There were two dragons, one black (deep and velvety) and one blue (shimmery azure). The black dragon was killed but the blue was allowed to live, brought back to the kingdom and kept as a captive slave. It was forced to do manual labor and such. But its mere presence in the kingdom was having a corrupting influence-- the land was producing weaker crops, objects tarnished and rusted more quickly, the behavior and tastes of the people were degenerating.
For example, I was shown a coffee table book at one point, a collection of nude photography, which seemed at a glance to be very tastefully assembled, but on closer inspection I realized all the models were... they were all either horribly aged, or crippled or infirm, wasted away from disease or other disorders, or horribly injured and still in critical condition. In most cases it seemed like the subjects were in no condition to have consented to being photographed nude. It was ill-making.
The company had moved its offices into a building that had previously been a hospital; my office was an old recovery room.
I got a call during my work day; it was a guy I didn't know, claiming he worked for CNN as a researcher. He wanted a few minutes of my time to ask some questions. Initially, he wanted to know about the weather, what it was like, but then his subject shifted. "Have there been an unusual number of planes flying over today?" he asked. "Particularly high-altitude planes heading west?"
I thought that was a rather odd thing to ask but when I looked out my window I could see that, in fact, there were several planes flying roughly westward, on slightly different tracks, and dozens of contrails indicating recent other flights going the same way.
A vaguely cold sensation began in my stomach and started crawling up my spine.
"What's going on?" I asked the guy on the phone. "Something is happening, isn't it?" He started to reply but his voice began to break up and fade away and within seconds the line had gone dead. I looked at the phone, full of dread, but then there was a knock at my door that startled me.
It was Tom L., the guy who originally hired me into the company. He had a crutch and a cast on one leg. I hadn't seen him in years but here he was. Apparently, he had broken his leg in some sort of recreational accident months ago ("last summer") and it was not healing as fast as it should (probably because of the corrupting influence of the dragon). Not all the rooms of the hospital had been converted to corporate use, so he was recovering in a room down the hall. We made plans for lunch and then he hobbled down the hall with his cast and his crutch, because the doctor had ordered him to walk around as healing exercise.