty, how they were created.
"A fascinating theory, my dear Harry," Borch said, his eyes alight with intellectual excitement. "One I had admittedly never once thought of. How… how sure of this theory are you, if I may ask?"
Harry shrugged, a gesture that was both casual and deeply confident. "Very sure," he told them. "But not quite completely. I would bet quite heavily on it, but as I've learned over the years, there is always room for error, for some unknown variable, no matter how much you try to account for it, no matter how much you try to change or control the outcome."
"How absolutely fascinating," Borch mused. He then turned to Geralt with a good-natured, teasing smile. "You still think it's just a matter of simple mutants, after hearing all that, my dear Geralt?"
Geralt gave a little, noncommittal grunt, a sound that was very typical of him. "If Harry says it's magic that makes them the way they are," he said, taking another long chug of his drink, "then I'm sure he would know better than me on the subject."
"You have much faith in this man," Borch declared, looking at Harry with renewed interest. "You must be quite something indeed, Harry, to impress such a famously stoic and skeptical witcher."
Harry smiled, a polite, almost humble smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. "I only know what I know," he said simply. "So," he added, deftly changing the subject, "you never actually told me what the two of you are doing in this rather random, out-of-the-way pub. Are you traveling somewhere together?"
Geralt shook his head. "Just got finished with a contract," he grumbled. "Basilisk. A nasty one. And then some of the local villagers decided they wanted to help themselves to my things, my pay, while I was down in the sewers taking care of it for them. Borch, however," he said, nodding towards the other man with a look of genuine gratitude, "managed to… discourage them, until I arrived."
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