Otto Karl Wilhelm Eric Kurt von Himmelstein wasn’t the average 10-year-old boy. For one thing he was a prince, and most 10-year-old boys aren’t. For another he had five first names which meant that he had a lot of uncles and cousins who wanted the boy named after them - and he was.

Even for a prince, he was different. His high-backed shoes were shabby, and his socks drooped over the tops. His golden hair was a gathering place for bits of flowers, grains of dirt and pollen and specks of wood chips. He wore his hair very very long and tied in the back with an old string he had found dangling from a bush.

“It is the drawstring to a cape belonging to a wizard,” he told himself, “and therefore it has magic powers which I will discover if I wear it long enough.”

Every morning his servants laid out beautiful blouses and jackets and trousers of satin and cotton and wool – some with jewels and gold braid and shiny buttons, but Otto preferred to run about in faded blue trousers and a shirt the color of moldy cabbage. Some nights Otto’s mother would sneak into his room and steal his favorite clothes and have them washed, but the young prince would track them down and wrinkle them and dirty them and rub things into them until they smelled like moldy cabbage again.

Otto himself smelled like moldy cabbage, and his father would often arrange his brows like bushy arrows pointing at the bridge of his royal nose and turn down the corners of his royal mouth and issue a very stern royal command to force his son to bathe - hopefully - once a week.

Being a real, honest-to-god prince, Otto didn’t live in the average house like the other 10-year-olds in the village of Cochem. He lived in the magnificent Reichsburg Castle that rests – even today – like a great stone crown set back on a mountain overlooking the beautiful Mosel River. The castle also “overlooked” the village itself, because it was only from the highest room in the tallest tower of the castle that it could be seen.

The townspeople had a tradition of adding descriptions to the royal names, so Otto’s father became known as King Wilhelm the Invisible, because the people rarely saw him. His grandfather was known as King Karl the Impossible, because he was; and Otto was referred to – if at all - as Prince Otto the Odd.

Everyone in the ruling family simply sighed when Otto did something odd – like drawing the picture of a five-legged hamster in indelible ink on the library wall or straddling a pond to have conversation with a frog or tying a small flag to the tail of his mother’s dachshund and sending it yapping through the royal antechamber during high tea.

On those occasions everyone would force a small smile and whisper to one another, “Well, you know our Otto. He’s odd.”

Another thing that made the young prince so different from other boys his age was his very unusual – and only - friend.

It was a dragon.