"Oh, it definitely doesn't hurt trees."

"Huh. Want to test it?" He extends a wing upwards. "Tip of the wing, just in case? I'll heal if it lands." 

"If you're suuuuure." Pwing. It does him no harm.

He retracts the wing. "Convenient! It's a rare spell that doesn't have to worry about crossfire." He wonders if there's some kind of opposed-elements effect going on. It didn't look or feel like a positive energy burst, but this world clearly seems to have different forces at work.

"Thanks for letting me test it."

"Delighted to be of service. Once my business here concludes, if you've an interest in a spar, or other activities, I don't intend to be hard to reach."

"You'd be hard to miss, if you're always that big."

"I can shapeshift — a bit like a magical girl can, now that I think of it — but it has daily limitations like much of my magic, about forty minutes, and I'm usually as you see me."

"That's not much like we do it at all. Must make it hard to get any privacy, being so huge."

"It's customary for my kind to lair on a nice secluded mountain peak, but one must generally keep the area clear of threats if one wishes to sleep in peace, which can be quite time-consuming. In the meantime I've been taking advantage of the ability to fly great distances and nest on clouds." 

"Nest on clouds, my goodness, I've touched them and they're just - cold wet air -"

"To me, they're more like a sea of fluffy blankets. 'Cold' isn't really a problem either, for a winter dragon. But in human form, I find ordinary blankets just as comfortable."

"You're a 'winter' dragon? Are there summer ones?"

"There are many kinds! What you might call 'summer' dragons are associated with fire, 'autumn' with air and lightning, 'spring' with earth and acid, and there are other variants as well, all with different abilities. These aren't really the technical terms, but I find them useful nonetheless."

"I don't think acid's very springy!"

"Side effect of both being loosely associated with earth, I suppose, at least in our magical theory. I never explored the whys too deeply, as my enthusiasm for magical theory is about as great as your enthusiasm for politics."

Giggle.

This sounds like a good opportunity to amuse the crowd with the story of how he was once mistaken for a different sort of dragon and wound up chased several miles by a group of halfling sharpshooters riding pterosaurs...

It's a good story even if nobody believes him. What's a pterosaur? Is a halfling like a pygmy?

A pterosaur is a kind of flying dinosaur! He's not sure how best to describe them to someone who hasn't seen one. He can prestidigitate a small crude model of a dimorphodon and pass it around, though. 

He's never met a pygmy from this world before, he doesn't think, but from the connotations his translation spell is giving him...maybe? Halflings are much smaller than humans, as a rule, though of course from their perspective humans seem large, clumsy, and bad at aiming.

Nobody here has ever actually met a pygmy. The model dimorphodon is very popular, though.

He will take the opportunity to segue into a story from the opposite end of the height spectrum. It begins with the rise to prominence of a clan of rune giants, and their decision to turn their superior might and organization to the task of enslaving their less sophisticated brethren in the valleys to the south; a decision that sparked centuries of vicious warfare and did not end well for the rune giants...

(This is one of those stories that carries a particular moral payload, but Ipaxalon has gotten quite good at hiding said payload by painting the non-rune giants as scrappy and heroic underdogs fighting against a brutal and decadent oppressor, with 95% of the tale being an account of their eminently identifiable characters and struggles against long odds. It helps that he was in fact a participant in the early wars and an eyewitness to most of the events described, and was close friends with several of the heroes in question.)

He accumulates more of an audience as the tale wears on, including a couple of people who look dressed up enough to be associated with the halls of parliament.

Sounds like an opportune time to wrap up, after doing justice to a few more climactic feats of derring-do. 

The story culminates in a doomed attempt at peace talks, a bloody ambush in the mountains, the tragic sacrifice of an actually-somewhat-sympathetic rune giant, and the siege of Jorvasten. While technically ending in stalemate, the final battle at Jorvasten ultimately leads to the fall and exile of its masters at the hands of a unified and very angry coalition of giants and their allies. 

If only the rune giants had seen fit to extend greater kindness and respect to their brethren, if only they had reached across the cultural gap with welcoming hand instead of clenched fist, or taken any one of the opportunities afforded to correct their course, so much tragedy could have been avoided on both sides. 

"You're, ah, Ipaxalon?" asks one of the dressed-up gentlemen, with the note in his hand.