You would have to search extensively to find the winding path or the quiet meadow, those for which England was later renowned. Instead, there were miles of abandoned, uncultivated lands; scattered paths, roughly carved into rugged rocks or deserted marshes. Most of the roads left behind by the Romans had now been destroyed or overgrown with weeds; occasionally, they faintly appeared within the wild landscape. Frozen fog hovered over rivers and marshes, serving the dragons best, which, even then, were the native inhabitants of this area. The people living nearby—one wonders what kind of despair drove them to settle in such bleak places—perhaps even feared these creatures, whose panting breaths could be heard long before their distorted faces emerged from the fog. However, these kinds of monsters did not surprise them. People at that time considered them just another everyday threat; moreover, there were so many other worries at that time—how to cultivate the frozen soil; how to find wood for the fire; how to eliminate the disease that could kill a dozen pigs in a day and fill children's cheeks with green rashes.
Anyway, dragons were not so bad, provided you did not provoke them. It was necessary to accept that every so often, perhaps after some mysterious quarrel among them, a creature would stumble into the village, wildly angry, and despite the screams and knives brandished at it, it would unleash its rage and injure anyone slow to move away. Or that, rarely, a dragon might take a child and vanish into the fog. The people of that time had to philosophize about such outbursts of rage. In such a region, on the edge of an endless swamp, in the shadow of some sawtooth hills, lived an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice. They might not have been their full or exact names, but for convenience, that is how we will refer to them.